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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Victor Conte's light sentence isn't a disaster. The BALCO case changed the sports landscape even if its founder won't rot in prison. Plus: Letters From Lost Fans.
Jul 18, 2005 | Wow, the dudgeon has been flying high and hard these last few days since Victor Conte and two others at the center of the BALCO steroids scandal copped pleas for short jail terms without having to sing about who they distributed the drugs to.
So, no criminal trial with Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Jason Giambi and other big-ticket athletes on the witness stand. The loss of that page-view-generating, newspaper-selling, ratings-generating event has caused a lot of outrage in the media. All of it on strictly altruistic, justice-seeking grounds, of course.
Conte will get four months in jail and four more of house arrest after pleading guilty to one charge each of conspiracy to distribute steroids and money laundering. He even gets to keep his cheesy mustache.
Greg Anderson, Bonds' childhood friend and personal trainer, will serve up to six months on the same charges, and BALCO vice president James Valente will likely get two years' probation for one count of steroid distribution. Another defendant, track coach Remi Korchemny, was reportedly negotiating a similar agreement. All of the deals will be accepted formally in October.
"Who negotiated this plea deal," asked Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News, "the Major League Baseball Players Association?" Lupica wrote that prosecutors "quit on their stools like Tyson."
"Somewhere this morning, Victor Conte Jr. must be having a quiet cup of coffee and suppressing a chortle," wrote Mark Purdy of the San Jose Mercury News. "This is what the government wanted?"
"BALCO prosecutors fumbled the ball," reads a headline on a column by the San Francisco Chronicle's Gwen Knapp in which she pounded the feds for conducting a case in which the only name that got named in open court was that of a 72-year-old grandmother who worked as Anderson's part-time bookkeeper and was what prosecutors called an unwitting accomplice.
The whole thing seems like a big fizzle, but every lawyer who's been quoted, those on either side and neutral observers alike, has said the deals are in line with sentencing guidelines for what's essentially a small-potatoes case.
The connection to big-league sports and to hugely famous figures like Bonds, Jones, Giambi and former football player Bill Romanowski made BALCO seem like the crime of the century, but Conte was accused of distributing drugs to about 30 people. He was hardly Pablo Escobar. The money-laundering charge involved a check for about two grand.
Even if Conte had been found guilty on all 42 counts of the indictment, experts have said, he'd have been looking at about a year in prison.
Various worldwide anti-doping officials have criticized the deals for not requiring the defendants to name names, which they see as a missed opportunity to do some real work in cleaning up the sports landscape.
Maybe it was, though this case may not be finished in court. Bonds is still looking at possible money-laundering and perjury charges, and Jones has sued Conte for defamation over statements he's made about her.
