From today's San Mateo Daily Journal: a book excerpt crediting Dana for breaking the BALCO story
Exerpt from Howard Bryant's book: Juicing the game
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Three months earlier, Dana Yates had been an intern with the San Mateo Daily Journal, a tiny newspaper in Burlingame, California, a speck of a town tucked along the forty-mile expanse of freeway and technology firms between San Francisco and San Jose about six minutes south of the San Francisco International Airport. Yates had wondered where she would wind up. She had graduated from college and, having enjoyed her time in the world of entry-level journalism, decided that, at least for the near future, making calls for the police blotter and covering city council meetings for the Daily Journal wasn't such a bad way to go.
On the morning of September 3, 2003, Yates received a phone call. According to the caller something weird was happening in Burlingame. Federal agents had swarmed a local nutrition laboratory. The caller told Yates it was worth checking out.
When she arrived, most of the action had already occurred, but the dust had not settled. Eyewitnesses told her that the raid hadn't been led by the local San Mateo police, but by an elite force, quite possibly the FBI.
As Yates sat down to write, she spoke with her editors about how to approach the story. Cautious, she did not want to overplay her hand. What if it was nothing? Then again, she thought, it seemed like a very big deal. "It wasn't every day," she later recalled, "that the federal government pulls a raid here. I mean, this is Burlingame."
The story contained only eight paragraphs, the first four of which revealed something more than a routine sting. Yates played it straight:
A Burlingame lab that specializes in nutritional supplements and serves athletes including Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and 250 professional football players was raided yesterday afternoon by the IRS and the San Mateo County Narcotics Team.
Agents from the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit and San Mateo County Narcotic Task Force raided Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, also known as BALCO, located at 1520 Gilbreth Road. Arriving in unmarked cars, agents slipped into the low-profile building with tinted windows at Iz:3o P.M. Computer technicians were seen entering the building and boxes of unknown items were removed.
"We're limited on what can be said. All the court documents are sealed at this point," said IRS spokesman Mark Lessler, adding that more information will be revealed today.
The IRS is the lead agency in this investigation and only a couple of county agents were on scene, said Capt. Trish Sanchez, with the San Mateo County's Narcotics Task Force.
The rest of Yates's story provided background that was already familiar to the Crusaders. BALCO had begun to curiously take shape as a player in the ongoing track and field doping story. A week earlier, sprinter Kelli White had tested positive for a banned substance she said was prescribed by a BALCO doctor to treat narcolepsy. The company's founder, a shadowy musician-turned-nutritionist named Victor Conte, was linked to C. J. Hunter, ex-husband of track star Marion Jones and disgraced shot-putter who had been banned from Olympic competition for testing positive for nandrolone, another potent steroid. To insiders in the track and field world, BALCO was a company to watch.
The next day, Yates reported that federal agents then went to a gym around the corner from BALCO to interrogate Greg Anderson, a personal trainer who worked for BALCO and also happened to be one of two personal trainers for Barry Bonds. Dana Yates, all of twenty-one years old and a full-time reporter for less than ninety days, had opened the door on what would become the biggest doping scandal in American sports history. "For the rest of my career," she said with a laugh, "I'll be trying to top BALCO."
The next few weeks were a heady time for Yates. The phone rang constantly. The San Diego Union- Tribune called looking for details. That paper's investigative reporters had been on BALCO's trail earlier in the year. So were the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She remembered
having coffee with a French journalist who had flown to Northern California as part of an investigation into track and field doping. The reporter, Yates recalled, had made a to-do list for his trip and one of his top priorities was to begin collecting information on BALCO. The Feds had beaten him to it.
Two days after the original story broke, the San Francisco Chronicle credited the Daily Journal with the scoop. At first, there was nothing sexy about it. The Chronicle thought so much of the BALCO story that it ran the piece on page A-14. Glenn Schwarz, the Chronicle sports editor, had a sense that the story could be a potentially important one, if for little other reason than the names involved. In the process of raiding BALCO, the federal agents assigned to the job had stopped to admire the photos of the superstar athletes in Victor Conte's offices. Barry Bonds was the best player in baseball. Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery were elite track stars. Sugar Shane Moseley was a boxing champion and Bill Romanowski, the linebacker, was well-known in San Francisco sports circles as a current member of the Oakland Raiders who had previously won a pair of Super Bowls with the 49ers. "There was some question about what the story was," Schwarz recalled. "But when you saw all those names, all connected with this one little company, you had a pretty good feeling that there was something there."
But, at least to the Chronicle, the larger import of BALCO did not immediately reveal itself. There was, to some of the editors, a decided lack of interest in the story from the paper's top editors. It was too amorphous, too difficult to pin down. The IRS had effected an "enforcement action" against a nutritional lab. What did that have to do with sports? What did it mean, anyway? Did the IRS raid BALCO because it didn't pay its taxes? From the beginning, BALCO sounded more like a money-laundering story than a sports one. It would make a nice piece of fiction that everyone at the Chronicle recognized the significance of the raid immediately. The truth was more complicated. To Glenn Schwarz, it was clear that the story had potential, but how to get at it was another topic altogether.
Exerpt from Howard Bryant's book: Juicing the game
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Three months earlier, Dana Yates had been an intern with the San Mateo Daily Journal, a tiny newspaper in Burlingame, California, a speck of a town tucked along the forty-mile expanse of freeway and technology firms between San Francisco and San Jose about six minutes south of the San Francisco International Airport. Yates had wondered where she would wind up. She had graduated from college and, having enjoyed her time in the world of entry-level journalism, decided that, at least for the near future, making calls for the police blotter and covering city council meetings for the Daily Journal wasn't such a bad way to go.
On the morning of September 3, 2003, Yates received a phone call. According to the caller something weird was happening in Burlingame. Federal agents had swarmed a local nutrition laboratory. The caller told Yates it was worth checking out.
When she arrived, most of the action had already occurred, but the dust had not settled. Eyewitnesses told her that the raid hadn't been led by the local San Mateo police, but by an elite force, quite possibly the FBI.
As Yates sat down to write, she spoke with her editors about how to approach the story. Cautious, she did not want to overplay her hand. What if it was nothing? Then again, she thought, it seemed like a very big deal. "It wasn't every day," she later recalled, "that the federal government pulls a raid here. I mean, this is Burlingame."
The story contained only eight paragraphs, the first four of which revealed something more than a routine sting. Yates played it straight:
A Burlingame lab that specializes in nutritional supplements and serves athletes including Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and 250 professional football players was raided yesterday afternoon by the IRS and the San Mateo County Narcotics Team.
Agents from the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit and San Mateo County Narcotic Task Force raided Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, also known as BALCO, located at 1520 Gilbreth Road. Arriving in unmarked cars, agents slipped into the low-profile building with tinted windows at Iz:3o P.M. Computer technicians were seen entering the building and boxes of unknown items were removed.
"We're limited on what can be said. All the court documents are sealed at this point," said IRS spokesman Mark Lessler, adding that more information will be revealed today.
The IRS is the lead agency in this investigation and only a couple of county agents were on scene, said Capt. Trish Sanchez, with the San Mateo County's Narcotics Task Force.
The rest of Yates's story provided background that was already familiar to the Crusaders. BALCO had begun to curiously take shape as a player in the ongoing track and field doping story. A week earlier, sprinter Kelli White had tested positive for a banned substance she said was prescribed by a BALCO doctor to treat narcolepsy. The company's founder, a shadowy musician-turned-nutritionist named Victor Conte, was linked to C. J. Hunter, ex-husband of track star Marion Jones and disgraced shot-putter who had been banned from Olympic competition for testing positive for nandrolone, another potent steroid. To insiders in the track and field world, BALCO was a company to watch.
The next day, Yates reported that federal agents then went to a gym around the corner from BALCO to interrogate Greg Anderson, a personal trainer who worked for BALCO and also happened to be one of two personal trainers for Barry Bonds. Dana Yates, all of twenty-one years old and a full-time reporter for less than ninety days, had opened the door on what would become the biggest doping scandal in American sports history. "For the rest of my career," she said with a laugh, "I'll be trying to top BALCO."
The next few weeks were a heady time for Yates. The phone rang constantly. The San Diego Union- Tribune called looking for details. That paper's investigative reporters had been on BALCO's trail earlier in the year. So were the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She remembered
having coffee with a French journalist who had flown to Northern California as part of an investigation into track and field doping. The reporter, Yates recalled, had made a to-do list for his trip and one of his top priorities was to begin collecting information on BALCO. The Feds had beaten him to it.
Two days after the original story broke, the San Francisco Chronicle credited the Daily Journal with the scoop. At first, there was nothing sexy about it. The Chronicle thought so much of the BALCO story that it ran the piece on page A-14. Glenn Schwarz, the Chronicle sports editor, had a sense that the story could be a potentially important one, if for little other reason than the names involved. In the process of raiding BALCO, the federal agents assigned to the job had stopped to admire the photos of the superstar athletes in Victor Conte's offices. Barry Bonds was the best player in baseball. Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery were elite track stars. Sugar Shane Moseley was a boxing champion and Bill Romanowski, the linebacker, was well-known in San Francisco sports circles as a current member of the Oakland Raiders who had previously won a pair of Super Bowls with the 49ers. "There was some question about what the story was," Schwarz recalled. "But when you saw all those names, all connected with this one little company, you had a pretty good feeling that there was something there."
But, at least to the Chronicle, the larger import of BALCO did not immediately reveal itself. There was, to some of the editors, a decided lack of interest in the story from the paper's top editors. It was too amorphous, too difficult to pin down. The IRS had effected an "enforcement action" against a nutritional lab. What did that have to do with sports? What did it mean, anyway? Did the IRS raid BALCO because it didn't pay its taxes? From the beginning, BALCO sounded more like a money-laundering story than a sports one. It would make a nice piece of fiction that everyone at the Chronicle recognized the significance of the raid immediately. The truth was more complicated. To Glenn Schwarz, it was clear that the story had potential, but how to get at it was another topic altogether.
- Written by Joanne
Two other local journalists that deserve praise are Nathan Mollat and Emanuel Lee. I have developed the habit of clicking on the on-line version of the paper each morning, primarily due to their great coverage of high school sports.
Posted by: Joanne | December 12, 2007 at 04:39 PM