Prison yard needed for Bonds?
From my seat in SBC Park, Barry Bonds has always looked eight feet tall at home plate. When he steps into the batter’s box, even the wind and the seagulls seem to stop in their tracks.
I have been trying to reconcile that image with the tired, defeated, bitter man on crutches who kept repeating during a recent press conference, “I’m done. I’m done.”
But there is another image that keeps coming to mind as elements of the federal investigation of Barry Bonds continue to be made public: This swaggering, larger-than-life superman sitting on the edge of cot in a prison cell.
This is the elephant in the room, the topic that so far has been pointedly avoided in discussions about Bonds: He could do time — not for using steroids or even tax evasion but possibly for lying to federal agents and the grand jury.
We need look no further back than last year to find another icon — Martha Stewart — who, through hubris and arrogance, landed in jail for five months. Remember, she wasn’t nailed for insider trading, which was the focus of the original investigation. She went away for lying about it to the FBI. The investigation into Bonds seems to be pointing in the same direction.
“The cover-up is usually what gets people,” said Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, “not the actual offense. But people think they can get away with it.”
Defense attorney Doron Weinberg, who handles white-collar crimes, said the best advice any attorney can give a client is not to lie. If the feds are willing to put a 62-year-old homemaking maven in prison for lying to them, they surely could do the same to baseball’s home-run king if they make their case. I’m no lawyer, but there seems to be a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting Bonds wasn’t telling the whole truth when he said he did not knowingly use steroids, such as:
— Greg Anderson, Bonds’ personal trainer, was captured on tape in 2003 talking about Bonds’ use of an undetectable performance-enhancing drug.
— Bonds’ name was on a “calendar and a schedule” seized at Anderson’s home that allegedly tracked steroid regimens.
— Bonds’ ex-girlfriend told the grand jury he talked about using steroids.
Did prosecutors have this much evidence against Scott Peterson?
There is another parallel to Martha: Bonds comes across as so arrogant and condescending, so cocksure of his own special status, that the buzz in legal and baseball circles is that investigators are, shall we say, energized to prove their case.
For his entire life, Bonds has been allowed to live by a separate set of rules. With the Giants, he occupies three lockers and has his own recliner and television. He dismisses advice from team trainers and team doctors. Maybe he figured that because he always wins, because he faces down opponents and the media and the pressure better than anyone who ever picked up a ball, he could win at anything, including a legal battle with the feds.
The penalty for personal possession of steroids, a misdemeanor, is usually probation. Bonds was assured if he told the truth to the grand jury, he would not face even that. Maybe his legal troubles would be over now if he had answered differently. Maybe he did indeed tell the whole the truth, as he maintains, and the feds are simply out to get him.
In any case, his life has been changed irrevocably. He is no longer the same man who stood eight feet tall at home plate.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].