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Victor Conte, who engineered a system to supply stealthy banned substances to top competitors including MLB legends Giambi and Bonds and sprinting gold medalist Jones decades ago, has passed away. He reached 75 years.

Government Probe and Criminal Cases

An official investigation into an additional venture Conte founded, the Bay Area lab, resulted in the guilty verdicts of Marion Jones, competitive biker Tammy Thomas, and ex-pro football defender Stubblefield, along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Conte's Admissions and Prison Time

Conte, who completed a third of a year in federal prison for illegal drug sales, talked publicly about his famous former clients. He went on broadcast media to assert he had observed triple Olympic champion Marion Jones inject herself with human growth hormones, but always refrained from pointing the finger at Barry Bonds, the Giants power hitter.

Baseball's Investigation

This probe led to the publication titled Game of Shadows. Just days following the release of the book in the mid-2000s, baseball Commissioner Selig appointed political figure Mitchell to look into PED use.

Conte stated he provided steroids referred to as “the cream” and “the clear” and guided their use to numerous top performers, including Jason Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, according to the report.

Using performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the honesty of the sport,” the Mitchell report concluded. “Widespread use by athletes of these drugs puts at a disadvantage the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the legitimacy of historical stats.”

Mitchell indicated the challenges were not sudden. Mitchell claimed all parties in baseball in the preceding decades – covering commissioners, management, the representative body and players – shared some responsibility for what he termed the PED epoch.

Case Inception

The official probe into Balco was initiated by a revenue officer searching the company’s trash. The defendant ended up pleading guilty to a pair of the 42 charges against him in 2005 ahead of a court case. Half a dozen of the 11 convicted people were convicted for misleading federal investigators.

Related Cases

His fitness instructor Anderson, confessed to steroid distribution charges stemming from his ties to the lab. The court gave him to three months in jail and three months of home confinement.

His Court Proceedings

The home run king was indicted for providing false statements to a federal jury about using performance-enhancing drugs and faced a trial in that year. The government abandoned the charges after several years when the prosecutors opted not to challenge an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the highest court.

A seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star outfielder, Bonds ended his career after the 2007 campaign with 762 homers, breaking the mark of Aaron's total that Hank Aaron achieved from 1954-76. The athlete refuted intentionally taking performance-enhancing drugs but has never been elected to the Hall of Fame.

Conte's Post-Prison Life

The former convict told the Associated Press in a past conversation that “sportspeople break rules to triumph, but the government agents and prosecutors also bend the rules.” He doubted whether the outcomes in such legal cases were worth the resources.

Following his prison term, he got back in business in 2007 by rebooting a supplements company he had started previously called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He operated in the same building that was home to his former lab in Burlingame.

Continued Justification

The controversial figure stayed unrepentant about his key part in distributing designer steroids to elite athletes. He argued he simply helped “balance the odds” in a arena full of doping athletes.

Expert Opinions

To a WADA member, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte was essentially selling cocaine or heroin. “This involves blatant drug dealing. This refers to drug consumption in violation of federal law,” he stated in the past. “This is not philanthropy and it's not altruistic. It's illegal sales.”