by Tim Elfrink
Elie “Booba” Yaffa made his name as a break dancer in Paris before rocketing to the upper tiers of a booming French-language hip-hop scene around the turn of the century. The muscular Senegalese Frenchman, who raps under the stage name “Booba,” has sold more than ten million records—topping the French charts with 2006’s “Ouest Side.” He has 1.4 million followers on Twitter. Booba moved to Miami in 2012 and soon hooked up with Bosch, whose notebooks show dozens of meetings. Other clients say the tattooed musician was a regular sight at Biogenesis.
Jon Secada may not be as hip as Booba, but the Cuban-born singer has sold twice as many albums and is still revered in his hometown as the Grammy-winning star behind ’90s hits such as “Angel” and “Just Another Day.” Like Booba, he was a steady client, with dozens of entries in Bosch’s records that show he was buying steroids, testosterone, and HGH for around $700 a month.
Unlike Alan Telisman, most Bosch clientele weren’t discerning enough to actually check out his credentials. If they were, they likely would’ve been sprinting away from his clinic after just a thorough read of a disclaimer he handed out with his drugs.
First, Bosch warned that “hCG is not FDA approved for weight loss” and “there is no medical evidence to support the use of hCG for this purpose.” Even more disturbingly, he noted that “although a link between HGH and cancer has not been established, Dr. Arturo Perez, Boca Body, and its agents cannot guarantee the possibility that such a link may exist,” adding that “we do not recommend growth hormone treatment to anyone with a biologically active cancer.”
But who was Dr. Arturo Perez? The physician died in 2011, as Florida online medical records would have shown any Bosch clients who checked.
The warning signs that Bosch wasn’t what he seemed, in other words, were there for anyone who looked past the sales pitch. But the truth was, most people willing to buy drugs out of the back of a tanning salon were willing to suspend disbelief.
Anyway, a sizable swath of Bosch’s clientele, partners, and associates—revealed in those notebooks he kept—weren’t the kind to balk at purchasing some Schedule III drugs from an unlicensed doctor. Amid the real estate agents, bankers, and construction workers, Bosch was also the steroid connection for murderous drug lords and scheming fraudsters.
One of Bosch’s most prolific clients and sometimes partner was Serge Emile Casimir. When Bosch dreamed up a new “business opportunity”—a monster “bio-identical hormone replacement therapy” center where he envisioned testosterone and HGH sales reaching $100,000 a month, for instance—he ran the idea by Casimir. The audacious plans didn’t usually go anywhere, but Casimir was a confidante.
The bald, goateed Casimir was also a grifter, paying for a waterfront condo, new luxury cars, and a boat through a series of crimes including the world’s oldest profession. He regularly crashed vehicles in an insurance scam, according to court records, and after he was fired from his day job as a car salesman, his boss there says he found out Casimir was a male prostitute. (Miami-area records show he was charged with prostitution in 1999 and 2000.) Casimir is currently awaiting trial in Mississippi for allegedly posing as an appliance dealer named Tommy Lest in order to bilk more than $25,000 from a businessman there.
Far higher up on the criminal food chain was Bosch’s customer Orlando Birbragher, an iced-out, thoroughbred-riding Panamanian who once smuggled coke for Manuel Noriega. The puffy-faced, white fabrics–wearing Birbragher, busted by the DEA in 1994 for bringing contraband-stuffed appliances and stereo equipment into America for the Panamanian president’s cocaine enterprise and selling machine guns to paramilitaries, flipped on the dictator and got off scot-free.
Ten years later, it turned out Birbragher—who spent more than a half-million dollars at a store called Starvin’ Marvin Jewelry; owned a $186,000 Paso Fino horse name El Libro; lived in a $3 million mansion; skiffed a thirty-six-foot boat; and kept a Ferrari, Bentley, Porsche, and Range Rover in his garage—hadn’t exactly gone straight. In fact, he was living Bosch’s dream life, as the owner of BuyMeds.com, a website peddling pills through fraudulent prescriptions.
Sentenced to thirty-five months in prison for dealing controlled substances and money laundering, by the time Birbragher met Bosch he was free on probation, reporting to a judge that he had been a “model citizen.”
Orlando and his wife, Alex Birbragher, made at least eight appointments with Bosch during this time. “Text address to send meds,” Bosch wrote next to Orlando’s name in one instance. Of course, under the terms of his probation, Birbragher was not allowed to “frequent places where controlled substances are illegally sold, used, distributed, or administered.”
Continuing Bosch’s tour of the Miami underworld, there was the time that his sale of PEDs unwittingly brought down a murderous international crime syndicate.
• • •
Alvaro Lopez Tardon was a dark-eyed, lean, and hyperactive Spaniard in his early thirties. Elaborate tattoos along his back snaked past the collars and cuffs of his designer shirts. Lopez Tardon was a devoted practitioner of Santeria, the Caribbean religion best known to outsiders for its ritual animal sacrifices.
It was through his new wife, Sharon, a beautiful American woman who had first become a patient in 2008, that Tardon met Bosch. Sharon asked that Bosch put her husband on the gold package, increasing his “youth, sexual intimacy, digestion, energy output, and weight management,” as she later said.
Bosch had just what they needed. “We were given a package of eight bottles of HGH and a red substance,” she later recalled, “that was to only be used by my husband.”
On some days, Lopez Tardon, who lived in a waterfront condo in Miami’s old-money enclave of Coconut Grove, drove a Bugatti Veyron. The car had a sticker price of well more than a million dollars. On others, he slummed it in a Lamborghini Murcielago or Ferrari F430.
Lopez Tardon told Bosch that he made his living as an automobile buyer for European clients. Bosch told Lopez Tardon that he was a doctor.
For three years, the husband and wife were regulars, picking up medication at one of Tony’s facilities—first at Boca Body, and later at BioKem and Biogenesis—and keeping the medicine in their fridge. Sometimes Bosch personally delivered the stuff to their luxury flat overlooking Biscayne Bay, taking a few hundred dollars cash as payment.
With Bosch’s wonder drugs, Lopez Tardon perfected his body. His abs were stacked and perfectly defined. He paid a professional photographer to stage glamour shots of his chiseled and inked-up physique while wearing only leather pants, his hair coiffed into a faux-hawk, mist gleaming on his chest.
But Bosch’s medicine brought more than shimmering pecs. The side effects took control of Lopez Tardon, his wife later told investigators. “My husband became isolated, hostile and violent,” she wrote. “He lost his sex drive and blamed me.”
On March 1, 2011, Lopez Tardon barged into their apartment and demanded that Sharon sign paperwork that would let him extend his American visa. She refused. Alvaro, now more than two hundred pounds of pure muscle, snapped. Furniture flew, wineglasses shattered, and he slammed his own head against the television set until the screen spiderwebbed.
Then he grabbed a knife and chased after his terrified wife. Sharon screamed and ran into the laundry room, where her husband cornered her, held the knife to her throat, and punched her repeatedly in the stomach.
Sharon hit a panic button that had been preinstalled in the luxe condo, and police arrived to arrest Alvaro. Cops found diamonds, luxury watches, an inordinate number of cell phones, and more than $10,000 cash among Lopez Tardon’s personal property, but let him go while awaiting trial on domestic violence charges.
But soon after the attack, a simmering Sharon decided to cooperate with the federal investigators looking to expose her husband’s true line of work.
Two months later—on July 14, 2011—federal agents in Spain and Miami launched coordinated raids. In Miami, they burst into Alvaro Lopez Tardon’s getaway penthouse on t
he thirty-eighth floor of a Brickell condo building. In Madrid, they raided the home of Alvaro’s brother, Artemio Lopez Tardon, and found €100,000 stuffed in a laundry basket, another €400,000 secreted around the building, €5 million in an elevator shaft, and €19 million hidden beneath the floor near a ten-person Jacuzzi.
The Lopez Tardon brothers, federal prosecutors say, were actually the sadistic frontmen of the Los Miami Gang, Spain’s biggest cocaine cartel.
In Miami, Alvaro had laundered more than $26 million in drug money, according to a federal indictment, by buying and reselling a huge fleet of luxury cars and waterfront condos. Back in Spain, he was wanted for at least five murders and scores of kidnappings and beatings tied to a war with a one-legged drug lord known as El Enano—“The Dwarf.” The Dwarf had once beaten Artemio so badly that he went temporarily blind, and then shot him through both knees and left him for dead along a highway. (Alvaro Lopez Tardon has pled not guilty and, as of publication, is awaiting trial in Miami.)
Nearly a year after the federal indictment against her ex-husband, Sharon was interviewed by a Florida Department of Health investigator and described in writing the rage Bosch’s medicine inspired in Alvaro Lopez Tardon.
The wife of a man living a murderous double life said Bosch had managed to trick her with his own charade—by convincing her, like so many other patients, that he was a licensed doctor.
• • •
Unlike Victor Conte, Bosch didn’t build his business around concocting high-end drug cocktails for elite athletes. Not initially, at least.
If Bosch had kept to the “civilians” of Miami—the construction workers, real estate agents, and even the Spanish drug kingpins—he’d likely still be in business in a strip mall somewhere, just like hundreds of other anti-aging clinics in Florida, bringing in a six-figure annual revenue in plain sight of disinterested authorities.
But running a local anti-aging clinic was still far from his perception of himself as an important, brilliant man—a Bosch, dammit, the same as respected physician Pedro and off-the-rails guerrilla Orlando. Running a clinic and posing in a lab coat may have been closer to the wealthy and famous doctor he’d always wanted to be, but his notebooks make it clear that he still saw much bigger things in his future.
In one page, he outlined his vision for a chain of clinics in South Miami, Key Biscayne, Doral, and Aventura, all feeding profits into a management company, which would then park the money “offshore.” The clinics, in turn, would support his own laboratory network, which could produce “private-label formulas” to sell to customers. Eventually, he wrote, the network would expand internationally to Panama, Colombia, and a destination spa in Belize.
His long-range goals—including his dream life span—were even more grandiose. Between dollar-sign doodles he mapped out his own goals: “real estate, limo, plane, research institute, yacht, 100 years old.” And here’s how he’d make it happen: “Create a brand for expansion, sell a percent for $15 million, invest $$ in a stem cell research therapy institute.” Bosch’s position in this brand would be “CEO / founder / chairman / lead physician / scientist / professor/author.”
Forget peddling testosterone in a South Miami tanning salon. Anthony Bosch wanted to be the Oprah of anti-aging. To gain the capital to make his dreams come true, though, Bosch knew he would have to expand the base of the highest-paying clients he had, the guys who could make him famous: professional athletes looking for an illicit edge.
But first Bosch had to learn how to boost their bodies. His notebooks provide a guide to his chemical tinkering—a process vastly different from those of his predecessors in the PED game.
If BALCO was the blueprint for big league doping success, Conte had crafted a tough-to-follow act. While Conte himself was a self-taught nutritionist—lacking even Tony Bosch’s basics from Belizean medical school—the former funk bassist did have the good sense to recognize his weakness.
So when Conte looked to move into the designer steroid game, he started by trawling online message boards haunted by hard-core bodybuilders. That’s where he met Patrick Arnold, a brilliant weight lifter with a bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of New Haven. Arnold was already a legend for popularizing Andro, the drug McGwire had been caught with during his home run chase; Arnold had synthesized it after finding it in old German patents.
Working with Conte, Arnold became the guru of secret steroids. He used a 1969 pharmacology textbook to find drugs that had never reached the market and thus weren’t on any professional league’s radars for testing. Three of his star creations—norbolethone, desoxymethyltestosterone (DMT), and tetrahydrogestrinone, better known as THG or “The Clear”—became Conte’s bestsellers to superstars such as Bonds and Marion Jones, the Olympian.
It was no easy job to re-create those drugs. Arnold had to try dozens of old formulas and then find bodybuilders to act as guinea pigs at the risk of destroying their livers. If one angry track coach hadn’t stolen a syringe of “The Clear” and sent it to Don Catlin, the head of UCLA’s anti-doping lab, the drug might have kept fooling testers for years.
Tony Bosch didn’t come from that kind of chemistry know-how or from a bodybuilding background. There was no way he’d be synthesizing exotic East German concoctions.
What he did have, though, was ready access to the dozens of compounding pharmacies in South Florida that catered to the anti-aging industry. With just a prescription pad and the signature from a friendly doctor, Bosch had an arsenal of banned substances at his fingertips. Instead of inventing new designer steroids, he began experimenting with custom combinations of testosterone, peptides, and hormones inside creams and lozenges.
Bosch’s method was to throw a GNC shelf full of supplements at the wall and then see what stuck. His signature product—a mix he later called “pink cream” that he sold to scores of big league players including Alex Rodriguez—lacks the elegant simplicity of a steroid like “The Clear.”
The mix he settled on, according to his records, contains no fewer than eighteen ingredients: DHEA, a low-level steroid banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency but not at the time by MLB; the minerals zinc, potassium, and magnesium; a variety of amino acids—L-glutamine, 5-HTP, L-arginine, L-tyrosine, ornithine, and lysine—that are variously purported to improve blood flow, help muscles heal faster, and promote natural HGH production; taurine, the key ingredient in Red Bull; yohimbine, popular as an aphrodisiac; serotonin, the antidepressant; tryptophan, the sleep aid; Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the key energy delivery system in muscles; ginseng, the energy-boosting herb; and, most important, a 3 percent concentration of pure synthetic testosterone.
Did that mishmash of amino acids and minerals—all of which, except the synthetic testosterone, were perfectly legal in MLB at the time—really help a batter looking to inflate his home run total? The reviews are mixed.
Travis Tygart, the chief executive officer of the US Anti-Doping Agency, says Bosch’s full regimen for Alex Rodriguez—which included the pink cream, along with a battery of other chemicals—was quite complex. While it might lack the scientific punch of a Patrick Arnold creation or the international heft of a Lance Armstrong scheme—which USADA later proved included a web of doctors stealthily transporting blood across European borders—it was customized to evade MLB’s specific tests.
“It was unbelievably individualized,” Tygart says of Bosch’s product. “It wasn’t a mass effort organized by a team or a set of managers like in cycling. It was one quasi-doctor who put together a very sophisticated performance-enhancing package for his client.”
Tygart points to Bosch’s canny use of DHEA in the cream: the mild steroid might not do much to build strength, but it does provide a valuable “out” for dopers, as Manny Ramirez nearly proved.
Along with the “pink cream,” Bosch’s other key product was troches, or “gummies” as he called them. Troches are candy-like suspensions that drugs can be mixed into.
Bosch’s genius, as he tinkered in a
tanning salon with these creams and lozenges, wasn’t in inventing some new, invisible stealth steroid. Instead, it was to convince his pro clients that the combination of his troches and creams—not to mention good old-fashioned human growth hormone, which baseball didn’t test for until 2013—could keep their testosterone levels low enough that they could evade detection by testers while still giving them enough of a boost to elevate their game.
In the years after the Mitchell Report, MLB’s main test was a check of the ratio of epitestosterone and testosterone, which should be 1:1. If a player soared above 4:1, they failed. The faux-doctor told his clients he’d found a sure way around it—by taking his pink cream at key times, and then boosting it with “microdoses” from his gummies, they could get the benefits of elevated testosterone without spiking their ratios.
There’s disagreement among experts whether this is true. Patrick Arnold himself later mocked Bosch’s claims, noting that “if you take testosterone sublingual before a game, you will pee positive afterward.” Bosch simply wasn’t “very sophisticated,” Arnold said.
“This idea of microdosing to give yourself very small amounts throughout the day has been known for some time to thwart tests,” says Dr. Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor who studies PEDs. “But the notion these would help you in an instant in a game is ridiculous. These are training drugs, the steroids and growth hormones. The instantaneous, in-game effect would be meaningless, except as a placebo.”
But Tygart says that combined with an off-season program, they can help. “That testosterone will give you more confidence,” he says. “You’re not going to suddenly grow muscle mass two hours before game time, but it will help you maintain and aid recovery in a significant way.”
And perhaps most important, MLB’s own experts later privately concluded that Bosch’s regimen could evade their tests.
