WP:BALCO Founder Conte Is at the Center of a Growing Doping Controversy

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33246-2003Dec3.html

A Search for Truth in Substance

BALCO Founder Conte Is at the Center of a Growing Doping Controversy

By Steve Fainaru

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 4, 2003; Page D01

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the mid 1990s, Victor Conte Jr., a one-time musician turned entrepreneur, developed a legal dietary supplement that purported to build muscle and speed recovery, much like an anabolic steroid.

BALCO founder Victor Conte Jr., an amateur scientist who did not finish college, in October displayed a bottle of his dietary supplement ZMA.

Conte called the product ZMA, and to promote it he recruited a stable of world-class athletes who attested to the supplement's powers to "make you 21/2 times the man you are!" Among the stars he attracted were Tim Montgomery, the world's fastest human, members of the Oakland Raiders and San Francisco Giants superstar Barry Bonds, who took three ZMA capsules before bedtime as part of an extensive nutrition program designed by Conte.

Conte, an amateur scientist who never finished college, made millions as he transformed his tiny company, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), into a significant player in the $19 billion nutritional supplement industry. He billed himself as a kind of nutritional consultant to the stars.

How far Conte went in his pursuit of exotic new substances to help athletes build muscle and endurance -- and who he may have persuaded to use them -- is the main question behind a sports doping controversy that has roiled leagues from Europe to Australia and led to deep soul searching in the United States about the integrity of athletic performance.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in October identified Conte as the source of tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, a steroid specifically engineered to be undetectable in standard drug tests administered to athletes. Twelve days later, the Food and Drug Administration banned THG, saying it was an illegal drug that could harm users.

A federal grand jury is investigating Conte and BALCO for tax evasion, money laundering and illegal distribution of controlled performance-enhancing substances. Nine athletes -- five in track and field, four in the NFL -- have tested positive for THG, but thousands of re-tests are being conducted on urine samples taken before the steroid was discovered. Scores of other athletes, including Bonds, Montgomery and New York Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi, have been subpoenaed to testify. Bonds is scheduled to appear before the panel today.

Combined with Major League Baseball's recent announcement that 5 percent to 7 percent of all tests on players last season came back positive for steroids, the revelations have had the cumulative effect of alerting fans to an epidemic of drug use in organized sports.

"This is our seminal moment," said Gary Wadler, a professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. "It raises the specter that so much of what we've come to believe has no legs, that the records we thought were incredible may, in fact, have been incredible. That the conversations over a cup of coffee at the local diner in the morning may have had no valid base because it was all Penn & Teller, it was an illusion, brought on not by magic but by illicit drug use. Maybe."

The unlikely center of it all is Conte, 53, a former bass player for the Bay Area funk band Tower of Power. The controversy has provided an unvarnished view of a charismatic entrepreneur who built a company around a used piece of lab equipment, then forged key relationships with athletes, doctors, academics and coaches to carve out a piece of the nutritional supplement business.

Conte has denied that he is the source of THG. He repeatedly declared his innocence in several e-mail exchanges but declined to comment publicly. One of his lawyers, Troy Ellerman, said Conte "most likely will be indicted. What he will be indicted for I don't know." Ellerman continued: "He's innocent, and I think when the evidence comes out that's going to be the result at the end of the day."

Former associates have described Conte as a brilliant amateur chemist who is almost entirely self-taught. Bob LeFavi, a professor of health science at Armstrong Atlantic State University and an Episcopalian minister, said Conte "doesn't have a PhD in biochemistry, but he certainly talks like he does. And I mean that in a good way. He is a self-made sort of arm-chair scientist."

Conte declared himself on tax returns as BALCO's "laboratory director." Under state and federal law, he is not qualified to hold the position because of his lack of formal training. He registered himself with USA Track & Field, the sport's governing body, as head of the ZMA Track Club, a group of athletes that promoted his nutritional supplements. He billed himself as "co-investigator" on a 1998 academic study that touted the strength-building properties of ZMA; the study was then used to support Internet claims that the supplement could build muscle.

Gross income from Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning (SNAC), a supplement company that Conte incorporated separately from BALCO, rose from $42,820 to $1.18 million in the two years after the study was circulated, according to court documents.

Conte signed agreements to manufacture and distribute ZMA through at least three labs -- Biotest, Twinlab and Experimental and Applied Sciences -- whose products NFL players are prohibited from endorsing because the companies have been found to manufacture products that contain banned substances.

State health officials opened an investigation last month after a child psychiatrist BALCO listed as its medical director told The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle that his name had been forged on hundreds of official documents filed with state regulators since 1989. The psychiatrist, Brian Halevie-Goldman, accused Conte of "playing doctor with somebody else's medical license to do things he wasn't supposed to be doing."

Ellerman has called Halevie-Goldman "a liar" who is trying to distance himself from the BALCO controversy.

Halevie-Goldman said he still has mixed feelings about Conte. "There's a lot of things I could say as a friend of his, and I still consider him a friend," he said. "I think I'm more grateful to him than angry. He's just very inspiring and energizing. Sometimes I would just talk to him and feel energized to go and get what I wanted. A lot of incredibly great athletes and CEOs and even medical scientists would be drawn into him, and would just love his energy and want to hang out and talk and collaborate."

Conte started BALCO in 1984 after dissolving Milbrae Holistic Health Center, a preventative medicine clinic that Conte operated with his ex-wife, Audrey.

Halevie-Goldman, who worked at both companies, said Conte built BALCO around a used piece of scientific equipment -- an Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrometer, or ICP -- which Conte purchased out of bankruptcy for about $12,000. The instrument, roughly the size of a piano, contains a plasma that reaches temperatures of nearly 14,000 degrees as it breaks down blood, hair, urine and other samples to their elemental components.

In 1987, Halevie-Goldman said, Conte performed a study on the University of California swim team to examine the levels of "trace minerals" before and after 90-minute workouts. The study led Conte to focus on the effects of zinc and magnesium on performance and strength, Halevie-Goldman said, and even led him to produce a scientific paper titled "Zap Your Zits with Zinc" after he used a supplement to aid a swimmer with chronic acne.

The experience alerted Conte to the marketing possibilities for nutritional supplements, Halevie-Goldman said. The following year, he incorporated SNAC and set out to develop his breakthrough product.

Until 1997, according to documents filed as part of Conte's divorce, SNAC failed to gross more than $5,000. Conte, in the same divorce papers, declared that he hit upon the idea for the nutritional supplement ZMA while meeting "with Dr. Marianna Baum, a renowned professor at the University of Miami, to discuss the possibility of BALCO labs performing mineral and trace element analysis for a zinc and HIV-1 study. . . . I began considering the idea of using a new form of zinc which also included monomethionine and aspartate to help with Dr. Baum's study."

Conte said he and Baum, who did not return phone calls, were unable to find funding for the study. He then thought about "revising the formulation and thought it might be a good idea to add some magnesium and B-6 to the formula. It was a coincidence that the word 'magnesium' started with an 'M' and that it could easily be substituted for the word 'monomethionine.' This is when the idea that ZMA could stand for zinc magnesium aspartate was born."

Zinc and magnesium are ubiquitous in most foods; most people get enough through a normal diet. But Conte was promoting the untested theory that supplementing zinc and magnesium would boost testosterone and thus build muscle mass and improve recovery time from injuries.

Conte funded his own study to build his case. In 1998, he teamed with a researcher at Western Washington University to produce "Effects of a Novel Zinc-Magnesium Formulation on Hormones and Strength." The 11-page study on 27 Division II football players found significant increases in testosterone and muscle strength over an eight-week period for 12 players who took three capsules of ZMA between dinner and bedtime.

Conte, in court documents, said he used an abstract from the study to secure an exclusive manufacturing and distribution agreement with Experimental and Applied Sciences Inc (EAS), which planned to sell the supplement under its own label for $75,000 in advance royalties. The deal dissolved within four months, in part because EAS believed Conte was distributing ZMA under other labels. After a settlement, Conte struck agreements to distribute ZMA through EAS and other companies.

One of those, Biotest, sells nutritional supplements that convert into steroids and publishes Testosterone Magazine, which advises readers on proper steroid use. T.C. Luoma, a Biotest partner who edits the magazine, said ZMA's success was "pretty much a question of good marketing. It's just zinc and magnesium." The supplement industry, he said, caters "to the average mentality of a 14-year-old. If you just use a lot of hyperbole, and if you don't have any shame you can make a lot of money in this business. It's kind of tragic, really."

Conte soon had coaches and athletes attesting to its powers. One was Remi Korchemny, a 71-year-old Ukranian-born sprint coach who trained Valery Borzov, the Soviet 100- and 200-meter gold medallist in 1972. Korchemny, who lived in the Bay Area, worked with a stable of Olympic caliber athletes, including Chryste Gaines, a 1996 Olympic relay gold medallist, elite sprinter Kelli White and Dwain Chambers, the fastest man in Britain.

Korchemny was referred to Conte by Raiders linebacker Bill Romanowski -- one of four Raiders who later tested positive for THG -- after trying ZMA himself and liking it. "I still use it," Korchemny said. "It helps you sleep better, and it's also good for digestion, and also for your sex life. You feel better as a man."

Conte gave him "50- or 60-percent discounts" on supplements, Korchemny said, and the coach would give them out to family and friends. Korchemny also began referring athletes to BALCO.

It was Conte's idea, he said, to form ZMA Track Club, which Korchemny described as "an advertising club more than an athletic club. Each time you had a newspaper article and they had ZMA hat or ZMA shirt, it was like advertising."

Unlike the NFL Players Association, which prohibits players from endorsing supplements, USA Track & Field has no such restrictions. When Conte registered the track club in 2001, he listed just four athletes as members: Montgomery, Gaines, shot putter Kevin Toth and Calvin Harrison, a gold medallist at the 2000 Olympics in the 4x400-meter relay.

Soon, however, more athletes began to surface under the ZMA affiliation. In 2002, Conte never sent in a registration form or his fee, according to USATF, but more than a dozen athletes competed under ZMA that year.

The club continued to list members, including hammer thrower John McEwen, in 2003, although many athletes moved on to other clubs such as Nike and Adidas.

Whether Conte, while promoting ZMA, substituted a benign steroid-substitute with the real thing remains the unanswered question. McEwen, like Toth, Chambers and Regina Jacobs, a middle distance runner, reportedly has tested positive for THG.

Just before BALCO terminated its laboratory license Sept. 22, Halevie-Goldman said he confronted Conte.

"I don't know how to phrase it; it was like, 'Victor, what . . . have you been doing?" said Halevie-Goldman, describing the encounter. "And he kind of started to tell me some things. I said, 'Wait a minute, maybe you shouldn't tell me. This is the wrong time to find out.' I said, 'If there's anything you've been doing to endanger my medical license -- you don't have to tell me what -- but I think an apology is in order.'

"He apologized," Halevie-Goldman said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company