Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

by Macur, Juliet

  Nike also sent a gigantic machine called the Chalkbot to stencil bright yellow chalk messages on roads. Those messages reminded fans of Armstrong’s cancer and his philanthropy. They also were reminders that Armstrong was the most popular rider at the Tour and one of the most popular athletes in the world.

  The Chalkbot stencils usually were messages from people touched by cancer. Many others were directed to Armstrong: “Love, Laugh & Livestrong. Go Lance!” “Your passion is my inspiration.” “You are unbreakable.” In some towns, the messages spanned hundreds of feet. In one instance, they ran for nearly eleven miles. On a Web site dedicated to the Chalkbot messages, Armstrong wrote: “Your messages show that we are stronger together.” Betsy Andreu, watching the Tour from her home outside Detroit, saw it and said mockingly, “Cancer shields, up!”

  Armstrong and his RadioShack teammates arrived at the starting line for the final stage of that Tour wearing all-black uniforms with a yellow “28” on their backs. The Livestrong people said the number stood for the 28 million people around the globe living with cancer. Race officials, however, ruled that the “28” jerseys were unauthorized and ordered Armstrong and his team’s riders to change into their approved red-and-gray RadioShack uniforms, delaying the start of the stage by twenty minutes.

  No one much cared. It was Lance Armstrong’s last Tour de France, and what would a Tour de France be without a Lance Armstrong brouhaha? He finished 23rd in the Tour, 39 minutes, 20 seconds behind winner Alberto Contador. It was his worst finish since 1995.

  When Hincapie sat with investigators after that Tour, he quoted Armstrong from 1995. “This is bullshit,” Armstrong told him. “People are using stuff.”

  Hincapie said he had understood that to mean Armstrong wanted the Motorola team to use EPO. So Armstrong went to Ferrari, and Hincapie eventually followed. He recounted Frankie Andreu telling him where to buy EPO and how to use it, and recalled that Hamilton and Livingston used it, too.

  Reluctantly, Hincapie also told investigators about the team doctor, Pedro Celaya, whom he considered caring and gentle. It was emotionally easier, he said, to name other Postal Service employees—Bruyneel, for one—who had supplied him with testosterone and growth hormone. He said the doping was systematic and surprisingly casual. During the 2001 Tour, he blood-doped and saw others, including Landis, blood-doping in front of other team members. He said Armstrong twice had supplied him with EPO after his own stash ran out.

  He couldn’t remember it all, and with good reason. “They were asking me about Lance’s doping, but doping then was like going to the bathroom,” he told me. “I can’t tell you how many times I saw Lance go to the bathroom.”

  He had been Armstrong’s right-hand man, his best worker bee, through all seven of the Tour victories. They had become friends, and now Hincapie had been impelled to testify against him. He only hoped Armstrong would never know.

  Everywhere Armstrong turned, he caught a glimpse of his shattering world. Novitzky and his investigators looked for witnesses who could prove he used drugs, provided drugs to his teammates and forced them to dope. They interviewed Sheryl Crow, who told them she knew about his doping and had even accompanied him on a trip to Belgium for one of his blood transfusions. They tracked down Armstrong’s old soigneur, John Hendershot, who had opened up a successful dog-training business in Colorado. He said he wouldn’t talk unless they forced him to because almost everybody doped back in the 1990s, when he had worked with Armstrong. It wasn’t fair that they were singling out Armstrong for it, he said. “Cycling is a drug sport, that’s it,” he says. “It will always be a drug sport.”

  Landis’s whistle-blower case brought in investigators from the Office of the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service. Those investigators were looking for evidence that Armstrong and the management of Tailwind Sports had defrauded the government by entering into a sponsorship contract knowing the team’s riders were doping.

  Then, there was USADA. Tygart eventually had stepped aside to let the federal investigators lead the inquiry into Armstrong’s doping, but he was trying his best on his own to gather evidence for USADA’s case.

  Armstrong reacted fiercely. He demanded that Fabiani, on the payroll at $15,000 to $20,000 a month, reach out to Democratic senators, to President Clinton, to the former president’s aides—to anyone, really, with influence to wield. He ordered Mark McKinnon, the political strategist and board member at Livestrong, to appeal to Senator John McCain, a 2008 presidential candidate for whom McKinnon had been an advisor.

  McKinnon recalled Armstrong’s order for me: “It was like, ‘McKinnon you blah, blah, blah, get your ass over there and talk to McCain, you pussy. If you’re a man, you’d go talk to McCain.’ ” McKinnon said he never spoke to McCain because he didn’t want to put the senator’s reputation at risk if it turned out that Armstrong was, in fact, a doper.

  Armstrong’s lawyers scrambled, reaching out to riders like Vande Velde and Hamilton to try to arrange joint defense agreements, or to offer free criminal lawyers. His legal team tried to convince several of Armstrong’s former teammates to sign affidavits saying they never saw Armstrong dope and indeed never saw any doping at all on the Postal Service team.

  While Armstrong and his team were on the offensive, his pursuers interviewed officials from the French national antidoping agency that had discovered Armstrong’s six EPO positives at the 1999 Tour, and collected the incriminating documentation. Italian officials also gave the Americans documents, from doping investigations of their own.

  Armstrong taunted Novitzky during one of the agent’s trips to Europe. He had opened a Twitter account with his nickname, Juan Pelota. (Juan sounds like “one,” and cancer had cost Armstrong one testicle. Pelota is Spanish for “ball.”) He then tweeted:

  “Jeff, como estan los hoteles de quatro estrellas y el classe de business in el aeroplano? Que mas necesitan?” The Spanish was crude, but pointed. The translation: “Jeff, how are the four-star hotels and the business class in the airplane? What more do you need?”

  As shown by the government’s failed case against Roger Clemens or the lame outcome of its case against Barry Bonds, the American public has no heart for chasing down its sports heroes, however ’roided up they may be.

  Armstrong had that working for him. Prosecutors in San Francisco had spent nearly seven years chasing Bonds for lying to a grand jury about his doping. They won one conviction on five charges, and that conviction was on a weak charge of being evasive during his testimony to a grand jury.

  In the summer of 2010, prosecutors in Washington brought a similar perjury case against Clemens. They claimed he had lied to Congress about using steroids. In 2011, the judge declared a mistrial. Retried, Clemens was acquitted.

  As the Armstrong investigation dragged on with no indictment, word went around that Hamilton had told his story to 60 Minutes.

  “Somebody in the government wanted 60 Minutes to do that piece, and made it happen,” the lawyer Manderson said. “The feds were investigating and getting ready to prosecute Lance. If they indicted Lance with what the public knew at the time, you could imagine what would have happened. He’d say, ‘I’m Saint Lance; this is a vendetta.’ But I think 60 Minutes changed that perception. They wanted the public to see the angel could actually be a doper, and they accomplished that.”

  During taping of the segment, Hamilton said Armstrong did what the majority of the peloton did, including blood transfusions, EPO and testosterone. Several times, as Hamilton seemed about to break down, the show’s producer, Michael Radutzky, encouraged him. “You are not a rat. You are a truth teller. What you’re doing is heroic. You’re a truth teller.”

  As soon as Armstrong saw the show in May 2011, his lawyers fired off a letter to CBS News chairman Jeffrey Fager, demanding the network make an on-air apology for its assertion that Armstrong had used EPO. They called the report “a vicious hit-and-run job.” CBS did not apologize.

  Three weeks later, at 2 a.m. i
n Aspen, Colorado, Hamilton texted Manderson, saying he ran into Armstrong and that it was ugly. Hamilton later told Manderson that Armstrong had threatened him during an unfortunate reunion in a restaurant called Cache Cache in the skiing hub’s quaint downtown.

  As Hamilton was making his way from the bathroom back to his table, he had to pass Armstrong at the bar. Armstrong put his arm up to stop him, then got in his face. “How much are they fucking paying you? . . . When you’re on the witness stand, we’re going to tear you apart. You are going to look like a fucking idiot. I’m going to make your life a living fucking hell.”

  The FBI rushed to investigate the incident for evidence of witness tampering. It wasn’t the first time that federal investigators had looked into claims that Armstrong was trying to intimidate a witness in his federal case.

  Armstrong had already sent Levi Leipheimer’s wife, Odessa Gunn, a text message out of nowhere, saying, “Run don’t walk,” shortly after Leipheimer testified to the grand jury.

  Armstrong, feeling ever invincible, was pushing his luck. He hired two high-powered lawyers, John Keker and Elliot Peters, whose résumés included a victory over Novitzky.

  Keker and Peters’s San Francisco firm, Keker & Van Nest, had represented Major League Baseball players in a case arguing that federal investigators, including Novitzky, had no right to seize baseball’s drug-testing samples and results from companies that had gathered them. They won the case.

  Within a week of taking Armstrong on as a client, Keker had arranged a meeting with André Birotte Jr., the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, which was the office investigating Armstrong. Keker essentially argued that Armstrong shouldn’t be prosecuted because his foundation had done so much good for cancer awareness. The lawyer also reminded Birotte that many of the government’s witnesses had credibility issues because they had doped and/or lied about doping.

  “You’re going to have a hard time prosecuting this guy,” Keker said. He thought the feds should quit the dawdling and decide if they would press for an indictment. So much time had gone by since the grand jury convened, he said, that Armstrong’s reputation and foundation were being unfairly damaged.

  “You know you guys are going to be litigating this fiercely because we’re going to be really vigorous here,” Keker said, which some of the prosecutors took as a veiled threat.

  It’s likely that if Birotte had been moved by Keker’s language, he would have shut down the investigation then and there. Instead, almost another year went by. Then the team of assistant U.S. attorneys on the case prepared a full prosecution memo that detailed the legal theories, strengths and weaknesses of the case and evidence they had gathered on Armstrong in the nearly two years of their investigation. Those attorneys recommended an indictment. They were 99 percent sure they could convict Armstrong on charges of drug distribution, mail fraud, wire fraud and witness tampering.

  They submitted that memo to Birotte.

  And they waited.

  And they lost.

  On the Friday before the Super Bowl, February 3, 2012, press release No. 12-024 appeared on the Web site of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. It was titled, “U.S. Attorney Closes Investigation of Professional Cycling Team.”

  Birotte said the investigation into federal criminal conduct by members and associates of a professional bicycle racing team owned in part by Lance Armstrong had been concluded. No explanation followed. Birotte told one investigator that the decision to close the investigation was his and his only, and that there would be no discussion on the matter.

  Novitzky was inconsolable. Prosecutors Doug Miller and Mark Williams, the main lawyers on the case, were speechless. Several investigators thought Birotte dropped the case because Armstrong’s powerful buddies in politics had pressured him. The Justice Department had received three letters totaling more than twenty pages from members of Congress regarding the investigation. None of the letters were released to the public.

  As soon as Armstrong heard the good news, he exhaled. Whew, close one! He had escaped from yet another tight spot. His lawyers called to congratulate him. His friends called to tell him how happy they were for him. He and his girlfriend, Anna, popped open a bottle of wine and toasted their good luck. But their celebration was premature.

  Minutes later, a press release appeared on USADA’s Web site.

  It was a statement from Tygart: “Unlike the U.S. Attorney, USADA’s job is to protect clean sport rather than enforce specific criminal laws. Our investigation into doping in the sport of cycling is continuing and we look forward to obtaining the information developed during the federal investigation.”

  The federal investigation was over, but USADA’s was only beginning.

  CHAPTER 23

  Compared with the federal case against Armstrong, USADA’s seemed puny. The agency, which has fewer than fifty full-time employees at its headquarters, had a fraction of the people and funding that had been brought to bear in the federal case. It was David versus Goliath.

  Armstrong had armed himself with a legal team of more than half a dozen high-powered litigators, many with Yale, Princeton and Harvard pedigrees. Even Armstrong’s spokesman, Fabiani, came from Harvard Law.

  At USADA, Tygart was working with just two other main lawyers and one who was relatively new to the agency. One was Bill Bock, the agency’s general counsel. He was a father of five and earned his undergraduate degree at Oral Roberts University and his law degree at Michigan. The other was Rich Young, an outside counsel and Stanford grad who had been the primary author of the World Anti-Doping Code. USADA’s legal affairs director, Onye Ikwuakor, who’d been co-president of his graduating class at Stanford Law, was the newcomer. They didn’t bill at $1,000 an hour, as some of Armstrong’s lawyers did, but they were resourceful, plucky and on a mission.

  In early 2012, USADA’s board, led by Olympic hurdling champion Edwin Moses, approved USADA’s move against Armstrong. Tygart would have picked up where the federal case ended, but the feds wouldn’t hand over their case files. The civil division of the Justice Department was still considering joining Landis as plaintiffs in a whistle-blower suit. They didn’t want to risk the testimonies they had gathered for the criminal case becoming public and tainting a civil case that could be worth more than $100 million to the government.

  At the end of April 2012—nearly three months after it reopened its Armstrong inquiry—USADA had done only two new interviews, with Betsy and Frankie Andreu. Tygart already had Landis in hand, though the Landis testimony was corrupted by both his own lies and his public hatred of Armstrong.

  Tygart needed to start gathering witnesses who were more believable than Landis—not a hard task, really—but they also needed to have firsthand evidence of Armstrong’s doping. It was a huge coup for Tygart, then, when Tyler Hamilton decided to cooperate with USADA’s investigation.

  A few weeks before the 60 Minutes interview, in the spring of 2011, Tygart and Hamilton met secretly in Denver. For the first time since Landis, Tygart heard a rich, textured story of the Armstrong doping program from someone who’d been very close to Armstrong.

  Tygart heard about the double lives built around PEDs and little red capsules of testosterone oil. Hamilton said team doctors handed white paper lunch bags to riders, filled not with sandwiches and juice boxes but with EPO, growth hormone and testosterone. When riders feared being overheard, they didn’t ask for EPO, they asked about “Edgar” or “Poe,” as in the poet Edgar Allan Poe.

  Hamilton’s lawyer, Manderson, said that throughout the meeting, Tygart’s expression seldom changed but that he grew pale. He looked like a guy who had spent years trying to track down Bigfoot, only to have the big guy show up at his front door.

  Still, Tygart needed more than Landis and Hamilton. So he did what he had to do to get others to talk: He cut some deals.

  Vaughters had already guaranteed the cooperation of his riders, though they were reluctant. They didn�
��t want to be labeled dopers or be known as the riders who took down Armstrong.

  Tygart threw in an incentive. Because those riders had volunteered to confess their doping to the federal investigators, USADA would go easy on them. He was even willing to bend the rules. The World Anti-Doping Code says that an athlete who provides “substantial assistance” in a doping investigation could have his sanction reduced by up to 75 percent. In this case, that would have meant a six-month ban. Instead, Tygart went one better: no ban at all.

  Vaughters, Zabriskie, Danielson and Vande Velde testified. All were told they would not be penalized—on the condition that they remove their names from consideration for the 2012 Olympics. If the Armstrong case went public, their doping past could embarrass the U.S. team.

  When Tygart had trouble convincing Hincapie and Leipheimer to come forward, he talked to their lawyers. He said, “Look, the system of doping in the sport is coming down, and all the riders, including Lance Armstrong, are going to be given the opportunity to get on the lifeboat. Are you on it?”

  Leipheimer was looking at a minimum two-year ban. That would end his career and forever label him as a doper. By “lifeboat,” Tygart meant a mitigated sanction. Leipheimer hopped on.

  For Hincapie, it was a more difficult decision. He still considered himself one of Armstrong’s best friends and had built his reputation on being Armstrong’s loyal sidekick.

  Armstrong wrote in his second book, Every Second Counts: “There have been times when I’ve practically lived out of the same suitcase with George Hincapie. In cycling, we’re on the side of a mountain for weeks, in small hotel rooms, sharing every ache, and pain, and meal. You get to know everything about each other, including things you’d rather not.” Hincapie did not relish having ratted on his good buddy, and he did not particularly like the idea of doing it all over again to a new pair of ears.