Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball'sSteroid Era

by Tim Elfrink

  Two coke dealers were posted outside a building lobby: a kid in a Timberland jacket and matching hat and his apparent “boss man,” a pudgy Hispanic man with a mustache. After some haggling—Sinclair insisted he didn’t want to pay “white-boy prices”—the detective gave them $35 and in return the cop pocketed two tinfoil packets of cocaine.

  Sinclair and his partners staged hundreds of these busts, many for higher stakes. But this piddling drug sting had lasting effects in Alex Rodriguez’s steroid saga.

  Police vehicles skidded around the corner. Eighteen-year-old Lincoln Daniel Persaud, ostentatious in his Timberland outfit, was arrested immediately. After a search, a uniformed officer stepped forward with a suspect matching Boss Man’s description.

  The orphaned teenager who had grown up with Rodriguez in a cramped apartment a few blocks away, and then in the DR and in Miami, was now a squat, pudgy man with a wispy mustache and a thicket of hair landing somewhere between a Jheri curl and a mullet.

  Thrown in the back of a police van, Boss Man screamed in Spanish that there had been a mistake, that they had the wrong guy.

  • • •

  “Sucart, Yuri. S-U-C-A-R-T. Bronx County.”

  He wore a starched shirt and a tie, and an interpreter translated from Spanish as he testified in his own defense at trial eighteen months after the arrest.

  While Rodriguez gained national acclaim as a high school ballplayer, Yuri Sucart had been quietly building his own anonymous adult life. He had attended Santo Domingo’s Universidad Mundial, and until 1986 worked as an assistant engineer for the Dominican water utility. For two years after that, he had been a blacksmith in Miami before moving to New York City.

  He had married a beautician named Carmen. Along with her son from a previous marriage, they rented a small apartment in the Bronx. Carmen was pregnant with their first kid together. Despite not having a taxi medallion or even a valid driver’s license, Sucart was a gypsy cab driver, shuttling passengers in his 1986 Chevy Caprice Classic. Between that and the few bucks they made exporting beauty supply products to the Dominican, where Carmen owned a salon, Sucart said they earned $300 a week.

  It wasn’t the lifestyle of a boss man. And as he leaned into the microphone, Sucart maintained his innocence, claiming that he had only been using a phone bank and hanging out at a nearby bodega when the cops swept him up. “What the police are saying is not true,” he repeated several times.

  The case did appear troubled. Sucart had no drugs and $21 on him when he was arrested, none of the bills NYPD-issued. Though Persaud implicated Sucart when he pleaded guilty to his own part of the drug sale, receiving probation, he then recanted on the witness stand. He said he had never met Sucart, and in fact had warned an officer at the arrest scene that he was not the right guy.

  Asked why he had initially lied, Persaud said it was on his attorney’s advice: “I was nervous then, and today I am nervous.”

  But the prosecutor made the case that Persaud was recanting out of fear, having recently burst into his office referring to Sucart as a “heavy player” and declaring that he would rather risk a perjury charge than “be found dead after testifying against Yuri.” And Detective Sinclair testified that he was “one-hundred-percent sure” Sucart was the other dealer.

  Eleven jurors believed Sucart. But one thought he was guilty. With the hung jury resulting in a mistrial, Sucart—previously free on bond—was dispatched to Rikers Island, New York City’s notoriously crowded and violent jail, to await the next trial.

  By March 1996, Sucart had spent several months in jail and been in legal limbo for nearly three years. He and Carmen now had two kids of their own, plus Carmen’s son Alex, all of whom had moved back to the DR while Sucart was incarcerated.

  And since Sucart’s arrest, Alex Rodriguez had gone from high schooler to major leaguer. Sucart’s little cousin had a seven-digit bank balance and 196 at-bats for the Seattle Mariners. It was spring training before the 1996 season in which Rodriguez was penciled in as the starting shortstop. If Sucart could shake himself of this legal saga, he had a standing offer to be Rodriguez’s driver, his gofer, his laundry boy, his chef.

  Sucart finally cried tio, pleading guilty to felony criminal sale of a controlled substance. Officially a convicted felon, he was sentenced to time already served, paid a $150 fine, and avoided deportation.

  If he was actually guilty, Sucart was one bad boss man indeed. Twenty years later, his underling is still covering for him. Persaud, who still lives in Washington Heights, maintains that Sucart was only guilty of looking a lot like his real boss man, who has since died. “There was one guy that found it all real funny: my boss,” says Persaud. “When I told him, ‘You didn’t get arrested because some other fat guy got arrested,’ he was laughing . . . RIP.”

  • • •

  By 1996, primed for a major league breakout, Rodriguez had gotten his first taste of the financial fortune to come and made his first few enemies in the process.

  As had been expected, Rodriguez was drafted first overall by the Seattle Mariners. Because most draftees have little leverage, signing with the MLB team that drafted them is usually a relatively simple process.

  But Rodriguez’s agent was Scott Boras, the Jack LaLanne of juicing every last drop of liquidity from major league team owners. Boras wielded Rodriguez’s commitment to UM as a threat. If he didn’t get the contract they wanted, the Mariners would lose their number one pick to dorm rooms, textbooks, and a Miami Hurricanes college baseball jersey.

  Within months of Rodriguez’s last game at Westminster, Boras guided the barely eighteen-year-old as he played financial hardball like a jaded veteran. Even before graduating high school, Rodriguez—telling a beat reporter that he wanted to play for the hometown Florida Marlins—asked the Mariners not to draft him. He had then refused to play for Team USA because it would theoretically cost him $500,000 in future baseball card endorsements. And with a deadline looming for Rodriguez to sign with the club or live up to his bluff and report to UM, Boras refused to budge from a signing bonus and contract demand that was outlandish at the time: $2.5 million.

  It took Rodriguez temporarily dropping Boras—and recruiting local politician and family friend Joe Arriola—to keep a future with the Mariners from disintegrating. Arriola salvaged a contract worth roughly $1.3 million. Boras was furious.

  Rodriguez’s use of UM as leverage—without any intention of enrolling there—was brazenly transparent. Not that school brass minded. Though he never took a class at UM, Rodriguez harbored a relationship with the university for more than two decades. It became a mutually sycophantic marriage—and an extremely lucrative one for UM—that later caused headaches for the school.

  After his release from Rikers, Sucart joined Rodriguez in Seattle. His occupation was personal assistant to the star. Other times, he was referred to as a personal trainer. In reality, says Seattle associate of Yuri Sucart’s Wilhelm Ansdale Henricus, “He was pretty much a glorified butler. He was a go-to guy.”

  Rodriguez’s high school coach Hofman traveled with his wife to Seattle on Rodriguez’s invitation to witness his former star player’s new big league lifestyle firsthand. He saw how Yuri played a docile Alfred to Rodriguez’s Bruce Wayne. “He’s a hardworking guy. He did everything for him, in terms of taking care of the mundane tasks that stars don’t do,” Hofman says of Sucart. “Yuri was somebody who takes care of all your business, drives you there, picks up your laundry, and takes care of things when you don’t have time yourself.”

  The cousins lived together in a condo in downtown Seattle, right on the Puget Sound. A Sporting News reporter wrote that it was furnished in “upper-end early yuppie.” The apartment looked like something Gordon Gekko, Wall Street’s antihero, might have lived in after banking his first million: leather couch, big stereo, big-screen television, golf clubs leaning against the wall, a batting trophy propped up against a window, a cigar humidor on the floor, an unrolled putting green with a sideways beer glass for
a hole.

  These digs—this life—were a far cry from the last addresses for both the cousins: a jail on Rikers Island for Sucart and a sibling-crowded suburban Miami home for Rodriguez. A profile from the era included a depiction of Rodriguez nearly hyperventilating after an encounter with sick kids at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. “I feel very uncomfortable doing that,” Rodriguez said afterward. “I usually let somebody from my foundation, Grand Slam for Kids, handle that sort of thing.”

  Rodriguez’s girlfriend—and soon-to-be wife—Cynthia Scurtis was a fellow fitness enthusiast who he had met at a Miami gym. She remained in Florida, and Sucart’s wife and kids also stayed home. In Seattle, Sucart reinvented himself.

  He met a group of flashy businessmen at the Kingdome during a Mariners game. They became fast friends, throwing cash around in Belltown, Seattle’s trendiest neighborhood. They were regulars at Assaggio, a posh Italian restaurant, and Axis, where they sucked down martinis and chorizo oysters. “Yuri and them would go out dining and drinking every night of the week,” says Henricus, a member of the group of friends. Rodriguez joined them once a week or so for dinner, drinks, and a cigar.

  Sucart attempted to parlay this friendship with investors into a business opportunity. Along with four of the buddies—Tim Attleson, Mario Pieris, Theodore George Bryant, and Nate Kreiter—Sucart founded Senok Management Group LLC, an “agency for professional athlete representation,” according to state filings.

  The goal was to use Sucart’s connections in the Dominican Republic—and, inevitably, A-Rod’s link—as a lure to bring ballplayers to the United States.

  The operation quietly flopped with few clients. Henricus says he had stayed away from any enterprise with Sucart as the figurehead. “He seemed to be a jovial, good-natured cuddly bear kind of person,” says Henricus. “He didn’t seem—in all respect—really intelligent or smart to me. He seemed just to be a follower.”

  Rodriguez’s cousin—round-bellied, easygoing, and always in the background—became ubiquitous in major league clubhouses where Rodriguez traveled. Sucart flew to cities a day ahead of his cousin, setting up hotels, since Rodriguez rarely stayed with the team, and toting baseball equipment. Although Rodriguez says he never did steroids during his Seattle tenure, later in the star’s career there is no denying that another of Sucart’s primary duties was facilitating Rodriguez’s doping.

  Rodriguez’s seasons in Seattle justified those slobbering scouts who had stalked him in high school. In 1996, his first full season with the Mariners, Rodriguez hit thirty-six home runs, drove in 123 runs, and—at just barely twenty-one years old—won the American League batting title with a .358 average. Though he had started the season batting ninth, by the end of the year he was anchoring a dynamic lineup also featuring Ken Griffey Jr., the longtime Mariners superstar outfielder.

  Rodriguez’s welcome to the bigs was also near the apex of the first Steroid Era. In 1996, a whopping sixteen sluggers hit forty home runs, and Mark McGwire led them all with fifty-two, a warm-up act for the next two seasons. Even then, the first overture toward PED testing in the major leagues was still seven years away.

  On the topic of notorious steroid users: In the winters, the former Miami kid Jose Canseco took Rodriguez, eleven years his junior, under his wing. In the latter half of the 1990s, when Canseco says he first started hanging out with Rodriguez, he was bouncing between teams as an aging hired gun with a well-known reputation for juicing and trouble. He had been arrested many times, including for ramming his wife’s BMW with his Porsche, and he soon tested positive in jail for steroids.

  And Canseco claimed to have dated Madonna a couple of years earlier, just as Rodriguez reportedly went on to do.

  In a strange way, in Canseco’s companionship Rodriguez was looking—quite literally—for trouble. Despite steroid rumors that had followed him since high school, Rodriguez’s public image was that of the corporate golden boy. It was a reputation that he later admitted rankled him and that he spent the next couple of decades thoroughly pulverizing. “He’s Mr. Clean,” Seattle teammate David Segui, himself later revealed in the Mitchell Report as one of the league’s more notorious dopers, said of Rodriguez at the time. “He doesn’t like to hear that, but he is. He likes everybody in here to think he’s some kind of thug from Miami, but he’s as milk-and-cookies as it gets.”

  Canseco gave him a guided tour of the dark side. They drove in Canseco’s Porsche to his twenty-two-thousand-square-foot mansion in Fort Lauderdale, surrounded by acres of poplar trees.

  They worked out in Canseco’s home gym. “I saw a lot of me in him,” Canseco says now. “I told him, ‘Alex, you’re going to be the next forty/forty guy.’ I knew he was going to become the best baseball player in the world. I even told his mom that. Alex didn’t believe me.”

  But Rodriguez certainly took the prophecy—that he could join the club of players who’d hit forty homers and stolen forty bases, a feat then accomplished only by Canseco and Barry Bonds—to heart. He bought a yellow Lab puppy with the kennel club name of “A-Rod’s 40-40 of Devonshire.”

  The relationship between the Miami-bred stars quickly soured. The first time Rodriguez saw Canseco’s wife, Jessica, the former Bash Brother says, the twentysomething kid remarked: “That was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “I realized he wasn’t a guy to be trusted after that,” says Canseco.

  In his second book, Vindicated—in which one chapter ends with a note to A-Rod: “I hate your fucking guts”—Canseco claims that Rodriguez attempted to have an affair with Jessica, whom he had since divorced.

  Canseco made allegations more pertinent than infidelity in Vindicated. He claimed that “in the latter half of the 1990s,” Rodriguez asked Canseco for a steroid connect. After Rodriguez’s monster rookie season, he had established the sky-high expectations that both drove his superstar status and burdened his psyche for years. In 1997, his production dipped. He still batted .300 with twenty-three home runs, eighty-four runs batted in, and one hundred runs scored. He started the All-Star Game at shortstop, a particularly special milestone because of who had hogged that honor for the previous thirteen years: his boyhood idol Cal Ripken Jr.

  Rodriguez compared the thrill of taking batting practice with Ripken to that of “a teenage girl going out to dinner with Madonna”—adulation of the Material Girl being the common thread running through Rodriguez’s career. It was the high point of what would have been a fantastic year for any other twenty-two-year-old, but for the best young player alive in the midst of the steroid era, the season was a letdown.

  In his book, Canseco wrote that he introduced Rodriguez to a Miami physical trainer nicknamed “Max,” who was also a steroids provider. If Rodriguez hadn’t already been doping, Canseco says in no uncertain terms that he started then.

  “I saw the changes in his body in a short time,” Canseco wrote. “Hell, if you ask me, I did everything but inject the guy myself.”

  Joseph Dion, a trainer in Pinecrest, Florida, was ultimately identified by Sports Illustrated as “Max.” In an interview with one of the authors of this book, Dion confirmed that he trained Rodriguez but vehemently denied having anything to do with steroids. “I hear he wrote a whole bunch of lies,” Dion said of Canseco. “My life is so clean I don’t even take vitamins.”

  After the accusation, Dion said, much of his professional client base dried up. He still trained anonymous wealthy folk and their kids, including soccer and baseball players from the Miami-area Gulliver private school.

  For his own part, Rodriguez told reporters that he had worked out with Dion but denied the steroid accusations and said that he had actually been introduced to the trainer by his old Boys & Girls Club mentor, Eddie Rodriguez.

  Whether or not it was with the chemical assistance of “Max,” Rodriguez justified both his dog’s name and Canseco’s psychic abilities the next year, slamming forty-two home runs and swiping forty-six bases. He hit forty home runs the next two seasons as
well. By the end of the 2000 season—with a $10 million Mariners contract expiring—Rodriguez was at peak marketability. Griffey Jr. had departed via free agency the year before. In 2000, Rodriguez had picked up the slack, leading the team to ninety-one wins and the American League Championship Series, which the Mariners lost in six games to the New York Yankees. Rodriguez’s agent, Boras, believed he had grown too big for small-market, mild-mannered Seattle.

  He was inarguably the best-hitting shortstop in history. And according to a seventy-three-page gold-embossed book that Boras distributed to major league suitors, pitting his stats against the all-time elites of the game, Rodriguez was essentially Babe Ruth with defined pectoral muscles.

  Winning possession of this human heirloom, then, was Tom Hicks, the owner of the cash-rich Texas Rangers, who was eager to make a splash with a monster signing. He certainly did that, signing Rodriguez to a ten-year, $252-million contract, exactly twice as lucrative as NBA superstar Kevin Garnett’s contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves, which had previously been the biggest deal in pro sports.

  In Dallas—a city that likes oversize things—Rodriguez became more of a pure slugger. As the sports world eventually learned, it was a metamorphosis aided by Rodriguez’s use of anabolic steroids. Years later, that Rangers squad was seen as Team Zero in baseball’s raging PEDs epidemic. Rodriguez’s teammates included Ivan Rodriguez, whom Jose Canseco linked to steroids; Juan Gonzalez, who was named in the Mitchell Report; and old Boys & Girls Club chum Rafael Palmeiro, who later failed a steroid test.

  Rodriguez was no longer the speedster he had been in Seattle, his stolen-base numbers dropping as far as the single digits. But he broke the fifty-homer mark in 2001, his first season with the Rangers, and in 2002 led the American League with fifty-seven homers. Only seven players had ever hit more in a single season, with three of them—Bonds, McGwire, and Sammy Sosa—representing the holy trinity of the Steroid Era.