by Tim Elfrink
It was an accident, he says: The product of him working in the New York Mets clubhouse, having a scholarly knowledge of steroids, and not being the sort to turn away a friend seeking advice or even drugs. But to Radomski, who has a jaw like a sledgehammer and wears a military-style flattop, it had begun sinking in that he would be, in the eyes of the law, nothing more than a narcotics trafficker with particularly high-profile clients. And there was evidence all over his damn house.
So Radomski lit the fireplace inside his perfect suburban Long Island home. “I did spring cleaning,” Radomski says, even though it was fall. He likes to say that his only partner in crime as a steroid dealer was the US Postal Service, since he almost always delivered drugs via the mail. So now he tossed package receipts, tracking labels, pieces of paper bearing phone numbers and addresses, notes from players—“everything I could find,” he says—into the roaring fireplace and a paper shredder that he worked simultaneously.
The frenetic spring cleaning ended up saving the reputations of an untold percentage of Radomski’s clients, he says. “There are a lot of players who are going to be in the Hall [of Fame] who I know were on the stuff,” he says. But without the government having evidence that they bought anything from Radomski, “I didn’t have a reason to throw these guys under the bus.”
He adds: “I saved my ass, too.”
There was one thing Radomski couldn’t do anything about, though: checks from those players who were too lazy to pay in cash, already deposited and recorded by his bank. Though not all of his customers went that route, the exposure of just this portion of Radomski’s major league clientele was enough to change the game forever.
On December 15, 2005, two months after the records purge, Radomski opened his front door to find a tall, completely bald federal agent who introduced himself as Jeff Novitzky. He used those words Radomski had half expected to hear for years—money laundering, steroid distribution, conspiracy—and unfolded a search warrant.
• • •
Sixteen years earlier, MLB’s first big missed chance to tackle its blooming steroid problem started with a meeting between a legendary college football coach and an FBI agent.
When he took the helm of the University of Michigan Wolverines in 1969, Bo Schembechler revitalized the program with one of the great upsets in football history, knocking off defending national champion Ohio State to spark the famed “Ten-Year War” with the Buckeyes. For the next decade, Michigan and OSU traded Big Ten titles and Rose Bowl trips as Schembechler steamrolled to almost two hundred wins.
But twenty years later, Schembechler looked at the newest powerhouse in the conference—the Michigan State Spartans—and saw only chemical enhancement behind their run to glory.
The Spartans had bullied their way to the Big Ten title and a berth in the 1988 Rose Bowl behind a monstrous squad led by future pros Lorenzo White, Tim Moore, and a cartoonishly ripped, six-foot-six offensive lineman named Tony Mandarich, who later posed for the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline THE INCREDIBLE BULK.
Schembechler had good reason to believe the squad’s newfound success was powered by synthetic testosterone. Rumors had reached him that several Spartans had pissed dirty in a blind NCAA drug test at the Rose Bowl. Years later, Mandarich admitted that he’d used steroids at MSU and cheated a drug test before the game.
Fed up, Schembechler called in Greg Stejskal. For the past decade, he’d invited the towering, mustachioed Ann Arbor FBI field office supervisor to address his team about the dangers of cocaine and other recreational drugs. This time he called his G-man buddy to tell him that a number of his rivals, particularly Michigan State, were rife with steroids.
“But he also said what bothered him the most was that he did these summer camps,” Stejskal says, “and lately the high schoolers were coming in and not asking whether they should do steroids, but when exactly they should start.”
Stejskal had played college football at Nebraska, so he was personally offended by steroid-inflated stars like Mandarich taking over the sport. “I’ll look into it,” Stejskal promised.
Neither man sitting in Schembechler’s wood-paneled office that morning knew their conversation would ignite the nation’s first major crackdown on steroids, a case that eventually spanned three nations and nabbed seventy major dealers.
The small investigation that started in a Michigan college town ultimately presented MLB with its final, best shot to pump the brakes on the drug-fueled train steaming toward shattered records, bulked-up sluggers, and an inevitable reckoning with chemical enhancement. Not only did Stejskal’s investigation show that steroids were flowing freely from gyms to locker rooms, he also offered MLB definitive proof that one of the game’s biggest stars was juicing. The result was deafening silence.
As he launched into Schembechler’s case, Stejskal had serendipitous timing on his side. A year earlier, President Ronald Reagan had signed a federal law banning all steroids for nonmedical purposes. But because the law focused narrowly on doctors overprescribing steroids, it did not allow for an FBI probe of users.
But in late 1989, a young US senator named Joe Biden—attempting to overcome a scandal during the last presidential campaign, when he’d been caught plagiarizing lines in a stump speech—saw getting tough on juicers as a way to get his mojo back. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had recently dominated headlines at the Seoul Olympics, having shattered a sprinting record before seeing his gold medal stripped when he failed a postrun urine sample for stanozolol, an anabolic steroid.
Without serious penalties for PED use in sports, Biden argued, kids would never take Reagan’s new prohibition seriously. “Millions . . . still look to those people who are the stars on the athletic field as the role models in our schools,” he said during one hearing. “If they are able to benefit from this use without any penalty, then it seems to me the message is overwhelming to the rest of America that drug abuse in any form is not that big a deal.”
By the end of the year, the future vice president had shepherded through the landmark Anabolic Steroid Control Act, a bill that forever changed the landscape of American doping. Users faced a year in jail for possessing steroids and dealers looked at up to five years for selling them.
Yet despite the new legal ammunition from Washington, Stejskal could still only piece together the resources for a small operation. Along with his partner, Bill Randall, he went undercover at a few Detroit gyms that Michigan’s strength coach had told them were notorious for steroids. They pretended to be Chicago businessmen looking for drugs while working out on the road. As the deadline for the six-month operation approached, the agents had trapped only a handful of small-time local dealers.
Then Washington called. “They told us the White House called the FBI because George H. W. Bush was asking what we were doing about steroids,” Stejskal remembers. “They told us, ‘You’ve got the only steroid case in the entire country.’”
Thanks to Bush’s pressure, Stejskal and Randall received not only an extension but money for a full-on probe. Operation Equine, as it was dubbed, was a go. “We still thought this would basically be a regional thing, maybe a case that took us into Ohio,” Stejskal says. “As it turns out, it went all over the country and into Canada and Mexico.”
They worked the case like any other federal drug investigation: Steroid users led the undercover cops to neighborhood dealers, who then led them up the chain to the real players in the area—either unwittingly or while wearing a wire under threat of arrest. By 1992, the indictments started pouring out of grand juries.
In Canada, cops seized $20 million in illegal steroids while prosecutors charged thirty-seven men, including the son of the chief justice of Canada’s Federal Court. In Cleveland, the feds nabbed the state’s biggest dealer and his entire network. A repeat Mr. Ohio winner ended up in cuffs. In Detroit, the king of Michigan’s anabolic steroid network ended up being a weight lifter with a too-good-to-be-true—but in fact, totally real—name: Joe DiMaggio.
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In 1992, the operation took its turn toward baseball. It all started with a young Southern California bodybuilder who liked to use cattle prods in his workouts.
American steroid culture was in a vibrant infancy in the mid-’80s, but Curtis Wenzlaff was already pushing its limits. Wenzlaff first tried steroids as a teenager at his local suburban California gym, quickly packing on forty pounds of muscle as he worked toward a college football scholarship. And the drugs were just the beginning.
Wenzlaff slept in a pitch-dark sensory deprivation chamber. He strapped a mask to his face and huffed pure oxygen while pounding iron. And he tied himself to a leg machine and demanded that a spotter electrocute him with a cattle shocker to keep him going. The insane regimen—and a hefty cycle of steroids—paid off with a scholarship to Cal State.
Soon after he graduated in 1987, a friend introduced him to Reggie Jackson. The vociferous slugger had recently retired from a Hall of Fame career and needed a new challenge. He became a regular at the weight lifter’s gym, and Wenzlaff eventually moved into the baseball legend’s sprawling Oakland mansion. (Both Jackson and Wenzlaff maintain the retired slugger had no inkling of his steroid business.) Reggie began taking him to Oakland Coliseum, guiding the trainer past security and into the locker rooms. That’s how Wenzlaff became one of the first in a long line of beefy stowaways toting syringes into major league clubhouses.
Naturally, he hooked up with Jose Canseco. In 1988, Canseco reaped the benefits of juicing, earning a spot in the history books with the first 40/40 season. Wenzlaff knew immediately from his physique that he was a fellow adherent to the dark arts of the needle, but he found Canseco lacked the sophisticated know-how native to West Coast bodybuilders. Wenzlaff was experimenting with the wildest testosterone blends California’s underground drug labs could cook up. “In terms of steroid knowledge,” Wenzlaff brags, “I was light-years ahead of him.”
Wenzlaff played steroid guru to Canseco during off-season Miami workouts, introducing him to a range of mixes like a new formula for the discontinued steroid Parabolan. But Wenzlaff didn’t just work with Canseco. By the start of the 1988 season, he was also selling to the younger member of the Bash Brothers. Mark McGwire had followed up his stunning rookie season’s forty-nine home-run showing by swatting thirty-two as a sophomore, but already he was looking toward Canseco’s chemical enhancements.
Wenzlaff says he was the provider, keeping McGwire on regular cycles of testosterone and anabolic steroids. McGwire ultimately admitted to his steroid habit, after years of denial, but swore they only helped him “stay healthy.” Wenzlaff ridicules that argument, once telling a reporter of McGwire’s regimen: “If Paris Hilton was to take that array, she could run over Dick Butkus.”
As the two A’s sluggers exploded both in size and fame, Wenzlaff’s under-the-table steroids business grew. He later claimed multiple major leaguers and Hollywood personalities among his clients, though he will only name Canseco and McGwire. In the summer of 1992, though, he brought on one customer too many, a friendly Chicago gym owner looking for steroids named Eddie Schmidt. At Wenzlaff’s condo, Schmidt pointed at a photo prominently displayed on the wall and asked innocently, “Hey, who’s that?”
“That’s Jose Canseco,” the dealer told him with a grin. “He’s a friend of mine.”
In September 1992, Wenzlaff met Schmidt at a Santa Monica motel for one last steroid sale. During the meeting, Schmidt called room service for some food. Wenzlaff answered the door, expecting a hotel employee with a cart full of snacks. Instead, he stared openmouthed at a tall federal agent brandishing his badge.
“You’re under arrest,” Greg Stejskal told him. Schmidt’s real identity, of course, was Stejskal’s FBI partner, Bill Randall. And Wenzlaff’s Michigan friend who’d referred him was an informant working for the feds.
Wenzlaff knew he was going down hard. The only question was, who would he take with him?
• • •
Bud Selig worked hard to burnish his everyman Midwestern image. He drove a Chevy Caprice, worked from a blocky Milwaukee high-rise on Lake Michigan, and even ate the same lunch every weekday: a $1.50 hot dog and a Diet Coke from the custard stand around the corner from his office.
But Selig had seized the commissioner’s seat through a good old-fashioned bloodless coup, and he’d done it because he believed fanatically in the job’s two holy missions: making the owners heaps more money and protecting the hallowed traditions of the national pastime.
“The most important part of this job, clearly, is to protect the integrity of the sport,” Selig said in a 2012 court deposition. “People live and die with baseball games. It’s their life. The more you’re in this sport, the more you understand that, how important it is to so many different people.”
Truthfully, Selig had always understood that passion because a love of hardball had driven his own career. Selig was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s biggest city, and raised by a prominent Ford dealer. He dreamed of a life in academia, working as a historian and lecturing on the distant past. “I’m a great student of history,” Selig said in the deposition. “I wanted to be a history professor.”
Instead, at his father’s urging, he went into the family business. But his passion was never used cars. Hank Aaron’s long-ball heroics with the Milwaukee Braves had indelibly marked Selig as a young man at Milwaukee County Stadium. When the franchise fled to Atlanta in 1966, he regarded it as a great tragedy.
Selig made it his life’s work to salve Milwaukee’s wound. He sold his dealership, gathered investors, and launched failed attempts to buy the White Sox, as well as two expansion teams, which ended up in San Diego and Kansas City. In 1969, Selig finally got his wish when the Seattle Pilots folded after one year. Selig’s group snatched the franchise for $10.8 million and brought baseball back to Wisconsin.
In the small market, Selig was a prudent owner and the Brewers were a middle-of-the-pack franchise, making it to one World Series, which they lost to the Cardinals in 1982. Behind the scenes, though, he was obsessed with the bottom line. Starting in 1985—just as the Pittsburgh drug trials were raging—Selig and his fellow owners began a scheme to drive down contracts by refusing to tender deals to free agents. Believing that rich clubs were bankrupting the small ones with massive contracts, Commissioner Ueberroth had spearheaded the move, which led to stars like Kirk Gibson and Tim Raines getting lowballed into re-signing at steep discounts. While the owners (including Selig) have never admitted to the plot, three independent arbitrators later found them guilty of collusion and ordered them to repay $280 million to players.
If Selig projected a quiet, pragmatic image in public, his behind-the-scenes move from the owner’s box to the commissioner’s seat came via bold mutiny. Fay Vincent, an entertainment lawyer and executive who had served as MLB’s deputy commissioner, was promoted to baseball’s top job in 1989. His was a President Garfield–esque stunted tenure, mostly because he tangled with Selig and the Milwaukee owner’s budding ally in Robert Manfred.
Manfred, who has degrees from both Cornell and Harvard, later became Bud Selig’s right hand and the de facto day-to-day head of the league. In 1990, he was brought in by the owners to try to end a strike that had already eaten up most of spring training and was threatening the start of the season as players and owners fought over free agency and arbitration rules. Midway through negotiations, he and union chief Donald Fehr agreed to take the weekend off from sparring. The way Manfred tells it, he was watching a college basketball game at Madison Square Garden when a staffer rushed in with the news: Vincent had secretly invited Fehr to his house to offer his own settlement behind Manfred’s back—one much less favorable for owners. “Fay sowed the seeds of his own destruction,” Manfred said.
In the eyes of Selig and Manfred, Vincent had come down on the wrong side of the perpetual power struggle between owners and the union. It was the defining struggle behind nearly every ongoing conflict in the sport, including its repe
ated failures to address the drug culture in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In September 1992, Selig headed a rebellion. With owners increasingly dismayed at Vincent’s decision making and Selig among his most outspoken opponents, it wasn’t difficult to organize a no-confidence vote, followed shortly by Vincent’s resignation. The Milwaukee businessman took his place as interim commissioner and never relinquished the position, getting the job for good in 1998.
Selig believed baseball faced the most serious threats to its survival in a generation. That danger, however, had nothing to do with the home runs flying out of the Oakland Coliseum at a record clip as McGwire and Canseco injected each other’s butt muscles with Wenzlaff’s concoctions. Selig later maintained that he made it through the heart of the Steroid Era with nary a hint of what was going on. “I never even heard about it,” he said in 2005, referring to steroids in the clubhouse. “I ran a team and nobody was closer to the players and I never heard any comment from them. It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999 that I heard the discussion.”
In his first years as acting commissioner, Selig was more focused on another problem: his belief that the owners had ceded too much power in their battles with the union. The result was that as many as a nineteen franchises were operating in the red, at least according to the owners’ notoriously unreliable estimates. He knew firsthand that small-market teams like his Brewers could never compete on the field until the sport halted runaway salaries in New York and Boston.
With the union’s agreement set to expire before the 1994 season, the owners and players prepared for a slugfest. Selig wanted an end to arbitration and to tighten free-agency rules—moves that would save owners from ever-inflating contracts; he even floated the idea of a salary cap. Players wanted blood from a man they thought represented all the owners who had colluded to rob them of $280 million. It was that crime that underpinned the decade of mistrust to come, helping to convince even those players who wanted to stop the inflow of steroids from allowing owners to institute a testing program.