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1 6 - 0 2 - 2 0 0 5 FBI agent reiterates accusation that he warned baseball of steroids
BY CHRISTIAN RED AND T.J. QUINN
NEW YORK - (KRT) - After a day of counterattacks from Major League Baseball, FBI Special Agent Greg Stejskal stood by his charges on Tuesday that he told baseball 10 years ago the game had a problem with steroids.
"I don't think I was off-base with anything I said," Stejskal told the New York Daily News. "I don't know what's going to happen. I hope the Bureau allows me to defend myself if necessary. But I'm not particularly worried. I can weather the storm."
Stejskal, a 30-year FBI veteran who oversees the Ann Arbor, Mich., office, set off baseball's latest steroid scandal when he was quoted in the Daily News on Tuesday saying baseball "looked the other way" when he told the league several players had been named during a three-year undercover operation into steroid trafficking in the early 1990s. Several FBI sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, were stunned to hear that an active agent had spoken so bluntly, and Stejskal said his office got calls from the office of U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) to ask why MLB was essentially calling one of their agents a liar.
Media attention was also overwhelming, Stejskal said. "Mike Wallace (of `60 Minutes') called me to ask if the article was accurate, and I told him, `Yeah, that article, it was accurate.' " By Tuesday afternoon, calls to Stejskal's office were referred by a receptionist to a spokesperson in Detroit.
On Monday, Stejskal told The News that he spoke to MLB security chief Kevin Hallinan about steroids on several occasions, beginning in the mid-1990s. Hallinan denied that he or any member of his office had spoken to Stejskal, or anyone else from the FBI, about steroids at any time.
"It did not happen," Hallinan said Monday night. "Not with this guy, not with anybody else."
Stejskal said he was surprised to hear of Hallinan's denial. "I can't understand why Kevin reacted so vehemently," he said. "And I'm sorry that Kevin put himself in that position to be so angry. I met with him several times, and last year spoke with his assistant." Baseball officials described Stejskal as "a media hound" on Tuesday, and continued to deny that anyone told Hallinan or anyone else in the commissioner's office that the game had a widespread problem in the mid-`90s.
Stejskal had his defenders, too.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Leibson, who is based in Detroit and prosecuted several cases in the early `90s stemming from Stejskal's investigation, said he was not aware of what Stejskal did or did not say to MLB, but, "I know enough about Greg: if he said he did it, he did it," he told The News.
Stejskal, a 55-year-old from Omaha, Neb., has been a fixture in Ann Arbor for most of his FBI career. He went to the University of Nebraska on a football scholarship, received a law degree from Nebraska and went to work for the FBI in 1975. He worked on several high-profile cases, including the search for Jimmy Hoffa, but one of his biggest cases came in 1989. That year, University of Michigan coaching legend Bo Schembechler, then the school's athletic director, asked his friend Stejskal if he knew where so many college athletes were getting steroids. Stejskal opened an investigation that he said had little support until the first President Bush asked Department of Justice officials what was being done about anabolic steroids. His investigation then went forward.
The undercover investigation went on for more than three years, snagging traffickers in the United States and Canada, and leading the FBI to learn that several "high profile" Major League Baseball players were abusing steroids, including then-A's star Jose Canseco. During the years of the investigation, Schembechler served as president of the Detroit Tigers. He could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
The investigation produced more than 70 trafficking convictions, although no users were prosecuted. Stejskal said he first spoke to Hallinan "in `95 or `96" about the use of steroids in baseball, and that while Hallinan "seemed interested," MLB officials took no action. At the time, anabolic steroids were illegal without a prescription, but baseball had no testing policy. Players Association leaders fought early attempts to create a policy in 1994. Stejskal said he also spoke to Hallinan during the 2002 season when Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco told Sports Illustrated that steroid use was widespread. Stejskal said Tuesday that he put a convicted steroids trafficker in touch with a lawyer representing MLB "3 1/2 or four years ago" so the trafficker could give MLB details about steroid use.
The trafficker, reached by the Daily News, spoke on the condition of anonymity and confirmed that he had spoken to the lawyer. "For Major League Baseball to sit and say they didn't know, that's wrong," the trafficker said.
By the time the trafficker said he spoke to MLB, however, officials were already negotiating with the Players' Association over baseball's first steroid-testing policy, which was included in the
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