Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (29 page)

The day Hamilton spoke with the federal investigators, Armstrong tried to make a final mark on the Tour de France. His hopes of winning an eighth time were long gone. But he might still win a stage—he had won twenty-five previously—and Stage 16 was his last, best chance to experience a Tour victory.

He had come to the stage in 38th place. He had taken it easy in previous days, several times slowing up before a stage finish to thank fans for coming.
L’Equipe
poked fun at his lack of effort, saying that he started the Tour as a professional cyclist, then became a tourist on a bike, then was simply a tourist.

But while Hamilton testified, Armstrong made it into an early breakaway on the 124-mile route with four grueling climbs and remained out front until the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo—seven years younger—outsprinted him to the finish.

It enraged him. Armstrong barreled through the crowd on his bike. At one point, for no apparent reason, he lowered a shoulder and body-checked a gray-haired man, nearly knocking him down. At the team bus, Armstrong twice pushed a fan trying to take a photo, finally snapping, “Get off me, get off!”

Armstrong knew he needed help. Not on his bike; it was too late for that. He needed to control the narrative of his story. So in the middle of the Tour, he and his personal lawyer, Tim Herman, decided to try to dig up dirt on Novitzky. Herman would pay $50,000 to the lobbying firm the Ben Barnes Group to “raise concerns” about Novitzky in Congress.

Armstrong also spent some of his downtime at the Tour meeting and hiring Mark Fabiani, a political spin doctor who represented President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater scandal.

Fabiani would help with the public relations aspect of Armstrong’s federal case. First, he told Armstrong to stop talking to reporters until a countering narrative was in place. It would go like this: Armstrong would say the government should not waste taxpayer dollars on the investigation of a cyclist who’d supposedly doped in Europe a decade before. He would attack the credibility of accusers. The effort also would stress Armstrong’s persona as a heroic cancer survivor.

As it happened, Armstrong had a PR team of sorts already at work. Dozens of Livestrong workers and volunteers were at the Tour, spreading the pro-Armstrong and pro-Livestrong message. Along the Tour’s course and in the start and finish towns of stages, they sold Livestrong bracelets for a euro, about $1.30 each, to raise money for cancer survivors in France. They handed out chalk so fans could write messages on the road.

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. in 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.”