Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes, including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track and field champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75 years old.
Conte died on Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. He did not reveal the cause of his death.
The federal government’s investigation into another company Conte founded, Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, yielded convictions of Jones, elite cyclist Tammy Thomas and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield, along with trainers, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.
Conte, who served four months in federal prison for trafficking steroids, spoke openly about his famous former clients. He appeared on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but he never implicated Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.
The research led to the book “Game of Shadows.” A week after the book’s publication in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
The steroid era
Conte said he sold steroids known as “the cream” and “the clear” and advised dozens of elite athletes on their use, including Giambi, a five-time Major League All-Star, according to the Mitchell report.
“Illegal use of performance-enhancing substances represents a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the Mitchell report said. “The widespread use of such substances by players unfairly disadvantages honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records.”
Mitchell said the problems didn’t arise overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball in the previous two decades (including commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and the players) shared some responsibility for what he called “the Steroid Era.”
The federal investigation into BALCO began with a tax agent rummaging through the company’s trash.
Conte ended up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the 11 convicted were caught for lying to the grand jury, federal investigators or the court.
Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges stemming from his connections with BALCO. Anderson was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.
Bonds was accused of lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and went on trial in 2011. Prosecutors dropped the case four years later when the government decided not to appeal an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the Supreme Court.
Bonds, a seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star outfielder, finished his career after the 2007 season with 762 home runs, surpassing the record of 755 set by Hank Aaron between 1954 and 1976. Bonds denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs, but has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bonds did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Conte told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview that “yes, athletes cheat to win, but government agents and prosecutors also cheat to win.” He also questioned whether the results in such legal cases justified the effort.
Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC System did not respond to a message sent through the company’s website.
Defiant about his role
After serving his sentence in a minimum-security prison that he described as “like a men’s retreat,” Conte returned to the business in 2007 by resurrecting a nutritional supplements business he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, or SNAC System. He located it in the same building that once housed BALCO in Burlingame, California.
Conte remained defiant about his central role in distributing designer steroids to elite athletes. He maintained that it simply helped “level the playing field” in a world already rife with cheaters.
For Dr. Gary Wadler, then a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte could well have been selling cocaine or heroin.
“You’re talking about totally illegal drug trafficking. You’re talking about drug use in violation of federal law,” Wadler said in 2007. “This is not philanthropy or any charitable action. This is drug trafficking.”
The SNAC System hallway was filled with jerseys of professional athletes and signed photographs, including track stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all of whom were punished for doping.
Conte was wearing a Rolex and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of his building. He told the AP in 2007 that he would not drive over the speed limit.
“I’m a person who no longer breaks the law,” he said. “But I still like to look quickly.”
Years later he met with the then president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.
“As someone who was able to get around their system for so long, it was easy for me to point out the many loopholes that exist and recommend specific steps to improve the overall effectiveness of their program,” Conte said in a statement after the meeting.
He said some of the bad decisions he made in the past uniquely qualified him to contribute to the anti-doping effort.
The SNAC System’s social media post announcing Conte’s death called him an “anti-doping advocate.”
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Associated Press writer Janie McCauley contributed to this report.