Feds May Have Tired of Waiting

Sources Say Prosecutors Felt Bonds's Trainer Would Never Testify

"I don't believe there is any new evidence" in the Barry Bonds case, said Victor Conte, founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. (By Marc Serota -- Getty Images)

The indictment of baseball slugger Barry Bonds does not appear to have been triggered by significant new evidence or witness testimony about his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs, several people close to the case said yesterday.

The indictment in the four-year-old investigation into whether Bonds, 43, lied to a federal grand jury on Dec. 4, 2003, likely resulted in part from the realization by federal prosecutors that they were not going to be able to compel testimony from Bonds's trainer, Greg Anderson, who has been jailed three times for refusing to testify against Bonds, the observers said.

Anderson was released from prison Thursday, hours after the indictment was unsealed. Bonds, who faces as many as 30 years in prison, was charged with four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Dec. 7 at U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

"They decided they were going to pull the trigger because they had [Anderson] in for a year, and . . . it was clear no court was going to allow them to keep him much longer," Mark Geragos, Anderson's attorney, said in a telephone interview. "That indictment has nothing new in it. All that stuff predates Greg going into custody."

The government's case against Bonds, who surpassed Hank Aaron to become baseball's all-time home run leader last season, was built in part on evidence seized in the fall of 2003 in a raid of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or Balco, a nutritional supplements lab in northern California. The indictment said the evidence includes a drug test from November 2000 that shows the presence of two anabolic steroids, and notations on a calendar from December 2001. The drug test result could be matched to a page with the name "Barry B," the indictment said. The calendar was labeled with "BB." The indictment did not reveal the notations on the calendar.

"I don't believe there is any new evidence" in the Bonds case, Victor Conte, the lab's founder, said in a telephone interview. "They reached a threshold and came to the realization that Greg Anderson was never going to testify."

Conte, who served four months in prison on steroid distribution charges stemming from the government's probe of Balco, said he was familiar with the items listed in the indictment.

He disputed their value in making a case against Bonds. He said Balco officials took blood and urine samples from all of the athletes who were their clients and subjected them to a variety of screens, including for anabolic steroids, numbering them and sending them to a laboratory for analysis. No rigorous chain-of-custody was followed that would ensure the samples were not tampered with or mislabeled, he said.

Conte said he had not located Bonds's results in the 30,000 pages of evidence he received in connection with the case but did not recall Bonds testing positive for any injectable steroids. The indictment does not specify the two anabolic steroids, but in testimony excerpted from Bonds's grand jury appearance, Bonds was asked if he had used testosterone or human growth hormone, which is not a steroid. He said no.

Conte speculated that the results might have indicated that Bonds tested positive for nandrolone and a high testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, which could be explained by the use of contaminated supplements or over-the-counter steroid products that were legally available until January 2005.

"If this is their smoking gun, then I believe they have some huge problems with this case," Conte said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Parrella, the lead prosecutor in the case, did not return several telephone calls yesterday seeking comment.

Bonds's case could have been slowed by several starts and stops that might have derailed plans to bring charges months earlier, observers said.

In February, Kevin V. Ryan, who had overseen the Bonds probe in the Northern District of California, was among the nine U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department in a move that eventually led to the resignation of Alberto Gonzalez as attorney general. The San Francisco-based office underwent a period of transition as Scott Schools took over as acting U.S. attorney.

Meantime, attorneys in Schools's office were bogged down with trying to reach a resolution in the perjury investigation of track star Marion Jones, who pleaded guilty last month to lying to federal investigators about her steroid use before and after the 2000 Summer Olympics, while simultaneously preparing to go to trial against track coach Trevor Graham and cyclist Tammy Thomas, both charged with lying to Balco investigators.

Graham's trial had been scheduled to begin at the end of this month. Both cases could go to trial next month.

Staff writer Dave Sheinin contributed to this report.