by Tim Elfrink
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In Washington Heights, the mostly Dominican New York neighborhood where Alex Rodriguez was born and Manny Ramirez was raised, Juan Carlos Nunez was the go-to conduit to the island. He owned a tiny storefront travel agency on 181st Street, which dealt almost exclusively in plane tickets to Santo Domingo.
Nunez became the wheeling-dealing problem solver for New York City’s Dominicans. Want to get a generator to relatives back home suffering from the regular apagones, or power outages? Nunez and a business partner were ready to cash in: On Spanish-language channels, they aired a commercial with an abuelita screaming, “With all these blackouts, who can stand it? But what makes me really mad is I can’t watch my soap operas!” Nunez promised to have a generator delivered and installed at any address in the DR within seventy-two hours.
Bald-headed and chubby, Nunez didn’t have the physique of a ballplayer. But his younger brothers, Tirzon and Jose, were both solid infielders by the time they were teenagers in the ’90s. The brothers were a constant presence at the Youth Service League (YSL), a Brooklyn circuit known as a pressure cooker for New York’s best hardball talent. Ramirez himself had made the ninety-minute-each-way subway trip to remote Brooklyn ballfields to play for the YSL as a teenager.
As Tirzon and Jose played in tournaments as far away as North Carolina, their elder brother, Juan Carlos, dropped them off and picked them up in his BMW. “Juan pretty much raised them,” says YSL director Mel Zitter. A consummate hustler, Juan soon figured out how to profit from his brothers’ baseball connections. Future pros like Julio Lugo, who played in the YSL and then stayed active in the league upon adulthood, grew close with Nunez. New York Mets general manager Omar Minaya says he first met Nunez when he was an area scout studying YSL for talent. Nunez became famous among these Dominican friends in professional baseball for quickly arranging their travel back home. By 2005, he recruited some of those travel clients, including Minaya, David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, and Octavio Dotel, for Dominican phone cards bearing their images.
But customers soon realized that the $2 cards, produced by Nunez’s travel agency, had less time than advertised. Nunez found himself in an ugly war with the organizing body of the bodegueros, or store owners, to whom he had sold the bulk of the cards, a spat that included a lawsuit (which was later settled out of court) and the Bodega Association of the United States demonstrating outside MLB headquarters.
Major League Baseball took a fleeting interest in the calling-card war outside its windows. The Dominican players were barred from further endorsement of the cards. Years later, when an even more brazen scheme unraveled publicly, league officials wished that they had kept a trained eye on the Washington Heights travel agent.
One of the players Nunez met through his teenage brothers’ baseball league was Lugo, a speedy second baseman who was born in the Dominican and attended a Brooklyn high school. YSL director Zitter believes that Lugo, who enjoyed a twelve-year career in the major leagues, connected Nunez with his Brooklyn-based agents, two brothers named Sam and Seth Levinson.
An attorney for the Levinsons, Jay Reisinger, says in an interview for this book that it was actually Omar Minaya who referred Nunez to the Levinsons, two of the most successful agents in baseball. “That’s a lie,” says Minaya, who says Lugo made the introduction and the brothers only called him for a reference concerning Nunez. “I told them that Nunez was clean. That’s what I thought at the time.”
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While baseball fans tend to think that Senator George Mitchell aired all of baseball’s dirty laundry with his report in late 2007, in fact there was a glaring omission. It hasn’t just been clubhouse attendants, trainers, fixers, and cousins who have hooked up ballplayers with steroids over the years. Licensed player agents were also complicit with their clients’ doping, attested under-oath steroid dealer Kirk Radomski, whose sworn statements and evidence concerning his claims have not been fully detailed publicly until now.
Radomski implicated one agency in particular as helping build his clubhouse enterprise: the Brooklyn-based ACES Inc., owned by the Levinsons. The brothers have built it into one of the most powerful and lucrative agencies in baseball, with contracts currently totaling an estimated $660 million.
The two diminutive siblings are from the cloistered borough of Staten Island. Seth, who is older, entered college at age sixteen, graduated from Pace University School of Law, became a lawyer in 1985, and immediately cofounded Athletes’ Careers Enhanced and Secured Inc. Of the duo, Seth is the designated schmoozer and deal-maker. Sam, who is not an attorney, is the natural-born numbers-cruncher.
Radomski says he met the Levinsons when they were still sneaking around the bowels of Shea Stadium, trying to recruit players. “I was there when they had no clients, when they were little broke Jew boys,” says Radomski, who is anything but politically correct. “They’d be in the tunnels, and the managers used to say: ‘Get these guys out of here!’”
In those early days, baseball contracts were so relatively meager that some MLB players didn’t bother to hire agents. There was little competition for clients. But as the owners’ collusion scheme fell apart and baseball contracts boomed in the early ’90s, the timing was perfect for the Levinsons.
ACES pioneered the incentive-laden contract, in which teams paid bonuses if their players won awards, were named to an All-Star team, or hit statistical thresholds. The payouts were relatively small, but the contract clauses gave the Levinsons the edge over other agents. It was with such legwork and perks that the Levinsons poached players like Todd Zeile, who jumped to ACES from superagent Scott Boras.
And Tiffany Hundley, the ex-wife of hard-hitting Mets catcher Todd Hundley, says that Seth Levinson parked himself next to her during home games. “Seth would just talk my ear off in the stands,” says Tiffany, “and try to convince me to go with him.” Ultimately, it worked: Tiffany set up a dinner with the Levinsons and her husband, where they flattered Todd by comparing his statistics with those of other catchers. He jumped to ACES. The total value of the Levinsons’ contracts reached the hundreds of millions.
Radomski says that he visited the Levinsons’ side-by-side houses in Staten Island and frequented ACES’s Montague Street office to the point that security no longer made him sign in. The brothers gave the steroid dealer a gold card, which they also handed out to players, imprinted with the ACES logo and their cell phone numbers and other contact info.
Sam Levinson instructed Radomski to put clients on his “program,” he says. (He ultimately affirmed his claims concerning the agency in a sworn affidavit under the penalty of perjury, at the request of MLB officials.) Though he wouldn’t tell Sam the details of the program, the agent asked whether it was “safe,” Radomski says, and appeared pleased with its results.
Hundley, who the Mitchell Report later confirmed was a Radomski customer, was the first ACES customer to buy steroids from the Bronx-born dealer. That first year—1996—he swatted forty-one home runs for the Mets. It was, at that time, a record number of homers in a season by a catcher, a bruising position. Radomski says that Hundley told him he had informed Sam Levinson that the dealer was providing him with Deca-Durabolin. “Whatever you’re doing for Todd, keep it going,” Radomski says Levinson told him.
On another day when Radomski was at the ACES office, Radomski later attested under oath, Sam handed him the phone. Then–Mets pitcher Mike Stanton wanted to know if Radomski could obtain HGH for him. (Stanton has denied that the Levinsons played a role in his doping.) As they discussed the drug and the dealer made plans to leave HGH in Stanton’s locker, Radomski says, Seth left the office when he gleaned the topic of conversation. Sam stayed.
This was their alleged routine, perhaps a cover to protect Seth’s bar license in the event of an implosion. “Seth was never involved,” says Radomski. “It was always Sam, ’cause Seth’s a lawyer. [As a lawyer] you got ethics, you got rules. Sam’s not.”
Radomski went to the ACES office “more than
thirty times” to pick up payments for steroids given to players like Hundley and Rondell White, he says. The office manager, Anna, gave him a white envelope full of $50 and $100 bills banded in $1,000 increments, or she wrote a check. And in the case of catcher Paul Lo Duca when he was with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Florida Marlins, Radomski was paid out of a joint Citibank account belonging to the player, Sam Levinson, and ACES Inc. The resulting two checks, for $3,200 each, were the strongest evidence of money going directly from ACES to Radomski.
But apparently Mitchell was uninterested in outing the Levinsons or any other agents. When he issued his report, there was no mention of any specific agents. And the senator actually went out of his way to shield the Levinsons. Copies of checks made out to Radomski were included as a public addendum to the Mitchell Report. But in the case of the Lo Duca checks, the name “Samuel W. Levinson ACES Inc.,” and the agency’s address—188 Montague—were redacted. The authors of this book obtained copies of two such unredacted checks.
The Levinsons’ attorney Reisinger says that his clients had nothing to do with those checks. As evidence, Reisinger sent a signed playing contract from Lo Duca that matches the signature on the checks paid to Radomski. “We categorically deny what Mr. Radomski says,” attests Reisinger, who points out that Radomski did not make any claims against the Levinsons in his memoir. “It contradicts what he said in his book, and, quite frankly, what he told Senator Mitchell.”
Reisinger downplays Radomski’s claim that Senator Mitchell’s investigators ignored legitimate evidence concerning ACES. “I personally participated in at least eight interviews on behalf of clients involved in the Mitchell Report. They did not lack for questions.”
But Radomski apparently isn’t the only former steroid operator who made claims to Mitchell about the Levinsons’ role in at least one player’s doping, according to federal court testimony. In 2012, during Roger Clemens’s perjury trial for allegedly lying under oath about steroids, the former pitcher’s attorney, Rusty Hardin, told the judge that Brian McNamee, the strength-training coach who played a role in Radomski’s steroid operation, had also informed Mitchell that the Levinsons had procured steroids for Mike Stanton. “For instance, Mr. McNamee has always said that in the case of Mr. Stanton, that actually the steroids were delivered from Mr. Radomski to Mr. Stanton’s agent, a lawyer in New York,” said Hardin.
Hardin intended to have Seth Levinson testify in order to impeach McNamee’s credibility, though that did not happen. “McNamee clearly has credibility issues,” says Reisinger, who points out that in the perjury trial based largely on McNamee’s witness statements, Clemens was acquitted.
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Nunez was hired in 2006, according to Reisinger, as an “independent contractor.” Neither of the Levinson brothers speak Spanish, so Nunez was their human Rosetta Stone, managing the daily affairs of their Spanish-speaking clients. Along with Juan Carlos, the Levinsons also hired his brother Tirzon. According to the Players Association, Nunez was certified as a limited agent, with no contract negotiation abilities, in 2010. It appears that Nunez was also a recruiter for ACES: Zitter recalls him scouting YSL players for the agency.
Though the Levinsons have since attempted to distance themselves from Nunez, calling him only a “paid consultant,” a baseball team executive disputes that. “They were always together,” says the executive, who asked not to be named, of Juan Carlos and the Levinsons. “I’d see them together in stadiums and at the Winter Meetings.”
Juan Carlos Nunez and his wife, Manuela, moved to Sunrise, a South Florida suburb, in 2009. Among the many ACES-signed players under Nunez’s wing were two Dominican talents who, as they neared or passed baseball middle age, were falling short of their potential: Melky Cabrera and Nelson Cruz.
Cabrera had once been a top Yankees prospect, until his poor power numbers led him to being benched, traded, and ultimately released. Overweight and in danger of washing out of baseball early, that winter Cabrera turned to Rodriguez, his former teammate, for help. He moved to Miami and spent the off-season working out full-time with a trainer named Cesar Paublini, a former bodybuilder from Venezuela.
Three days a week, Cabrera and Rodriguez took cuts together in batting cages. A July 2012 Daily News story chronicled Cabrera’s resulting “career renaissance,” which the paper credited to his “astute decisions” to seek Rodriguez’s guidance and Paublini’s training. “He felt it was going to be better for his career to get in an environment that was conducive to him training six days a week,” Rodriguez told the Daily News. “He wanted to get into a nutritional program and do all the right things to elevate his career.”
It’s not clear whether Rodriguez personally introduced his former teammate to Tony Bosch. But at the time, Rodriguez’s own “nutritional program” was firmly controlled by Bosch. After his three-homer game in August, Rodriguez’s surging power production had only made him more faithful to Bosch’s troches, pink cream, and the rest of his custom protocol. A calf injury had forced him to the disabled list late that month, but he had returned quickly and had a September worthy of a younger A-Rod, slamming nine home runs with twenty-six RBIs in only twenty-two games.
Rodriguez had once again floundered in the playoffs as the Yankees lost to the Rangers in the American League Championship Series. Anthony Bosch could only do so much to help. He was a fake nutritional doctor, after all, not a fake psychiatrist. And sealing Bosch’s sainthood in Rodriguez’s eyes: On October 5, January 19, and February 19—after half a season and then an off-season on the Biogenesis regimen—Rodriguez had been randomly drug tested by the league. All three times, he’d pissed clean. Bosch later bragged on national television that it was his carefully timed low doses that had fooled the testers.
Whether Cabrera met Bosch through Rodriguez or another source, after that winter working out with A-Rod, his name shows up more than twenty times in Bosch’s notebooks. The notations indicate Cabrera, who grew an Amish-style beard ringing his massive jaw, signed checks for $9,000 for “pink cream” and testosterone troches. Bosch often wrote his first name as “Melkys.” Other times, he used his code name for him: “Mostro,” perhaps a perversion of the Spanish word for monster.
If it was indeed Rodriguez who introduced Bosch to Cabrera—and by proxy Juan Carlos Nunez—then A-Rod actually planted the seed for the relationship that turned Biogenesis into a league-infecting scourge.
Soon Bosch began noting meetings with Nelson Cruz, whom he nicknamed “Mohamad.” The then–Texas Rangers outfielder was a model of frustration. He had the raw power to hit forty home runs in a season, but the brittle condition to never play a complete one. He had never managed to play 130 games, but he still hit thirty-three dingers in 2009.
According to Bosch’s books, Cruz’s standard bill for pink cream and troches came to $4,000, and Bosch at least once hand-delivered the stuff to Cruz in Texas.
Later notes reveal how elaborate the dealings were between Bosch and Nunez. In return for big, steady checks from millionaire players like Cabrera and Cruz, Bosch provided substances for no up-front charge to Nunez’s young ballplayers who hadn’t yet tasted a big league payday.
These included Mets prospects Cesar Puello, whom Bosch called “Mi Hijo” or “My Son,” and Ricardo Cespedes, who was “DR.” The latter player, scouted eagerly at a Dominican academy, hadn’t even reached his sixteenth birthday and couldn’t be signed to a professional contract. But Bosch’s records suggest that he floated both players thousand-dollar doses in order to “accommodate your requests,” as he later termed it to Nunez. (Major League Baseball never publicly tied Cespedes to Biogenesis. This is the first time his name has been revealed to be among Bosch’s records. In interviews with MLB officials, according to a league source, Bosch denied supplying Cespedes with PEDs, and the young player denied receiving them.)
A Biogenesis workout cadre was forming in Miami, with Bosch keeping the players juiced and Paublini keeping them pumped. An undated photo that Paubli
ni uploaded to Facebook shows the sweat-drenched trio of Cabrera, Cruz, and Puello posing with the short and chiseled trainer in a gym. (Another Facebook photo shows Paublini training Cameron Diaz, Alex Rodriguez’s ex-girlfriend.)
By early 2012, Nunez had become Tony Bosch’s golden goose for major league customers. Biogenesis’s roster soon overflowed with ACES clients. Bosch took stock of those clients early in the 2012 season. On a few pages where Bosch also jotted a casual reminder to return his brother’s sweater and wrote “pick up Cialis from Manny,” the fake doctor recorded his patients’ early spring statistics. The names read like a roll call of current and former ACES Latin American stars: Melky Cabrera; Cruz; Puello; solid-hitting Detroit shortstop Jhonny Peralta; catchers Jesus Montero, Yasmani Grandal, and Francisco Cervelli; pitchers Fautino de los Santos, Sergio Escalona, Antonio Bastardo, and Jordan Norberto; outfielders Jordany Valdespin and Fernando Martinez; and infielder Everth Cabrera.
It was nearly enough for Bosch to field his own baseball team, drawing from ten big league squads; the nations of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua; and a single sports agency. The influx of ACES ballplayers caused business to boom so much that starting in April 2012, Bosch asked all of his major league clients to make out their PED-buying checks to a new company he’d incorporated, called RPO LLC. With its acronym standing for “Real Players Organization,” the corporation was nothing more than a check-processing front for his top secret business.
For Nunez, the financial incentive to drive players to Bosch was clear. Beside the bonuses from players for improving their performance, the ACES clients—Melky Cabrera, Cruz, and Peralta in particular—racked up vastly improved numbers and signed contracts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars while on Bosch’s regimen. To have his players doing so well certainly improved his standing with his bosses, Sam and Seth Levinson.
