Boxing.com

If someone does the crime and does the time that should be that. But it’s not. The slate’s not wiped clean. We don’t forgive and forget. One’s past doesn’t just disappear like a puff of smoke. It follows one like a hellhound on a trail.

Victor Conte did the crime, which in his case was besmirching the Olympics, baseball, football, and boxing (via Shane Mosley). He also did the time. But the Victor Conte story, much like Victor Conte, just won’t go away.

He may no longer be King of the Asterisks, as his influence has shrunk to the size of Barry Bonds’ genitals. But Conte appears to have found a new home, and that home, it’s sad to say, is in boxing.

Conte may have cleaned up his act. He may now be on the up and up. But how can anyone know what is or is not going on, especially with someone as shady as Victor Conte, until it’s revealed what is or is not going on?

In 2004, Martin Bashir sat down for an exclusive “20/20” interview with Conte shortly after Marion Jones, the “World’s Fastest Woman,” pleaded guilty to charges of lying to federal investigators about using steroids. Conte was her “nutritionist” and never admitted to any wrongdoing, but he did say that getting around the Olympics’ anti-doping rules was “like taking candy from a baby… I was the mastermind so to speak.”

Does boxing really need more people with no moral compass messing around with the sport?

Conte has been working with Andre Ward, Nonito Donaire, and Zab Judah. The latest fighter to join Conte’s stable is Andre Berto. Berto, if you recall, leveled charges of steroid use against Victor Ortiz, who whupped him and took his title in April.

Berto didn’t take his loss like a man and tweeted, “There is a reason why Ortiz had so much energy, a reason he could take my heavy shots and keep ticking. And there is a reason why he came into the ring [at] 165 pounds.

“I know people close to him and his camp, and I know exactly [what] he was taking. It wasn’t Flintstone vitamins! But it is what it is. I should [have] beat him anyway, but it wasn’t me that night. Ortiz wasn’t him either.”

Berto has either a great sense of humor, knows irony inside out, or is tweeting from the Victor Conte playbook.

In any event, he has now come to Conte’s defense.

“At the end of the day,” Berto said, “we might have a target on our back, but they can test us all day long.  Victor’s right. Performance enhancing drugs is very rampant in boxing. We know that for sure, but we’re definitely probably like the cleanest athletes here. We’re taking the right things we need for our bodies, just trying to get the best out of our bodies without stepping to the dark side.”

We’re all for letting bygones be bygones, what’s done is done, que sera, sera. Victor Conte has as much right to earn a living as the next guy. But a leopard doesn’t change his spots.