BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Victor Conte, the Johnny Appleseed of designer steroids, is back in business.
Victor Conte
Conte
Witness the new, $190,000 Bentley parked outside the building that once housed the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, where federal agents uncovered a massive steroids ring and sparked professional sports' highest profile drug scandal.
Since leaving prison a little over a year ago, Conte and his 22-year-old daughter have revived a nutritional supplements business he launched two decades ago called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning -- SNAC for short.
They're mainly hawking a zinc and magnesium-based powder called ZMA that's a staple for serious weight lifters who use it to repair damaged tissue and to sleep better. It's legal and available through about two dozen distributors.
Conte has never been at a loss for words, especially when it comes to self promotion.
"I'm feeling much better and the passion has come back," he says. "Things are going well."
Conte said sales have increased 20 percent in the last year and that SNAC rings up about $300,000 a month.
Many of his best customers are professional athletes, he says, including Barry Bonds, still the prime target of the federal investigators who sent Conte to jail for four months for illegal steroids distribution.
A photograph of Bonds and the slugger's personal trainer Greg Anderson graces the home page of the SNAC Web site. Bonds and Anderson are wearing shirts and hats emblazoned with the ZMA logo. Anderson was also convicted for steroids distribution and is now in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating whether Bonds committed perjury when he testified that he unknowingly ingested steroids.
"I'm absolutely a huge fan of Barry Bonds," Conte says.
He hasn't spoken with Bonds for some time "for obvious reasons," but the baseball player has never objected to SNAC using his image to sell ZMA, Conte says.
Bonds declined interview requests before and after the San Francisco Giants played the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.
While Conte also boasts that many professional football players use ZMA, the product is not on the National Football League's approved supplements list and teams are precluded from officially handing out ZMA.
That doesn't stop Conte from dropping the names of athletes and teams and implying in his cagey manner that the rich and famous are clamoring for his product.
But for anti-doping authorities, Conte and BALCO will forever remain synonymous with high-tech cheating in sports.
"I certainly am not going to glamorize Victor Conte," said Travis Tygart, incoming head the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which polices illegal drugs in amateur sports. "In the past, he has done some horrible things."
Conte remains defiant about his central role in doling out designer steroids to elite athletes endlessly searching for even the tiniest edge. He maintains he simply helped "level the playing field" in a world already rife with cheaters.
To Dr. Gary Wadler, a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte may as well have been pushing cocaine or heroin.
"You are talking about totally illegal drug trafficking, you are talking about using drugs in violation of federal law," Wadler said. "This is not philanthropy and this is not some do-gooding. This is drug dealing."
These attitudes have lot to do with why Conte no longer uses the BALCO name and has taken down the infamous BALCO sign, which was easily seen from Highway 101 and where tourists once posed for photographs flexing their biceps like body builders. In its place is a small sign that hangs above the nondescript front door.
The office space inside is half of what it was when Conte was shipping the undetectable steroid THG to athletes around the world.
However modest the business now appears, its proprietor remains anything but.
Conte says he's often recognized in public. "I'm a high-profile guy now," says the former bassist for Tower of Power and jazzman Herbie Hancock. "People approach me wherever I go on a daily basis."
He says he taught music to fellow inmates and organized a prison track team at the minimum security Taft Correctional Institution.
"My guys always won," he says.
The hallway at SNAC is lined with game jerseys of pro athletes, and signed photographs, including track stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all caught doping.
"To BALCO," reads the inscription on a photograph of baseball player A.J. Pierzynski from when he was a Minnesota Twin. "Thanks for all the help."
Pierzynski was ordered to testify before the grand jury that indicted Conte but has never been accused of any wrongdoing.
Chris Cooper's Raiders jersey also hangs on the wall, inscribed with "thanks for keeping me in good health and bringing me to the top of my game."
Cooper tested positive for THG and was fined by the NFL in 2004.
The chunky Rolex hanging from Conte's wrist is an extravagant taunt to his enemies in sport and government, whom he says sought his ruin.
Then, of course, there's the Bentley and a similarly fast Mercedes parked at home he likes to show off. The cars can each reach 100 mph in about the time it takes a sprinter to cover 100 meters and the Bentley tops out at 200 mph. But he doesn't plan to be caught speeding.
"I'm a person who doesn't break laws anymore," he says with a sly grin and the same carnival barker audacity he used to defend athletes caught using his illegal performance enhancing drugs. "But I still do like to look fast."
Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press
