by Tim Elfrink
In July 2011, Galea pleaded guilty before trial to bringing misbranded drugs into the United States, a felony. In a presentencing letter, the doctor’s attorney—while stating that Galea had “complete acceptance of responsibility and true remorse”—claimed that Galea was confused as to the legality of growth hormone in the United States, given the substance’s “quirky regulatory history”; argued that the doctor had been in the process of applying for a legal American work visa; and said that his care for the athletes was not about money.
“In several instances he saved the careers of players or enabled them to achieve career milestones—such as Super Bowl success—which was [sic] otherwise unattainable,” Galea’s attorneys wrote.
In the filing, Galea described in vivid detail the virtues of his Canadian practice and his philanthropy, included a photo of the statue in his honor outside an Israeli hospital—by the pop artist Romero Britto, it depicts a brightly colored abstract clown with Galea’s trademark black spiky hair—and submitted 123 gushing reference letters of support from doctors, team owners, and patients.
Apparently won over, Judge Richard J. Arcara sentenced Galea to time served, which was the night he spent in jail upon his arrest. Galea also paid a fine of $275,000. (According to prosecutors, he had billed more than $800,000 from American patients.)
In an interview for this book, Galea’s Canadian attorney, Greenspan, combated the notion that Galea doped up American athletes. “The only thing he pleaded guilty to was bringing drugs into the United States without the proper labeling,” says Greenspan, adding of the HGH Galea’s assistant was caught trying to get across the border: “It was infinitesimal and for his personal use.”
Greenspan says he is barred from disclosing Galea’s treatment of Rodriguez due to patient-confidentiality rules. But “there’s never been a finding” that Galea’s treatments in the United States involved performance enhancement, the attorney says.
Judging from Judge Arcara’s comments in court, that is only semantically correct. Without mentioning any names or even the sport of the athlete he was referring to, the judge confirmed that at the minimum one athlete received a banned substance from Galea. “We don’t allege that Dr. Galea intended to enhance the performance of his patients when they were athletes to make them bigger, faster and stronger,” Arcara remarked during a sentencing hearing, “but he did know that at least one of the treatments that was given involved a substance that was banned by the sports leagues they played in.”
• • •
The federal indictment wasn’t the last bit of American discipline faced by Galea or his longtime colleague Lindsay. Because neither were licensed to practice medicine in Florida, both were breaking the law when they treated Woods or any other patients in the state. Practicing medicine without a license in Florida is a felony, punishable by up to a year in jail.
In December 2009, the Florida Department of Health opened a slow-moving probe into Galea’s treatment of Woods after it was first reported in news articles. The case fell to a DOH investigator named Sidronio Casas. An unlicensed activity investigator with a law degree who earned $39,000 annually, Casas took a valiant stab at the assignment, knocking on the door to Tiger Woods’s mansion and leaving his business card.
Woods refused to be interviewed by Casas, but through the golfer’s attorney, the investigator was able to get Chris Hubman, chief financial officer of the golfer’s personal corporation, to corroborate what he saw. “I believe Dr. Mark Lindsay referred Dr. Galea to Mr. Woods and Dr. Lindsay was present for some of the treatments as well,” Hubman added in an e-mail, resulting in the DOH opening an additional investigation into Lindsay. Hubman provided the state with the nearly $200,000 in invoices from the two Canadians, a significant bill for just more than a year of periodic treatments.
MLB executive Rob Manfred and other league officials interviewed Rodriguez in 2010 about his treatment by Galea. And by January 2011, league investigators had launched what was a years-long effort to learn more about the Canadian doctor’s treatment of Rodriguez. MLB investigator Victor Burgos called the state agency, according to an internal DOH memo, “wanting information [about Galea] and he had information to share.” Attorney Nancy Snurkowski advised investigator Casas: “Please call collecting information, but not sharing.” It appears that nothing substantive resulted from the call. Galea’s treatment of Rodriguez is not mentioned by investigators in the case file.
When Casas sent evidence in the Galea case to a state law-enforcement body for possible prosecution, he was rebuffed, an investigator e-mailing him back that they were busy with pain-pill clinics at the time.
Far more befuddling was an internal response Casas received to his investigation.
In August 2011, with the investigation more than a year and a half old and Galea already convicted federally, DOH chief counsel Rickey Strong and senior attorney Snurkowski addressed a memo to two other members of the agency’s legal department.
The memo laid out the evidence against Galea; the fact that even a Google search gave the agency probable cause that the doctor unlawfully practiced medicine in Florida; and the intense media interest in the case. “The issue at hand here is how do we want to proceed in this matter,” reads the memo. “This investigation is over a year old, however, Nancy Snurkowski was instructed a year ago to ‘stand down’ because they did not want us interfering with their investigation. In addition, Nancy was instructed to ‘stand down’ because this investigation was also predicated during the time of Tiger’s marital issues.”
Near the beginning of the DOH’s investigation in late 2009, Woods’s personal life was exploding spectacularly with the news of multiple affairs. The DOH refuses to say how that factors into punishing somebody for practicing medicine unlawfully—although the clear implication is that the state agency wanted no part of any action that might make controversial headlines.
“I truly don’t remember the content of what happened there,” says Strong when asked to clarify the comment concerning Woods’s marital issues. Snurkowski has since resigned from the agency. A DOH spokesperson said “all of the information we can provide on this case is documented in the case file.”
Galea was sent a cease and desist letter from Florida, demanding that he no longer practice medicine without a license. The same sort of letter was sent to Mark Lindsay. There were no criminal charges, and despite them invoicing six figures from a single patient in a manner the state had deemed unlawful, there were no financial sanctions.
Anthony Bosch, masquerading as a doctor for years, would have been heartened by the Florida DOH’s ineffectuality.
Galea is still a licensed doctor in Canada, and according to Greenspan, his practice is “busy as ever” and he continues to treat American athletes from all major sports leagues at his Toronto clinic. “I can assure you if we gave you a patient list, you’d know fifty of them,” says Greenspan.
Galea even rereleased his book, The Real Secret to Optimal Health, in 2013, with a new cover blurb from a favored patient.
“Dr. G, you are the best!” wrote Alex Rodriguez.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
Inside the Notebooks
On May 7, 2009, only one month after Alex Rodriguez held his own steroid press conference, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre stepped up to a podium in Chavez Ravine and stared out at an army of cameras.
His hangdog features drooped as he confirmed the news: His star slugger, Manny Ramirez, had just earned a fifty-game suspension for failing a drug test.
“He was devastated,” Torre told reporters. “The only advice I had for Manny is to not spend a whole lot of time thinking about something you can’t change but to basically change the things you can.”
Just two months earlier, Torre and Ramirez had sat together on stage in front of the same gaggle of local reporters and ESPN crews. Joined by Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and superagent Scott Boras, they’d gathered to announce that the thirty-seven-year-old slugger had
signed a $45 million deal to keep him in LA for two more years.
Ramirez had long been baseball’s most mysterious superstar, a dreadlocked cutup in baggy pants whose popular “Manny being Manny” image boiled a complex persona to a series of goofball moments: taking a leak inside the left-field wall mid-inning at Fenway Park, forgetting a paycheck in his boot in the Rangers locker room, and blasting the dirtiest hip-hop possible over Fenway’s speakers during warm-ups.
That carefree perception had started to fray during his last years in Boston. His 2008 standoff with the Red Sox—which forced a trade to the Dodgers that July, four years after the deal that would have bartered him for Rodriguez fell through—made him look calculating. Earlier that year, he’d shoved Jack McCormick, the team’s beloved sixty-four-year-old traveling secretary, when he couldn’t get tickets for an away game. Stories soon emerged of Manny neglecting family and friends back in the Washington Heights neighborhood where he’d grown up poor.
But on March 5, 2009, Manny had been back in prime goofball mode, ready to celebrate his new contract in his new sunny West Coast home. “I’m baaaaack,” Manny mugged into the mic as McCourt slapped his legs and hooted with laughter.
No one was laughing now. Manny had started the new season on a tear, notching a .348 average with six homers, but now he’d be out through most of the summer. Worse, whatever was left of his naïve baseball savant act was gone forever. “Manny being Manny” had been killed by “Manny the doper.”
Ramirez skipped the interview rounds, instead releasing just a short statement before disappearing to his home in South Florida: “Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me.”
Manny’s claims of ignorance took another hit within a matter of weeks, when the New York Times revealed that Ramirez and his former Red Sox teammate David Ortiz had been among the 104 players flagged for steroids in the 2003 round of testing that was supposed to remain anonymous but had also already burned Rodriguez.
This time around, an expensive new test had helped to out the slugger’s cheating ways. At the Laboratoire de contrôle du dopage, the Montreal lab that runs baseball’s drug tests, Manny’s urine sample was flagged as suspicious; the lab then ran a pricey follow-up scan called carbon isotope testing, which can spot synthetic molecules that end up in the blood after using testosterone or steroids—even if a sample has passed a testosterone ratio test.
According to an MLB source with knowledge of his defense, Manny had presented a novel argument: that he’d failed because a licensed doctor had given him DHEA, a mild steroid that was not then banned by MLB and can trigger that test. It was a brilliant strategy because it’s impossible to distinguish DHEA positives from steroid or testosterone—except it meant Ramirez had to turn over his medical records to prove it. Those files showed he’d also been given hCG, which is banned. So even though he wriggled out of the positive urine sample, Manny still ended up suspended.
Those medical files also introduced MLB officials to a Miami character whose role in his positive test was, at the time, only a blip on the league’s radar.
“The first time I heard about Tony Bosch was in connection with our investigation of Manny Ramirez in 2009,” Manfred later testified in Alex Rodriguez’s confidential arbitration hearing. “The union produced to us medical records from Tony’s father and there were references that came up in our investigation that, you know, there was this father who was a physician and a son that was involved in wellness clinics.”
Manfred dispatched a team of investigators to look into the pair. In June, about a week before Manny was due to return to the lineup, news leaked that the DEA was also looking into Manny’s provider. ESPN posted their names: a seventy-one-year-old Cuban-born doctor named Pedro Bosch, possibly aided by his son Tony.
Pedro loudly denied the report, calling it “outrageous and slanderous.” He was emphatic: Manny Ramirez had never been his patient. Tony, though, was nowhere to be found.
The DEA wasn’t the only agency that opened a probe into Manny’s doping. A source in the Florida Department of Health says its state investigators opened a case on both Bosches. The source even furnished the authors of this book a case number. But the DEA never brought any charges, and Pedro Bosch’s state license remained untainted. (A Florida DOH spokeswoman, given the case number connected to the 2009 investigation, says only that “due to confidentiality constraints . . . we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a complaint.”)
Tony did feel the heat, though. In one of his always-at-hand, undated notebooks, he wrote himself a numbered to-do list. Twelfth on the list, behind e-mails to write and meetings to remember, was this little reminder: “Deal with problems: Manny Ramirez, IRS, child support, smoking, finances, etc.”
But from a back-alley marketing perspective, Bosch turned his high-profile outing as Ramirez’s illicit physician into a plus. One longtime client, a University of Miami fraternity member and weight lifter who purchased steroids, HGH, testosterone, and other substances from Bosch, says the fake doctor often bragged about his adventures with Manny. Bosch recounted once refusing to leave Ramirez’s apartment until the star paid his $24,000 meds bill. Bosch also said he rounded up attractive women for the star, according to the UM frat boy client, to whom the chatter was clearly boastful: “He was bragging about how he was Manny’s boy.”
When Bosch pitched his services to elite athletic clients, Ramirez’s airhead reputation allowed him to push blame on to Manny for the failed PED test. Ramirez couldn’t even last an inning in the Fenway outfield without having to dip into the Green Monster when nature called—of course he didn’t have the mental wherewithal to follow Bosch’s exacting instructions, which would have allowed him to pass a urine test.
And once the secret was out that Ramirez had been treated by Bosch at the time, the slugger’s vastly improved statistics in 2008 acted as implied advertising for Bosch’s services. After batting a relatively pedestrian .296 with twenty home runs in 2007, he had defied aging the next season, batting .332 with thirty-seven dingers at thirty-six years old.
One superstar took particular notice of Ramirez’s improved stats.
• • •
By 2010, Porter Fischer barely recognized himself. His gut hung low over his belt, his arms were shapeless, and his neck was ringed with blubber. He’d never been a fitness fanatic, but as a teen at Columbus High School in South Miami and a college student at Florida State, he’d stayed reasonably healthy.
But after a decade in the restaurant industry chasing orders and opening new Ruby Tuesday franchises in the Panhandle, he’d moved to Orlando in the mid-’90s and shifted careers into marketing. He slapped on a headset and stuffed himself into a cubicle. Suddenly, he was off his feet, spending all day at a computer coordinating giveaways at local bars. Somewhere between his weekly flights to corporate seminars, his three A.M. binge-eating, and his always-unhealthy appetite for beer, Fischer had woken up middle-aged and overweight.
“I got really fat,” Fischer says. “I got up to two hundred twenty-eight pounds. My body fat was thirty-two percent or some shit. I went to a doctor, and he said, ‘Your fucking cholesterol could kill a damn elephant.’”
Fischer’s body wasn’t the only part of his life that fell apart in Orlando. As it always seemed to, Fischer’s problems had come thanks to an aversion to authority. The trouble this time started after Fischer had landed a gig in 2004 as a salesman for the Louisville, Kentucky–based National Tobacco, a firm that markets Zig-Zag rolling papers. He’d left his last job managing a theme park after a fiery argument with his boss.
This time around, a manager fired him in 2006 for allegedly selling extra Zig-Zag products on eBay. Police records make it clear that Zig-Zag suspected Fischer hadn’t gone away quietly afterward.
E-mails from that boss’s account started going out on the main listserv at 6:23 P.M. on November 26. The first had an attachment: a crude cartoon of
a black man who had “OD’d” on watermelon and fried chicken, and a message, supposedly from the boss to his wife, that “if it were that easy, I’d start a melon patch tomorrow.” Three more e-mails, each with a racist joke or image attached, hit company listservs in the next hour. The boss swore that someone had broken into his account.
National Tobacco soon filed a civil complaint in federal court, claiming an anonymous hacker had infiltrated its computers. Fischer was never named in the civil complaint, but the FBI got involved. On June 12, 2007, a team of agents surrounded a vacation cabin where Fischer was staying in central Florida. While the feds methodically searched the home, Marion County sheriff’s deputies allegedly found Fischer’s weed stash in a coffee mug.
Fischer fought the marijuana charges, convincing a judge that there was no warrant to search for drugs, and he was acquitted. As for the feds, no charges ever came down; National Tobacco closed its civil complaint in 2010 without ever naming the anonymous hacker.
Fischer started over back in the same neighborhood where he’d grown up in South Miami. It wasn’t an easy choice. Fischer traced most of his woes to his mom. The marriage between Ann Marie Porter and his helicopter pilot dad, Gary Fischer, was unhappy. Porter says she was “an authoritarian” who took her wrath out on him.
Fischer’s parents divorced soon after he had graduated from Columbus, one year behind Tony Bosch, and headed for Florida State University. “If you want to know the source of my attitude, of ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ that’s exactly where it comes from,” he says of his mother’s punishments. “Now that I’m big and strong enough, I don’t like to be pushed around.”
