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

by Tim Elfrink

  Years after the trade, when Rodriguez thrust Sucart into the eye of a national news storm, the formerly anonymous relative had his image on the cover of New York tabloids and be the focus of a three-thousand-word ESPN.com story.

  Still, no reporter learned of his conviction.

  But that old secret kept Sucart paralyzed. Because of it he could never be an American citizen and was at least once stopped on his way into Miami from the Dominican Republic. He was nearly deported, saved only by an emergency injunction based partly on filings showing his employment by Rodriguez.

  Sucart tried to get out from under his cousin’s thumb. In 2006, Rodriguez paid him $57,499.92 a year. Sucart parlayed these earnings into the makings of his own miniature real estate empire. He took out more than a million dollars in mortgages, buying several properties in Miami-Dade County. Some were single-family homes, others several-unit rental properties in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Miami area.

  Unfortunately, he went on this buying spree right before the South Florida housing bubble burst as violently as any market in the United States.

  Whether or not Sucart really had been a Washington Heights heavy player a decade earlier, he was now a convicted felon with a flimsy immigration status and no other job prospects. He was naturally subservient and harbored an ingrained devotion to family.

  It all added up to put Sucart in no position to deny his favorite cousin if asked to do something illegal.

  For Alex Rodriguez, $252 million couldn’t buy you a better PED connection at the same time that a new, nearly undetectable drug began making its way into professional sports.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  Gurus of Growth Hormone

  From the rutted, puddle-strewn road between Ladyville and Belize City, there’s not much to distinguish the Central America Health Sciences University (CAHSU) from the call center next door. They occupy neighboring red-and-white structures erected in a gravel plot hewn from tropical vegetation. Inside one, twentysomething Belizeans endure tedious days answering customer service calls from America’s pissed-off smartphone users. In the other, twentysomethings mostly from India and China listen to lectures on anatomy and macrobiology.

  The tiny medical school is backwater and provincial enough for a melancholy Graham Greene novel. Yet for Tony Bosch, the cramped classrooms on the edge of an impoverished Central American capital were a gateway to the medical fraternity he’d desperately wanted into his whole life.

  Here, he could finally nab the degree that had eluded him two decades before in Santo Domingo. More important, the Caribbean college could thrust Bosch into the hottest medical trend in America—a gray market boom in HGH, steroids, and testosterone packaged under the futurist title of “anti-aging medicine.” That expanding billion-dollar industry was born in this same Belizean academy, where an antisteroid zealot–turned–chemical evangelist named Robert Goldman and his business partner, Ronald Klatz, nabbed their own quickie MDs.

  Until Tony Bosch came along, that pair were far and away CAHSU’s most famous alumni. Not that his alma mater is all that excited to claim Bosch nowadays.

  “Just look at that bomber who is a [Harvard] graduate,” says CAHSU’s CEO, Dr. Murali Rudraraju, referring to the Unabomber. “He was the best of the best as a student, but at the end of the day, you graduate from X or Y university with your degree and then you decide whether to do something good or bad.”

  • • •

  It took Bosch a decade to find an unorthodox path to medical school amid the ruins of his life in the early ’90s. The softball glory Bosch found in Alabama hadn’t solved his deeper issues. His Miami Meds may have been tops in the nation, but his personal finances were nearing a Ponzi-like collapse.

  Bosch was hopeless at managing money and keeping promises. De Armas had worked to keep his charismatic partner in check, but he often didn’t succeed. Business lunches often turned into $500 drunken celebrations, with no medical orders placed at the end. Orders that did come in were laden with pledges that could never be kept.

  “Tony was a great marketer, but he’d say anything to close a deal and then leave us to worry about the details,” De Armas says. “And he’s the worst administrator I ever met. If he had one dollar to work with, he’d spend two dollars every single time.”

  The friends had brought in an investor named Tonie Lanza, who’d sold her own medical supply business for a profit a few years earlier. “They were really aggressive young kids, and from the outside, it looked like they were working really hard to be successful,” Lanza says.

  She took out a second mortgage and sank $65,000 into the business. Lanza quickly realized that staking cash on Tony Bosch’s promises was about as safe an investment as Enron stock circa 2001. Lanza blamed the failures on Bosch’s partying. “They were not good business people,” she says. “Their interest was not focused on running a successful business.”

  De Armas agrees that Bosch was already spending too much time and money at nightclubs, even with a young daughter and a newborn son at home. “He liked to schmooze, to drink and party, and he could get away with it because it was part of his gig as the marketer,” he says.

  By 1991, Miami Med was belly-up. A judge ordered them to pay a bank for Lanza’s mortgage, and she lost everything. “I never got a dime back,” she says. “It was a bad, bad experience.”

  Bosch was out of business. The softball team was disbanded. De Armas packed up and moved to Sarasota, looking for new work. A few months later, Tiki filed for divorce. She was tired of her hard-partying, forever-broke husband. Their Coral Gables home went into foreclosure, with more than $184,000 still in arrears on the mortgage.

  Bosch was adrift. His career, his young family, his reputation as a slow-pitch tycoon—everything had been shredded to bits within months.

  He found work as a respiratory therapist and cannonballed into the social scene in Brickell and Key Biscayne, two of Miami’s toniest waterfront neighborhoods. The work was dull, but the barhopping was anything but. Bosch had always been a boozer, and as a newly single, attractive guy from a Cuban clan infamous for his cousin Orlando’s exploits, his life took a turn for the bacchanalian. Attend a party in the young Latino scene in Coconut Grove or Coral Gables in the mid-’90s, and there was a good chance Tony was there with a Habana Libre on the rocks and different gorgeous woman on his arm.

  “Tony likes socializing. He has a lot of friends, and he’s let a lot of people into his world that I’d never agree with,” says Hernan Dominguez, his longtime friend and business partner. “Anyone can saddle up to Tony because he’s a very social and open person.”

  Amid the partying, Bosch never lost his entrepreneurial spirit. He rarely went more than a year without a manic burst of energy and self-belief propelling him into some new scheme. Starting in 1990, he founded his own therapy business and a curiously spelled financial group, the Organization of Yung Investors. The next year came a new partnership with Roger De Armas called the Florida Latin Association of Medical Equipment Suppliers, followed shortly by a community center and a distribution company.

  None lasted more than a year or two. Tony as always had boundless ideas and zero discipline, and lawsuits trailed like sharks behind his financially bleeding enterprises. A landlord sued in 1994. Another man sued over a contract a few years later. In 1996, Tiki filed the first of what would become a litany of unpaid child-support claims against her ex-husband, alleging that he’d racked up more than $17,000 in unpaid bills for their kids. A judge ordered Bosch to send his ex-wife $496 a week, as banks circled over the desiccated remains of his credit.

  Yet around 1997, a surprising calm began to settle on Bosch’s gale-tossed lifestyle. Through a friend of a friend, he met a stunning blonde a decade his junior named Aliette Baro. She was different from the arm candy he’d usually take partying. By the end of the year, they married. Within a few years, they started a family with another daughter and a son.

  Tony also seemed to final
ly find some business stability. Shortly after their marriage, Aliette—who was free from Tony’s troubled lawsuit history—cofounded a firm with his brother, Ashley, called DMG Health Care. With Bosch’s reams of contacts in the local medical world and his brother’s more stable business management, they set up shop in a strip mall north of the airport.

  Bosch was suddenly living life in a bull market. He and Aliette moved into one-story home with a brick-paved driveway just a few blocks away from the famed Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. On weekends, they met at his parents’ nearby house.

  De Armas was happy for him and visited Bosch to catch up whenever he was back in town. If Tony wasn’t exactly the phenomenal success story they’d always imagined back in the good old days of Miami Med, he could be doing a lot worse.

  But anyone who thought Tony Bosch would settle for a wife, kids, and a modestly successful business didn’t know his inner dialogue. Like his infamous cousin Orlando, he’d always been a writer and a dreamer, spending free hours plotting business moves and sketching plans in his notebooks. His tastes always exceeded his means, and his dreams always eclipsed his reality.

  Tony wanted to live to be one hundred, to write bestselling books, and above all, to be famous and wealthy. Even as he settled into life with his beautiful young wife and two kids, Bosch was thinking bigger.

  One day in early 2003, De Armas stopped by Bosch’s house to say hello, and Aliette greeted him outside.

  “He’s not here,” she told Bosch’s old friend. “He won’t be here for a while. He’s moved to Belize.”

  • • •

  No drug craze truly hits its peak until a doomsaying Cassandra lights up news broadcasts with predictions about hordes of youth crumbling under its influence. It happened with steroids in the early ’80s. As the drugs blazed from West Coast bodybuilders to suburban high schools, Robert Goldman gave synthetic testosterone its very own Reefer Madness.

  Titled Death in the Locker Room, Goldman’s book, published in 1984, is peppered with lurid accounts of freakish physical abnormalities and photos of grotesquely ripped women built like linebackers. Goldman’s alarmist prose went beyond the already well-hyped fears about ’roid rage and shrinking testicles and drifted into the dubious, like an assertion that doped-up bodybuilders could sexually transmit cancer to their lovers.

  The approach worked as well as any good horror story. Goldman sold thousands of copies and briefly became the curly-headed, handsome face of antisteroid advocacy, publishing two follow-ups, Death in the Locker Room: Steroids, Cocaine, & Sports and Death in the Locker Room II: Drugs & Sports. For reporters looking for a juicy quote about the evils of steroids, Goldman was the man happy to predict an epidemic of corpses with huge pecs.

  Within a decade, though, this anabolic critic abruptly transformed into the guru of growth hormone, bringing an underground industry into the spotlight and creating a profitable safe haven for thousands of drug-slinging businessmen like Tony Bosch.

  Born and raised in Brooklyn, Goldman made his name by setting obscure strength records. He once ripped through 13,500 straight sit-ups and then nabbed a Guinness book nod for finishing 321 handstand push-ups while clad only in a luridly striped Speedo. He turned that minor fame into a job at fitness celebrity Jack LaLanne’s New York gym. By the early ’80s, he watched uneasily as steroids swept through the bodybuilding scene, and his antidrug activism solidified after meeting Dr. John Ziegler, who had invented the first anabolic drugs three decades earlier. By the time Goldman encountered him, Ziegler had forsworn his creation and was tormented by how he’d changed the sports world. “I became his protégé student, studying under him in the last years of his life,” Goldman says in an online documentary about his own life. He dedicated his book to the regretful innovator.

  Six years after Death in the Locker Room, though, a new drug completely altered Goldman’s thinking about chemical enhancement. The spark for his 180-degree career shift came in 1990 in Wisconsin, where an aging researcher named Dr. Daniel Rudman devised a study to test out a relatively new synthetic product called human growth hormone.

  Scientists had known for decades that pituitary gland hormones were important to the body’s development. By the early ’50s, scientists in California and at Yale isolated hormones from cows and pigs, and in 1956, a pair of Berkeley researchers isolated HGH from a human pituitary. Within four years, they demonstrated that the drug helped children with severe growth deficiencies. Because the drug came from human cadavers, though, it was quite expensive. Through the mid-’80s, fewer than eight thousand kids in the United States got HGH treatments.

  Thanks to bodybuilding guides like the mail-order Underground Steroid Handbook, the hormone’s legend spread from stunted kids to ripped musclemen. HGH was tough to get, but serious bodybuilders—who would do anything to seek out new hormones to test their effects in the weight room—had already learned that combined with steroids, it sped muscle growth and reduced healing times.

  But in 1985, growth hormone was in danger of disappearing from the market altogether. A federal study found that the cadaver extracts were linked to at least four cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a fatal condition similar to mad cow disease that left victims with spongy holes in their brains. HGH was quickly banned in the United States and Europe. The outbreak ended up being a blessing in disguise for the hormone’s backers, though; the ban spurred Genentech’s first synthetic HGH to the marketplace by the end of the year. It didn’t take bodybuilders long to pick up on the benefits; Jose Canseco, for instance, says he started using growth hormones in the ’90s (adding the scientifically dubious claim in Juiced that HGH inflated his penis size right along with his batting average).

  It was Dr. Rudman’s study that launched HGH out of gyms and into messianic territory—whether the doctor liked it or not. The trigger was his fateful 1990 report for the New England Journal of Medicine called “Effect of human growth hormone in men over 60 years old.” Among those effects, he found, were thickened skin, more lean body mass, and less fat. In some respects, he wrote, the men seemed twenty years younger. Rudman knew his study was limited and tried to warn off overzealous interpretations. “This is not a fountain of youth,” he wrote. “We need to emphasize that the aging process is very complicated.”

  It was a useless caveat. True believers latched onto the positive aspects of the report, certain that Rudman had unlocked the key to immortality. Goldman met some of them himself in the early ’90s, he later told ESPN, including an old couple who’d shot each other up with HGH and lost twenty-five pounds and a cadre of seventy-year-old bodybuilders who’d carved years off their sagging pecs. A decade after sounding the warning sirens over steroids, Goldman found himself buying wholesale into the new drug revolution.

  Along with his business partner, a Des Moines–trained osteopath named Ronald Klatz, Goldman called a dozen other doctors to Chicago in 1992. The pair’s genius was to recognize early HGH’s marketing potential. The dozen doctors founded an organization to promote their cause: the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (or A4M). But both Klatz and Goldman, who’d gotten his own osteopathic degree in Chicago, lacked one key ingredient: MDs to bolster their evangelism. Where could two guys in their midthirties find an institution willing to give them the degrees they wanted?

  They found their answer in Belize, at the Central American Health Sciences University. In 1996, CAHSU was housed in downtown Belize City, a humid cacophony of rusted jeeps slamming through potholes and street vendors hawking rasta beads to cruise ship tourists. The Caribbean is littered with high-admittance, low-cost medical schools, a trend that started in the ’70s with colleges in Dominica, Grenada, and Montserrat and grew to more than sixty schools around the region. But CAHSU was a brand-new player in the game; Goldman and Klatz were members of its inaugural class.

  The same year the pair landed in Belize, another landmark HGH study was published. The 1996 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine described a test set up to re-create Dr. R
udman’s project, with the goal of replicating his results. The findings were devastating to HGH’s anti-aging boosters. Although subjects had increased lean muscle and decreased fat, their strength, endurance, and mental abilities were unchanged and most suffered side effects like puffy ankles and sore joints. Many were in so much pain they asked to stop the trial. “We cannot recommend it,” wrote the report’s author, Dr. Maxine Papadakis. “It’s not the fountain of youth.”

  That study didn’t seem to change A4M’s advocacy for HGH. Goldman and Klatz returned to Chicago in 1998, clutching new medical degrees they’d acquired in only two years in Belize. They told a Chicago Tribune reporter that they’d transferred credits and also finished “quite a number of months” of clinical rotations in Mexico. In 2000, the state of Illinois took umbrage to that claim, fining them $5,000 each and ordering them to drop their MDs and to use “D.O.” to reflect their osteopathic training, since CAHSU is not recognized in the United States.

  On paper, the pair made for a curious tandem to tout the miracle effects of human growth hormone. But their timing couldn’t have been better. With Rudman’s 1990 paper as the Quranic source document for their new movement (and scant mention of the follow-up study six years later), A4M staged popular annual conventions in Orlando and Vegas, charging doctors $3,400 for certification as anti-aging specialists. Their slogan didn’t beat around the bush: “Aging is not inevitable! The war on aging has begun!”

  A4M’s founders stress that their advocacy goes beyond just testosterone and hormone therapy and includes healthy eating and exercise. But it wasn’t presentations about vegetables that were filling A4M’s coffers with millions in dues. The crowds came to hear about new wonder drugs and to get tips on how to stay on the right side of the blurry gray line between highly profitable anti-aging clinic and illegal drug dealer.

  The FDA has made its feelings clear on HGH. The feds have approved the drugs for just a handful of rare conditions, including growth deficiencies and short bowel syndrome, which by one measure less than forty-five thousand people in the whole nation suffer from. All other uses, including for performance enhancement among athletes, are banned. The simple fact, regulators say, is that few long-term studies have been done on just what HGH does to the human body. Some research suggests it contributes to heart disease and diabetes, while others link it to problems including carpal tunnel syndrome. Recent studies into testosterone, meanwhile, have demonstrated such a clear link between the drug and deadly heart attacks and strokes that the FDA ordered a full review in early 2014.