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| May 29, 2008 | Thursday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1429 |
Prosecution details Graham’s alleged lies
SAN FRANCISCO, May 28: Athletics coach Trevor Graham orchestrated a doping scheme for his elite athletes and lied to federal investigators about his role in it, the prosecution said in closing arguments of Graham’s trial on Tuesday.
“This is a very simple, straight forward case. It’s about telling the truth,” Assistant US Attorney Jeff Finigan told the jury. “If federal agents come to speak to you and you speak to them, there’s only one rule: You tell them the truth. ... Throughout the interview, he was not truthful with the agents.”
The defence officially rested its case outside the presence of the jury without calling a witness.
Graham is accused with three counts of lying to federal investigators in June 2004. Graham told two Inland Revenue Service agents that he never set up his athletes to receive drugs from Angel “Memo” Heredia, a Laredo, Texas discus thrower who bought performance enhancing drugs in Mexico and sold them to many star athletes.
“He denied it, he was unequivocal, he was definitive,” Finigan said.
Graham said he never met Heredia and had not talked to him on the phone since 1997.
But during Graham’s trial, prosecutors produced numerous witnesses, photographs and telephone records and FedEx receipts showing the track coach and Heredia shared a much deeper connection than Graham admitted. The jury reviewed evidence of more than 100 calls made from two of Graham’s telephones to Heredia’s house.
The jury also heard tapes of a few calls between Graham and Heredia when the prosecution said the two talked about how to cover up their roles in the case.
Olympic gold medal winners Antonio Pettigrew, Jerome Young and Dennis Mitchell and two other athletes testified Graham introduced them to Heredia and encouraged them to use drugs.
Finally, Heredia testified that he shipped a steady supply of drugs to Graham in Raleigh, North Carolina and had the FedEx receipts to prove it.
“The lies he told in this interview were a calculated effort on the defendant’s part to lead investigators away from him,” Finigan said.—AP
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