By Amy Shipley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 2, 2007; A01
The battle against the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs by athletes is increasingly being led by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies as part of an expanding cooperative effort with the U.S. Olympic Committee's primary anti-doping body, according to law enforcement and anti-doping officials.
The latest manifestation of this collaboration came this week in the multi-state crackdown on illegal online sales of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs that led to the arrests Tuesday of eight people in three states, the officials said.
In the run-up to the bust, Drug Enforcement Agency agents in Mobile, Ala., contacted federal investigators involved in the probe of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or Balco, in Northern California that has implicated dozens of Olympic and professional athletes, including baseball slugger Barry Bonds. The California investigators put them in touch with officials from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, with whom they have been closely cooperating for the past four years.
Within days, the USADA sent a chemist to Mobile to offer his expertise. Several DEA agents flew to Colorado Springs, where the anti-doping agency is based. There were frequent phone conversations. The cooperation illustrated the changing landscape of anti-doping enforcement, investigators say.
USADA officials say the collaboration also reflects the failure of a more than three-decade effort to contain the use of performance-enhancing drugs by competitive athletes through testing. These officials say that with the Beijing Olympics less than 18 months away, they fear the use of even more sophisticated drugs and masking agents by athletes will continue to outpace testing methods.
The collaboration has "had an absolutely enormous effect," said Don Catlin, who has been involved in anti-doping efforts since the early 1980s as the director of UCLA's Olympic Analytical Laboratory, which services the USADA. "When I look at the 23 years of work before Balco and what we were able to do -- yeah, we would grind out positives and occasionally have a big hit -- but when the government decides to go after it and comes in with their tools . . . they [wiretap], they pull out e-mails. I was amazed.
"It has clearly caused a revolution. Sports authorities have no power to do anything and government has the power to do all. That's what it takes."
The crackdown on the online pharmacies this week suggests how the relationship already is benefiting both sides. While law enforcement agents have said they are targeting the pharmacies and not necessarily their customers, the California investigators urged DEA agents to turn over evidence of any involvement by high-profile athletes to the USADA so it could start disciplinary proceedings against them.
One lead agent in the multifaceted, four-state investigation said he would be willing. "Certainly," Carl Metzger, narcotics commander for Orlando's Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, said in an interview. "It would be reasonable to do that."
The pharmacies' customers are reported to have included Los Angeles Angels outfielder Gary Matthews Jr., former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, former baseball star Jose Canseco, a physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers and what one official called other "celebrities."
Federal officials say the cooperation has given them ready access to the scientific expertise of the anti-doping community as well as the benefit of USADA's proximity to athletes and coaches.
Matt Parrella, an assistant U.S. attorney working on the Balco case, said the USADA's ability to sanction drug cheats independent of a criminal conviction by banning them from competition helps "validate" federal investigators' work. Law enforcement authorities rarely go after users of performance-enhancing drugs, choosing instead to focus on distribution networks.
"It was a good relationship from the beginning," Parrella said in an interview in San Francisco. "They could bring something to the table that was unique and we were bringing something to the table they had no ability to do."
The USADA is involved in at least four other drug-related government investigations including the Internet pharmacy case, according to USADA general counsel Travis Tygart and chief executive Terry Madden. They declined to reveal the details of the investigations.
Government officials speculate that increases in federal sentencing guidelines for steroids and other drugs that resulted from the Balco probe have provided agents with more incentive to pursue such cases. "I've seen these things break apart under their own weight many times," Parrella said.
In the Balco case, he said, it did not. "All involved realized this was a relationship that needed to be fostered for the greater good."
To some extent, the collaboration reflects a worldwide trend. International anti-doping agencies have grown increasingly reliant on government intervention to catch drug users since 1998, when Australian customs agents caught Chinese swimmers with banned drugs and French police conducted raids and made arrests at that summer's Tour de France.
At the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, local police confiscated blood-transfusion material at a residence of the Austrian cross-country ski team. Four years later at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italian police raided the rooms of Austrian skiers and biathletes. Dozens of cyclists have been linked to a federal drug raid last year in Madrid known as Operation Puerto.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, an independent Montreal-based body established by the International Olympic Committee, has become so convinced of the necessity of investigative work in anti-doping enforcement that it is preparing to hold its second symposium on the matter in London in April. Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service who is the lead investigator in the Balco case, and Parrella spoke at the first conference last November in Colorado Springs.
"If you look at the really big busts, the really big advances, the majority have been with the assistance of other government agencies," WADA Director General David Howman said. "It's important that we don't get all wound up collecting urine and blood. It's not the be-all and end-all."
Athletes sanctioned in the Balco scandal said they used a steroid specifically designed to avoid detection. Such "designer steroids" aren't the only problem. Testers still don't have reliable tests for human growth hormone and other naturally produced performance enhancers known to be popular with athletes.
In an environment in which the athletes who use illegal performance-enhancing substances seem routinely to be at least one step ahead of drug testers, efforts are underway to strengthen the relationship between sports bodies and law enforcement officials.
The creation of a task force that would bring together various governmental and nongovernmental agencies is being discussed on Capitol Hill as a means of formalizing the relationship and creating a mechanism for information-sharing, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.
The USADA, in its seventh year of existence, receives about 60 percent of its funding from the federal government. It is a nonprofit corporation whose stated mission is to eliminate drug use in sports and protect athletes' health through research and education. It has no investigative power, no investigators and no budget designated for investigations.
The USADA has another problem: jurisdiction. All of the U.S. professional sports leagues conduct their own drug testing even though in 2005 several members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.), publicly urged the leagues to turn their testing over to the USADA.
Of the many examples of the USADA's partnership with government agents, two stand out, officials say.
In 2004, Kevin V. Ryan, the U.S. attorney who oversaw the Balco case until leaving for private practice last month, granted Novitzky, the IRS investigator, permission to testify at two arbitration hearings in which the USADA sought -- and received -- bans for athletes who had never failed drug tests. Ryan also allowed Novitzky to take various pieces of evidence with him rather than providing copies whose authenticity might be questioned.
Parrella said the moves weren't merely "uncommon, it was unique," since the criminal probe was far from complete.
"What drove my decision was the realization that this case was bigger than" the criminal investigation, Ryan said. "Everyone was a little nervous about it. It had never been done before. It turned out to be more a gesture of goodwill. It was our recognition that they had a job to do. . . . They knew we had a lot of evidence, a lot of material, that would help them in their mission."
Throughout the Balco probe, USADA officials communicated almost daily with Novitzky and an assortment of other agents involved in the case, including Parrella and fellow Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jeff Nedrow and Jeff Finigan, IRS agent Erwin Rogers and FBI agent Heather Young.
"If you tried to formalize [the relationship], you'd have lawyers meeting for five or 10 years and nobody would agree on anything," Catlin said. "The beauty of this is it happened. It was all sort of spontaneous from people trying to do the right thing."