Victor CONTE

A decade ago he was one of the villains in one of the biggest scandals in sports. Today the man behind the infamous lab that helped birth baseball's Steroid Era is still hustling—and trying to reclaim his name

TODAY VICTOR CONTE is selling. He was selling yesterday, too, and he will be selling tomorrow. He has been selling something or other for more than three decades, with a notable shift to masterminding a notorious steroid program 17 years ago and serving prison time for his role in that endeavor, and, strictly speaking, that affair was probably a sale too—the sale of a lifetime. He arrives at the front door of his business carrying a clear bag full of freshly laundered towels, dressed in a loose-fitting surf shirt and baggy jeans, like a paunchy dad en route to a Jimmy Buffet concert. The business is called SNAC Nutrition, on the corner of a business strip in San Carlos, Calif., located some 25 miles south of downtown San Francisco and even closer to the BALCO lab where the scandal that came to be known by that name was birthed. A black banner hangs across the front windows announcing in bold yellow letters: SPORTS NUTRITION SUPER SALE.

Inside the door, Conte, 66, conducts a tour so energetically that he rarely completes a sentence and eventually runs short of breath, with beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. The man loves his work. "We're having some fun," he says, and not just once. SNAC Nutrition, a business Conte launched after BALCO, but more than a decade before he started dealing steroids, is a wholesale distributor of nutritional supplements, primarily ZMA, a combination of zinc, magnesium and vitamin B6 that Conte created and that may or may not help users sleep better and recover more efficiently from workouts, but which is purchased briskly by the public. SNAC is also a swanky training center at which boxers augment their training for professional championship fights and Olympic competition.

Conte buzzes in and out of offices and then veers to an interior island where there is a display of supplements in giant black tubs. Next to that is a "store" that features SNAC-branded gear. Conte has been operating out of here for 17 months; he says he tried to buy the building but was turned down, and instead leases it for $25,000 a month. But that's all right because, he says, his supplement business "is doing a million a month in sales." There's a warehouse out back, where boxes of product are ready to be shipped. And, of course, the gym. Conte shouts to his trainer, Mike Bazzel, "We'll be back in a minute." There is a conference room with a fancy chess set given to Conte by British sprinter Dwain Chambers, whom he made fast once by giving him steroids and once, Conte says, by not giving him steroids.

The most memorable area is a foyer adorned with framed mementos of past clients: a newspaper story on disgraced sprinter Tim Montgomery, a magazine cover of disgraced Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones, a photograph of disgraced home run champion Barry Bonds (wearing a ZMA hat), an autographed jersey from disgraced former NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski. And, to be fair, signed jerseys from other football players who are not disgraced, including John Elway. It feels like seeing portraits of Monica Lewinsky hanging in Bill Clinton's study. Conte knows this. "I decided a long time ago, I cannot run from who I am," says Conte. "So what I tell people is, 'Welcome to the Hall of Fame. Or the Hall of Shame, depending on your viewpoint.'"

Conte delivers the joke with a flourish; he's nothing if not self-aware. And it's important to understand that whatever he's selling on any given day, the product he's always selling most aggressively is Victor Conte. It is his core business.

THE BALCO scandal was the foundation of what baseball historians have come to call the Steroid Era, a title that confidently presumes the eradication of performance-enhancing substances from the game and banishes them to a dark past. (Conte has strong, countervailing opinions on this narrative.) Track and field and cycling, also ensnared in the scandal but hardened by past entanglements, have been less self-assured, a caution borne out by subsequent incidents. In 2003, federal agents raided the offices of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). Among those questioned in the raid was Conte, BALCO's founder.

Revelations showed that Conte had shifted from distributing nutritional supplements (first at BALCO, then at SNAC) to developing PED programs for athletes, using undetectable substances developed by an underground chemist named Patrick Arnold. Conte was the perfect antagonist for the BALCO story: a man with a murky past and a villain's name straight from a spy movie.

Yet outside the discussion of legality and ethics, his achievements were considerable. Conte developed a strong functional understanding of the biology of human performance and enhancement. He wrote dosing schedules for Jones, who dominated the 2000 Olympics; Montgomery, who broke the world record in the 100 meters in 2002; and Kelli White, who won the 2003 world championships. (All of these performances were subsequently wiped out.) Conte has maintained that he did not provide steroids to Bonds (just supplements), but Bonds's trainer Greg Anderson was a BALCO client and the 2006 book Game of Shadows concludes that Bonds used steroids.

"Conte is one of the great, recent biomedical autodidacts," says Michael Joyner, an anesthesiologist and expert in human performance at the Mayo Clinic. "He got into supplements and nutrition when information was exploding. It was a perfect time for 'innovative' ideas about dosing, schedules and mixing and matching commercial and black market compounds. With an M.D., if he hadn't gone in the direction that he did, he could have run a big pharma company."

Instead, in February 2004, Conte and others were charged with steroid distribution and other felonies in a 42-count indictment that spanned 31 pages. Conte faced a maximum of 30 years in prison. It's a point of pride for Conte that he pleaded guilty to just two counts and served only four months. "I was public enemy No. 1. They made it into a huge deal for what they had, which was me sharing a testosterone cream prescription that I had with a few athletes," he says, offering a generous reading of his history. "That's why I got four months in a Club Fed where they were smoking weed and doing steroids and the female guards were having sex with the inmates." Conte was imprisoned until March 2006 at Taft Correctional Institution, near Bakersfield. After describing the sex and drugs there, he described having been initially thrown into solitary confinement to intimidate him from bringing media to the prison. It's entirely plausible that both scenarios are true, but Conte employs them skillfully as befits the narrative of the moment—the haughty white-collar genius who gamed the system or the backroom drug dealer who did the crime and did his time.

Jones and boxer Shane Mosley sued Conte—Jones for $25 million and Mosley for $12 million—for defamation. "Both thrown out of court," says Conte. He makes a fist and throws a short right uppercut. "Two first-round KOs." The Jones case was settled in 2006. The Mosley case was dismissed in '10. Rich Nichols, who was Jones's attorney, says, "The confidentiality provisions of the settlement agreement prohibit the parties from disclosing the terms of the settlement." Conte responds, "I did not agree to not talk about Marion or anybody else, and I'm still at liberty to tell all that I know to be the truth." He says no money changed hands.

SNAC DOES not look like a traditional boxing gym. It is spotless and bright, with a ring in the middle of the room. Heavy bags and speed bags hang in their usual places. All this is normal. Other equipment is not. In 2009, Conte reunited with Chambers, who was banned in '03 for using BALCO PEDs. This time Conte vowed to make Chambers fast and clean, and instead of using steroids, used intermittent hypoxic-hyperoxic training—to simulate effort at high altitude and recovery in hyper-oxygenated air. (Athletes have used this, and various forms of altitude training, for years.) Chambers won the world 60-meter indoor title in '10 and tested clean.

Conte has rebuilt the BALCO model with a legal training method. He studied hypoxic-hyperoxic training. His current gym includes a 12-foot-high, clear-plastic tent connected to small machines called oxygenators. They look like dehumidifiers, cost $5,000 each, control the oxygen in the tent and allow boxers to simulate high-altitude training. There is a smaller tent with a stationary bike for active recovery. There are treadmills connected to oxygenators and masks that the athletes wear in training to manipulate oxygen levels.

Almost all the athletes are boxers. Conte says he got into the boxing world through a chance meeting with world flyweight champ Nonito Donaire at a bank in 2010. Conte saw a chance to redeem himself through a sport also in need of rescue. "Boxing was the red-light district of sports, in terms of PED abuse," he says. "Boxing is straight-up about bodily harm, compared with running faster than the guy in the next lane, but there were no random testing programs in place. I felt compelled to become an outspoken antidoping advocate for boxers."

Donaire was training near Conte's previous gym, and Conte pitched him on his program. Donaire went back to his trainer, Bazzel, who was predictably skeptical. "People said he's gonna drug your guy," says Bazzel. "I talked to him, and he laid everything out. He said 'That's who I was.' Victor is an example of what boxing has always been. Boxing gives people a chance to bring themselves up."

Since 2010, Conte has worked with 10 world champions, including Donaire, former welterweight champion Shawn Porter, former middleweight champion Danny Jacobs and former welterweight champion Andre Berto. Conte is not a trainer; he calls himself the "camp chief." He coordinates the hypoxic-hyperoxic training schedule and creates a nutrition-and-supplement program, along with blood testing.

All this is to keep Conte in sports, but make no mistake—it's also to sell his products. Conte pays everybody: boxers, trainers, assistants. In return they promote SNAC products. "In this world," says Conte, "I am Nike." ZMA, which Conte trademarked in 1996, is SNAC's core product. On SNAC's website, ZMA is described as "the first product developed specifically to enhance recovery by improving sleep efficiency." Conte claims that SNAC services 130 companies selling ZMA and that General Nutrition Centers sells five brands of SNAC ZMA. A GNC spokesman said, "GNC does not purchase any products from SNAC Nutrition. We do purchase products from other companies that contain SNAC's ZMA ingredient within them."

WITH CONTE, the public will always demand a certain ongoing mea culpa. And he will provide it. "Why did I do it?" he says. "It had nothing to do with money. I liked being in the trenches with the athletes and with the science. And these athletes, it's not like they met me and I introduced them to drugs. They were always using drugs, but they were using them out of the trunk of cars in parking lots. That was my rationalization. I'm not proud that I decided to join that culture."

He still plays an unusual role in that culture. At spring track meets in Boston and Nashville, his name was floated to runners, coaches and agents; all of them recoiled. "He blew up our sport and then walked away," says gold medalist Maurice Greene, whose response underscores track and doping's complex relationship. In 2008, The New York Times published records of a transfer from Greene to a relative of a known PED dealer, without substantiating what was purchased. Greene, who is retired, never tested positive for banned substances and is embraced as a track and field ambassador.

Conte is also a bountiful source for journalists seeking clarification on doping cases. He did so at the 2012 Olympics, suggesting that a majority of medalists were using PEDs, triggering an emotional response from Usain Bolt. Conte does so, here, as well: "Baseball players were hitting 70 home runs, now they're hitting 50 so they must be clean?" he says. "No. They're still using drugs, they're just sneaking around more, and the gains are less because they have to duck and dodge the testing." He identifies a drug that he's confident athletes are using today, which can be taken on the day of competition.

It's up to athletes to decide whether they trust Conte or not. "I'm a great believer that everybody deserves second chances," says Nicola Adams, an Olympic flyweight gold medalist. "He's doing good things for the sport."

When U.S. 2012 Olympic flyweight bronze medalist Marlen Esparza, 27, started working with Conte in 2010, her agent told her not to mention his name in interviews, just SNAC. "People gave me stick about it," says Esparza. "Victor told me that would happen. I understand that he's a guy who did something wrong a long time ago. He's a good person." Conte's boxers are tested regularly, and he has sponsored several in the VADA (Voluntarily Anti-Doping Association) program that tests boxers and MMA fighters anytime in the eight weeks leading to a match. The BALCO scandal, and others, have shown that a clean testing record means little, but none of Conte's boxers have been publicly sanctioned for using PEDs. (Berto tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, but Conte says he wasn't working with him at the time.)

Conte says he has tried to work with antidoping agencies to effect change, but after some initial cooperation has found them unwelcoming. A top U.S. doping official says Conte never provided useful doping intelligence. Meanwhile, the massive, state-sponsored Russian doping scandal of 2010--16 and smaller, but no less damaging, scandals involving Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes have pushed BALCO deeper into the past. Conte moves forward. "It doesn't matter what people say about me," he says. "I'm an example that there is such a thing as a second chance. I've worked to regain my credibility. I would never risk it again."

The first paragraph of his obituary is written in stone. Now he's working on the rest.

"It doesn't matter what people say about me. I'm an example that THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A SECOND CHANCE. I've worked to regain my credibility. I would never risk it again."

HALL OF SHAME

Conte has ties to these disgraced top athletes

BARRY BONDS

Home run champ became the face of the BALCO scandal

DWAIN CHAMBERS

Sprinter was banned for two years in 2003 after positive PED test

MARION JONES

Olympic star had medals from 2000 wiped out after steroid admission

TIM MONTGOMERY

100-meter world record was voided after he was found guilty of PED use