Memo to world: Angel "Memo" Heredia speaks on the record for the Times

Recent stories from out of California hint that a relatively new witness will blow the spikes off track and field.  Angel 'Memo' Heredia emerged as Gov't witness in the post-BALCO perjury trials now underway in the San Francisco Bay area.  The TimesOnLine published an incredible piece on Heredia today.  "Blow the spikes off" would be a description of his account.

On March 10 three years ago Angel Heredia was feeling at one with the world as he returned to his room on the campus of Texas A&M University in the small south Texas town of Kingsville. He had been for a workout and didn’t think twice about the two campus police officers standing not far from the entrance to his room. Maybe a break-in, he thought.

Chatting briefly with the officers, he walked on to his room. Inside there were two men, neither of whom he had met before, but that didn’t matter. He knew them. The uncommonly tall white one with the bald head was Jeff Novitsky, an investigator with the criminal section of the Inland Revenue Service (IRS); his African-American colleague was Erwin Rogers. If you were involved in elite-level athletics in the US in 2005, chances were you knew these gentlemen.

How important to track was Heredia?  This important:

As a supplier of banned drugs and an advisor on how to use them, Heredia had been supremely successful. Twelve of his athletes had won a combined total of 26 Olympic medals and 21 world championship medals. But now he and his lawyer had to consider their next move. IT WAS the story you couldn’t have made up. As the 2003 track season got into full swing, Victor Conte and Trevor Graham didn’t seem to have much to complain about. Owner of the Bay Area Laboratory CoOperative (Balco) in San Francisco, Conte was working with some of the best athletes in a number of sports. His clients included the star of the Sydney Olympics, Marion Jones, and the 100m world record holder Tim Montgomery.

Coach Trevor Graham held court in North Carolina.  As we know now, Graham mailed a tainted syringe to the USADA in an attempt to nail Victor Conte's BALCO operation, after the two men came to be competitors.  At the same time, Conte was undermining Graham with a letter saying Graham used a Mexican steroids dealer (Heredia).  Such is covert operations in track and field.

BALCO blew up.  The BALCO investigators probed Graham, who tried to play down the connection to Heredia.  As Victor Conte started down a path to conviction for steroid distribution and jail, the Feds tracked down Heredia.  The rest is history.  And how did Heredia stumble upon PEDs?

Heredia was a teenager and they were talking about what it took to be a champion. Delis pointed his right hand at his left arm, stuck out his index and middle finger and then brought his thumb through as if pressing the plunger of a syringe. The kid didn’t want to believe that but he suspected it was true. His own career didn’t amount to much; for all his fine technique, Heredia didn’t have the size, and then there were the injuries. Along the way, he realised Delis was right. Performance-enhancing drugs were everywhere and because he had his father’s love for chemistry, perhaps, Heredia was drawn to the science of performance-enhancement...

Heredia told the Feds about how he first came into contact with Graham. A friend of his, a pole vaulter, met the coach while studying at Raleigh in North Carolina. Graham wanted to know if there was someone in Mexico who might be able to get him certain drugs that would enhance the performances of his athletes.

“This friend told me Trevor was interested in getting growth hormone, testosterone and winstrol. Trevor called me and we set up a meeting for him to come to Laredo. He came over the Christmas holiday in 1996 with Randall Evans and Alvis Whitted, two of his athletes at the time. They travelled by car, about a 20-hour drive, which surprised me, and they stayed for four or five days.”

(more after the jump including elite track names)

 

Names?  How about Tim Montgomery, Antonio Pettigrew, CJ Hunter, and Marion Jones.  Look at Jones's regimen.

In the late 90s, Heredia worked with Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones, Antonio Pettigrew, Jerome Young and many others. Most of his contact with Jones was through her then husband CJ Hunter. Heredia showed athletes how to inject themselves, how to use the small needles for the injection of growth hormone. He reminded them to take iron supplements when using EPO and warned them about nandrolone. “Great anabolic,” he would say, “terrible clearance time.

After the trials for the Sydney Olympics were completed, 16 of Graham’s athletes had qualified for the Games, 12 of whom worked with Heredia. It was a high point from which they would soon fall.

“In the lead-up to Sydney, Trevor and CJ spoke to me about Marion. They wanted her to have everything she needed but it had to be undetectable. No cheap stuff. They asked me if I could get a designer steroid but it was like three weeks before the Games. Time was very short. We kept it to the main stuff: growth hormone, insulin, EPO, IGF-1 [a growth hormone].” However, the dynamic within the group was changing. Hunter tested positive for nandrolone, a career-ending blow, and then Graham and Heredia fell out. “I was left with $29,000 worth of drugs on my hands. My relationship with Trevor broke down because money-wise, there were a lot of problems. There was a lot of money owing to me.”

And Mo Greene...yes Mo Greene:

The athletes continued to work with Heredia and in 2002, he claims a friend of his was approached by the coach John Smith. Would he be interested in working with two of Smith’s sprinters, Maurice Greene and Larry Wade? He says a meeting was set up and Heredia met Smith, Greene and Wade in Houston, Texas.

“I found John Smith very professional. He knew what was going on and wanted me to work with the two athletes from his group that he most trusted. After winning in Sydney, Maurice had slipped a bit. Tim Montgomery was the new kid on the block. Maurice wanted to run fast, make a medal at the Athens Games and hold on to his adidas contract.”

Heredia worked with Greene in 2003 and 2004. Theirs was a predominantly business relationship. “We got on fine but it wasn’t a relationship based on friendship.” Heredia claims he would call Greene, talk to him about his test results, explain to him what he was getting and make sure he followed the protocols. “He ran well in 2003 until he had problems with his knee. He followed the same protocols in 2004 and he did well to get the bronze medal in Athens.”

Heredia had documentation showing a $10,000 wire transfer from an M Greene. When Greene was asked about this money, he said he had paid someone else’s bill. He flatly denies using performance-enhancing drugs. Smith and Wade have not commented on the allegations. “Obviously Maurice was caught by surprise,” says Heredia. “You know, all of a sudden they call you and tell you your name is in the press linked to the main witness in the Feds’ investigation.

“So Maurice says he paid the $10,000 for someone else? A guy said to me, ‘I want a friend like that.’ But who’s going to give you $32,000 just because you smile at him. Come on! It don’t work like that.” BY THE middle of 2004, the word was out that the Feds were eager to interview Heredia. Associates advised him to disappear into Mexico and lie low until the Feds moved on to their next case, but he had finally got round to doing his kinesiology degree and wasn’t walking out on that.

There is much more at the Times site.  Heredia's post-BALCO testimony will be bombastic for sure.  A bombastic and yet pathetic look at the deterioration of fair play in sports.