by Tim Elfrink
Bosch didn’t always make his rent check, but sometimes he could be prescient. One of the reasons he homed in on UM ballplayers was because they would potentially graduate to the bigs and open another avenue for Biogenesis into the major leagues. And that’s exactly how it played out.
Years later, after Biogenesis exposés revealed to some extent Bosch’s infiltration of UM player and coach ranks, the school still appeared more concerned with damage control than rooting out the problem. The university released a defensive statement pointing out that 3,380 student-athletes had been tested for PEDs since 2005 and that all had passed. But the school doesn’t test for HGH. And “the university did not specify why it chose to release results that began in 2005,” read an Associated Press article on the statement.
Of course, Sanchez and Albir had failed their tests the fall before.
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In total, at least six players from those two UM seasons—Albir, Carrillo, Sanchez, Braun, Chirino, and third baseman Danny Valencia—were named in Bosch’s records. Four were future major leaguers. Carrillo and Braun were later suspended over their ties to Bosch, while Albir was embroiled in expensive civil litigation. Sanchez, Valencia, and Chirino were either cleared of wrongdoing or never punished.
Though it’s unclear when Bosch began treating them, the records make it obvious that the links to UM that Bosch maintained, particularly with Lazer Collazo, were key to his relationship with this stable of players.
Soon after noting that he planned to meet with the ex–pitching coach about the former UM star Sanchez, Bosch’s records suggest he set up several meetings with the Marlins first baseman. By 2011, when it appears that the first meeting occurred, Sanchez was struggling desperately and would be shipped back to the minors. One of Bosch’s notations next to Sanchez’s name is simple: “$$$$.” Sanchez was never suspended over his ties to Biogenesis, and baseball sources say they were unable to conclusively determine whether he was a Bosch client.
Once a prospect on par with Braun, Cesar Carrillo underwent Tommy John surgery in 2007 and never regained his pitching form. After several years of bush league ball, he made his big league debut for the Astros in 2009, but his first start came against the Milwaukee Brewers, a powerful lineup anchored by none other than Ryan Braun. Carrillo was shellacked, giving up eight runs, including a two-run homer to his ex-teammate. Two games later, he was sent back to the minors for good. The notebooks indicate that the pitcher turned to Tony Bosch to break back into the bigs. The Biogenesis chief had at least six meetings with Carrillo and noted that he had sold him HGH and testosterone.
Danny Valencia was a six-foot-two slugger who transferred to UM in 2005. He made it to the majors in 2010 with the Twins and racked up 330 at-bats and a .267 average while bouncing between Minnesota and the minors. Valencia is listed in one of Bosch’s notebooks reviewed by the authors, under the heading “Baseball,” along with a number of other pro clients including Braun and Alex Rodriguez. Like Sanchez, MLB officials later decided they did not have ample evidence that Valencia had been a Bosch client after the clinic owner claimed he had never treated him; it’s possible he’s listed as a prospective client that Bosch simply hoped to nab.
Israel Chirino—nicknamed “Chique”—never made it to the bigs, despite Collazo’s and Bosch’s best efforts. Drafted by the White Sox in 2004, his career sputtered to a halt in high-A ball in 2009. Like Carrillo, the records suggest that Chirino turned to Bosch for an unsuccessful comeback, with his name showing up in the notebooks at least four times.
As he treated these UM players–turned-pros, Bosch continued to acquire fresh clients with new classes at UM. In 2009, D. J. Swatscheno walked into his office. Once one of the top high school pitchers in Broward County, he asked Bosch’s help in recovering from Tommy John surgery in his freshman year at UM. Swatscheno had the same drastic surgery as a sophomore, and then—after transferring to Florida International University—a remarkable third time in one college career. His name appears at least a dozen times in Bosch’s books.
Swatcheno’s teammate Yasmani Grandal was a prodigiously talented catcher from Miami Springs. By his senior season in 2010, the catcher was eating college pitching for breakfast: His year-end stats included a .401 batting average and fifteen homers. He was also one of Bosch’s most loyal clients, as revealed by the notebooks. Bosch, who used the nickname “Springs” for the catcher, later hand-delivered drugs to him in spring training before his rookie year with the San Diego Padres.
Soon after Grandal’s teammate Frankie Ratcliff was busted in 2010 with nineteen vials of HGH, Tony Bosch’s reach into UM’s current program grew even deeper. He began treating a well-respected veteran trainer: James “Jimmy” Goins, a balding, goateed man in his early thirties, had been working in UM’s gyms since 2004. He was just the type of customer who made Bosch’s eyes light up, and from his notebooks it’s clear he had big plans for Goins. In one entry, he includes Goins’s name under a scrawled heading about “Scores Sports Management,” an agency that Bosch wanted to launch with former BioKem partner Carlos Acevedo.
On Saturday, February 11, 2011, Bosch recorded a meeting with Goins as a new patient. They met more than a dozen times afterward. A handwritten page dated the next month shows what Bosch was selling him: MIC, amino acids, Winstrol, testosterone, DHEA, and IGF-1, an insulin popular with bodybuilders to stimulate muscle growth.
Though Goins later denied distributing PEDs to students and sued Miami New Times, the Miami Herald, and other media outlets—a case later dismissed by a judge—Bosch’s records suggest that he attempted to milk the trainer for his connections. On the same page of notes, he writes that he sold Goins a $75 Christmas gift certificate with a $100 bonus for referring new patients.
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In the weeks after Ratcliff’s arrest, MLB officials in South Florida did their best to unravel the doping tendrils snaking through the Hurricanes program. They didn’t yet know of Bosch’s growing influence on campus, but they had other reasons to worry that Ratcliff’s arrest was a symptom of a deeper disease.
Their biggest concern, just a year after Alex Rodriguez’s 2009 steroid admissions, was the star’s overriding influence on campus. Though Rodriguez never attended the university, the $3.9 million he donated to the school the same year as the scandal had made him royalty in the baseball park bearing his name and everywhere else on campus. Like Kosar, he sat on the UM board of trustees.
Rodriguez had free rein in the locker room and used the team’s weight rooms to train every off-season. He’d show up at Alex Rodriguez Park every morning around six A.M. to take ground balls or hit pitches from coach Mike Tosar, Collazo’s other half at the helm of the Hardball Baseball Academy.
The most promising players gravitated toward him, and baseball officials, who’d grown ever more wary of the controversial superstar, worried about where that orbit would lead future big league stars. One prodigy, a key slugger on the 2008 ’Canes named Yonder Alonso, was so tight with A-Rod he ended up moving into his mansion during the season and joining in his workouts, sources close to the program say.
MLB soon found a former UM baseball player to cooperate in the post-Ratcliff investigation. (That player, whose name the authors have agreed to keep anonymous, was interviewed for this book and confirmed the details of his testimony.) He told MLB that for several years a pitcher had supplied the squad through an uncle who was a convicted drug dealer. As the investigator looked into the former player’s claims, that man was awaiting trial after being busted by the DEA for dealing Oxycodone through the mail. Authorities allowed an MLB official to speak to him, but he wasn’t cooperative. The pitcher also gummed up.
The former player’s account of PED permeation on the UM baseball squad was potentially explosive. Just like Raudel Alfonso, who had been on the team five years earlier, this player also believed that PED testing was flawed. He told the league that he believed head coach Morris helped players dodge NCAA drug testers, though he lacked a
ny hard evidence. The method: Clean players like the ones cooperating with MLB were tested far more often than those who the coach knew were doping.
Less than two years after MLB’s investigation into UM’s steroid problem, Bosch’s exposed clientele list showed that baseball officials were right to suspect the school’s program had problems. But if the UM administration or the NCAA did learn about the league’s findings, the response was not apparent.
By then, Bosch had turned selling PEDs to baseball players into such a booming business that rival dealers were cutting into his territory. The previously mentioned UM fraternity brother says that after a few years of buying from Bosch, he and a friend saw an opportunity. After being approached by Bosch’s supplier, the frat boy confesses, they decided to cut out the fake doctor and buy peptides straight from his source. They then mislabeled the peptides as HGH and sold the stuff for sizable profit to at least one UM ballplayer and at least five baseball players from Florida International University, the state school ten miles away.
“Bosch kind of pioneered this,” says the enterprising frat boy of dealing PEDs to college kids. “He’s the one who made it possible.”
• • •
Marcelo Albir, the rich-kid bar brawler, wasn’t drafted after UM. It’s unclear what he does for a living. Since his college days, Albir has incorporated several vague companies in Florida and Texas: MAC Investors Inc., Globo Investments LLC, Ecolite Solutions Inc. He remained a regular at Bosch’s clinics, however, and is listed nearly a dozen times in portions of his notebooks.
To MLB officials, Albir’s role in Biogenesis was clear: He was the man who regularly shepherded PEDs from Bosch to budding superstar Ryan Braun.
On a UM team full of native Floridians, Braun had breezed in from California. He was the son of a tax adjuster father and a mom who worked for Anheuser-Busch as, yes, a brewer. Braun started at UM as a shortstop, a five-tool kid at the position whom UM had missed out on when Alex Rodriguez had bypassed college, but was an outfielder and third baseman by the time he was drafted.
Braun’s full scholarship was three-quarters academic and one-quarter athletic. A business major, his grades were perfect. He was Carrillo’s roommate throughout college. Also like A-Rod, Braun was fastidious to the point of OCD, keeping his locker and dorm room so just so that one Herald columnist compared him to Felix Unger, the tidy half of the Odd Couple.
He was preternaturally loose under pressure, and his numbers at UM were impressive. In his junior season, he hit nearly.400, swatted eighteen homers, and stole twenty-three bases. When the Brewers took him in the first round, Bud Selig was delighted for his former franchise.
Here was the clean-cut savior of baseball—what Alex Rodriguez was billed as a dozen years earlier—playing for the commissioner’s hometown team. In 2007, Braun had a bionic MLB rookie campaign, batting .324 with thirty-four home runs and ninety-seven RBIs.
Braun’s father, Joe, was Israeli and had lost much of his family in the Holocaust. So Braun found himself with the nickname “Hebrew Hammer.” He had never been an observant Jew or even had a bar mitzvah, and since his mother isn’t of the faith he wouldn’t be considered Jewish by any strict definition. “But I do consider myself definitely Jewish,” Braun said in 2010. “And I’m extremely proud to be a role model for young Jewish kids.”
Was this guy for real? Bosch could have told you the answer to that if he was so inclined. Braun later professed—after a twisting saga of denial—that a “nagging injury” drove him to Biogenesis in the “latter part” of the 2011 season, the Brewers superstar’s fifth MLB summer. If that’s true, it wasn’t exactly Tommy John. Braun missed a few games that season—the best of his career—with a strained calf.
It’s apparent from the notebooks that Braun and Bosch shared a connection to the player’s Miami-based attorney, Chris Lyons. One inscription next to Ryan Braun’s name reads “20-30k” and Lyons’s name. Bosch provided Braun with a testosterone cream as well as his trademark lozenges.
Bosch, who testified in Rodriguez’s later arbitration that he was acquaintances with Lyons, refers at least one other athletic client to the lawyer. Another Lyons client, tennis star Wayne Odesnik, shows up in Bosch’s notebooks twenty-six times, at one point next to the dollar amount “500.” The South African Odesnik, who lives in Florida, is sort of the A-Rod of the tennis court: He’d already been suspended for two years for attempting to bring HGH into Australia before a tournament, and when the International Tennis Federation halved the punishment to one year for his “substantial assistance,” speculation was rampant that he had snitched on other doping players. (Odesnik has denied buying banned substances from Bosch.)
Lyons himself shows up at least six times in Bosch’s notebooks, next to the phone number for his Miami law office.
Even as Braun was making illicit purchases from a man running a testosterone clinic on West Dixie Highway, he was on top of the baseball world. Purported nagging injury or not, Braun’s numbers were orgasmic in 2011. He batted .332 with 33 homers, 111 RBIs, and 33 stolen bases. The Brewers had the best regular season in the team’s forty-five-year history, dating back to before the Bud Selig ownership days.
The Brewers, recognizing that Braun was a once-in-a-franchise talent and personality, had already thrown enough money at him before the season started—$150 million—to keep him in Wisconsin until 2020.
Selig no longer owned the Brewers, of course, but he didn’t hide his affinity for the team—or their out-of-nowhere hero. He made it a point to show up periodically at the UM alum’s Milwaukee restaurant, Ryan Braun’s Graffito, for dinner. As the Brewers reveled in their first division title in twenty-five years, the commissioner was in love. Braun was a Miller Park mensch. His perfectly coiffed hair was dreamy. He was, in a word, perfect.
Starting October 1, 2011, everything got very ugly, very quickly.
• • •
In the first game of the National League Division Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Braun went three for four with a double and two runs scored, and the Brewers won. As he returned to the clubhouse, Braun was greeted by a representative of Comprehensive Drug Testing. Random piss test. Chaperoned to a side area along with two other players, Braun peed in a cup, which was then recorded and sealed by a thin man with a mustache.
Braun likely wasn’t too concerned. As he himself later said, he had been randomly tested three times that year, and also submitted a urine sample when he signed his contract extension. Most important, “Dr.” Bosch explained to all of his patients that his testosterone troches were a down-to-the-minute science in order to make sure they wouldn’t piss dirty.
The next day, Braun went three for four again with a homer, and the Brewers won. They ultimately dispatched the Diamondbacks, and Braun kept hitting. They were finally outslugged by the St. Louis Cardinals—who went on to win the championship against the Texas Rangers—and on October 16, the Brewers’ season ended two games short of the World Series.
Braun and Prince Fielder had pushed the Brewers further in the postseason than the team had gone since 1982—before either of them were born. Braun had hit .405 in the playoffs. The local newspaper dispensed bittersweet plaudits. “But the Brewers were something different, provided something unexpected,” a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist cooed. “They captured a lot of hearts. For a lot of fans, the next opening day can’t come here soon enough.”
Three days later, Braun learned that he had pissed positive.
According to later reports, the urine sample had come back with a 20:1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. That was five times the 4:1 marker that flagged a positive test. Braun later said that union reps, informed of the failed test, “told me that the test result was three times higher than any number in the history of drug testing.”
As per baseball’s Joint Drug Agreement, any test with a ratio of 4:1 or higher causes the sample to be retested, this time with a player’s representative present. This more comprehensive test is
designed to show whether the high testosterone occurred naturally or was “exogenous”—that is, artificial. Braun’s sample came back as exogenous.
At this point, Braun could have canned Anthony Bosch, accepted the fifty-game suspension for a first positive test, sacrificed his golden-boy image, sat out just under a third of the 2012 season, and lost $1.85 million in salary.
Instead, Braun appealed through the union. His tact: viciously attack the urine tester. Pending the appeal, scheduled for early 2012, the positive test was kept confidential.
He hired attorney David Cornwell, a seasoned PED-battle veteran who had shown that he knew how to redirect blame when faced with a player’s positive test. When Phillies pitcher J. C. Romero was suspended for fifty games after a failed test, Cornwell sued GNC and four other companies for selling Romero a “tainted” supplement without his knowledge. The case was settled out of court.
Also invited to the war room was Braun’s agent, Nez Balelo of Creative Artists Agency, and—according to a later lawsuit and partly confirmed through records collected by the league—a childhood friend who was working on getting a law degree online.
That friend, Ralph Sasson, has claimed that Balelo and Braun asked him to see what dirt he could find on the man who had collected the urine and what arguments he could spin that might help Braun’s appeal. Though it sounds absurd that an athlete with a $150 million playing deal might ask his amateur buddy to take a stab at this defense, Sasson produced a signed contract in court. Signed by Balelo, it references “work done” for the agent, his firm, and Braun between November 3, 2011, and February 24, 2012—the latter date being the end of Braun’s appeal process. Balelo’s attorneys have admitted in court that it is his authentic signature.
A record that found its way into the MLB offices backs up Sasson’s claim. He says he prepared a brief to help bolster Braun’s defense debunking the failed test. In the convoluted process that was Braun’s appeal, that brief passed from Balelo to Albir to Bosch, who ultimately handed it over to league officials, according to an MLB source who had seen the brief.
