The Balco mastermind, Central Player in Infamous Sports Performance-Enhancing Drug Scandal, Succumbs at Age 75.
The man behind the scheme, who devised a operation to supply undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes featuring baseball greats Giambi and Bonds and track and field star Jones decades ago, has died. His age was 75.
Government Probe and Legal Outcomes
An official probe of another company set up by him, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), resulted in the guilty verdicts of Jones, competitive biker Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Stubblefield, along with various support personnel and professionals.
Open Discussions and Sentencing
He, who spent a third of a year in federal prison for illegal drug sales, talked publicly about his well-known clients. He went on TV to claim he had observed three-time Olympic medalist Jones self-administer with human growth hormones, but never directly incriminating Barry Bonds, the Giants power hitter.
Baseball's Investigation
The federal case inspired the volume titled Game of Shadows. Just days following the book's publication in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig brought on former senate majority leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.
Conte stated he sold steroids known as certain undetectable drugs and advised on their application to many top performers, including Jason Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.
Using banned drugs poses a serious threat to the honesty of the game,” the report stated. “Prevalent consumption by athletes of such substances unfairly disadvantages the clean players who avoid them and raises questions about the validity of historical stats.”
Mitchell indicated the challenges didn’t develop overnight. The report emphasized each participant in the sport in the preceding decades – including commissioners, team executives, the union and athletes themselves – bore partial blame for what he called the PED epoch.
How It Began
The federal investigation into the company started when a revenue officer searching the business refuse. Conte ultimately admitted guilt to a couple of the 42 charges filed against him in that year ahead of a court case. Half a dozen of the individuals found guilty were ensnared for misleading federal investigators.
Related Cases
His fitness instructor Anderson, confessed to steroid distribution charges stemming from his ties to the lab. He received a sentence to a quarter year in incarceration and three months of restricted movement.
Bonds' Legal Battles
Bonds was accused of providing false statements to a investigative body about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and stood trial in that year. The case was dismissed the charges four years later when the government decided not to challenge an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the federal apex court.
A seven-time National League MVP and frequent All-Star, Bonds ended his career after the that season with 762 homers, exceeding the milestone of Aaron's total that Aaron achieved from 1954-76. Bonds denied knowingly using banned substances but has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Conte's Post-Prison Life
Conte told the Associated Press in a past conversation that “sportspeople break rules to win, but the government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too.” He doubted whether the results in such legal cases justified the effort.
Following his prison term, Conte got back in business in the late 2000s by rebooting a nutritional supplements business he had started two decades earlier called his supplements brand. He operated in the same building that previously contained Balco in Burlingame.
Continued Justification
Conte continued to justify about his central role in doling out designer steroids to top sports stars. He maintained he simply helped “even the competition” in a sports environment teeming with doping athletes.
Expert Opinions
To a WADA member, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte could be compared to selling hard drugs. “It concerns blatant drug dealing. You are talking about substance use in defiance of legal codes,” he stated in 2007. “It's not a good deed and it's not altruistic. It's trafficking.”
