The picture couldn't have been creepier—there were guns visible in the frame. Joe Papp, a former pro cyclist whom I'd interviewed in person just ten days earlier, had e-mailed me a photo he took in his bedroom, using his BlackBerry. The image showed his desk, an alarm clock, books, a bottle of nail conditioner, and the firearms: a Kalashnikov-style assault rifle and a shiny black 9mm handgun.

Last September, when I'd flown home from Pennsylvania after spending time with Papp in the Pittsburgh suburbs, it was obvious that the 33-year-old was troubled. He had shown me videos he'd taken in secret, of ex-teammates using performance-enhancing drugs—what he called his "insurance policy." He'd told me about his Cuban wife, herself a talented cyclist, who had just given birth to their son but couldn't escape Cuba and come to the U.S. Banished from cycling, stuck living with his mother, and low on cash, Papp was tortured over the prospect of having to work a mind-numbing job to stay afloat.

"Life is hard," he'd said. "Am I in purgatory right now? Is this where I should've ended up?"

Less than a year before, in 2006, Papp had been living the bike racer's dream: He was part of a solid, second-tier European team that competed in places like Italy, Turkey, and Brazil. To maintain that life, he had taken a witches' brew of performance-enhancing drugs, and the drugs overshadowed everything. They made him faster, but they also nearly killed him. "It was a Faustian bargain," he'd said, "but you saw the pictures of my life in Tuscany."

When Papp got busted, he tried to redeem himself with a bold public confession at a major doping trial—the May 2007 hearing in Malibu, California, concerning Floyd Landis's alleged testosterone use during the 2006 Tour de France. But that turned out to be another catastrophe; it only raised Papp's profile as a cheater.

Then came Papp's e-mail to me, which arrived on a late-September night. He had told me once that he'd "visualized suicide," and events seemed to be pushing him that way. Two days before I heard from him, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration had served a search warrant at the suburban home of Papp's mother, Marie. Papp claimed he had no idea what the agents wanted. He'd already told law-enforcement officers everything he knew about doping's underhanded world. Apparently the DEA thought he knew more, and it wasn't reluctant to push him.

Which prompted Papp to send his alarming message. "I'm not going to fucking jail," he'd told me over the phone. "Not for cycling."