Victor Conte, mastermind of a scheme to supply undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago. He was 75 years old.
Conte died on Monday, the sports nutrition company he founded, SNAC System, announced on social media. The cause of his death was not disclosed.
A federal investigation into another Conte-founded company, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, convicted Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas and former NFL quarterback Dan Stubblefield, trainers, distributors, trainer, chemist and lawyer.
Conte, who served four months in federal prison for steroid trafficking, has been open about his famous former clients. He said on television that he saw Jones, a three-time Olympian, inject herself with human growth hormone, but always kept Bonds, a slugger for the San Francisco Giants, in the way.
The research led to the book A Game of Shadows. A week after the book was released in 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
Steroid era
Conte said he sold the steroids, known as “cream” and “clear,” and advised dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, to use them, Mitchell said in the report.
“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” Mitchell said in a statement. “The widespread use of such substances by players unfairly harms honest athletes who refuse to use them and calls into question the validity of baseball records.”
Mitchell said the problems did not appear overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades, including commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players, shared responsibility for what he called the “steroid era.”
The federal investigation into BALCO began as a tax agent was digging through the company’s trash.
Conte in 2005 pleaded guilty at trial to two of the 42 charges against him. Six of the 11 convicted were framed for lying to a grand jury, federal investigators or a court.
Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges stemming from his ties to BALCO. Anderson was sentenced to three months in jail and three months of home detention.
Bonds was accused of lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs, and in 2011 was tried. Four years later, after the government decided not to appeal the obstruction of justice conviction to the Supreme Court, prosecutors dropped the case.
A seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star, Bonds retired after 2007. season with 762 homers, surpassing Hank Aaron’s record of 755 from 1954-1976. Bonds denied knowingly taking performance-enhancing drugs, but was never elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bonds did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Conte in 2010 told The Associated Press in an interview that “yes, athletes cheat to win, but government agents and prosecutors also cheat to win.” He also questioned whether the results of such legal cases justified the effort.
Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, did not return an email and phone call seeking comment. The SNAC system did not respond to a message sent through the company’s website.
Despite his role
After serving time in a minimum-security prison he described as “like a men’s retreat,” Conte returned to business in 2007, reviving a nutritional supplement business he started two decades earlier called the Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, or SNAC System. He founded it in the same building that once housed BALCO in Burlingame, California.
Conte continued to ignore his central role in prescribing designer steroids to elite athletes. He claimed he was simply helping to “level the playing field” in a world already full of scammers.
To Dr. Gary Wadler, then a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte may also have been pushing cocaine or heroin.
“You’re talking about completely illegal drug trafficking. You’re talking about drug use in violation of federal law,” Wadler said in 2007. “This is not philanthropy and this is not some kind of charity. This is drug trafficking.”
The lobby of the SNAC System was lined with jerseys and autographed photos of professional athletes, including track and field stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all of whom have been suspended for doping.
Conte wore a Rolex and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of his building. In 2007, he told the AP that he would not speed.
“I’m a person who doesn’t break the law anymore,” he said. “But I still like to look fast.”
Years later, he met the then chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.
“As someone who has managed to escape their own system for so long, it was easy for me to point out the many loopholes that exist and recommend specific actions to improve the overall effectiveness of their program,” Conte said in a statement after the meeting.
He said some poor decisions he made in the past made him uniquely qualified to contribute to the anti-doping effort.
SNAC System’s social media post on Conte’s death referred to him as an “anti-doping advocate”.
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Associated Press writer Janie McCauley contributed to this report.