Steroid dealer ID's packet at Clemens trial
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House as his retrial continues. (May 3, 2012) Credit: AP
WASHINGTON -- Confessed steroid dealer Kirk Radomski Tuesday examined a packet containing needles and performance-enhancing drugs that Brian McNamee said he used to inject Roger Clemens and identified them as materials he had sold to McNamee.
"These are mine," Radomski, a former Mets clubhouse attendant and main source for the 2007 Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball, said as he peered into the clear-plastic packet handed to him by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gilberto Guerrero. "Yeah, this is all the stuff I would get."
Prosecutors brought Radomski to the stand Tuesday after putting off the testimony of chief witness McNamee, Clemens' former trainer and chief accuser in the perjury trial of the former Yankees pitcher for lying to Congress in denying use of steroids in 2008.
Radomski testified he knew McNamee, sold him several kinds of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, and even taught him how to mix and create cycles for injecting the drugs.
"He didn't know much about it," Radomski said. "He was learning. I was teaching him about it."
Under questioning by Guerrero, the fast-talking bodybuilder and Manorville resident took jurors on a tour of the world of steroids and human growth hormone. He described the uses of different drugs, sizes of needles used to inject them, and cycles of weeks or months for taking them.
Radomski said he began selling the performance-enhancing drugs to McNamee in 1999 or 2000.
He identified a torn shipping label that he said he used to send HGH to McNamee at the Houston address of Clemens in 2003, saying he had found it under his "dinosaur of a TV" on his bedroom dresser in July 2008, 2 1/2 years after federal agents searched his Manorville home. Radomski said he discovered it only after he moved the TV when it broke.
He said that just before 6 a.m. Dec. 14, 2005, federal agents raided his home. "I got a knock on my door," said Radomski, knocking on the witness stand. He agreed it was a moment that changed his life as he described agents swarming in with a search warrant.
The search led to his cooperation with the U.S. attorney's office in Northern California and later with former Sen. George Mitchell, who based his report naming 89 baseball players, including Clemens, as users of steroids or HGH on Radomski and the receipts, checks and shipping labels recovered in that 2005 search.
In April 2007, Radomski pleaded guilty to distributing steroids and money laundering. After cooperating with prosecutors, he was sentenced to 5 years' probation and an $18,575 fine./As the day ended, Clemens attorney Michael Attanasio pressed Radomski on what he had hoped to win from prosecutors and the court by cooperating in the steroid probe. Attanasio noted that Radomski was at the time "on a razor's edge," facing 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.
Radomski denied he was seeking leniency. "I did what I did and I was taking responsibility," he said, adding he was okay with what his lawyer said would likely be 18 to 24 months in jail.
