by Tim Elfrink
Heavy-handed though his approach may have been, it worked. Eventually, he permeated the clubhouse across the street. He even sat in the stands and watched his clients play. Alfonso “Flaco” Otero, a longtime coach of UM baseball camps, says that he met Bosch during a baseball game at Alex Rodriguez Park, introduced by a friend who had been treated by the fake doctor. “He said [Bosch] was a person who helps big league ballplayers as far as their performance on the baseball field,” Otero says. (He declined to name the friend.)
It hadn’t been an accident that Bosch set up shop practically in the outfield of a incredibly successful university baseball program, where steroid use was an open secret long before he opened the Coral Gables clinic.
To Bosch, it must have been tempting to find a way into the UM team. This was the same guy who had sunk thousands into a real-life fantasy squad called the Miami Meds. Now he played a role in shaping some of the best young baseball players in the country. And this time, he made a profit.
• • •
Frankie Ratcliff’s phone buzzed just before seven thirty P.M. on September 10, 2010. The text message was garbled but clear enough: “Got ur number frm my boy He said ur shit is good Can I get a half How Much?”
Ratcliff was best known on the University of Miami’s palm-lined campus as an up-and-coming infielder on the storied Hurricanes baseball team. Three months earlier, the speedy Key West native had finished a promising freshman season at Alex Rodriguez Park, popping six homers to go with thirteen stolen bases and a .276 batting line.
But to a subset of kids in the Coral Gables dorms, Ratcliff was much more famous as a reliable connect for good weed.
Ratcliff didn’t recognize the number vibrating his phone that Friday night, but that wasn’t so unusual—pot dealers relied on word-of-mouth references on the giant campus. Ratcliff told his new customer he could sell him a half ounce, talking up its potency as they haggled for a price: “Shit is fire got purple in it,” he bragged.
They settled on $220, and met on a bridge outside a residence hall. Just after Ratcliff handed over the goods, the new customer flashed a badge and arrested the young second baseman. A few miles south, police burst into his messy off-campus apartment with a drug-sniffing dog.
Inside a black Air Jordan shoe box in his bedroom, they found one hundred grams of weed in plastic Baggies and a scale. Then an officer yanked open the bottom drawer of Ratcliff’s dresser. Two boxes sat inside. One had 100 twenty-nine-gauge insulin needles. The other contained nineteen blue-topped bottles of Hygetropin, a synthetic human growth hormone.
The arrest of a UM infielder for HGH possession made a local TV broadcast and got a few hundred words in the Miami Herald.
But unreported in that brief media attention, and until now, was the MLB reaction to the arrest. The league already had an eye trained on the campus. There were too many minor leaguers coming out of the school failing drug tests.
Now league investigators followed a trail that started with the Ratcliff arrest. An official worked with players and police and discovered that prominent UM players had been suspended, according to an MLB source familiar with the investigation, due to PEDs, but that such punishment was kept quiet by team administrators and coach Jim Morris. The league shared their concerns, which were not disclosed in the press, with the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “It showed that the University of Miami program is dirty as sin,” says a former MLB official familiar with the league’s investigation. It’s not known whether the NCAA had any reaction. The University of Miami declined to comment for this book or to make Coach Morris available for an interview.
That MLB investigation didn’t turn up that one of the players’ off-campus sources was the fake doctor who set up shop across the street. But Bosch’s own records confirmed that. And it wasn’t until UM alumni–turned–MLB stars started testing positive for PEDs that league officials learned how right they had been about the school’s years-long PED problem. It started with a recently crowned MVP’s positive test and a drawn-out saga of punishment and evasion, ultimately leading directly back to Bosch and Alex Rodriguez.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
Infiltrating “The U”
They call it “The U.” South Floridians are weaned on University of Miami athletics. The school is most famous for its lightning-rod football program, which raised hackles in the ’80s as Jimmy Johnson’s camo-clad crew rocked to 2 Live Crew and sparked the “Convicts vs. Catholics” rivalry with Notre Dame.
But UM’s baseball teams are just as dominant. The school has worn a path to Omaha’s College World Series since the early ’70s and has won four national titles. Jim Morris has helmed the team since 1994 and wears two of those championship rings, from 1999 and 2001. One graduate in particular became among the best ballplayers of his generation—until he and several other fellow former UM Hurricanes drew national attention to the program for all the wrong reasons.
Tony Bosch’s strongest link to the team came through his decades-long relationship with an incendiary pitching coach. Lazaro Collazo—who goes by “Lazer”—was a hard-throwing pitcher who anchored the relief squad on the UM team that won the 1985 College World Series.
He later returned as an assistant coach, and then the squad’s pitching coach. Bald-headed and with the rock-solid bulk of a drill sergeant, he sports the sunglasses tan lines of a man who spends his life on a baseball field. While coaching at UM, he started a profitable side project, the Hardball Baseball League, a nomadic training league. Among his students: an adult Tony Bosch, always desperate to improve his personal game.
Though he was a well-respected pitching coach—taking future pros like Danny Graves and Jay Tessmer under his wing at UM—Collazo’s erratic behavior tended to sabotage his career with Anthony Weiner–like frequency. In 2003, the NCAA found that the hardball academy had violated multiple rules, including Collazo using it to funnel talented high schoolers to the ’Canes and paying college players for their instruction.
The scandal nearly harpooned the baseball program. After seventeen years there, Collazo resigned. The players paid homage by hanging his number-forty-two jersey in the Hurricanes dugout.
His next gig, as head coach of Miami’s Gulliver baseball team, imploded the next year in even more queasy fashion: He utilized a motivating tactic he was famous for, now with kids who were far too young. In the locker room after a loss, he whipped out his genitals in front of the high school team. He angrily wondered, according to a police report, if they “had a set of these or were equipped with a vagina.” After resigning again—though lucky to avoid sexual abuse charges—he ultimately ended up working with his cousin, an uncertified baseball agent in Miami.
Still a ubiquitous figure in South Florida youth ball, Collazo maintained relationships with UM stars, and Bosch maintained a relationship with him. He appears more than a dozen times in Bosch’s notebooks, which indicate that the steroid-peddler also treated Collazo’s baseball-playing sons for $60 a week.
Bosch had an invaluable source for new customers in Collazo, who seemed to be known by every athlete from Miami to Havana—and not just baseball players. The records reveal that Collazo referred a “PT,” meaning patient, named Antonio Gonzalez to Bosch. That’s the name of a Miami attorney and manager to several Cuban boxers, including an up-and-coming lightweight star named Yuriorkis Gamboa. Soon enough, Bosch was prepping Gamboa for HBO-televised bouts in Las Vegas with a regimen of HGH, peptides, and testosterone, according to the records. Attorney Antonio S. Gonzalez denies introducing his client to Bosch, and Gamboa says he took only legal supplements.
Collazo was the same way about building his relationships in the tight world of Miami sports. He trained young kids who had raw ability and no money, just because he saw a glimmer of talent. That’s why he had taken a prepubescent pitcher named Israel Chirino under his wing and become like a “father figure” to the kid, according to Kevin Santiago, who was Chirino’s college roommate. And then when Chiri
no went to UM and got drafted by the White Sox, maybe Collazo hooked him up with Tony Bosch. That’s how referrals work. That’s what friends are for.
In one note dated September 2011, Bosch writes, “Lazer: Re: Meeting with Gaby Sanchez.” The future major league first baseman, whose own PED problems in college have not been reported until now, was one of at least eleven UM players, coaches, and trainers whose names ultimately showed up in Bosch’s notebooks.
• • •
The 2004 and 2005 Hurricanes baseball squads were two of the most talented teams in the school’s storied hardball history. Those rosters included eight future major leaguers, including one—Ryan Braun—who went on to win a National League MVP award. Gaby Sanchez slammed homers, center fielder Jon Jay was a menace on the bases, and preternaturally talented relief pitcher Chris Perez threw ninety-mile-per-hour fastballs.
But beyond the bright lights at the stadium, some players also brought the program trouble. Five key players were suspended and expelled, including two stars who several sources say were banned for a full season for testing positive for PEDs. The teams never snagged the College World Series title for which they seemed destined.
In on-the-record interviews with the authors of this book, two players said that steroids were a known problem on the team; PED tests posed little deterrence; and that if Jim Morris and other coaches showed any concern, it was only that the issue might boil over and destroy the baseball program. Little had apparently changed five years later, when a UM player made similar claims to an MLB investigator.
In March 2004, the team had steamed to eighteen wins in twenty-two games when suddenly the team’s veteran setup man, Shawn Valdes-Fauli, was dismissed and starter Brandon Camardese was suspended. UM is a private school, under no obligation to reveal the reasoning behind player discipline. Jim Morris was tight-lipped, and with no information one newspaper columnist congratulated the coach on his apparent sternness. “He could have indulged the player misbehavior for the sake of bringing a better overall team into the playoffs,” wrote a Miami Herald scribe. “Instead, he did right. The coach taught.”
Just over a month later came another suspension, this time of one of the best pitchers in Hurricanes history. Morris suspended closer George Huguet, and his otherworldly 0.39 ERA, for “violating team policy,” fresh off setting a new team record for saves. Though Morris again wouldn’t dish, Huguet’s teammates knew he had drug issues—and not of the steroid variety. “He had ‘Ricky Williams syndrome,’” says one ex–high school player who was friends with many on the UM team that year. Weed was his vice, he claims. Huguet never played another game for the ’Canes, and within a few years his life had spiraled far off course: Once destined for Major League Baseball, instead he—along with another former-athlete friend who sold AK-47s on Facebook—was busted selling cocaine to an undercover cop in Hialeah.
Amid the turmoil, the 2004 Hurricanes managed to make it to the second round of the World Series, buoyed by pitcher Cesar Carrillo’s undefeated 12-0 record.
The summer following that season, Braun, Sanchez, and Carrillo all played for the collegiate Cape Cod League, on a team called the Brewster Whitecaps. Braun struggled all summer and ultimately left early, but what his Brewster teammates remember is the twenty-one-year-old kid bragging about his close relationship with thirty-year-old superstar Alex Rodriguez. “He said him and Alex worked out together in Miami some when Alex came into town,” says Steve Tolleson, who went on to play for two major league teams. Another teammate remembers Braun ostentatiously talking to Rodriguez on the phone during a bus trip. And a third, outfielder Ryan Patterson, says most Brewster teammates found Braun’s constant showboating about his famous friend to be annoying. “It bothered a few of the guys,” says Patterson. “It was ‘Alex has this car, and did this with me,’ and the guys were like ‘OK, can we play some baseball?’”
In 2005, the two suspensions that had the most obvious bearing on Biogenesis hit. A Christopher Columbus High graduate, pitcher Marcelo Albir was an heir to a mop fortune. His father, Carlos, owns the Miami-based ABCO Products. The elder Albir sits on bank boards and is a member of the Nicaraguan American Chamber of Commerce. Marcelo’s brother, Carlos Jr., had already seized his corner office in the massive factory, where the walls are covered in highly stylized glossies of the string-topped cleaning implement.
But later police records indicate that Marcelo was no mild-mannered mop magnate. Arrest reports following his graduation from the school describe Albir pushing a Key West waitress as he railed about how much money he had spent at the bar, and another time yelling with friends at the bartender of a Miami-area hotel as they were getting kicked out for belligerence that they wished “they had their pistol with them because they would shoot him.” (Neither arrest was ultimately prosecuted.)
Such antics were Albir’s preferred stress relief even when he was at UM, according to an associate of the team who recalled him narrowly avoiding arrest at a South Beach club after it was explained that Albir was a Hurricane. Albir was close friends with teammate Sanchez, whose nickname among friends was “Hijo”—or “Son”—because he seemed perpetually attached to his father.
Albir and Sanchez were suspended in January 2005, again for those mysterious “university policy” violations. They did not play for the entire season. But the pair was, in fact, suspended after failing tests for PEDs, multiple sources with knowledge of the team confirm.
Outfielder Kevin Santiago says that he, Albir, and Sanchez were among seven players tested on a day in October 2004. Santiago remembers that it was the first time the school subjected students to a performance enhancing–drug test that wasn’t during a College World Series. The students were instructed to give a urine sample in a bathroom adjacent to a trophy room. “I came in when Gaby was in there,” says Santiago. “He was sitting in a stall and it looked like he was trying to buy time.”
Some weeks later, the team first heard that Sanchez and Albir were suspended. Santiago says Morris held an all-team meeting. “‘Certain guys have been suspended and I don’t want to say what it was for,’” Santiago says Morris told the team. “‘But I think you know what it was for.’
“The point of the meeting was, ‘If you’re using something, stop now, because we don’t want the program to get into trouble,’” says Santiago.
Pitcher Raudel Alfonso says it was well-known that Sanchez and Albir had failed the PED test.
“Flaco” Otero was formerly a coach on the Westminster baseball squad and has run baseball camps at UM for more than twenty years. He’s known Sanchez since he was twelve and confirms that the player was suspended for testing positive for PEDs. “That caught a lot of people by surprise,” says Otero. “It was a mistake, and Gaby’s moved on.” When MLB investigated the program, the league also learned that the pair had failed a test for performance enhancers, according to two MLB officials.
And failing such a test at UM took some skill, says the Hialeah-born Alfonso. “Drug testing was a joke,” says the former pitcher. “A plain-out joke.”
He says that athletes were typically informed on a Sunday night that they would have to submit to a test early the next morning at the Hecht Center, the University of Miami’s athletic administrative hive. He recalls UM football players speaking openly about using Whizzinators, the fake penis designed to fool drug testers. Another option was checking into the hospital with any ailment, which negated the test.
Third, if athletes didn’t show up to the Hecht Center on time, they were told to go to an outside testing center. So the most common ploy was for ballplayers to give their driver’s licenses to similar-looking teammates who they knew were clean, to urinate for them at an outside center.
The UM team’s steroid reputation was so widespread it even reached players from other colleges. “Everybody knew that the guys from Miami somehow had a connection,” says Ryan Patterson, who played for Louisiana State University and then in the Blue Jays and Marlins organizations. But besides the o
ne speech following the suspensions of Albir and Sanchez, Morris and other coaches didn’t seem too concerned about getting to the bottom of the problem. “They didn’t care,” says Raudel Alfonso. “They didn’t give a shit.”
And neither did major league scouts, apparently. The Hurricanes fell flat to end the 2005 season, losing against the Huskers in a game in Lincoln, Nebraska. But a whopping nine UM players were drafted by MLB teams that year. Four of the five players who went in the first ten rounds—Braun and Carrillo, both drafted in the first round; and Gaby Sanchez and Israel Chirino—were all named in Bosch’s records, with Braun and Carrillo destined to be suspended in the Biogenesis case. Those names come as no surprise to teammates like Raudel Alfonso, who says they were all in the team clique surrounded by constant steroid rumors.
It’s exactly those sorts of draft results that drive college players to juice. Though Alfonso says he didn’t use steroids at UM, he gets why players did. The college baseball grind is “miserable,” he says. You wake up at five A.M., work out and practice all week, play ball all weekend, and spend every day so sore you can’t stand up in the shower. When you see another player able to stand up in the shower, you wonder if they’re on PEDs, and you want some to feel that same comfort. “It was never ‘I’ll take steroids to throw harder or hit a few more home runs,’” says Alfonso. “It was all about recovery.”
And they were everywhere. “It was maybe as easy as getting marijuana,” posits Kevin Santiago, who also says he never used steroids but seriously considered it.
For his own part, Alfonso says if he wanted to procure steroids, he knows whom he would have asked first: Marcelo Albir. Another associate of the team, in an interview with an author of this book, said that when he did buy steroids himself that’s exactly from whom he purchased them.
And Major League Baseball came to believe that Albir was the conduit to players like Braun for Tony Bosch as well, according to a league official with knowledge of the Biogenesis investigation.
