by Tim Elfrink
With Sasson on board, Team Braun studied how the outfielder’s urine had been collected and shipped to the Montreal lab. They noted the time that the sample was taken, the time on the FedEx slip, and the time that it arrived at the lab. Suddenly, an argument presented itself. It was a loophole, and likely a factually meaningless one, as both the league and doping experts later argued. But it was a loophole large enough for Braun to slip through.
On November 22, 2011—despite presumably crossed fingers in the MLB offices—Braun was awarded the NL MVP award, beating out Matt Kemp and Braun’s teammate Prince Fielder. The media still didn’t know that Braun was facing an impending suspension. He took a call from the Journal Sentinel and said he had been nervously awaiting the award announcement in California. “I was on my balcony, looking at the ocean,” said Braun. “It’s a beautiful day in Malibu.”
Less than three weeks later, ESPN’s Outside the Lines broke the story, citing anonymous sources, that Braun had been suspended and was appealing. As fans reeled from the news that baseball’s newly crowned golden boy had failed a drug test, confusion reigned in the media. Reports differed on whether Braun had tested positive for through-the-roof testosterone levels or a substance that was banned but not a performance enhancer. And Braun’s camp began floating their argument, that there had been a breakdown in the “chain-of-custody issues” involving the handling of the urine sample.
“He did not take performance-enhancing drugs,” said Cornwell, “and anyone who writes that is wrong.”
Braun’s hearing began on January 20, 2012. The de facto judge deciding his fate was Shyam Das, a professional arbitrator who had refereed union battles involving steelworkers, mail handlers, NFL players, and—since 1999—Major League Baseball players. (The purportedly confidential appeal process being flaunted in the press acted as a dress rehearsal for Alex Rodriguez’s own bizarre circus two years later.)
In the MLB headquarters on Park Avenue, Cornwell and representatives of the players union laid out their evidence that the sample had been mishandled by Dino Laurenzi Jr., the Milwaukee-area resident who had collected it from Braun in the locker room.
Because he’d taken the samples after five P.M. on a Friday, he hadn’t given the urine belonging to Braun and two other players to FedEx on the same day; Laurenzi instead kept the samples in a Rubbermaid cooler in his basement. He had then mailed them to Montreal the following Monday.
Braun’s camp argued that that procedure violated the Joint Drug Agreement. The union pact details the handling of urine samples, stating that “absent unusual circumstances, the specimens should be sent by FedEx to the laboratory on the same day they are collected. If the specimen is not immediately prepared for shipment, the collector shall ensure that it is appropriately safeguarded during temporary storage. The collector must keep the chain of custody intact. The collector must store the samples in a cool and secure location.”
Despite Laurenzi apparently following those instructions, Braun’s attorneys argued that the process allowed opportunity for tampering. They had no evidence that Laurenzi had actually tampered with the sample. Team Braun pointed out that Laurenzi’s son had acted as the official chaperone during the sample collection, a fact that the superstar’s attorneys used to suggest that the procedure was a sort of urine-soaked amateur hour.
Laurenzi, who has master’s degrees in sports medicine and business administration, later argued that waiting to FedEx the sample was also standard procedure set by his employer, Comprehensive Drug Testing, which was hired by the league. “CDT has instructed collectors since I began in 2005 that they should safeguard the samples in their homes until FedEx is able to immediately ship the sample to the laboratory,” Laurenzi later said in a statement, “rather than having the samples sit for one day or more at a local FedEx office.”
In a bizarre confluence of scheduling, on the Saturday after the arguments came to a close on Park Avenue, a slicked-back, tuxedo-sporting Braun accepted his MVP award at a midtown Manhattan Hilton less than a mile away. “I’ve always believed a person’s character is revealed through the way they deal with those moments of adversity,” Braun ruminated in his acceptance speech.
On February 23, Das issued his ruling: Suspension overturned. It was the first time a player had successfully challenged a drug-related penalty in the history of the sport. Though Das’s written decision was confidential, Braun’s argument that his sample had been mishandled was clearly what had swayed him. Travis Tygart, head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called the argument the “technicality of all technicalities.” He added: “It’s just a sad day for all the clean players and those that abide by the rules within professional baseball.”
Again, Braun could have cashed in his chips and felt lucky to escape with his shirt. But instead of graciously handling the overturned suspension, he doubled down.
The next day, Braun stood at a podium in the center of a baseball diamond at the Brewers’ spring training complex in Arizona. His was a defiant, angry, and, in hindsight, ludicrous speech. Saying that he had handled the situation “with honor, with integrity, with class, with dignity, and with professionalism because that’s who I am,” Braun then proceeded to smear with innuendo the as-yet–publicly unnamed urine collector Laurenzi.
“There were a lot of things that we learned about the collector,” said Braun, “about the collection process, about the way that the entire thing worked that made us very concerned and very suspicious about what could have actually happened.”
Laying the groundwork for leaked accusations to come later, Braun said that if Laurenzi had taken the sample to FedEx immediately, it would not have been in danger of being tampered with due to a “bias . . . based on somebody’s race, religion, ethnicity, what team they play for, whatever the case may be.”
Saying, “I would bet my life that this substance never entered my body at any point,” he then declared that the day’s vindication was not just for Ryan Braun, victim. “Today is about everybody who’s been wrongly accused, and everybody who’s ever had to stand up for what is actually right.”
A subterranean smear campaign then spun into action. First, despite arbitration confidentiality rules, an e-mail was sent out from a member of Braun’s camp using a transparent pseudonym. “I have reason to know that the circumstances surrounding his testing are very suspicious. You might be interested to know that the person who administered the test, Dino Laurenzi [Jr.], a collection agent for Comprehensive Drug Testing, is an athletic trainer as well as the director of rehabilitation at United Hospital Systems in Kenosha, WI,” read the e-mail, which Yahoo! sportswriter Jeff Passan published in its entirety. “This means that Laurenzi would have unfettered access to lab equipment and, if he was so inclined, would provide him the necessary resources and opportunity to tamper with the test.”
As Laurenzi’s name was leaked to other outlets including the New York Times and ESPN, the quiet fifty-one-year-old man received the Yuri Sucart treatment, being thrust from anonymity into the eye of a media storm. He was forced to hire an attorney and issued a statement declaring in part: “I have worked hard my entire life, have performed my job duties with integrity and professionalism, and have done so with respect to this matter and all other collections in which I have participated.”
Braun wasn’t done. As ESPN and Yahoo! later reported, he called stars around the league—namely Troy Tulowitzki, Joey Votto, and Matt Kemp—as they reported to spring training, and told them that Laurenzi had gone after him because the urine collector was an anti-Semite and a Cubs fan. He also made the same claims to his teammates.
In an interview for this book, Braun’s childhood friend Sasson took reluctant credit for those claims. He said that, upon being given Laurenzi’s name by Braun soon after the Brewers star learned of the failed test, he found two pieces of information on the urine collector’s Facebook page. One: Yes, Laurenzi was a Cubs fan, says Sasson. Two: He was a member of a Seventh-Day Adventist congregation.
Sa
sson says he told Braun that there had been some history of anti-Semitism in that faith. “I told him to take it with a grain of salt,” says Sasson. “But he ran with it.”
As Braun not only prepared to play again in 2012 but even reveled in having made a mockery of the drug-testing procedure, baseball’s brass was livid. Rob Manfred, then the league’s vice president of labor relations, noted that MLB “vehemently disagrees” with Das’s decision. The league threatened to appeal to a federal judge but didn’t follow through.
The decision had opened up “The Braun Defense.” A year earlier, Rockies catcher Eliezer Alfonzo had been suspended for a hundred games after his second failed drug test. Now Alfonso appealed and argued that his sample procedure had the same chain-of-custody issues as the Brewers star’s. His suspension was also overturned.
Being an arbitrator is a tightrope position. Both sides can fire you for any reason. And a couple of days after Alfonso successfully appealed his own decision, Selig canned Das despite thirteen years of hearing MLB cases.
Selig knew exactly what that 20:1 testosterone to epitestosterone ratio meant: Braun was guilty of doping, whatever the arbitrator said.
He didn’t know where Braun was scoring the PEDs. But he’d spent years assembling a team of ex-cops for just this kind of problem. The Braun debacle taught league officials that they couldn’t rely on testing to snare cheats. If players were going to fight dirty, they’d have to react in kind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
MLB’s CIA: Enter the Spies
The dilapidated barn rested in the shadows of the rugged mountains wrinkling the rural countryside west of Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city. An abandoned farm spread out below the wooden structure with acres of empty, rolling space, making any approach visible for miles.
It was the perfect hideout.
Inside, Wilson Ramos lay silent on a rickety bed, trying to ignore the four men standing guard with assault rifles. A few weeks earlier, the muscular, 220-pound catcher had finished a remarkable first year for the Washington Nationals, swatting fifteen homers to go with a .267 average and solid defense. Baseball America had named the twenty-four-year-old to its 2011 All-Rookie Team, noting that “few rookie catchers this century” outhit him. When the Nats missed the playoffs, Ramos had flown back to Valencia, his hometown, to play winter ball for the nearby Tigres de Aragua. He’d landed in an expertly orchestrated trap.
At the center of the web was a twenty-six-year-old spider named Alexander Moreno Bolanos, a guerrilla who’d spent four years training with Colombia’s FARC rebels before deserting the revolutionary struggle for more lucrative work. Bolanos had found a construction gig near Valencia as a cover while he assembled more than a dozen cohorts. They started scouting the countryside until they found the farm: remote, protected by peaks that rose to nearly five thousand feet, owned by an elderly couple willing to sell without asking too many questions. In Montalbán, the tiny pueblo below, they bought a small house to use as a headquarters. Bolanos found a cousin of Wilson Ramos’s willing to feed him intel on the young catcher’s daily movements.
Just after sundown on November 9, 2011, Bolanos struck. Wilson Ramos had wandered into the front yard of his family’s home to enjoy the cooler evening air while his mother cooked arepas in the kitchen. Suddenly, an SUV squealed to a halt and two armed men burst out and sprinted into the yard. One grabbed Ramos, put a gun to his temple, and forced him into the car. Before he knew what was happening, Ramos was blinded by a hood, and the car was speeding away.
It was a nearly flawless kidnapping. But Bolanos hadn’t counted on Major League Baseball’s secret weapon: Joel Rengifo.
The grizzled fifty-five-year-old, nicknamed “La Leyenda”—“The Legend”—by his antidrug colleagues in Caracas, had dealt with thornier plots than this snatch-and-grab. Six years earlier, he’d carried out one of the ballsiest rescues in his nation’s history, rescuing pitcher Ugueth Urbina’s mom from kidnappers with moves straight out of the Chuck Norris handbook—killing one in a gunfight and another by shooting a propane tank to trigger a massive explosion.
Rengifo returned Urbina’s mother unscathed, and MLB was so impressed by the gutsy operation they hired him as a part-time contractor to help Venezuelan players with security. Two years later, a few months after the Mitchell Report, he was hired as the first full-time overseas investigator for MLB’s new Department of Investigations.
But now, as he rushed from Caracas to Valencia, Rengifo knew this situation was even more serious than the Urbina case. For the first time, an active major leaguer had been kidnapped.
Whoever took the catcher was a pro, Rengifo knew. After meeting Ramos’s distraught parents and assuring them he’d return their son alive, the veteran cop dove into the case. He and his colleagues soon realized the crooks had made a vital error in a separate case.
A few months earlier, Bolanos’s gang had snatched a Portuguese man who worked at a local bakery and used cell phones to arrange for the ransom delivery. Police learned through a source that Bolanos hadn’t bothered to change his numbers since.
As they worked to triangulate the cell’s signal, police found the kidnappers’ SUV in the small mountain town of Bejuma. That helped narrow the search. Soon, they homed in on the headquarters in tiny Montalbán. Officers managed to nab one member of the gang from the headquarters and forced him to lead them to the remote barn.
At ten A.M. on Friday, November 11, a team of commandos began making their way over the rugged hills toward the hideout. The terrain was so mountainous the trek took nearly twelve hours, but at nine fifty-eight P.M., the rescuers struck. A fierce gunfight broke out with the kidnappers. Ramos cowered under a bed as bullets popped and wood splintered all around him until—miraculously—he heard police bursting in and calling his name.
The dramatic rescue was without a doubt the biggest public success in the short history of MLB’s Department of Investigations.
But it was also light-years from the type of job that Senator George Mitchell had envisioned the unit doing when he’d made its foundation the first recommendation in his seminal 409-page report.
“If you had asked me when [the DOI] was formed, in terms of priorities, if we were concerned about kidnappings, it wouldn’t have been high,” the department’s chief, Dan Mullin, admitted in the wake of the Ramos operation. “It certainly is now.”
The story of MLB’s Department of Investigations is unique in professional sports. A quasi–police force staffed by ex-cops and federal agents, the unit has millions of dollars at its disposal to carry out open-ended missions—essentially, protecting baseball’s best interests—however it sees fit. But finding the definition of “best interests” wasn’t easy. Rather than going hard after drug cheats, as Senator Mitchell imagined, it spent years floundering for a mission. Should its detectives go after steroid dealers or gamblers? Should they spearhead international kidnapping rescues or go after prospects lying about their age?
The powerful crew of ex-cops given carte blanche to do Bud Selig’s confidential work has also found itself accused of abuses, from interrogating Caribbean prospects to sleeping with a witness. An entire documentary—complete with hidden cameras—was made about one Dominican star’s claims that a DOI agent conspired to ruin his draft stock.
In the years before Tony Bosch and Alex Rodriguez made Dan Mullin and his team tabloid fodder in New York, the DOI quietly became the CIA of the sports world: a mysterious, powerful group whose best successes couldn’t be broadcast to the public and whose worst excesses threatened to stain the institution they were created to protect.
For all the intrigue, the group traces its history to one of the simplest recommendations made by Mitchell in his December 2011 report. The way the ex-senator saw it, the DOI would have a clear-cut mission. “The commissioner should create a Department of Investigations,” the senator wrote, “led by a senior executive who reports directly to the commissioner.” Its purpose was to respond “vi
gorously to all serious allegations of performance-enhancing substance violations.”
Throughout the Steroid Era, the closest that baseball had to an internal investigative wing was its security department. Staffed by former police officers, the department had been headed since 1986 by Kevin Hallinan, an ex–NYPD cop trained in counterterrorism.
But Hallinan had made it clear that chasing down steroid rumors was not in his job description, as evidenced by how he reportedly blew off Greg Stejskal’s information about Jose Canseco juicing with the help of Curtis Wenzlaff.
The problem wasn’t necessarily that Hallinan didn’t care about PEDs. As Mitchell realized, his job was to keep ballplayers safe. It didn’t make sense to ask the same people protecting players to turn around and mount serious investigations into whether they were cheating. It was like asking a bodyguard to narc on his clients.
If baseball wanted to get serious about steroids, Mitchell believed, it needed to separate its investigations from its security. Then, when the next BALCO erupted, baseball’s I-team could aggressively respond instead of watching from the sidelines and hoping local cops or federal agents got the drug dealers.
Selig jumped at the idea. “Senator Mitchell made it very clear to us that we needed an investigative capacity to supplement even the best, even the gold standard of testing programs,” Rob Manfred later testified at Alex Rodriguez’s arbitration. “We’ve worked very hard in recent years to develop that capacity.”
The plan also offered another way to keep baseball’s steroid problem in-house. The last thing the commissioner or the union wanted was Congress to set up an independent drug-testing operation to go after the sport’s cheaters. On January 11, 2008, just a month after the Mitchell Report landed, Selig created the Department of Investigations. Baseball doesn’t release its internal budgets, but according to one estimate, the group was given an annual budget of $7 million. Within a few years, it employed six investigators, four analysts, three administrators, and an army of part-timers in the Caribbean and Latin America.
