One week before Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens testified before a House committee at a contentious public hearing last February, McNamee sat down for a deposition with committee investigators.
During questioning behind closed doors in a Capitol building office, McNamee said that as part of his job as Clemens’s trainer, he had injected him with steroids and human growth hormone. McNamee gave the deposition under oath. He was asked several times if he had ever informed Kirk Radomski, a steroids dealer, that he was injecting Clemens with drugs. In each instance, McNamee answered no, he had not.
That assertion has been contradicted by a passage in “Bases Loaded,” a new book by Radomski, in which Radomski says that McNamee indeed told him that he was injecting Clemens. That contradiction and others have raised concerns that Radomski has hurt his credibility as a government witness in the perjury investigation against Clemens, and that he might have damaged McNamee’s credibility as well.
These concerns will probably be felt in Washington, where federal prosecutors have convened a grand jury to hear evidence about whether Clemens committed perjury when he insisted to the same House committee that he never used performance-enhancing drugs. McNamee is Clemens’s chief accuser. Radomski, who has already testified before the grand jury, is less important to the prosecutors. But he was seen as having some value because he sold McNamee steroids and human growth hormone during several of the years that McNamee says he was injecting Clemens.
In light of the contradictions Radomski is creating with his book, legal experts said the government would probably think twice about using Radomski as a witness if Clemens were indicted and were to go on trial.
“In a perjury case a prosecutor’s worst nightmare is for a witness to make public statements that contradicts another witness, especially the key witness in the case,” said Mathew Rosengart, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in New York and a former federal prosecutor. “Perjury cases are almost always a he-said, she-said dispute, and there usually isn’t a smoking gun, so corroboration of witnesses is essential. The questions about Radomski are a good thing for Clemens’s defense.”
Daniel Richman, a professor of law at Columbia University and, like Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, echoed Rosengart’s concerns. “Every inaccuracy or inconsistency will provide material for the defense for cross-examination,” Richman said. “And they will use it to create doubt in the jury’s mind about Radomski and — by extension — McNamee.”
In his book, Radomski writes that he was introduced on the telephone to McNamee in 1999 by the player David Segui. At the time, McNamee was the strength and conditioning coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. Sometime after they met in person about a year later, Radomski said, McNamee told him that he had injected Clemens with the steroid Winstrol in 1998.
McNamee told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that he began injecting Clemens in 1998 with steroids that Clemens had obtained on his own. To that extent, his account conforms with Radomski’s. However, according to a transcript of his deposition, he said that he never told Radomski he had done so.
“Did you ever indicate to Mr. Radomski that Roger Clemens was using steroids or H.G.H.?” McNamee was asked by a committee investigator.
“No,” McNamee said.
“Did you ever drop hints to that effect?” McNamee was asked, referring to Radomski.
“No,” McNamee said.
McNamee added: “He would ask me how I was doing. You know, obviously he knew I trained him in the off-season.”
“But you’re saying you never told him that Clemens was using these substances?” McNamee was asked.
“Yes,” McNamee said.
But on page 196 of the book, Radomski writes that “McNamee told me that in 1998 he’d begun injecting Clemens with Winstrol that Clemens had gotten for himself.”
The other key contradictions that have arisen pit Radomski against George J. Mitchell, the former senator who used Radomski as a key source of information in the December 2007 report he produced on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In the book, Radomski implies that Mitchell fished for information from him in several instances, looking for evidence about high-profile players about whom Mitchell had suspicions.
Mitchell disputed that notion twice in the past week, denying that he talked to Radomski about anyone other than the dozens of players who had been Radomski’s drug customers. “The fact that you have a white knight like George Mitchell pointing out that something a witness said is not accurate — a witness he relied heavily on — the same week he is being appointed to be an envoy to the Middle East is something that the prosecutors will find regrettable,” Rosengart said.
A good deal of Radomski’s book, which will be released in bookstores this week, dwells on his days as a Mets bat boy and clubhouse attendant. Some anecdotes, including Radomski’s account of substituting his urine for Dwight Gooden’s in several drug tests, are designed to generate headlines. But what the book may ultimately do is create headaches.
“Clemens and his team of lawyers must be heartened,” Richman said.
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