Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

by Reed Albergotti

  So Hamilton was a known liar. Any testimony he gave would also be compromised by the fact that he had an obvious personal grievance with Lance, having heard that his ex-wife, Haven, had dated Lance shortly after they divorced.

  But prosecutors figured his one saving grace as a witness was that, while he had lied to the public and even to his closest friends, he had never lied in a court of law. And just as they hoped, now that Hamilton had a federal subpoena to answer to, he decided the lying would have to stop. He wasn’t willing to risk going to prison to keep his secrets.

  In July, in the federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, Hamilton spilled his guts to the grand jury, testifying among other things that he had seen Armstrong inject EPO. Hamilton’s testimony went on for nearly four hours—so long that the prosecutors weren’t done with him by the end of the day when it was time to send the jurors home. Proseuctors offered Hamilton limited immunity if he would talk to prosecutors outside of the grand jury. Hamilton agreed. In a room with his own attorneys present, Hamilton proceeded to give Novitzky more details that would be helpful in the investigation.

  For Hamilton, it felt good to give his testimony. To finally tell the truth. And then, having told the truth to the US government, he decided it was time to tell the truth to the world. He began shopping around a book proposal.

  One early morning that summer, Novitzky approached Stephanie McIlvain at her home in Southern California. Novitzky was aware that McIlvain had visited Armstrong during his cancer treatments in Indiana, and he believed she overheard his 1996 hospital room discussion with doctors about his previous drug use, and that she lied under oath in her SCA testimony. McIlvain was home with her son; her husband, Pat, had already left for work. Standing on her doorstep, Novitzky, who was accompanied by one other federal investigator, went for the jugular. “You lied and you could go to jail if you don’t allow us to come into that house and speak with you,” he said. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” McIlvain said, terrified. “I need to get with a lawyer.”

  A few weeks later she spent more than four hours before a Los Angeles grand jury, recounting what took place in the hospital on the day Armstrong allegedly confessed to doping. She wasn’t the killer witness Novitzky had hoped for, however. She told jurors that she had lied to Betsy, to David Walsh, to ESPN, when she said she remembered the hospital room scene. She had heard rumors, she said, of Lance Armstrong’s doping, but didn’t have any firsthand evidence. She was going through a difficult time, she said, and made up stories about Armstrong because, in some strange way, it made her feel good. She was ashamed. She said nobody at Oakley pressured her in any way with regard to her SCA testimony. She made that story up, she said, to get Betsy Andreu off her back.

  Her husband, Pat, also spent considerable time in front of the grand jury. Prosecutors grilled him about whether he was coerced by executives at Oakley to pressure his wife into lying during the SCA testimony. Pat swore under oath that nobody at Oakley ever weighed in.

  Greg LeMond was also issued a subpoena in mid-July. He wasn’t a subject of the investigation, but prosecutors said they were seeking the documents he obtained in the discovery phase of his lawsuit against Trek, which had been removed to the US District Court in Minnesota in April 2008 and by then settled. LeMond had wanted to go to trial against Trek, but the case unraveled. Although LeMond had recouped minor damages in the settlement, he considered the litigation an outright failure. He was happy to comply with the subpoena, in the hope that those documents might prove helpful in going after Armstrong, even though they hadn’t done LeMond much good.

  Part of the documentation that LeMond sent to federal prosecutors was his 2004 recording of a conversation between himself and McIlvain in which she admitted that she had, indeed, overheard Armstrong confess to using performance-enhancing drugs in the Indiana hospital room in 1996. LeMond had recorded the phone call with her because he thought McIlvain might be called to testify in a lawsuit with Trek, and he was worried she might try to cover for Lance. He had heard from Betsy that McIlvain was balking and was planning to lie in the hearing.

  LeMond also offered to be helpful in another way. He was going to lend his support to Floyd Landis. Now that Landis had come clean about doping, he wanted to do what he could to help him with any legal issues he might still be facing. As a favor to LeMond, two of his own laywers—Leo Cunningham and Mark Handfelt—agreed to represent Landis and assist him with navigating the federal investigation. LeMond and Landis were now allies in the fight against doping, and against Armstrong.

  Meanwhile, Landis was secretly working on a legal case of his own. He possessed an acute understanding of the interwoven relationships and commercial forces that had made it possible for Armstrong and his associates to keep Armstrong’s doping secret. Turning to a law that private citizens have used to bring civil lawsuits against major companies, including tech giant Oracle Corporation and drugmaker Pfizer Inc. for allegedly defrauding the government, Landis sued Armstrong and other key players—including Thom Weisel, Bill Stapleton, Johan Bruyneel, and Bart Knaggs. On June 10, he had filed his federal whistle-blower lawsuit, under seal, claiming Armstrong and his closest backers defrauded the federal government when they took money from the United States Postal Service. The team’s contracts with the Postal Service specifically prohibited doping, and it is a violation of the federal False Claims Act to knowingly violate a government contract. If found liable, the men could be responsible for up to triple the amount of money paid out on the US Postal contract, which was somewhere north of $30 million all told. The suit had come about in an interesting way. After the Wall Street Journal story broke, the cycling website VeloNews had run an article entitled EXPERT: FLOYD LANDIS COULD BE PROTECTED, AND REWARDED, BY WHISTLE-BLOWER LAW. Landis saw the article and called the whistle-blower lawyer quoted in the story. The lawyer, Paul Scott, agreed to take the case on a contingency basis, since the potential rewards were great. As a US citizen, Landis could sue the men under the False Claims Act on behalf of the US government and be rewarded with up to 30 percent of any money recovered by the government. Justice Department lawyers in Washington, DC, began weighing whether to join Landis’s lawsuit and launched an investigation of his claims. If they joined in, Landis would have a much better chance of receiving a payout.

  Novitzky and the federal prosecutors thought that if they could get George Hincapie to talk, they would have the story of doping nailed down. Hincapie was the only American rider who was close to Armstrong during all of his seven Tour de France wins. He knew everything. And unlike almost every other close teammate of Armstrong’s, Hincapie was a credible witness. He had never tested positive, never publicly proclaimed his innocence. He had never even had a falling-out with Armstrong. He had no motivation to lie. In fact, his lawyer, Zia Modabber, was a close friend of Lance’s.

  But once it became clear that the prosecutors were serious, Hincapie began to think that he should find a lawyer without any connections to Lance. Hincapie’s friend, William Crowley, the second in command for billionaire hedge fund owner Eddie Lampert and an avid cyclist, hooked Hincapie up with Crowley’s own lawyers at the white-shoe boutique law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, in New York. One of the partners assigned to help Hincapie figure out his next move was David Anders. Anders, a former federal prosecutor known for highly publicized takedowns of Wall Street titans and for his WorldCom prosecution, understood how to navigate the situation. It was unlikely Hincapie was in any legal jeopardy himself, he explained, so long as he cooperated and didn’t lie to prosecutors. They agreed that Anders and Hincapie would fly to Los Angeles together and meet with the prosecutors—after the 21-day Tour de France, which Hincapie was scheduled to race in later that summer.

  The race that July was a disaster for Armstrong. Even sports channels like ESPN and Versus had begun mentioning in their coverage the investigation under way in Los Angeles. Armstrong fell out of contention after crashing just before a pivot
al mountain stage. He tried to win just a single stage, but, in the end, he couldn’t even manage that. When Lance stepped foot outside the bus, he was mobbed by reporters asking him about Floyd’s more detailed allegations. Instead of holding post-race press conferences each day, Lance gave interviews to a Team RadioShack public relations manager, who played a tape of the interview in the press room. Reporters covering the event were forced to huddle around a tiny speaker and jot down notes from the recording.

  By the end of 2010, federal prosecutors had interviewed dozens of witnesses. In grand jury testimony and informal proffers, they learned of the widespread doping and trafficking of controlled substances. They had even procured the testimony of Sheryl Crow, after she had agreed to their proffer. Crow had witnessed doping firsthand, she said. She told investigators that in 2005, she had flown with Lance on a private jet to Belgium, where she watched him receive a blood transfusion.

  Michael Ball was cooperating against Armstrong, too. But Ball had something Novitzky wanted. Some members of Ball’s Rock Racing team told him that they had stayed in a house that Lance had once lived in and had found an old blood testing device made by Quest Diagnostics called a HemoCue—a small, red gadget the size of a paperback book that can instantly analyze blood. By pricking one’s finger and placing a drop of the blood onto a tiny piece of clear plastic and inserting it in the HemoCue, a rider could derive an instant hematocrit reading. The riders told Ball that Armstrong’s red blood cell percentages were still stored in the device and they were abnormally high. The riders gave the HemoCue to Ball, who ended up keeping it at his office. Ball handed it over to Novitzky, who analyzed it for possible evidence against Lance. Ball was never charged. Novitzky, Miller, and Williams began to put together the pieces of a charging document against Armstrong. For months, ever since hearing the allegations Landis had made, they’d been discussing how they might build a criminal case against Armstrong and the managers of the Postal team. Assuming Landis’s allegations were true, which all the evidence seemed to substantiate, the challenge would be to find out how they violated federal criminal law. Doping itself is not a crime in the United States, so they had to look for ways the team’s sophisticated conspiracy could have violated federal laws. They figured wire fraud might be one potential criminal charge because it covers any communications by mail, fax, or e-mail. Another option was a conspiracy charge for allegedly covering it all up. Then there was good old-fashioned drug trafficking.

  There was also a more creative option: that Armstrong and the US Postal team had criminally defrauded their sponsors by violating their contracts with criminal acts, such as transporting controlled substances across state and international borders. (Every one of the team’s major sponsor contracts included clauses that prohibited the team from doping. Some of the contracts were more explicit than others.) And that, ultimately, was the legal strategy the prosecution settled on: to charge Armstrong, and perhaps the US Postal team managers, with having defrauded their sponsors—not just the US Postal Service but the Discovery Channel, Trek, Nike, and so on—when they signed off on contracts. This was unique in the annals of professional sports. Though other athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens had been charged with lying under oath and obstruction of justice, none had ever before been charged in federal court with defrauding sponsors by doping.

  • • •

  The investigation took a heavy emotional toll on Lance, who was worried what the public thought of him. He was desperate for information not just about Novitzky and his latest moves but about the reporters covering the story, too—and he would stew over their coverage, dismissing them, including us, as hacks who were completely wrong on the facts. Despite the headlines, Armstrong found some measure of consolation in telling himself that he was still able to pass the Starbucks test: When he walked into Starbucks to get his morning coffee, nobody shouted, “Doper!”

  Lance was trying, so far as possible, to lead a normal family life. His ex-wife, Kristin, had been subpoenaed and later testified, but one afternoon in August, at the Four Seasons in Austin, he bumped into her lunching with friends, and they greeted each other cordially. With his girlfriend, Anna Hansen, who is ten years his junior, he was planning for the arrival of a baby girl, his fifth child, due in October.

  Lance did believe, however, that there was a real possibility the grand jury in Los Angeles would hand down an indictment. The thought that he might face a criminal trial unnerved him. But everyone else in his world seemed confident that he would emerge unscathed, just as he always had. Lance’s agent, Bill Stapleton, continued to keep in close touch with all of his major sponsors and paid a visit to Nike headquarters that summer. By late August, two of his sponsors—Michelob and RadioShack—had filmed new ads starring Lance. And Nike was in the midst of planning an aggressive expansion of the Livestrong brand overseas, particularly in Europe.

  As the federal investigation dragged on for months, it hit a number of snags.

  One problem was that George Hincapie wasn’t the star witness prosecutors had hoped he would be. In a five-hour meeting in a private room at the courthouse in Los Angeles, Hincapie told Novitzky and the prosecutors that he had doped and that he was generally aware that his friend Lance had doped—engaging in blood transfusions, using EPO and other banned drugs. Hincapie said Armstrong had even provided him with vials of EPO. But Hincapie said he hadn’t seen Lance doping firsthand. And some of Hincapie’s testimony contradicted Floyd Landis’s account.

  Kevin Livingston, who now ran a training business in the basement of Armstrong’s bike store, denied almost all knowledge of Armstrong’s use and the team’s sophisticated doping regimen. Kevin was represented by Lance’s friend Modabber.

  Beyond that, nearly all of the cyclists who provided testimony had serious credibility issues. Even Jonathan Vaughters, now managing a team committed to clean cycling, was compromised because he had become bitter enemies with Armstrong, which meant he might have an axe to grind.

  In 2011, Lance announced his second retirement from professional cycling. Then thirty-nine years old, he said he intended to spend more time with his children and dedicate more energy to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

  Armstrong’s image, though, was about to suffer from another assault. In May 2011, almost exactly one year after the Journal’s story about the Floyd Landis e-mail, Tyler Hamilton appeared on 60 Minutes and confessed to doping. In a message he sent by e-mail to his friends and family just before the broadcast, Hamilton said the federal investigation had triggered him to tell “the whole truth” for the first time, because he had concluded that “this was the way forward” for him. During the TV interview, he described his own doping as well as that of many of his teammates, including Armstrong, who he said had injected EPO more than once in his presence. Hamilton also repeated an allegation Landis had made—that Armstrong had paid a bribe to quash the positive test after the 2001 Tour de Suisse.

  The day after the show aired, Mark Fabiani made a statement: “Tyler Hamilton is a confessed liar in search of a book deal—and he managed to dupe 60 Minutes. . . . Most people, though, will see this for exactly what it is: More washed-up cyclists talking trash for cash.” At Fabiani’s suggestion, Lance created a website, www.Facts4Lance.com, to counter Hamilton’s allegations.

  Hein Verbruggen chimed in, too. In an interview following the show, Verbruggen said Armstrong “never, never, never” doped. He denied that there had ever been a cover-up of any positive test. “I repeat again: Lance Armstrong has never used doping. Never, never never. And I say this not because I am a friend of his, because that is not true. I say it because I’m sure. Even if we would like, it would not be possible to bury a positive test.”

  A few weeks later, Hamilton went to visit friends in Aspen, where he ran into Lance at Cache Cache, a fashionable restaurant in town. According to Hamilton, Lance bumped his shoulder aggressively, and remarked that nobody would ever believe him. He then told him that his lawyers would chew him up and spit
him out; his life would become a living hell. Hamilton described the encounter to his lawyer, who complained to the prosecutors that Lance was trying to intimidate a witness. Though both Lance and the owner of the restaurant described the incident as a non-event, it was taken seriously enough that the FBI showed up at Cache Cache a few days later to take possession of its surveillance tapes. Since the tapes captured only the kitchen area, they had no firm evidence.

  This was at least the second incident of what investigators believed was witness intimidation. Armstrong had sent an e-mail to former US Postal teammate Michael Barry, asking him to lie to the grand jury. Barry refused, and informed investigators of the exchange.

  Despite the scrutiny, Lance had no intention of leaving the public stage. His plans involved competing in marathons in 2011 and 2012, and eventually in the Ironman Triathlon. During 2011, he made his first forays into off-road tri events and met with only mixed results. He took it hard. But he intended to keep training with Michele Ferrari still by his side.