by Tim Elfrink
Whether the brothers knew what their underling was doing would soon become a burning concern for MLB.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
“HS”
By late 2011, Bosch’s gypsy trail of low-rent offices had led him to 1390 South Dixie Highway in Coral Gables, directly across the street from the University of Miami’s baseball field, the fittingly named Alex Rodriguez Park. It was from this office that he provided PEDs to more than a dozen major leaguers, including one of the greatest baseball players in UM history, and athletes from several other sports. Broken-down football legends bought illicit substances there, as did youth coaches and middle-aged dads looking to buy their sons drugs.
The address was a sterile complex that backed up on a canal clogged with tethered sailboats. Bosch rented a suite, and to his longtime patients who had followed him from dentists’ offices to tanning salons, this felt like real respectability. Bosch eventually got a brand-new logo designed by Porter Fischer, and a new name after a falling-out with BioKem chief Carlos Acevedo: Biogenesis of America. “Instead of, like, some guy selling drugs out of the back of an office, it was rejuvenation,” says a UM fraternity brother who had purchased steroids and testosterone from Bosch for years. “He was trying to look more legit.”
And he had the bustling walk-in business of a town physician, even if he didn’t have the medical license. The frat boy recalls that the waiting room was packed. And it wasn’t just meatheads, he says: Biogenesis attracted people “of all shapes and sizes and colors,” all of them waiting for their appointment with “Dr. Tony.”
Casting his net next to UM made for some serendipitous clients. These included several ex-football stars made prematurely elderly by a career’s worth of busted joints and rattled helmets.
Julio Cortes staggered into Biogenesis looking for help with brutally aching knees and a back prone to locking up. Three decades earlier, he was a hard-charging defensive end on the UM Hurricanes, part of the rowdy squad that won a national title in 1983. He went on to play three years of pro ball for the Seattle Seahawks and a few teams in Canada.
Now he was an investment agent and, like many of his former teammates, sometimes struggled to walk. He had another reason to give Bosch a shot: They’d attended Columbus High School together, and Cortes had even pummeled Bosch a few times when the undersize kid had briefly tried to make the football team. “Tony Bosch put me on a program that started with nutrients for the ligaments and the joints,” and went on to include testosterone, Cortes says. “A month before I saw him, I was sitting on the ground and I couldn’t get up. He put me on this program, and a month later I’m playing racquetball and feeling good.”
Cortes says that unlike many of Bosch’s clients, he was under no illusion that Bosch was a licensed doctor. But like a lot of Cuban Americans in Miami, he wasn’t bothered by that detail. “Cuba has awesome doctors, but they come to Miami and they’re not allowed to hold a pencil because they’re technically not doctors here,” he says.
Cortes was impressed at his chemical turnaround, so he started referring his buddies. A steady stream of ex-Hurricanes and former NFL players started creaking over to Bosch’s shop for treatment. Among them: Bernie Kosar, a demigod in both Cleveland and Miami. The Hurricanes legend, who quarterbacked that 1983 national title, had gone first overall in the NFL Draft two years later, joining the Cleveland Browns in his native Ohio. After a twelve-season pro career, which he finished with the Miami Dolphins, Kosar has stumbled through a sometimes-incoherent retirement marred by batty behavior, bankruptcy, and drunk-driving arrests.
Bosch’s records confirm that Kosar was a patient. Bosch contacted Kosar, the notes indicate, and at least once sent him a shipment: “Delivery confirmation and payment, $600.”
Compared to the highly addictive painkillers that NFL teams shovel at players, Cortes says Bosch’s treatments were a healthier alternative. “We can either do this or get back on the oxy,” Cortes says. “You read the papers about Kosar and he’s a mess. He’s slurring his words from the medication, from the oxy that the Browns gave him.”
If he gave Cortes and Kosar testosterone, Bosch broke the law. But it’s hard to see immediate harm in two ailing middle-aged men snagging testosterone if it helped heal their aches. After all, they had legitimate health problems and were certainly old enough to know what they were getting into.
But that wasn’t true of everyone the UM frat boy noticed in Bosch’s waiting rooms. Disturbingly, his customers were all ages, too. “Not only were adult patients waiting,” says the UM student, “but fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old kids were there with their parents.”
Another customer says the teenagers were a regular enough sight at the clinic that it dissuaded him from Bosch’s services. “I remember seeing a dad bring his high school kid in there. He looked like he was fifteen or sixteen, maybe seventeen, and he had shorts on from his high school team,” says the client, who asked not to be named because he went to Bosch for regular steroid cycles. “I’m [sic] twenty-four years old when I went there. . . . I did years of research into steroids, watched documentaries, and made my own educated adult decision. But a sixteen-year-old kid? That’s not right.”
Cortes noticed the young clientele, too. “There were guys from high school and college in there,” he says. “I didn’t like seeing that. I saw some college kids and young athletes in there all the time. They’re coming in from right across the street. But it’s not my business.”
Those kids in the waiting room were a fraction of the underage clients who had become one of Bosch’s biggest demographics.
• • •
If you were an undersize high school athlete, Anthony Bosch knew your pain. He had been that 120-pound lightweight craning his head over the shoulder of a massive fellow high schooler on team photo day, his face hidden behind drooping bangs, practically invisible, remembered by coaches and teammates years later only as some vague phantom loitering at the end of the bench.
To Bosch, there was great unfairness in the notion that some kids went on to play baseball for a living partly because they were big enough, and the rest—because of a little genetic misfortune—claimed their Toyota Corolla, their cubicle, and the dull commute that would drive them to their grave. And there was even more injustice in size dooming a kid’s athletic prospects when the hairy teenage leviathan taking his college scholarship had himself used PEDs to get so big.
Bosch had a philosophy concerning PED use in his favorite sport, a tao that he later shared on national television. Synthetic cheating “was part of baseball,” Bosch told 60 Minutes. He imagined himself as a batter, he explained, “and I know that the guy that’s throwing the ninety-five-miles-per-hour pitch is on sports performance–enhancing drugs. The guy who’s gonna catch the ball is on a program. The guy that I have to tag at third from a throw from center field when he’s sliding—he’s on it. Fair play? Fair play—if everybody’s on it, wouldn’t that be fair play?”
If this philosophy applied to big leaguers who were already set for life, why shouldn’t the same be true for teenage kids whose success on a baseball field could pluck them from obscurity and poverty?
Such reasoning drove Bosch. So did the checks he received from parents and coaches. Looking at his notebooks, it appears he had no scruples at all. One patient form among his records includes a note from Bosch asking that a student be excused from school from nine A.M. to two P.M. to come to an appointment at Biogenesis. The boy’s name and birthdate matches that of a Miami-area baseball player. His date of birth is listed as November 10, 1998—making him fourteen at the time of the appointment.
If Bosch indeed believed there was nothing wrong with kids doping, he was far from alone. Florida, after all, had grappled with high school athletes juicing since at least the ’80s, and a decade later steroid use among teenagers was prevalent enough for the opponents of a teenage Alex Rodriguez to swear he was on something. These days, parents openly coach one another in the bl
eachers about how to tell your doctor your son was stunted so that he would prescribe HGH.
As always, Bosch sought like-minded allies who acted as funnels to ever more customers. One of his most lucrative connections was an evangelical baseball coach who had been famous for building a baseball powerhouse where there was once only Broward County dirt.
A Hialeah kid, Tommy Martinez had played two seasons of bush league ball for the Cleveland Indians in the early ’80s. In 1990, he convinced the principal of Florida Bible Christian School to let him launch a team. It was an unlikely proposition, considering that the school had no baseball diamond.
But Martinez had a vision. His massive fingers bore championship rings collected in high school and on the pro circuit in Italy. He was cut like a statue from a Roman ruin, and he wore his hair slicked back. “It almost look[ed] like he was cut out of a rock,” says Roddy Barnes, who was a Florida Bible pitcher.
Barnes and the rest of the fledgling team got their workouts in by digging up dirt, mowing grass, and hopping over holes and debris as they ran laps in a de facto construction site. They built their own baseball diamond.
Martinez poached top players from all over Miami-Dade County through notes left on windshields and other dubious methods, and within six years, the Florida Bible boys were blowing out teams with scores like 41–1. A Miami Herald reporter posited that their performance was “more impossible than outstanding” and accused Martinez’s players of cheating—but not by doping. Instead she suspected Martinez was fudging his players’ hitting statistics, which he denied.
Martinez was prone to epic fits of rage. Barnes recalls him smashing through a closed door during one tantrum. And his favorite training exercises involved smoking line drives from close range at his teenage fielders. Pitcher Anthony Cancio Bello caught one of these bullets to the left eye. “Only now that I’m thinking back on it do I realize how dangerous that was,” he says.
Florida Bible was district champion for seven straight years. In 1997, Martinez fell while erecting a net to keep home run balls from denting the school building; nearly paralyzed, he quit the school. Eight years later, he was head coach at Sagemont High, a prep school in Weston where he again brought his team to district berths. Between the two private schools, Martinez won seven Coach of the Year awards.
There’s no indication that Martinez was providing his Florida Bible players with steroids. Barnes and Cancio Bello say he never approached them with illicit substances. But by his tenure at Sagemont, he had Bosch on his side. Bosch’s notebooks show more than fifty purchases made by the coach or three of his players: his sons.
“Tommy will bring two new patients on Monday at 1:45 P.M.,” read one early note. Martinez’s own full name shows up nineteen times in Bosch’s books, sometimes next to the phone number leading to his private baseball academy (Its slogan: “Pro Vision—Performance Training”). He paid in both cash and check. Bosch referred to Martinez’s three boys by their first names, or other times simply as the “Martinezes.” In all, the sons are listed at least fifty-four times. When one of them went on to play college ball, Bosch recorded that in a note.
In an interview for this book, Martinez denied that his sons had any association with Bosch. “My kids are still skinny and small,” he says. Martinez claims he first went to Bosch when his weight exceeded three hundred pounds, his poor health ultimately causing him to resign from Sagemont. Bosch supplied him with hCG, growth hormones, B12 shots, and several other substances. Martinez offers an unusual rationale for why his sons’ names make so many appearances in Bosch’s books. He says that since the crippling accident at Florida Bible, he purchased oxycontin and other pills from “pain clinics,” storefront operations that were ubiquitous in Florida until recently. In order not to have too long of a paper trail at both the pain clinics and in Biogenesis records, Martinez says, he used his sons’ names when purchasing drugs from Bosch. “I have to be careful,” Martinez says. “As far as pro ballplayers and all that, I didn’t know that.”
The records reveal that at least two of Martinez’s private clients also patronized Bosch. Among the players Martinez trained at his ranch, which he outfitted with a batting cage, was one of the top high school players in South Florida. Brandon Sedell made at least fifteen appointments with Bosch, according to his notebooks. The catcher played for American Heritage High, one of the best baseball teams in the state, and in 2011 he won Player of the Year in Broward County. On November 6, 2010, in one typical note, Bosch wrote that Sedell—currently starting for Nova Southeastern University—paid him $500 in cash.
Martinez also trained Sebastian Diaz. The infielder, who played for University High School in Fort Lauderdale, is currently on the University of Miami Hurricanes. A Sebastian Diaz is listed thirty-three times in Bosch’s books, in one instance next to the annotation “HS,” for high school. But Diaz’s attorney, David Kubulian, says his client doesn’t know Bosch and never bought PEDs. “[He] denies vehemently ever visiting Mr. Bosch’s clinic,” Kubulian says.
Martinez also says he had nothing to do with Sedell’s or Diaz’s alleged association with the steroid clinic.
Another youth coach listed in Bosch’s books, who had already been outed during the most famous PED investigation in baseball history, was Josias Manzanillo. “Pitching coach,” Bosch wrote next to Manzanillo’s name on a shortlist in his records that also included such regular clients as Sucart, Alex Rodriguez, and Tommy Martinez. As a relief pitcher, Manzanillo managed to play parts of eleven seasons on eight major league teams from 1991 through 2004, a career that was only remarkable for its dogged length and the number of unfortunate incidents in which he was involved.
Manzanillo earned mention in the Mitchell Report through two separate incidents. Radomski said that when the pitcher was on the Mets in 1994, Manzanillo asked the Mets staffer to inject him with steroids, and Radomski did so in the team clubhouse. Manzanillo’s attorney told Senator Mitchell that the pitcher purchased only a cycle of steroids for $200 or $250 but then “chickened out or thought better of it” and didn’t use the drugs. The Mitchell Report also notes that seven years later, a drug dealer who ferried pills from across the Mexican border was detained by security at the Anaheim Angels stadium. One of his baseball-player clients, the dealer confessed, was then–Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Manzanillo.
The middling relief pitcher’s other most memorable career moment had come on April 10, 1997, when a Manny Ramirez line drive exploded one of his testicles, resulting in surgery.
Manzanillo is cofounder of Manzy’s Pitching Farm, a Broward County academy training kids of all ages. Though Bosch’s records indicate that he at least targeted Manzanillo to become a client, the pitching coach says he has never even heard of Anthony Bosch. “I have no idea who you’re talking about, to be honest,” says Manzanillo. “I don’t even know this guy.”
Bosch’s records also include a basketball coach with stunning NBA connections. Benigno “Benny” Fragela, a former Coral Gables High guard, has said that he played pickup basketball games with Miami Heat legend Alonzo Mourning and Chicago Bulls forward Carlos Boozer. Both became close friends and, ultimately, partners.
Since 2007, Boozer and Fragela have run a summer basketball camp at the Hank Kline Boys & Girls Club in Miami. Fragela is listed in state records as the cofounder of Boozer’s Buddies, the Bulls star’s Miami-based charity for children with sickle-cell anemia.
Through his own company, CBF Sports Management, Fragela has run Heat superstar Dwyane Wade’s fantasy camp, his teammate Mario Chalmers’s camps in Miami and Alaska, and recently New York Knicks power forward Kenyon Martin’s basketball camp. His website still includes plans for a Nike launch event for LeBron James on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road in October 2013, though Fragela’s attorney, Richard Barbara, says that Fragela did not ultimately run that event.
Considering that the events are funded through the players’ charities, a secondhand link to Tony Bosch likely isn’t the public relations they we
re seeking. Fragela’s name appears at least twenty-three times in Bosch’s notes, sometimes alongside annotations reading “basketball coach” or “HC”—head coach. The phone number listed next to his name leads to CBF Sports Management, his company. And the sums indicated to have been paid from Fragela to Bosch are significant: “paid 230 cash,” “400,” “pd $450.”
Barbara, Fragela’s attorney, says that the coach sought out Bosch for an Achilles injury. He was referred by a neighbor. Barbara would not say exactly what Fragela purchased from Bosch, but he vehemently maintains that Fragela never procured PEDs for the young basketball players in his charge. “This has nothing to do with what he does for a living,” says Barbara.
Whether or not Martinez, Fragela, or Manzanillo were among them, coaches and parents supplied Bosch with young clients. He designed doping protocols for many high school athletes, according to his records. He often helpfully wrote “HS” next to their names. Those who have graduated now play college ball for teams called the Fighting Camels, the Jaspers, and the University of Miami Hurricanes. Even Yuri Sucart’s son, a ballplayer for Westminster just like Alex Rodriguez, was also a frequent customer of Anthony Bosch, according to his records.
For Bosch, treating high school players was a volume game. Unfortunately, none of them had much cash, and the odds were low that even the best ones would end up playing professionally. But baseball players at a Division I university had a much higher chance of going pro—meaning bigger fees and high-caliber referrals for Bosch.
Bosch obsessed over building his UM client base. Multiple clients remember him getting downright schmaltzy in his attempts to impress patients with links to the school. One patient says he bragged about Manny Ramirez and Melky Cabrera. Another says he wanted the patient to invite his UM ballplaying friends to meet him. “We gotta get dinner, you gotta come to the clinic and check it out,” Bosch said.
