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The personal surgeon for Barry Bonds has been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury that is investigating whether the Giants' outfielder committed perjury in 2003 when he denied under oath that he had ever taken steroids, The Chronicle has learned.
Dr. Arthur Ting, the physician who treated Bonds for the knee injury that sidelined him for most of the 2005 season, has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury at the U.S. District courthouse in San Francisco later this month, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
The sources asked not to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the grand jury probe.
Reached by phone, Ting referred a reporter to his lawyer, Daniel Alberti, who could not be reached. The Giants' organization declined to comment. Bonds was not available for comment, and his attorney, Michael Rains, said he was "not prepared to respond to that information."
The sources described the grand jury's probe as an offshoot of the federal steroids case involving the Burlingame-based Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or BALCO, a nutritional supplements concern.
Four men, including Bonds' personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid-distribution charges last year as part of what prosecutors said was an international conspiracy to corrupt sports by providing undetectable steroids to elite athletes. The drugs were distributed by BALCO and Anderson.
In the early stages of the investigation, a grand jury subpoenaed at least 30 elite athletes who had been customers of BALCO -- Bonds among them.
In December 2003, as previously reported in The Chronicle, Bonds told the BALCO grand jury that he had never used steroids.
But in his testimony, he acknowledged that his trainer had supplied him with flax seed oil and arthritis balm -- substances that matched the description of "the clear" and "the cream," two undetectable performance-enhancing drugs distributed by BALCO.
The sources said federal investigators believed Bonds lied under oath in part because documents seized in government raids on BALCO and on his trainer's home included doping calendars that appeared to reflect Bonds' drug use.
In March 2005, a former girlfriend of Bonds', Kimberly Bell, also told the grand jury that Bonds had admitted to her that he had used steroids beginning in 1999, the Chronicle has previously reported.
Since then, the government has continued to question witnesses regarding Bonds and steroids in its ongoing investigation -- including looking into whether he testified truthfully -- and a grand jury began taking testimony last month, two sources said.
Bonds' lawyer, Rains, said that last month he contacted the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco to find out if it had completed any investigation involving Bonds.
"I got the typical federal answer, 'We're not going to say one way or another,'" Rains said.
Rains has maintained throughout the investigation that the government was out to get Bonds. "It's always been the U.S. versus Bonds, and they're always just gunning for the big guy," the lawyer said in March of last year.
Ting is of interest to investigators because he has visited BALCO with Bonds, the sources said. In September 2003, a BALCO employee told federal investigators that around that time Ting had accompanied Bonds to the lab and drawn his blood for testing.
The doctor has been Bonds' personal surgeon for much of the outfielder's San Francisco career. In 1999, when Bonds suffered a serious elbow injury, Ting operated to repair the damage. Last year, Ting performed three operations on Bonds' ailing knee -- two to repair torn cartilage and a third to combat an infection that had developed after the surgery. Bonds didn't play his first game of the 2005 season until September.
Ting's patients include many elite athletes, and he is among the best-known orthopedists in the region. But public records show he has twice been disciplined by the state Medical Board.
In 1996, Ting was put on probation after he allegedly allowed a medical technician to diagnose injuries and write prescriptions.
In 2004, the medical board again put Ting on probation, this time after he was accused of prescribing drugs to friends while keeping inadequate records. Ting acknowledged he was "negligent in his supervision of subordinates" but denied wrongdoing.
The probe of Bonds is the latest twist in a case that has grabbed international headlines, mostly because of BALCO's celebrity clientele.
In a statement to federal agents at the time they raided his laboratory in September 2003, BALCO founder Victor Conte identified 27 stars of baseball, football and Olympic track and field to whom he said he was providing designer steroids. Some of the drugs were created to be undetectable on conventional steroid tests.
Among the athletes Conte named were New York Yankees Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, track and field superstar Marion Jones, and Bonds. Conte later renounced the statement, but his top assistant at BALCO, James Valente, also gave a statement to federal investigators in which he said Bonds and Giambi had been provided BALCO drugs through Bonds' personal trainer, Anderson.
Conte, Valente, Anderson and veteran track coach Remi Korchemny were indicted on steroid conspiracy charges in 2004. But steroid dealing carried relatively light penalties under federal law, and the cases were settled with plea bargains last year. Conte served four months in federal prison and Anderson served three months. They are now on house arrest. Valente and Korchemny were put on probation.
But investigators continued to pursue the case, and in November, an Illinois chemist, Patrick Arnold, was indicted on steroid charges for allegedly creating one of the undetectable steroids that BALCO had distributed. After Arnold's indictments, the sources said, the investigators continued an inquiry into the truth of Bonds' 2003 grand jury testimony.
The Giants are scheduled to begin a three-game series in Los Angeles beginning today. The Dodgers and Major League Baseball are expected to provide heightened security for Bonds, who was taunted repeatedly during the team's season-opening series in San Diego.
A Giants spokesman said the extra security for Bonds was neither unexpected nor out of the ordinary
