Writeup in today's Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-0511130136nov13,1,2132504.story?coll=chi-sportsnew-hed Hardly in the clear By David Haugh Tribune staff reporter Published November 13, 2005 CHAMPAIGN -- Visible from Interstate 57, down a bumpy road that becomes narrower than a lane of the Dan Ryan Expressway, surrounded by acres of farmland and a campground bordering a creek, a tan three-story stone building sits. A sign in the front lawn of the 40,000-square-foot facility identifies the address as 309 W. Hensley, but the name of the company, Proviant Technologies, is not obvious on any of the site's exterior walls. Champaign man: Respected chemist or designer of performance-enhancing drugs? The BALCO probe focuses on Patrick Arnold. The place blends quietly into a nook of northern Champaign County so remote that two young men felt comfortable enough one day last week during the noon hour to urinate in the middle of an adjacent cornfield, behind a tractor. The odometer says it is 130 miles from Chicago, but it feels farther. In this setting is where the federal government believes the mother of international performance-enhancing drug scandals, BALCO--with arms that reach from here to San Francisco to China and Greece--was born. Inside the walls of Proviant's laboratory is where a federal indictment alleges Patrick Arnold, the Champaign chemist who invented "andro," illegally obtained anabolic steroids from China that he synthesized into a human-growth hormone and shipped to Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative founder Victor Conte, among others. A federal grand jury in San Francisco representing the Northern District of California indicted Arnold, 39, on three counts of illegally distributing the drugs. Facing up to 13 years in prison and $750,000 in fines, Arnold entered a plea of not guilty Wednesday and was released on a $100,000 recognizance bond. "I don't want to talk about this, I can't, and my attorneys are the only ones you can talk to, so don't call me," an agitated Arnold said on the phone from his Champaign apartment. His San Francisco-based attorney, Nanci Clarence, called Arnold "a respected chemist and researcher in the field of nutritional supplements" who will be found not guilty. Others such as Don Catlin, the world-renowned founder of the Olympic Analytical Lab at UCLA, consider the indictment of Arnold the biggest development yet in the BALCO case. Catlin helped ignite the BALCO investigation in 2003 with the discovery of a syringe anonymously sent to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that was filled with tetrahydragestrinone, or THG--also known as "the clear" and later linked to Arnold. "I think Conte is just the distributor--he doesn't make the things like Patrick Arnold can make things," said Catlin, known in the industry as the "doping detective." "So indicting Arnold is much more foundational and at the core of this issue than Conte was." Conte, the chief distributor in a scheme that implicated some of the sporting world's most elite athletes such as Marion Jones and Barry Bonds, was sentenced to four months in prison and four months' home confinement in a plea agreement. Greg Anderson, Bonds' personal trainer, was sentenced to three months in jail and three months' home confinement for his role. Arnold, accused of misbranding and sending performance-enhancing drugs from Champaign to BALCO that were found in a storage locker rented to Conte, will continue his defense Nov. 30 during his next scheduled court appearance in San Francisco. He is the fifth person to be charged in the BALCO case. The company for which Arnold is listed as a secretary, Proviant Technologies, issued a statement after the indictment that said: "Patrick has a respected reputation as a chemist in the nutritional supplement industry . . . [and] has always sought to conduct his business in a professional manner and strict adherence to the law." Proviant President Ramlakhan Boodram declined through a spokesman to discuss his relationship with Arnold, and attempts to contact any colleagues at the business were stymied at the main entrance. "Visitor by appointment only," a sign read. Asked if arranging such an appointment were possible, a receptionist replied as she shut the door firmly, "I'm sorry, there is nobody from our office who is going to be talking to you today." `Doesn't make any sense' Joseph Arnold, Patrick's father, who lives in Guilford, Conn., was even less enthusiastic about defending his youngest son publicly. He professes to believe in his innocence but was loathe to elaborate the reasons over the phone because of lessons he says he learned during the investigation. "I think I've had my phone tapped, so I'm very wary of these kind of calls," Joseph Arnold said. "He's a wonderful young man, a perfect gentleman who would not be inclined to do the things he's accused of. It doesn't make any sense." Raised in a home where both parents were school administrators, Arnold was a high school wrestler who became a bodybuilder but quickly gained notice for his brainpower as much as his brawn. He graduated from the University of New Haven with a degree in chemistry that led him toward a career as a synthetic-organic chemist for a noted chemical company. Arnold was working and living in his parents' home in Connecticut when Stan Antosh, then the chief executive officer of a supplements lab in Palm Springs, Calif., offered him a job at Osmo as a researcher at the recommendation of a friend even before meeting him in person. Not long after he was hired, Arnold devoted hours to translating German patents and came across the formula for a nasal spray made up partly of androstene, a hormone the former East German Olympic team used to build strength in athletes. China also produced the chemical in large quantities. Deregulation in the supplement industry in the mid-1990s eased restrictions on manufacturers, opening the door for Arnold to develop and market androstenedione in pill form. By the time St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire had made the supplement "andro" a part of baseball history in the summer of 1998, Arnold had increased Osmo's profits 2,000 percent. He became known in the business as the "father of prohormones" and relocated far away from the supplement industry's spotlight to Seymour, Ill., where he formed his own research company before joining forces with Boodram at Proviant. Andro made Arnold such a major player in his profession that The Sporting News named him one of the 100 most powerful people in sports. Fame--or infamy? Fame empowered Arnold. He fancied his role as a guru and relished offering advice, writing for bodybuilding magazines and spreading his message on supplements to whoever would listen. Called a "megaphone for the industry" by one bodybuilding magazine, Arnold formed a lobbyist group aimed at influencing legislators to legalize prohormones. "Patrick had a good reputation for being ingenious," said Steve Downs, chairman of the World National Bodybuilding Federation. "But I think the whole BALCO thing from the beginning, and this included, I don't want to say vindicated, but pleased people who are taking this problem with anabolic steroids seriously." In an affidavit that supports Arnold's indictment, one e-mail exchange with professional bodybuilder Milos Sarcev quotes Arnold as bragging about making a "side career" out of developing designer supplements. One eager bodybuilder so valued Arnold's input regarding supplements and steroids that, partly in jest, he wanted to know "where to send money, gold or kidneys." Arnold responded with instructions to send cash to a post office box. Arnold also liked sharing his knowledge on Internet message boards such as
www.bodybuilding.com. Between June 2002 and September 2005, investigators tallied 8,284 posts under the name Patrick Arnold and used that information against him with the grand jury. "There may be some [chemists who] know certain aspects of pharmacology more than I do, but when you add up overall knowledge of chemistry and pharmacology, I will go up against the best of them," Arnold allegedly posted in a forum last August. "I know by heart how to make most every steroid." In the eyes of authorities monitoring the message boards, one man's boast was another's admission of guilt. After Internal Revenue Service investigator Jeff Novitzky discovered in August 2002 a check for $1,100 from Conte to Arnold, Arnold's bank records were seized. An examination of those documents, which helped navigate the BALCO maze for officials, traced the origin of the scandal all the way to China. Paper trail Records show that between March 2002 and September 2003 Arnold made 11 wire transfers totaling $10,200 into two Chinese banks. Arnold is alleged to have purchased the anabolic steroid gestrinone, used to produce THG. The drug is available primarily in China off a Web site called thinkerchem.com that advertises the sale of anabolic steroids for research purposes. Further investigation also revealed that the Demetrios Air Freight Co., based in Greece, had made four separate deposits totaling $5,000 in Arnold's bank account during that same time frame. Authorities consider that payment to Arnold for supplying "the clear," or THG, to Demetrios Tsiaousolpoulo, the company's owner. Tsiaousolpoulo's father and noted Greek track and field coach Chris Tsekos are good friends, the indictment claims. According to the affidavit, Arnold sent four separate shipments of the clear substance that were forwarded to Tsekos for use by his athletes. In August 2002 in an e-mail to another Greek track and field coach, Andreas Linardatos, Conte described Arnold as "the clearman." On Sept. 3, 2003, during an interview with Novitzky, Conte identified Arnold as the supplier of the clear to BALCO and colleagues in Greece. Conte had stored THG in a storage locker along with supplies of norbolethone, another anabolic steroid that fit the legal definition of a controlled substance that had not been produced since the 1960s, and desoxymethyltestosterone, or DMT. Federal agents found all three performance-enhancing drugs in Conte's locker next to a box with a postmark "Champaign, Ill." with a return address that matched Arnold's post office box. Arnold also told Conte in an e-mail in May 2002 that he was providing technical advice for banned U.S. cyclist Tammy Thomas on how to fight her positive drug test for norbolethone, which is now illegal thanks to the Anabolic Steroid Control Act in 2004. Last January the government also banned the prohormone 1-AD, the top seller for Arnold's company Ergopharm, an arm of Proviant. Finally, an indictment A bad year got worse for Arnold last month when federal agents from the IRS criminal division and U.S. Food and Drug Administration executed search warrants at his home and laboratory at Proviant, where they obtained enough evidence to gain an indictment. The FDA became involved in February 2004 and even inspected Proviant after the mother of a teenager who had purchased prohormones from Arnold's company complained about their effects on her son. Even if Arnold knew the walls had been closing in for some time, he maintained as strong a front as one might expect from a muscle man. Sixty days before the raid, Arnold shared his confidence, as he was wont to do, with his bodybuilding buddies in cyberspace from a computer in Champaign. "As much as the feds may want to make an example of me, with the way the law is written, there is not much that can be done," Arnold posted on a bodybuilding.com message board. "Certainly they may make a media and political controversy out of it. But I don't care." - - - Cast of BALCO characters Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants is the biggest name to have been accused of using steroids in connection with BALCO. Victor Conte, BALCO's founder, was sentenced to four months in jail and four months' home confinement for distributing performance enhancers. Greg Anderson, Bonds' personal trainer, got three months in jail and three months of home confinement in the BALCO case. Chris Tsekos, a Greek track coach, is accused of receiving four shipments of "the clear" from Patrick Arnold. ----------
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