by Tim Elfrink
Now, in early 2010, he was back to where it all began: his mother’s house. Tortured history or not, the place was totally rent-free. The guesthouse was surrounded by a tall wooden fence, which separated it from his mother’s home.
As Fischer mulled what to do with his life, he fell back on a favorite hobby—tanning. He became a regular at the nearby Boca Tanning Club, a franchise in a chain of twenty-four-hour jungle-themed operations where lotions started at $20 a bottle and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino from The Jersey Shore was a spokesperson.
When he wasn’t spraying himself nuanced hues of orange or flirting with the cute receptionists, Fischer hammed it up with the place’s ownership and regulars. The tanning club was its own ecosystem, a pond stocked with a certain kind of suburban American cowboy—muscular, bronzed, and tattooed, always up for a nice quick moneymaking scheme, prone to violence, and carrying along murky pasts. The men he met there all came to play key roles in the twisting saga of Tony Bosch and Alex Rodriguez.
Pete and Anthony Carbone ran the place. Two brothers from Long Island, New York, they were only kids when they had watched their wealthy father fall off a boat and perish while sailing fifty miles away from Montauk in 1993. Friends from Northport High School, where Anthony transferred as a junior, say the younger Carbone came with a brawler’s reputation and defended it well. “I don’t remember him looking for a fight, but when they found him he would win,” says one friend, who also remarked that the brothers were incisively smart. Teenage Anthony kept a stock ticker loaded on his computer and was a trader even in high school.
They had both played football and wrestled in high school. Elder brother Pete was musclebound, and Anthony had a lanky grappler’s frame. Anthony, who was twenty-eight when he first met Fischer, later said he majored in criminal justice at Oneonta, a New York state school, and had chased that career south. “I wanted to be a cop when I came down to Florida,” says Anthony now. “They didn’t take me. I think I had too many speeding tickets.”
So Anthony Carbone got into the low-overhead tanning business instead. Carbone calls himself an “area developer.” Along with Pete, who reminded Fischer of a Sicilian wiseguy right out of Goodfellas, they ran a couple of salons and owned pieces of many others. “I want to retire at an early age and spend my days spearfishing and learning how to surf and be a better me,” Anthony Carbone says. “Take up piano and find my creative side.”
Then there was Gary Jones, a contractor who often came by to fix the tanning beds. Jones, at six-foot-one and 250 pounds, was built like a football linebacker, with a pudgy face and a mess of short, curly hair. Fischer gravitated toward him. Jones dispensed gravelly wisdom, and unlike the rest of the tanning salon crew, he wasn’t young, cocky, and buff. Like Fischer, he was overweight and over the hill. Fischer pegged him as being in his fifties.
Sometimes Jones growled about being a bank robber decades earlier, and serving time in federal prison. But that could have belonged in the sizable bullshit category of tanning salon conversation, next to the image of Anthony Carbone tickling the ivories and painting watercolors.
A couple of years later, when he found himself a victim of an unbelievable plot possibly navigated by Jones, Fischer realized how little he knew about Jones, the sage ex-con whom he had so quickly befriended.
• • •
Jones had first sped into Florida in a late-model Corvette with his brother Robert riding shotgun and a vinyl duffel bag full of fake twenty-dollar bills.
It was January 1987, and the Joneses were in town for the Daytona 500. In the twelve days they spent in the area, they partied like redneck shahs, booking a motel room; patronizing establishments with names like Finky’s and TC’s Top Dog; buying race tickets and pit passes; and stocking up on souvenir mugs, T-shirts, and seat cushions—all with fake twenties. The change from each purchase was the real score. Secret Service agents in Jacksonville and Miami, tipped off by an informant, knew they were in the region to pass fake bills but couldn’t nab Gary and his brother until they were back home in Waterbury, Connecticut.
In the small pond of two-bit Connecticut grifters, Gary Jones was—for this brief zenith—a whale. He and his gang dropped fourteen bogus twenties ringing in 1987 at a disco called Cat’s Nightclub. He owned his own bar: T.P. Hustlers. Federal Teletypes tracked his whereabouts. Snitches sold info on him: the Tommy gun he owned, the secret compartment he was arranging to have installed in his Corvette. “Let’s take a ride,” Jones would tell an associate, and then they’d spend the day driving around Waterbury, passing twenties in convenience stores, fast-food joints, bail bonds outfits, bank deposits, and—of course—tanning salons.
One member of Jones’s gang made a big show of his burgeoning pockets in front of a customer at the European Suntan Center. “Where did you get all that money?” asked the tanning patron. The man put the wad of twenties under his nose—“Look at it good; it’s counterfeit money”—and offered to sell him some.
That man became one of those informants, confronted by the feds, whose intel led agents to trace $40,000 in fakes to Jones and friends. Sixty thousand dollars more in counterfeit twenties, prosecutors later theorized, had likely entered circulation undetected. “He fears for his life and the personal safety of members of his family,” a prosecutor wrote of one codefendant, “in the event Gary Jones becomes aware of the fact that he is cooperating with the government.”
Jones served two years of a six-year sentence at a prison in Otisville, New York, before his release in 1989. He followed Interstate 95 to Florida, that Oregon Trail for ex-cons and hustlers looking to circumvent the rule of weather and law. By the time Fischer met him, Jones had started his own tanning bed repair company: Tan-Tech Inc.
Jones bragged of crimes for which it’s not clear if he was ever caught—smashing his truck through bank walls and escaping with two scores in one day. Though he says he “retired” from crime, his actions suggest that he was just waiting for an irresistible score to present itself. And Porter Fischer soon appeared the perfect mark.
• • •
Strange criminal occurrences went down at the Carbone brothers’ salons—episodes that suggested Machiavellian schemes local police weren’t interested in unraveling. If Fischer had known more about the clandestine goings-on tied to the Carbone brothers, he might have thought twice about casting his lot with them.
In the middle of one night in 2010, an overnight desk attendant at their Boca Raton outlet was attacked. “Where is the money?” two men asked the employee, named Adam Godley, as they threw him to the ground, kicked him, Maced him, and mussed his onion-shaped hairdo.
Boca Raton police officers reviewed the security footage at the club and told Anthony Carbone they’d be back to retrieve it as evidence the next morning. But when they returned, they were told the recording device and film had suddenly been stolen as well.
Cops had found that before the beatdown, one of the attackers had filled out a customer questionnaire. Using the man’s information, they discovered that he was friends with Anthony Carbone. There were photos of them together on Facebook, and they had both been involved in a police incident in Northport, New York, where they were both from.
A source close to the tanning salon crew says that Carbone believed Godley had been stealing from the shop and arranged the beatdown as revenge. Carbone denies this, and he’s never been officially accused of any crime involving the incident.
The alleged attacker was extradited to Florida on assault charges, but was freed after Godley disappeared. The Carbones threatened him “until he got so scared he had to leave the country,” says Godley’s mother.
The police closed the case. If the beatdown was arranged and the evidence destroyed, it certainly wasn’t a master caper. But this is the tropics. You don’t have to be Keyser Söze to get off scot-free.
• • •
Fischer particularly clung to Anthony’s brother, Pete. The younger Carbone was everything Porter wanted to be: confident, slick, and comfortably
married but still popular with the sculpted girls in the salon. Fischer attached himself to the salon owner and soon started bugging his new friend for work.
He’d managed restaurants for years, after all—why not bring him on to run the neighborhood salon? When Carbone rebuffed him, telling him “they couldn’t afford him,” Fischer sensed the true reason for the rejection. At forty-six, he was at least a decade older than Carbone or any of his employees. And worse, Fischer at last had to admit the truth: Inside Boca Tanning, he looked like the Midwestern couch potato tossed into a crowd of body-obsessed beach fiends.
The shame got him off his ass. He started biking every day along the alligator-choked canals bisecting the neighborhood’s million-dollar mansions. He switched to Michelob Ultra.
And then, one day in December 2010, he walked into Boca Tanning to find a new operation had been set up inside.
In the back of the shop, a small room had been outfitted with a medical table and a few instruments, like a blood pressure machine. It was manned by a guy named Jorge Velazquez, a muscular five-foot-nine and 185-pound man with tightly cropped hair and a serious countenance. Pete Carbone had invited him to set up after meeting him at the liquor store Velazquez owned in Kendall. His nickname was “Oggi,” short for his middle name, Augustine.
Like others in the crew, the New York–born Velazquez had a criminal record. According to cops, back in 1990 he had been an unsuccessful cat burglar, pilfering $6,000 worth of goods from a Miami-area home and getting busted when he tried to pawn the victim’s class ring. (A judge withheld adjudication in exchange for probation.) His rap sheet of charges reads like a meathead Teletype: brawling, possession of cocaine and steroids, corruption of public moral decency, larceny, and assault.
The then-forty-year-old Velazquez was dating a student eighteen years his junior, in a relationship that was marred by violent outbursts, according to domestic violence reports later filed by the police. “The underlying fact is that he is an emotionally troubled individual,” says that girlfriend’s father, Carlos Alvarez Diez. “He is likely bipolar or has some other kind of behavioral disorder.”
Velazquez had bought all in on the anti-aging craze, as evidenced by the vanity plates ANTI8GE and ANT1AGE, with which he adorned his Nissan sports car and Jeep SUV, vehicles that he tended to park in handicapped spaces.
As Oggi now explained to Fischer, his operation was called Boca Body. It offered hCG “weight-loss therapy.” Fischer was intrigued.
At Velazquez’s request, Fischer brought in a copy of a body-fat report he’d gotten from his doctor and handed it over to Oggi, who flipped through the pages like an expert, shaking his head softly at what he saw.
“Wow, these are high,” Fischer remembers Oggi saying. “I don’t know if we can do anything. But I’ll show the doctor.”
The “doctor” wasn’t in that day, but when Fischer returned to Boca Tanning later that week, he first met Tony Bosch. “Dr. T” won him over immediately, especially when he offered the “Columbus discount” after realizing Porter had gone to the same high school.
Within a month, Fischer was on Bosch’s full regimen: hCG for weight loss, plus a testosterone cocktail to tone his physique, topped off with the anabolic steroid Anavar to build pure muscle. He couldn’t believe how well, or how quickly, it all worked.
It’s not that Fischer didn’t have any worries about what he was putting in his body. Most doctors, he had to admit, wouldn’t give him stacks of needles and instructions to inject himself directly into the butt before workouts. In fact, he once asked Bosch about what, exactly, he was being sold.
“Oh, that’s what Lance Armstrong takes,” Fischer recalls him saying. At the time, Armstrong was already in the news for doping allegations, but he had not yet had his Tour de France titles stripped from him. Fischer figured the stuff was legit. “I mean, this guy had a coat that said ‘Dr. Tony Bosch.’ I thought he was a fucking doctor.”
These days, Anthony Carbone denies any involvement with Bosch’s operation. “I know Oggi was a partner in Boca Body,” says Carbone. “It was not a business in [which] I was hands-on.”
Carbone claims that he rarely met Bosch—the man wearing a white lab coat and occupying a sizable portion of his brother’s tanning salon. “I heard he was lurking,” Carbone says vaguely.
Whenever Fischer placed a new order, Bosch scribbled the details in a notebook. He’d do the same when he checked his voice mail, or seemingly out of nowhere Fischer would see him write in them, as if to just jot down a random musing. Fischer thought those notebooks—with black-and-white marbled covers, resembling something an eighth grader might use to take notes in chemistry class—were funny. A grown doctor, and here he was keeping a diary like a little boy.
When the shit hit the fan, those notebooks were the first thing Fischer thought of.
• • •
Bosch had ended up in the back of a tanning salon because he’d had been chased out of Key Biscayne, his distaste for paying bills once again getting him in trouble. The dentist whose office he had used to set up his first Miami-area anti-aging operation accused him of stealing money and supplies, according to Jorge Jaen, a later business partner also burned by Bosch.
Always agile in outrunning creditors, Bosch found new digs for his transient business. Through his old friend and business partner, Hernan Dominguez, he staked out office space in Dominguez’s father’s medical office just behind Coral Gables Hospital. There, Bosch founded Orthomolecular Medical Association. It was an impressive name, referring to a type of alternative nutritional medicine. In reality, it was just another weight-loss and testosterone clinic.
By October 2010, he’d met Oggi, who had struck a deal for him to help set up Boca Body in the tanning salon. It was a natural fit. Tony had two kinds of ordinary customers: the flabby Porter Fischers of the world, looking to lose weight or build muscle; and the hard-core bodybuilders who made no pretenses about what they wanted—steroids, testosterone, and HGH. A salon like Boca Tanning was the rare place where both types congregated, from body-conscious middle-agers to weight lifters orange-spraying their carefully cultivated abs.
For those customers who would never think of themselves as “juicers,” Tony Bosch’s salesmanship carried the day. A look at one typical patient’s file shows exactly how the unlicensed doctor played up nonexistent expertise and then offered a range of illegal drugs to men and women who wouldn’t buy back-alley steroids in a Gold’s Gym locker room.
First, Bosch asked his patients to fill out a “Health History Questionnaire.” Bosch asked them how concerned they were with achieving twelve goals. Did they just want “to feel better overall”? Or was it their mission to “improve muscle conditioning”? He quizzed the prospective patients about their diet and exercise habits. A professional phlebotomist then took his blood, to be shipped off to a local lab. Finally, a staffer snapped digital pictures of the sheepish, shirtless patient trying to suck in his gut.
A few days later results arrived from the lab. No matter the answers to the questionnaire or the results of the blood test, Dr. Bosch’s diagnosis was always the same. He’d tut-tut over the paperwork, shake his head quietly, and announce: Your hormones and testosterone are out of balance. We need to begin hormone replacement and testosterone therapy.
A thirty-two-year-old real estate developer named Al—whose medical file from the clinic the authors reviewed—is a prime example of what happened next. Al first met Bosch in October 2011, strolling into Tony’s clinic looking for help with a pudgy gut. He was five-foot-ten, weighed 220 pounds, and wanted to cut forty pounds off his frame. Within weeks, Dr. Bosch had him on a cocktail of illegally prescribed drugs. Bosch put him on a weekly regimen of the women’s fertility drug hCG, MIC (a combination of three amino acids), testosterone, and DHEA (a mild steroid). Later, he added human growth hormone to Al’s weekly mix.
Bosch relied on word of mouth, wary of advertising his illicit services too openly. Betty Tejada, a longtime friend from Key
Biscayne, recalled her neighbor talking up his drugs as a way to lose weight after childbirth. And Tony Lamberto, a sixty-three-year-old construction worker, has an infomercial-ready recollection of his experiences with Bosch’s miracle drugs. He heard about Bosch after noticing his buddy Lalo at the gym had lost weight. “Oh my God, you’re so skinny!” Lamberto says he asked his friend, “What’s going on with you?”
Lalo’s response: “I went to this guy Tony Bosch! I lost about forty pounds in one month.”
So Lamberto—paying $80 a month for hCG—injected himself in the stomach once in the morning and once in the afternoon. He lost forty pounds, too. His wife saw Bosch, and she slimmed down, too. “My wife was fat, too,” says Lamberto, “and we lost weight together!”
Not every prospective client was as beguiled by Bosch’s official-looking lab results, white lab coat, and salesman’s charm.
Bosch, constantly working his connections for new customers, met sixty-five-year-old Alan Telisman through his daughter, a Key Biscayne resident who had come to him for hCG weight loss. Bosch had Telisman, an already fit personal injury attorney, fill out the usual questionnaire in May 2012. Then he put together a heavy program of restricted drugs: 10 percent testosterone cream, MIC, and even Proviron, a bodybuilding androgen.
Telisman tried the program for about four months, visiting the clinic weekly and paying about $100 a visit, but decided he didn’t like Bosch’s operation. “I was under the impression he was a doctor until . . . [I] saw those diplomas from Belize hanging on the wall,” Telisman says. “Then I checked when I got home and saw he was not licensed in Florida.”
Bosch dated a sculptor at one point, as evidenced in a breakup missive he drafted in his notebooks—“I want to move on and find my happiness like you found yours”—and his client lists drew from that art scene, including some prominent names never before reported. Miguel Paredes, “who combines the exhilarating sense of New York graffiti art with the skill and perceptiveness of a truly exceptional artist,” according to his website bio, was such an enthusiastic Bosch client that his bug-eyed creations adorned the clinic walls.
