Court Documents Show Barry Bonds Tested Positive for 3 Types of Steroids
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Court documents show Barry Bonds tested positive for three types of steroids, and his personal trainer once told his business manager in the Giants' clubhouse how he injected the slugger with performance-enhancing drugs "all over the place."
Prosecutors plan to use those 2000-2003 test results and other evidence, detailed in documents released Wednesday, at Bonds' trial next month to show he lied when he told a federal grand jury in December 2003 that he never knowingly used steroids.
Bonds' attorneys want that evidence suppressed, and U.S. District Judge Susan Illston is to hear arguments Thursday on what to allow jurors to hear. Bonds' trainer Greg Anderson, who was jailed several times for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury, appears to be at the heart of the government's case. But his lawyer, Mark Geragos, said Anderson will again refuse to discuss Bonds if prosecutors call him to testify.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Also among the evidence made public were a positive test for amphetamines in 2006 in a urine sample Bonds gave to Major League Baseball; doping calendars Anderson maintained with the initials "BB" and a handwritten note seized from his house labeled "Barry" that appears to be a laundry list of steroids and planned blood tests; and a list of current and former major leaguers, including Jason Giambi, who are expected to testify at the March 2 trial.
The documents said that Steve Hoskins, Bonds' childhood friend and personal assistant, secretly tape-recorded a 2003 conversation with Anderson in the Giants' clubhouse because Hoskins wanted to prove to Bonds' father, Bobby Bonds, that his son was using steroids.
Anderson and Hoskins, who were near Bonds' locker, were discussing steroid injections, and at one point, they lowered their voices to avoid being overheard as players, including Benito Santiago, and others walked by, according to the documents.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Anderson: "No, what happens is, they put too much in one area, and ... actually ball up and puddle. And what happens is, it actually will eat away and make an indentation. And it's a cyst. It makes a big (expletive) cyst. And you have to drain it. Oh yeah, it's gnarly. ... Hi Benito. ... Oh it's gnarly."
Hoskins: "... Is that why Barry's didn't do it in one spot, and you didn't just let him do it one time?"
Anderson: "Oh no. I never. I never just go there. I move it all over the place."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Also during that conversation, Anderson told Hoskins that "everything that I've been doing at this point, it's all undetectable," according to the documents.
"See, the stuff that I have ... we created it," he was quoted as saying. "And you can't, you can't buy it anywhere. You can't get it anywhere else."
He added that he was unconcerned about Bonds testing positive because Marion Jones and other athletes using the same drugs had not been caught doping.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"So that's why I know it works. So that's why I'm not even trippin'. So that's cool," Anderson said, according to the transcript.
The San Francisco Chronicle first reported about a tape recording involving Anderson in October 2004.
Bonds attorneys argued that none of Anderson's statements outside of court should be admissible.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"If Anderson does not testify for the government, the truth of any statement he may (or may not) have made out of court cannot be so tested," lead Bonds attorney Allen Ruby wrote. "Mr. Bonds will be stripped of the opportunity to confront and cross-examine the most prejudicial but least reliable evidence against him."
Bonds and Hoskins had a nasty falling out after slugger went to the FBI with accusations Hoskins stole from him.
Three of Bonds' test results were seized in a 2003 raid on the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, the headquarters of a massive sports doping ring shut down by federal agents. Agents said they seized numerous results of blood and urine tests by Bonds, which prosecutors argue show that the slugger was intimately involved with BALCO.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Bonds lawyers moved to suppress 24 drug tests from 2000-06; more than two dozen drug calendars; BALCO log sheets; handwritten notes; opinion evidence on steroids, human growth hormone, THG, EPO and Clomid; witness descriptions of Bonds' "physical, behavioral and emotional characteristics" — including acne on his back, testicle shrinkage, head size, hat size, hand size, foot size and sexual behavior — recorded conversations that didn't include Bonds; and voice mails allegedly left by Bonds on the answering machine of former girlfriend Kimberly Bell.
Bonds' lawyers also want to prevent the jury from hearing evidence of at least four positive steroid tests they argue can't be conclusively linked to Bonds because of how they were processed.
According to records prosecutors took from BALCO, Bonds tested positive on three separate occasions in 2000 and 2001 for the steroid methenelone in urine samples; he also tested positive two of those three times for the steroid nandrolone.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A government-retained scientist, Dr. Don Catlin, also said he found evidence that Bonds used the designer steroid THG upon retesting a urine sample Bonds supplied as part of baseball's anonymous survey drug testing in 2003, when the designer drug was not yet detectable. Federal investigators seized them in 2004 from the private laboratory used by Major League Baseball before they could be destroyed, which the players were promised.
Catlin said the sample also tested positive for Clomid and foreign testosterone.
Included in the evidence was a letter from baseball independent drug administrator Bryan Smith that Bonds tested positive for an amphetamine during a drug test on July 7, 2006, when Bonds hit a three-run homer at Dodger Stadium. There also was a letter from baseball commissioner Bud Selig to Bonds that Aug. 1 informing him of the positive test and telling him that he will be subject to six more tests over a one-year period.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The New York Daily News reported on that test on Jan. 11, 2007, saying Bonds attributed the positive test to a substance he had taken from teammate Mark Sweeney's locker.
The court documents also show that prosecutors plan on calling to the witness stand Giambi, along with his brother and former major leaguer Jeremy Giambi. The government also plans to call Bobby Estalella, Marvin Barnard and Santiago, all former teammates of Bonds and clients of Anderson.