Victor Conte, architect of the Undiscoverable Savings Scheme Performance enhancing drugs For professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and decades-old Olympic track champion Marion Jones. He was 75 years old.
SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post that Conte died on Monday. The cause of his death was not revealed.
The federal government’s investigation into another company founded by Conti, Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, resulted in convictions for Jones, elite cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with trainers, distributors, a coach, a chemist and a lawyer.
Conte, who spent four months in federal prison on doping charges, spoke openly about his famous former clients. He has appeared on television to say he saw three-time Olympic medalist Jones injecting herself with human growth hormone, but he has always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants’ outfielder.
The investigation led to the book “A Game of Shadows.” A week after the book was published in 2006, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
The era of steroids
Mitchell’s report said Conte said he sold steroids known as “Cream” and “Clear” and recommended their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league all-star.
“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the Mitchell report said. “The widespread use of such substances by players unfairly harms honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the authenticity of baseball records.”
Mitchell said the problems did not develop overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball in the previous two decades — including commissioners, club officials, the players’ union and players — shared some responsibility for what he called “the era of steroids.”
The federal investigation into BALCO began when a tax agent searched the company’s trash.
Conte ended up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the eleven convicted were arrested 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 home confinement.
Bonds was charged with lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and stood trial in 2011. Prosecutors dropped the case four years later when the government decided not to appeal an overturned obstruction of justice ruling to the Supreme Court.
Bonds, a seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star, is done His career following the 2007 season with 762 homers, surpassing the record of 755 set by Hank Aaron from 1954-76. Bonds denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs but did He was never elected To the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bonds did not respond to an email seeking comment.
“Yes, athletes cheat to win, but government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too,” Conte told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. He also questioned whether the results in such legal cases justify the effort.
Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC did not respond to the message sent through the company’s website.
Defiant for his role
After serving his sentence in a minimum-security prison, which he described as “like a haven for men,” Conte returned to work in 2007 by reviving a nutritional supplement project he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, or SNAC. He located it in the same building that housed BALCO in Burlingame, California.
Conte has remained defiant about his central role in the distribution of steroids designed for elite athletes. He maintained that it simply helped “level the playing field” in a world already full of cheaters.
According to Dr. Gary Wadler, then a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte may have been promoting cocaine or heroin.
“You’re talking about completely illicit drug trafficking,” Wadler said in 2007. “You’re talking about drug use in violation of federal law. That’s not charity and it’s not charity. That’s drug dealing.”
The lobby at SNAC was filled with T-shirts and autographed photos of professional athletes, including track and field stars Tim Montgomery, Kelly White and C.J. Hunter, all of whom were punished for doping.
Conte wore a Rolex watch and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of the building where he lived. He told the AP in 2007 that he would never exceed the speed limit.
“I’m someone who doesn’t break the rules anymore,” he said. “But I still like to look fast.”
Years later, he met the then head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.
“As someone who has been able to evade their system for a long time, 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 bad decisions he had made in the past made him uniquely qualified to contribute to anti-doping efforts.
The SNAC social media post announcing Conte’s death described him as an “anti-doping advocate.”
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Associated Press writer Janie McCauley contributed to this report.
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