An Agent Fighting Steroids Harvests Trash and Turmoil

By DUFF WILSON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
New York Times

Jeff Novitzky is an unlikely contender for the role of Eliot Ness of the steroids age. He is an I.R.S. special agent, a position that is rarely glamorous. The work is often tedious and dull, poring over bank records and tax returns, and writing reports.

Mr. Novitzky, an accomplished high school athlete who majored in accounting in college, is quiet, respectful and direct in his work for the Internal Revenue Service, and he enjoys getting out of the office to track his cases. He is not above going through people’s trash. Or listening in on their phone calls.

He has been known to take their trash home some nights, to keep working.

Now, Mr. Novitzky is front and center in the biggest investigation to hit baseball since Chicago’s Black Sox scandal in 1919. He dug up the evidence that a grand jury used last week to indict Barry Bonds, who became baseball’s career home run leader this year with the San Francisco Giants. Mr. Bonds faces five felony charges for perjury and obstruction of justice that could send him to prison for years.

It was clear almost immediately after the indictment was announced that Mr. Bonds would not be the only person on trial in San Francisco next year. Mr. Bonds’s lawyers are trying to base their defense on Mr. Novitzky and his methods. The very qualities that make Mr. Novitzky a respected investigator — his passion, aggressiveness and perseverance — are expected to be used against him in trying to have the case dismissed.

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