Mikiemo83
09-28-2007, 03:55 PM
some strange stuff and I am going to go out on a limb and say mostly false but this is crazy
Steroids Confidential
Greg Anderson has given up his freedom rather than testify about Barry Bonds. But one man has learned the deepest secrets of the trainer behind baseball's new home run king.
Prison changes a man. Makes him hard and cold, "like the frozen earth itself," as Hemingway once observed. Only returning to the outside has allowed Marlon Leftwich to thaw his spirit, to warm his soul.
He was paroled in August after serving a six-month sentence, ample time for seasons to change and hope to decay. The San Francisco native landed behind bars for a crime spree vast in geography but narrow in its choice of targets: Over a six-week period, federal court records state, Leftwich crisscrossed California, Arizona, and Nevada to rob 44 convenience stores.
He didn't get rich along the way, stealing a paltry $755 in cash — and more than twice that amount in junk food. Before politely asking each store clerk to open the register, Leftwich would stuff his brown leather trench coat full of high-fat munchies, ranging from fried pork rinds to Little Debbie Devil Squares. (Perhaps predictably, his fondness for beef sticks led federal agents to dub him the Slim Jim Bandit.) His "weapon" was an empty Bed Head shampoo bottle that, when pointed from inside his coat pocket, passed for a handgun.
Leftwich's three-state snack binge ended on a brisk February morning in Daly City. The feds, tipped off by a confidential informant, set up a sting at a 7-Eleven near an exit ramp off Interstate 280. A young FBI agent posed as the store's clerk, chosen for the role, in part, because of his acne-mottled complexion. A security camera recorded Leftwich, his thin black hair cinched in a ponytail, as he drifted through the aisles, pocketing a dozen bags of CornNuts and Combos, five boxes of Pop-Tarts, and eight Hostess fruit pies — four apple, four cherry. Moments later, as he approached the checkout line, the FBI agent vaulted over the front counter and slammed him to the floor.
"He took me down hard," Leftwich says, wincing at the memory, cradling his tattoo-streaked forearms against his chest. "The ****ing pie filling went everywhere."
He recounts his arrest while sitting in a cramped room in a Tenderloin SRO that he asked SF Weekly not to identify, fearing unwanted attention. A stack of copies of the Examiner doubles as his chair. He sleeps on a wooden pallet swaddled in bubble wrap; when he rolls over at night, "it sounds like the Fourth of July." On a rusty hook inside the door hangs his ruined trench coat, dark fruit-pie splotches visible in the wan light cast by the room's lone ceiling bulb.
The 43-year-old Leftwich moved here after his release from prison to piece together the shards of his life. He found a job in pest control, and though to him it marks a demotion from his stylist days at Supercuts, he earns enough to afford basic cable. (Affording a television has proven more difficult.) Thanks to weekly hypnosis sessions with a nutritional psychologist, he has tamed his junk-food addiction, shedding 24 pounds from his 6-foot frame. To symbolize his new start, he shaved his head. As much as anyone, he resembles a bald Malcolm Young, the spindly rhythm guitarist for the hard-rock band AC/DC.
But for all the progress made toward retrieving his self-respect, Leftwich, his face pale and gaunt, wears the gaze of the haunted. Flitting back and forth, his narrow-set, sea-blue eyes betray his anxiety, as does his habit of checking the door's peephole every few minutes. He needs to talk. He needs to set down a burden too heavy for one man to bear.
For transporting stolen goods across state lines, Leftwich wound up assigned to the federal penitentiary in Taft, 40 miles southwest of Bakersfield. With no beds available until mid-March, however, he spent the first week of his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin. When he met his cellmate — or "cellie," in prison parlance — Leftwich thought he recognized him. His black hair styled in a mohawk with dreadlocks, the inmate, stout and thickly muscled, spoke in a voice oddly squeaky for someone so buff. He introduced himself as Greg.
As it happened, the next day, while watching ESPN on the only TV in the prison commons area, Leftwich learned why his cellie looked vaguely familiar. The cable sports network aired a spring-training update on the BALCO case, the federal steroids investigation that has embroiled Giants slugger Barry Bonds since 2003. Across the screen flashed the images and names of some of the scandal's key players, including BALCO founder Victor Conte, Bonds' former mistress Kimberly Bell, and his onetime personal trainer — Greg Anderson.
"I almost had a Depends moment," Leftwich says. "I'm thinking, 'My cellie is the guy who juiced maybe the greatest player of all time.'"
Aside from the 43-year-old Bonds, Anderson is arguably the person most responsible for this year's crowning of a new home run king in Major League Baseball. In late 2005 Anderson served three months for steroids distribution and money laundering in connection with the BALCO probe. But it's his unwillingness to testify in front of the latest grand jury convened in the case that has kept Anderson, 41, in federal custody since August 2006. Held in contempt of court, he shows no signs of cracking before the grand jury's term expires in January, stoking intense speculation about what he knows and whether Bonds bought his silence.
Yet contrary to Anderson's public reticence, Leftwich claims during their time as cellmates the chemically enhanced trainer shared one shocking anecdote after another about Bonds and BALCO. Among the revelations, according to Leftwich:
• Desperate to combat the testicular shrinkage that can occur with steroids use, Bonds injected human growth hormone directly into his genitals during the 2002 playoffs — with disastrous results for both him and the Giants.
• In early 2003, owing to the performance-enhancing drugs coursing through his body, Bonds suddenly began lactating, forcing doctors to excise his mammary glands.
• Wary of taking steroids since the BALCO flap broke, Bonds, intent on maintaining his edge, now supplements his diet with "Barry's brew," a homemade high-energy drink made of elk semen that has yielded its own troubling side effects.
As the 2007 regular season — and Bonds' time with the Giants — draws to a close this week, the sordid details threaten to further tarnish Bonds' legacy. Nonetheless, in Leftwich's view, exposing the secrets amounts to a public service for a city and team held hostage too long by the mercurial godson of Willie Mays. "Game of Shadows just scraped the surface," he says, referring to last year's book on Bonds and BALCO written by two Chronicle reporters. "It's time to tell the rest of the story."
The defiant gym rat who won't rat out his superstar friend. The obtuse loyalist who puts his wife and son second to a seven-time MVP. The cunning opportunist who has sacrificed his freedom to squeeze a big payday from a notoriously cheap narcissist.
Descriptions of Greg Anderson vary widely, much like the theories about his motives for refusing to discuss Barry Bonds before the BALCO grand jury. The conjectures persist because he spurns the media with the same mulish resolve with which he defies the court. He remains an enigma — an enigma with a soul patch.
Given his past obstinance, SF Weekly dispensed with contacting Anderson or his attorneys, who without fail inform reporters seeking interviews that their client will never talk about Bonds. In fact, until Marlon Leftwich emerged, the sharpest insight into Anderson's psyche came from another well-known grand-jury resister, video blogger Josh Wolf, who served time in the same prison. In a July interview with the Associated Press, Wolf said of Anderson, "He was always eating eggs."
Leftwich confirms news accounts that the fitness-obsessed Anderson requested kitchen duty so that he could exert control over his diet while locked up. "Yeah, that's true, Greg was always eating eggs," Leftwich says. "His egg-white omelets? They were the only things that helped me forget where I was."
The dust-brown buildings that make up the Dublin prison complex squat behind metal fencing garnished with coiled razor wire. The main wing of the minimum-security facility houses 1,200 female inmates. A smaller adjacent building holds 100 male inmates awaiting trial or transfer to another prison, or who have been found in contempt of court. Two men occupy each cell, furnished with a bunk bed, sink, and toilet. They battle tedium more than fear, unless the plumbing backs up.
........
Leftwich attributes to Anderson a story about Bonds, angry over steroids causing his testicles to shrivel, taking matters into his own hands. Prior to a rendezvous with his then-mistress, Kimberly Bell, after Game Five of the Series, he shot a full dose of human growth hormone into his scrotum. Within the hour, as her lover's penis swelled to the width of a Coke can, Bell had to drive a moaning, half-conscious Bonds to an emergency room. Doctors gingerly drained the fluid and applied dry ice to his groin, narrowly averting a catastrophic eruption of his organ. The next night, unable to bend properly due to the soreness between his legs, Bonds misplayed a ball late in Game Six, helping the Angels surge from behind to win. Anaheim would take the series the following night.
As Leftwich remembers it, Anderson said, "I tried to warn Barry not to shoot HGH into his junk, same way I warned him not to shoot 'the Clear' into his pecs."
Anderson obtained the Clear and the Cream, two undetectable steroids that left users feeling superhuman, through BALCO's Conte, whose office sat around the corner from the trainer's gym. According to Leftwich, Anderson recalled that Bonds, bitter about his fielding miscue in the World Series, vowed to enter the 2003 season bigger and better than ever. His efforts went horribly awry.
Every day for a week before spring training, as Anderson watched in hushed dismay, Bonds jammed two syringes loaded with the Clear into his pectorals. Soon after, he started producing breast milk.
Rumors that the All-Star leftfielder was lactating spiked after an exhibition game that March. In Leftwich's telling, Anderson described how a Giants locker room attendant on laundry detail noticed two coaster-sized white stains inside Bonds' No. 25 jersey. "Is Barry preggers?" the young man quipped, holding up the jersey as players cackled. He would not crack wise again while on the club's payroll. Bonds, stepping from the showers with a towel covering his painfully tender nipples, overheard the joke. He demanded that Giants owner Peter Magowan, fresh off a colonic irrigation and visiting the locker room, fire the attendant on the spot. Magowan obliged, then fired three more just to make Bonds laugh.
Days later, with the team ascribing Bonds' absence from the clubhouse to general fatigue, doctors removed his distended mammary glands in a seven-hour operation. (Displaying sound judgment, Anderson didn't joke to his client about selling the glands on eBay.) Lingering soreness from the surgery hampered Bonds early in the season, with his batting average hovering at an anemic .270 through May. Leftwich says Anderson explained the problem this way: "Dude, it's not easy to turn on a fastball when it feels like wild dogs are eating your flesh knobs."
..............
link
http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-09-26/news/barry-bonds-drinks-elk-semen-lactates-shoots-hgh-in-scrotum-former-trainer-tells-all/print
Steroids Confidential
Greg Anderson has given up his freedom rather than testify about Barry Bonds. But one man has learned the deepest secrets of the trainer behind baseball's new home run king.
Prison changes a man. Makes him hard and cold, "like the frozen earth itself," as Hemingway once observed. Only returning to the outside has allowed Marlon Leftwich to thaw his spirit, to warm his soul.
He was paroled in August after serving a six-month sentence, ample time for seasons to change and hope to decay. The San Francisco native landed behind bars for a crime spree vast in geography but narrow in its choice of targets: Over a six-week period, federal court records state, Leftwich crisscrossed California, Arizona, and Nevada to rob 44 convenience stores.
He didn't get rich along the way, stealing a paltry $755 in cash — and more than twice that amount in junk food. Before politely asking each store clerk to open the register, Leftwich would stuff his brown leather trench coat full of high-fat munchies, ranging from fried pork rinds to Little Debbie Devil Squares. (Perhaps predictably, his fondness for beef sticks led federal agents to dub him the Slim Jim Bandit.) His "weapon" was an empty Bed Head shampoo bottle that, when pointed from inside his coat pocket, passed for a handgun.
Leftwich's three-state snack binge ended on a brisk February morning in Daly City. The feds, tipped off by a confidential informant, set up a sting at a 7-Eleven near an exit ramp off Interstate 280. A young FBI agent posed as the store's clerk, chosen for the role, in part, because of his acne-mottled complexion. A security camera recorded Leftwich, his thin black hair cinched in a ponytail, as he drifted through the aisles, pocketing a dozen bags of CornNuts and Combos, five boxes of Pop-Tarts, and eight Hostess fruit pies — four apple, four cherry. Moments later, as he approached the checkout line, the FBI agent vaulted over the front counter and slammed him to the floor.
"He took me down hard," Leftwich says, wincing at the memory, cradling his tattoo-streaked forearms against his chest. "The ****ing pie filling went everywhere."
He recounts his arrest while sitting in a cramped room in a Tenderloin SRO that he asked SF Weekly not to identify, fearing unwanted attention. A stack of copies of the Examiner doubles as his chair. He sleeps on a wooden pallet swaddled in bubble wrap; when he rolls over at night, "it sounds like the Fourth of July." On a rusty hook inside the door hangs his ruined trench coat, dark fruit-pie splotches visible in the wan light cast by the room's lone ceiling bulb.
The 43-year-old Leftwich moved here after his release from prison to piece together the shards of his life. He found a job in pest control, and though to him it marks a demotion from his stylist days at Supercuts, he earns enough to afford basic cable. (Affording a television has proven more difficult.) Thanks to weekly hypnosis sessions with a nutritional psychologist, he has tamed his junk-food addiction, shedding 24 pounds from his 6-foot frame. To symbolize his new start, he shaved his head. As much as anyone, he resembles a bald Malcolm Young, the spindly rhythm guitarist for the hard-rock band AC/DC.
But for all the progress made toward retrieving his self-respect, Leftwich, his face pale and gaunt, wears the gaze of the haunted. Flitting back and forth, his narrow-set, sea-blue eyes betray his anxiety, as does his habit of checking the door's peephole every few minutes. He needs to talk. He needs to set down a burden too heavy for one man to bear.
For transporting stolen goods across state lines, Leftwich wound up assigned to the federal penitentiary in Taft, 40 miles southwest of Bakersfield. With no beds available until mid-March, however, he spent the first week of his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin. When he met his cellmate — or "cellie," in prison parlance — Leftwich thought he recognized him. His black hair styled in a mohawk with dreadlocks, the inmate, stout and thickly muscled, spoke in a voice oddly squeaky for someone so buff. He introduced himself as Greg.
As it happened, the next day, while watching ESPN on the only TV in the prison commons area, Leftwich learned why his cellie looked vaguely familiar. The cable sports network aired a spring-training update on the BALCO case, the federal steroids investigation that has embroiled Giants slugger Barry Bonds since 2003. Across the screen flashed the images and names of some of the scandal's key players, including BALCO founder Victor Conte, Bonds' former mistress Kimberly Bell, and his onetime personal trainer — Greg Anderson.
"I almost had a Depends moment," Leftwich says. "I'm thinking, 'My cellie is the guy who juiced maybe the greatest player of all time.'"
Aside from the 43-year-old Bonds, Anderson is arguably the person most responsible for this year's crowning of a new home run king in Major League Baseball. In late 2005 Anderson served three months for steroids distribution and money laundering in connection with the BALCO probe. But it's his unwillingness to testify in front of the latest grand jury convened in the case that has kept Anderson, 41, in federal custody since August 2006. Held in contempt of court, he shows no signs of cracking before the grand jury's term expires in January, stoking intense speculation about what he knows and whether Bonds bought his silence.
Yet contrary to Anderson's public reticence, Leftwich claims during their time as cellmates the chemically enhanced trainer shared one shocking anecdote after another about Bonds and BALCO. Among the revelations, according to Leftwich:
• Desperate to combat the testicular shrinkage that can occur with steroids use, Bonds injected human growth hormone directly into his genitals during the 2002 playoffs — with disastrous results for both him and the Giants.
• In early 2003, owing to the performance-enhancing drugs coursing through his body, Bonds suddenly began lactating, forcing doctors to excise his mammary glands.
• Wary of taking steroids since the BALCO flap broke, Bonds, intent on maintaining his edge, now supplements his diet with "Barry's brew," a homemade high-energy drink made of elk semen that has yielded its own troubling side effects.
As the 2007 regular season — and Bonds' time with the Giants — draws to a close this week, the sordid details threaten to further tarnish Bonds' legacy. Nonetheless, in Leftwich's view, exposing the secrets amounts to a public service for a city and team held hostage too long by the mercurial godson of Willie Mays. "Game of Shadows just scraped the surface," he says, referring to last year's book on Bonds and BALCO written by two Chronicle reporters. "It's time to tell the rest of the story."
The defiant gym rat who won't rat out his superstar friend. The obtuse loyalist who puts his wife and son second to a seven-time MVP. The cunning opportunist who has sacrificed his freedom to squeeze a big payday from a notoriously cheap narcissist.
Descriptions of Greg Anderson vary widely, much like the theories about his motives for refusing to discuss Barry Bonds before the BALCO grand jury. The conjectures persist because he spurns the media with the same mulish resolve with which he defies the court. He remains an enigma — an enigma with a soul patch.
Given his past obstinance, SF Weekly dispensed with contacting Anderson or his attorneys, who without fail inform reporters seeking interviews that their client will never talk about Bonds. In fact, until Marlon Leftwich emerged, the sharpest insight into Anderson's psyche came from another well-known grand-jury resister, video blogger Josh Wolf, who served time in the same prison. In a July interview with the Associated Press, Wolf said of Anderson, "He was always eating eggs."
Leftwich confirms news accounts that the fitness-obsessed Anderson requested kitchen duty so that he could exert control over his diet while locked up. "Yeah, that's true, Greg was always eating eggs," Leftwich says. "His egg-white omelets? They were the only things that helped me forget where I was."
The dust-brown buildings that make up the Dublin prison complex squat behind metal fencing garnished with coiled razor wire. The main wing of the minimum-security facility houses 1,200 female inmates. A smaller adjacent building holds 100 male inmates awaiting trial or transfer to another prison, or who have been found in contempt of court. Two men occupy each cell, furnished with a bunk bed, sink, and toilet. They battle tedium more than fear, unless the plumbing backs up.
........
Leftwich attributes to Anderson a story about Bonds, angry over steroids causing his testicles to shrivel, taking matters into his own hands. Prior to a rendezvous with his then-mistress, Kimberly Bell, after Game Five of the Series, he shot a full dose of human growth hormone into his scrotum. Within the hour, as her lover's penis swelled to the width of a Coke can, Bell had to drive a moaning, half-conscious Bonds to an emergency room. Doctors gingerly drained the fluid and applied dry ice to his groin, narrowly averting a catastrophic eruption of his organ. The next night, unable to bend properly due to the soreness between his legs, Bonds misplayed a ball late in Game Six, helping the Angels surge from behind to win. Anaheim would take the series the following night.
As Leftwich remembers it, Anderson said, "I tried to warn Barry not to shoot HGH into his junk, same way I warned him not to shoot 'the Clear' into his pecs."
Anderson obtained the Clear and the Cream, two undetectable steroids that left users feeling superhuman, through BALCO's Conte, whose office sat around the corner from the trainer's gym. According to Leftwich, Anderson recalled that Bonds, bitter about his fielding miscue in the World Series, vowed to enter the 2003 season bigger and better than ever. His efforts went horribly awry.
Every day for a week before spring training, as Anderson watched in hushed dismay, Bonds jammed two syringes loaded with the Clear into his pectorals. Soon after, he started producing breast milk.
Rumors that the All-Star leftfielder was lactating spiked after an exhibition game that March. In Leftwich's telling, Anderson described how a Giants locker room attendant on laundry detail noticed two coaster-sized white stains inside Bonds' No. 25 jersey. "Is Barry preggers?" the young man quipped, holding up the jersey as players cackled. He would not crack wise again while on the club's payroll. Bonds, stepping from the showers with a towel covering his painfully tender nipples, overheard the joke. He demanded that Giants owner Peter Magowan, fresh off a colonic irrigation and visiting the locker room, fire the attendant on the spot. Magowan obliged, then fired three more just to make Bonds laugh.
Days later, with the team ascribing Bonds' absence from the clubhouse to general fatigue, doctors removed his distended mammary glands in a seven-hour operation. (Displaying sound judgment, Anderson didn't joke to his client about selling the glands on eBay.) Lingering soreness from the surgery hampered Bonds early in the season, with his batting average hovering at an anemic .270 through May. Leftwich says Anderson explained the problem this way: "Dude, it's not easy to turn on a fastball when it feels like wild dogs are eating your flesh knobs."
..............
link
http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-09-26/news/barry-bonds-drinks-elk-semen-lactates-shoots-hgh-in-scrotum-former-trainer-tells-all/print