BALCO founder Conte is dead

AP:

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 champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.

Conte died Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. It did not disclose his cause of death.

The federal government's investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Conte, who served four months in federal prison for dealing steroids, talked openly about his famous former clients. He went on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medallist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.

The investigation led to the book 'Game of Shadows'. A week after the book was published in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.

Conte said he sold steroids known as "the cream" and "the clear" and advised on their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.

"The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game," the Mitchell report said.

"Widespread use by players of such substances unfairly disadvantages the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records."

The federal investigation into BALCO began with a tax agent digging through the company's trash.

Conte wound up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the 11 convicted people were ensnared for lying to grand jurors, federal investigators or the court.

Conte's attorney, Robert Holley, didn't respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC System didn't respond to a message sent through the company's website.

After serving his sentence in a minimum security prison he described as "like a men's retreat," Conte got back in business in 2007 by resuscitating 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 doling out designer steroids to elite athletes. He maintained he simply helped "level the playing field" in a world already rife with cheaters.

SNAC System's social media post announcing Conte's death called him an "Anti-Doping Advocate."