Jurors in the perjury trial of Barry Bonds in San Francisco heard testimony today from a fourth baseball player who admitted receiving a performance-enhancing drug from Bonds’ trainer Greg Anderson.
Randy Velarde, whose 16-year professional career included two years with the Oakland A’s, said he received a substance in 2002 from Anderson that he knew to be a steroid.
On Tuesday, three other players, including Colorado Rockies and former Oakland A’s first baseman Jason Giambi, testified that they received various types of steroids from Anderson in the years leading up to 2003.
Bonds, 46, is on trial in the court of U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on charges of lying in December 2003 to a federal grand jury that was investigating the sales of sports drugs by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO.
He is accused of lying when he said he never knowingly received steroids or human growth hormone from Anderson and never received any kind of injection from him.
Prosecutors have brought the athletes to the stand to try to show that Anderson had access to steroids and human growth hormone and that he informed the players what the substances were and how to use them.
But Illston has instructed jurors that they are not to conclude that just because the other athletes may have knowingly used the drugs, Bonds may also have done so.
The purpose of the athletes’ evidence is only to show the manner in which Anderson operated, Illston told the jurors on Tuesday.
The jury also heard today from two U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents and three employees of a Los Angeles drug testing laboratory about a urine sample Bonds provided for Major League Baseball drug testing in 2003.
The MLB testing program was supposed to be anonymous. But during the BALCO probe, IRS agents seized samples from a laboratory in Las Vegas and transferred them to the UCLA Olympic Analytic Laboratory in 2004 for further analysis.
The sample Bonds provided did not show steroids in the initial testing in 2003, but the retesting at UCLA in allegedly showed signs of previously undetectable so-called “designer steroids.”
Brian Bishop, a UCLA laboratory technician who helped with storage of Bonds’ sample, said he didn’t know the identity of the donor of the sample, but said he knew it had been brought to the laboratory by the IRS.
Julia Cheever, Bay City News
Want more news, sent to your inbox every day? Then how about subscribing to our email newsletter? Here’s why we think you should. Come on, give it a try.
