Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative

The Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, also known as BALCO, was an American company led by founder and owner Victor Conte. In 2003, journalists Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada investigated the company's role in a drug sports scandal later referred to as the BALCO Affair. BALCO marketed Tetrahydrogestrinone, or "The Clear", a then-undetectable, performance-enhancing steroid developed by chemist Patrick Arnold. Conte, BALCO vice president James Valente, weight trainer Greg Anderson and coach Remi Korchemny had supplied a number of high-profile sports stars from the United States and Europe with The Clear and growth hormones for several years.

The BALCO company

BALCO, a company with its headquarters in Burlingame, California, USA was founded in 1984. Officially, BALCO was a service business for blood and urine analysis and food supplements. In 1988, Victor Conte offered free blood and urine tests to a group of athletes known as the BALCO Olympians. He then was allowed to attend the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. From 1996 Conte worked with well-known American football star Bill Romanowski, who proved to be useful to establish new connections to athletes and coaches such as Korchemny. Conte and Korchemny shortly thereafter founded the ZMA Track Club for marketing purposes, well-known members of it being sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery. In 2000, Conte managed to contact American baseball star Barry Bonds via Greg Anderson, a coach working in a nearby fitness studio. Bonds then delivered contacts to other baseball professionals.

The scandal

In 2003, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California began investigating BALCO. U.S. sprint coach Trevor Graham had given an anonymous phone call to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in June 2003 accusing a number of athletes being involved in doping with a steroid that was not detectable at the time. He also named Victor Conte as the source of the steroid. As evidence, Graham delivered a syringe containing traces of a substance nicknamed The Clear. Shortly after, Don H. Catlin, director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles, succeeded in developing a testing process for tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). Now able to detect the new substance, he tested 550 existing samples from athletes, of which 20 proved to be positive for THG.

On September 3, 2003 agents of the Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, San Mateo Narcotics Task Force, and USADA conducted a house search at the BALCO facilities. Beside lists of BALCO customers in a BALCO field warehouse they found container whose labels indicated steroids and growth hormones. In a house search at Anderson's place two days later, steroids, $60,000 in cash, names lists and dosage plans were found. On June 6 2006 the house of baseball player Jason Grimsley (Arizona Diamondbacks) was searched as part of the ongoing BALCO probe. Grimsley later said that federal investigators wanted him to wear a wire in order to obtain information against Barry Bonds. He told people which players used performance-enhancing drugs. When the dust cleared, Grimsley was released by the Diamondbacks and was given a 50-game suspension by Major League Baseball.

Among the athletes listed in the record of BALCO customers were:

• MLB players: Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Benito Santiago, Jeremy Giambi, Bobby Estalella, Armando Rios
• Athletes: Hammer thrower John McEwen, shot putters Kevin Toth and C.J. Hunter, sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the medium-distance runner Regina Jacobs, boxer Shane Mosley.
• NFL players: A number from the Oakland Raiders, including Bill Romanowski, Tyrone Wheatley, Barrett Robbins, Chris Cooper and Dana Stubblefield.

Conte was also connected with supplying "vitamin supplements" to the U.S. Olympic Judo team coached by Willy Cahill of San Bruno, California. Patrick Arnold, BALCO's chemist, alleges that Bonds and Sheffield were given "The Clear", though the athletes deny knowing about it and Arnold does not claim to have personally witnessed it..

On July 15, 2005, Conte and Anderson cut plea bargains, pled guilty to illegal steroid distribution and money laundering and avoided an embarrassing trial. They will spend approximately four months in jail and four months on probation.

In April 2005, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada were honored with the journalist prize of the White House Correspondents' Association. In 2006, they published the book Game of Shadows, which consists of a summary of about 200 interviews and 1,000 documents they collected for their research.

In October 2006, investigations against Fainaru-Wada and Williams were started. In their case the reporters used a protocol of a secret testimony of Barry Bonds in front of a grand jury but refused to name their informer. Both then faced coercive detention penalties of up to 18 months. However, in February 2007, federal prosecutors dropped charges against the reporters after a Colorado attorney, Troy Ellerman, who once represented Conte and another executive of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, admitted to leaking the testimony and pleaded guilty to federal charges of unauthorized disclosure of grand jury testimony.