Peyton Manning's secret investigation into alleged HGH dealer

[tk13]

This was a really long investigative article so I shortened it quite a bit. It's funny because this sounds like something Pioli would do... only it's a Peyton Manning police force. It's also the first time I've seen Manning's people admit drugs were shipped to his wife.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...2c9_story.html

Inside Peyton Manning’s secret investigation into Al Jazeera documentary

By Will Hobson and Justin Wm. Moyer

BROWNSBURG, Ind. — Five days before a documentary alleged that quarterback Peyton Manning and other star athletes had used performance-enhancing drugs, two men hired by Manning’s lawyers visited the parents of the documentary’s key witness. Both men wore black overcoats and jeans and, according to a 911 call from the house that evening, one initially said he was a law enforcement officer but didn’t have a badge.

After they told their daughter to call 911 the night of Dec. 22, Randall and Judith Sly stepped outside to talk to the strangers, who clarified they were private investigators, not cops. They had come to this red brick house with a well-manicured lawn looking for the Slys’ 31-year-old son, Charlie, a pharmacist who was the primary source in the upcoming documentary.

The revelation of the visit to the Slys’ home in this rural, upper middle class suburb is another in what has been a series of strange twists and turns since the Al Jazeera documentary, “The Dark Side: The Secret World of Sports Doping,” first aired. In the documentary, Sly boasted about helping pro football and baseball players cheat. In one scene, Sly implied that Manning took human growth hormone prescribed by an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic and shipped to Manning’s wife, Ashley.

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Manning’s lawyers launched the private probe shortly after Al Jazeera started contacting athletes who would be named in the documentary. They hired investigators to identify, locate and interrogate Sly, and sent a lawyer to examine Peyton and Ashley’s medical records at the Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine in Indianapolis.

Manning’s investigative team did nothing that would interfere with subsequent investigations, said Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary and crisis management consultant Manning has hired.

The lawyer who visited the Guyer Institute did not remove any records, Fleischer said, and Manning’s investigators in no way influenced or coerced Sly into issuing his recanting statement, which he recorded Dec. 24, the day after they had questioned him.

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“It was pure puffery,” Cohron said of his client’s words. “He was manufacturing a story to bolster his own appearance.”

The story Sly said he made up contained at least a bit of truth, though: The Guyer Institute did ship medication to Ashley Manning, Fleischer confirmed. Citing Ashley’s right to privacy, Fleischer declined to specify whether the medication was human growth hormone, which is banned by professional sports leagues and only legal to prescribe in America for a few specific conditions, such as growth hormone deficiency, HIV wasting syndrome and short bowel syndrome.

Manning’s pre-emptive investigation, Fleischer said, was a “natural reaction” to being asked to respond to anonymous allegations.

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“The Sly family’s initial thoughts were, ‘This must be a scam,’ ” Cohron said. “His dad thought they [Al Jazeera] were only in the Middle East and they reported on terrorist attacks. The whole situation was surreal.”

The Slys, who refused multiple requests for an interview and deferred all questions to their lawyer, started to realize this was not a scam when private investigators Brian Bauer and Ben Ford arrived at their home just before 5 p.m. on Dec. 22. Initially afraid, the Slys told their daughter Kaitlyn — Charlie’s younger sister, home from North Carolina for Christmas — to call 911. But by the time a police officer arrived a few minutes later, the investigators had allayed Randall and Judith’s fears.

The Slys told the officer the men could stay, dispatch notes show.

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Manning’s investigators are satisfied Sly’s claims about the star quarterback are false.

“It’s like Peyton said: It’s a bunch of hooey and garbage,” said Bauer, who last week spoke briefly with a reporter at the Greenwood, Ind., office of his company, Phenix Investigations.

Bauer deferred most questions to Manning’s lawyers, but denied the claim that he introduced himself to the Slys as law enforcement.

“Impersonating a law enforcement officer is against the law, so obviously I didn’t do that,” said Bauer, a balding, bulky redhead who wore a skin-tight long-sleeved Under Armour shirt and jeans. “Otherwise I would have been arrested.”

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Dr. Guyer declined an interview request this week. Stephen Cooke, an Indianapolis public relations executive who said he was working with Guyer, initially offered to answer questions, and then didn’t reply to multiple emails and voice messages. In multiple statements since the documentary aired, Peyton Manning has never denied that the Guyer clinic shipped human growth hormone to his wife, as Sly alleged. Manning has just denied ever taking it.

“We’ve never said he [Sly] had everything wrong. We just said what he said about Peyton was wrong,” Fleischer said. “It’s like the saying . . . Someone with a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”