by Tim Elfrink
“I have had conversations with . . . our experts about the protocols and methods of administration that Mr. Bosch used,” Rob Manfred later testified in Alex Rodriguez’s confidential arbitration hearing. “And our experts do, in fact, believe that they, while maybe not perfect, could substantially reduce the likelihood of a player testing positive using those substances.”
Those experts believed that Bosch’s microdosing could probably keep his clients from failing the ratio test, Manfred testified, thus leaving only the carbon isotope test to nab them; and for that possibility, he’d included DHEA to cloud the results.
Either way, Bosch also knew that the placebo effect alone could sell his program to athletes grinding out 162 games a season. If he could help the hitters get bigger and stronger in the off-season, who cared if his in-game troches’ effect was minimal—they gave players a self-belief they found just as important.
“These athletes are so competitive and so willing to do anything and everything to win,” Tygart says.
Besides, Bosch did sell athletes what they wanted. There was no doubting what testosterone and HGH could do, and he started including more exotic products, including peptides such as GHRP and CJC-1295, both of which stimulate the body to make its own HGH; both are banned by MLB, but are all but impossible to test for.
The brilliance of Bosch’s developing scheme was twofold: The traditional PEDs in his system would give athletes just the illegal edge they were looking for. And the “precise timing” and “microdosing” would keep them safe from the censors; if they failed, Bosch could always claim—as he had with Manny Ramirez and as he claimed multiple times in years to come—that they simply hadn’t followed his instructions to a T.
It was a hell of a lot simpler than resurrecting strings of forgotten East German amino acids. And for a least a few years, it was a hell of a lot more profitable for Tony Bosch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Bosch’s Shadow Empire
The handshake that was both Tony Bosch’s biggest break and the beginning of his downfall came very late on a sweltering night in Tampa.
It was July 30, 2010, and Bosch was flanked by Jorge “Oggi” Velazquez, the former cat burglar who had set up the meeting. To the ballplayer they both called “Cacique,” they could have seemed a comical, perhaps disconcerting, couple as they walked into his hotel room: the short, hard-eyed former liquor store owner with a temper said to verge on bipolar, and the twitchy, ingratiating character everybody called “Dr. T.”
This guy is the best at what he does, Velazquez promised, laying the salesmanship on thick. He can provide you with everything you need.
If the ballplayer had any misgivings, he missed his chance to cut bait with no harm done. Instead, Bosch later said, the first words out of Cacique’s mouth were: “What did Manny Ramirez take in 2008 and 2009? What were you giving Manny Ramirez?”
The inquiry was rooted in both envy and concern. On Bosch’s regimen, Ramirez had apparently rejuvenated his health and his swing, playing in all but nine regular season games, almost doubling his home run output from the previous season and knocking in 121 runs. Stuck in an extremely high-profile power slump, Cacique wanted that fountain of youth.
The flip side of that coin, of course, was that the only reason anybody knew Ramirez was taking anything at all was because he got caught. He’d pissed positive, and paperwork had given away Anthony Bosch.
But Ramirez was busted, Bosch now explained to Cacique, because he hadn’t followed instructions. Ramirez had allowed somebody else to give him an intramuscular injection at the wrong time, causing the drugs to remain in his system when it came time for a league urine test. Getting caught, Bosch explained, was just Manny being Manny.
Another Bosch regimen for Rodriguez, using his nickname, “Cacique”
It was “nearly impossible” for his clients to test positive if they followed his instructions, Bosch promised. He would provide diagnostic blood testing, proper dosing, and exact times at which the drugs should be administered.
The ballplayer was sold. Bosch detailed the testosterone creams, growth hormone, and other substances he would be recommending, and they made plans to meet again.
Soon afterward, the nickname “Cacique” started appearing in Bosch’s notebooks. Other times, Bosch simply dropped the lingo and write “AER” next to his new client’s phone number, which started with Miami’s area code of 305.
The initials stood, of course, for Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez.
• • •
The meeting between Bosch and Rodriguez was one part luck, one part cosmic inevitability, and all parts Yuri Sucart.
In 2009 or early 2010, Sucart, who was friends with Velazquez, had a consultation with Bosch, according to a detailed arbitration decision made public during Rodriguez’s later fight with the league. Sucart, who had carried around extra pounds since childhood, was nearing obesity in his late forties. As he had for construction workers and Spanish drug lords, Bosch put Sucart on a pounds-shedding regimen of supplements and hormones.
Sucart still doted on, and was employed by, his younger cousin. For Alex Rodriguez, the 2009 season, which had started in disgrace had ended in renaissance, in the form of the Yankees championship. Sure, Rodriguez had burned Sucart by outing him as his steroid source to investigators and reporters, costing his cousin access to MLB facilities, but he had also given him a salary bump. Sucart, who made under $60,000 in 2006, saw his pay raised to $100,000 over the five years following. Rodriguez even had the Yankees make an extra 2009 championship ring, worth thousands of dollars, for his newly banned-from-the-MLB cousin.
It was Sucart who used the nickname “Cacique” for Rodriguez, revealing the sycophantic extent of their relationship. Caciques were the indigenous chiefs on Hispanola, the island that later became Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They had utter power over their fiefdoms.
As Bosch treated Sucart, the chubby patient had often made reference to the man he called that name, or alternatively, “Primo.” During his treatments, Sucart wore Yankees hats and shirts and that 2009 championship ring. He told Bosch that he worked for Rodriguez, and any Google search of Sucart—bringing up thousands of hits about the steroid scandal that had erupted just one spring earlier—would have informed the fake doctor that this was a relationship written in the stars.
Among the supplements Bosch gave Sucart were his signature “gummies” or fast-acting testosterone troches. Sucart told Bosch that he thought the troches packed an “unbelievable sense of energy recovery.” He added that he had given one to “Primo” and that Rodriguez “loved it because of its explosive effect,” according to the arbitration decision.
This long-distance flirtation between Bosch and Rodriguez lasted months until the superstar finally decided to take the plunge in late July 2010. Rodriguez was suffering a power outage that would worry only the world’s most insecure slugger: He was stuck on 599 home runs.
After losing so much of 2009 to his hip injury, Rodriguez had stayed mostly healthy through the first four months of the 2010 season. He was no longer being treated by Anthony Galea, who was indicted in May 2010. Rodriguez’s power numbers were unremarkable but steady: He had fourteen home runs by the All-Star break, and, batting behind the consistently mashing cleanup hitter Mark Teixeira, Rodriguez bolstered the Yankees’ batting order as the team traded first place back and forth with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Rodriguez was named to the July 13 All-Star Game for the thirteenth time in his career. Despite the game being played in California at the Los Angeles Angels’ stadium, the Yankees dominated the festivities. Their inimitable eighty-year-old owner, George Steinbrenner, who had retreated from the Bronx to Tampa in the last years of his life, had died that morning and was the subject of a pregame tribute. Eight Yankees made the All-Star team, and, as the World Series manager the year before, Joe Girardi now managed the American League team.
And it wouldn’t be a Bronx-themed party without an A-Ro
d injury controversy. Girardi left Rodriguez on the bench all game as his team lost to the National League, leading to speculation that Rodriguez’s right thumb was injured. The New York Daily News called it “thumb-gate.”
But within a week of the regular season resuming, Rodriguez hit two more home runs, including number 599 on July 22. It came in a home game against the Kansas City Royals, the first of a four-game series. Five days before his thirty-fifth birthday, Rodriguez—who had already been the youngest player in history to hit five hundred home runs—was close to becoming the youngest to six hundred.
When he next came to the plate, the umpire threw the pitcher a specially marked ball for him to deal to Rodriguez. Umps continued to do so until he hit his next home run. This was MLB’s method of authenticating Rodriguez’s eventual milestone ball, a custom originating in the home run mania of the late ’90s, when McGwire’s seventieth home run ball was auctioned for $3 million.
But Rodriguez didn’t swat another home run that game. And in fact, even as fans sold out Yankee Stadium every day hoping to witness history, Rodriguez was unable to clear a fence through the three games remaining in the homestand against Kansas City.
The Yankees left for a seven-game road trip on July 26, and Rodriguez lamented that he wouldn’t hit number six hundred in front of the Bronx faithful. But he couldn’t connect for four games in Cleveland, either.
For any other hitter, going two weeks without a home run would not even be noticed. But—in what seemed to be a career-long pattern for Rodriguez—what was at first celebratory was turning torturous. As sellout crowds followed him wherever he went, he complained that stadiums full of flashing cameras on each swing never let him forget the looming milestone. Those conspicuous, specially marked baseballs began to taunt him as the league went through more than one hundred of them.
Rodriguez’s pursuit of milestones wasn’t just about personal pride. His deal with the Yankees, after all, paid him $6 million for each of the top all-time home run leaders he passed, starting with Willie Mays at 660.
A column by ESPN New York scribe Andrew Marchand epitomized the incredible amount of pressure Rodriguez felt. “What Rodriguez’s endless chase for his six hundredth home run is exposing is who he is and how he will be judged from this point,” wrote Marchand. “A-Rod still is a very good regular-season player—maybe even great—but not elite anymore.”
It seems likely that Rodriguez would have hooked up with Bosch eventually, his frustrating hunt for six hundred notwithstanding. After all, Rodriguez’s job description brought with it a constant vise of pressure and scrutiny. Despite his enormous talent, Rodriguez spent his career seeking a synthetic edge, especially when struggling to meet mile-high expectations.
Rumors of PED use had chased him since he was the top high school ballplayer in the country, and steroids had fueled his monster seasons in Texas while he attempted to justify the biggest contract in sports history. In 2007 and 2008, he had been permitted to use testosterone and other banned substances as the much-maligned superstar anchor of the New York Yankees. After that he had been linked to Dr. Galea, the now-felonious physician whom a judge had confirmed had given banned substances to at least one American athlete, as Rodriguez pursued and attained that elusive championship ring.
Taken as a whole, Rodriguez’s greatest baseball achievements were inseparable from his use of steroids and other PEDs. Now his body was corroding due to age and, possibly, years of steroid abuse. But all he needed was one more push to knock down those historic milestones and place him among the all-time greats.
Maybe the question wasn’t: How could he jeopardize everything to cheat? Maybe at this point, it was: How could he not?
With six hundred looming, the call had come to Velazquez, who relayed it to Bosch: Rodriguez wanted to talk about potentially becoming a client. They met at a Tampa hotel following a loss against the Tampa Bay Rays in which the hacking-for-the-upper-deck Rodriguez had floundered, going hitless in four at-bats.
Sucart, who despite MLB’s ban had remained Rodriguez’s ubiquitous shadow, joined his cousin, Velazquez, and Bosch at the hotel room as well.
In hindsight, Major League Baseball could have saved itself some grief if it had assigned a full-time tail to Sucart after Rodriguez first implicated him. Here was a baseball player who one season earlier had admitted to doping; the handler who had smuggled the stuff to him and injected him with it; a bodybuilder with a prior record including steroids possession and clear business ties to anti-aging clinics; and the doctor’s son who in 2009 was linked to the banned substance taken by Manny Ramirez. As far as conspicuous summits go, this was the PED version of the meeting of the Five Families.
The four continued to meet often. Rodriguez played one more game in Tampa—still without hitting number six hundred—and returned with the team to New York. In the beginning of August, they all gathered again, this time at Rodriguez’s $30,000-per-month two-bedroom divorcé digs at 15 Central Park West, the millionaires’ lair also home to Denzel Washington and Sting.
Bosch explained that he insisted on drawing blood in order to design an appropriate protocol. The bogus doctor flew back to Miami with Alex Rodriguez’s plasma. Bosch knew that vial contained the opportunity of his career. In Florida, he had the blood analyzed. Bosch consulted with a urologist, according to the arbitration document, possibly over the hefty amounts of testosterone he was about to start doling out to Rodriguez. And Bosch had lengthy conversations about Rodriguez’s medical history with Sucart, the superstar’s career-long tie to all things illicit.
Bosch dreamed up an elaborate and extremely detailed doping protocol that would take Rodriguez into December, built around testosterone, HGH, and growth hormone–producing peptides. The next time Bosch traveled to see Rodriguez in New York, his luggage was packed with preloaded syringes.
On August 4, his dry spell having chased him to Ohio, Florida, and back to the Bronx, Alex Rodriguez finally connected on a pitch that made a sold-out Yankee Stadium erupt with certainty. Number six hundred flew into Monument Park, the museum beyond center field honoring Yankees greats. As he rounded the bases, Rodriguez lifted his palms coyly. His teammates streamed out of the dugout to congratulate him, and he took a curtain call for the roaring crowd.
Fans knew only about the one positive steroid test back in 2003. That was still enough to forever mark Rodriguez as a cheater. But this was as close as he got to redemption and leadership in the eyes of the fans and his team: a championship ring and number six hundred out of the way.
Rodriguez wasn’t on Bosch’s regimen yet. But even as he circled the bases, and after the game when his colleagues celebrated him for succeeding without steroids—“That’s a chapter of his life I think he’s turned the page on,” said hitting coach Kevin Long—he knew he’d found the man who would put him back on the juice.
For Rodriguez, one week past his thirty-fifth birthday, being “very good,” ESPN’s snarky appraisal, was not nearly enough. And he wasn’t content being the steady five-slot hitter while Teixeira, five years his junior, played the marquee slugger. He was determined to knock down every one of those milestone bonuses in his contract. He wanted to be the lone member of the eight-hundred-home-run club, Bosch later said. To do that would take a nature-defying late-thirties power resurgence of the sort Barry Bonds had pioneered.
On August 14—seven days after his down-to-the-minute regimen with Bosch officially began—Rodriguez slammed three home runs in Kansas City. It was the fourth time he had hit three in a game. The last time he managed it, in 2005, he was still in his twenties.
After the locked-in game, Rodriguez admitted for the first time that his lagging power production had bothered him. “I haven’t really hit for any power this year, so it’s been frustrating,” he said. “Being stuck at 599 was really a microcosm of what’s happened all year. I’ve been able to drive in runs and hit some doubles here and there, but overall I’ve hit for no power.”
But now, Tony Bosch had a be
liever.
• • •
As Sucart became more and more involved with Bosch, not only facilitating the man’s relationship with Rodriguez but referring him to other patients, Bosch wrote a note to himself: “Start paying Yuri Sucart.” The weight-loss patient had become a minority partner.
This was just another jot in the ledger that detailed Bosch’s secret business model. To any casual observer, Bosch was running another strip-mall anti-aging clinic serving the Porter Fischers of Miami, regular Joes looking to lose a few pounds, pack on some muscle, or up their testosterone counts.
But from the first days he returned to Miami from Texas, Bosch had begun work on a far more profitable, secret enterprise: selling performance-enhancing drugs to athletes. His goal was a thriving roster of big leaguers crashing the record books on his perfectly tailored regimen—and paying him tens of thousands a month for the privilege. Getting to those pro stars wasn’t a simple job, though. In the shadow economy of high-risk PED supply and demand, trustworthy word of mouth is paramount. Bosch zeroed in on three main avenues to cultivate his famous clientele: the youth coaches grooming the next generation of ballplayers; the University of Miami, where top prospects refined their game for the next level; and finally, the men such as Yuri Sucart, who lived on MLB’s periphery and had ready access to the guys looking for Bosch’s underground meds.
In the latter category, Bosch’s records show his unsubtle technique: He made a beeline for anyone who had access to athletes, offering middlemen like Yuri a cut of the proceeds or discounts in return for their referrals.
When it came to his MLB clients—who weren’t eager to fly to Miami and stroll into Bosch’s testosterone clinic every time they needed new doses—Bosch relied on these cronies to ferry drugs and make sure he got paid.
Yuri Sucart wasn’t the only MLB exile filling that role. One well-connected baseball hustler became Bosch’s biggest connection to pro stars.
