by Tim Elfrink
Selig knew he needed a powerful personality to lead his new baseball cops. He turned to a brash former NYPD deputy chief named Dan Mullin. A large man with wavy brown hair brushed straight back from a fleshy Irish face, Mullin had spent twenty-three years in in the NYPD, rising from a beat cop to deputy chief of America’s largest force. He’d done so with brains, cockiness, and a willingness to get creative to get the bad guys.
Mullin worked his way off the beat and into the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where, in the early ’90s, he spent three years running that department’s detective squad. He distinguished himself with unusual broadsides against the mob, such as planting an undercover cop as an executive in charge of a Manhattan building in order to snare wiseguys running a garbage-hauling racket.
Mullin hand-groomed an officer who he knew had a small-business background to go undercover. “A lot of cops have certain mannerisms and speech patterns, and you know right away that they’re cops,” Mullin later said. “[He] doesn’t act like a cop, doesn’t speak like a cop.”
The crazy plan was a raging success. The undercover cop spent two and a half years in charge of the building, secretly collecting evidence that later put two garbage-hauling magnates in prison. Just to top it off, he proved so adept at the job that after the trial, he quit the force and was hired on for real as a company vice president in charge of the property.
After leaving the DA’s office, Mullin spent several years running precincts around New York. In the late ’90s, he was the top cop for the 103rd Precinct, which covered the then-hard-boiled Queens neighborhood of Jamaica. Allegations of rampant brutality by his cops became routine enough that around one hundred residents and leaders called a meeting in June 1999 to confront Mullin and his boss.
Like so many in the NYPD, his defining moment on the force came on September 11, 2001, when he was among the first responders who rushed to the World Trade Center after the first plane hit. Mullin helped shepherd the panicking crowds rushing out of the main concourse to safety. When the South Tower suddenly collapsed just before ten A.M., he was near the corner of Vesey and Church Streets. As a wall of debris and dust rocketed down the block, he rolled under a truck with Ruth Fremson, a New York Times photographer.
“I held on to the arm of the man under there with me, not realizing he was a policeman,” Fremson later recounted. Mullin later earned a medal for his bravery during the attack.
A year and a half later, he left the force, hired by Selig as senior director of security, the number-two man in the department. After the Mitchell Report, he quickly saw the logic behind creating the DOI. “The security department had some responsibility protecting players at large events and [Mitchell] thought there might have been conflict between trying to protect players, their physical security, and then investigating them,” Mullin later said in a court deposition.
For Mullin’s deputy, Selig chose George Hanna, an FBI veteran who had once killed a Brooklyn mobster in a bar shootout. In Mullin and Hanna, Selig’s new DOI started with two tough-as-nails cops at the top who’d spent decades going after wiseguys and drug runners. To fill out their squad, the men looked for ex-cops who could speak Spanish and understood baseball—a perfect job description for the legions of officers who worked part-time doing security at ballparks around the country.
That’s where they found Eduardo Dominguez Jr., a Boston cop who’d spent decades on the drug enforcement beat, and Victor Burgos, a two-decade NYPD vet and Spanish speaker who’d earned distinction leading drug busts on a DEA task force.
Mullin wanted his investigators to hit the ground running. Mitchell had envisioned the team as kind of a “strike force,” set up to aggressively respond to steroid rumors, and Selig took the senator’s recommendations about how to stir up actionable intel. The commissioner sent an edict to every team spelling out any employee’s duty: to immediately contact the DOI whenever they caught wind of drug abuse. An anonymous hotline was also set up for players to narc on teammates.
But Dominguez and Burgos’s first big steroid tip didn’t come from an anonymous whistle-blower. Far from it. Two months after the formation of the DOI, Jose Canseco published his second book, Vindicated, to brag about how the Mitchell Report had verified exactly what he’d warned in his previous bestseller, Juiced. Mullin sent his new hires to a Canseco book signing in midtown Manhattan to eat crow and ask if the former Bash Brother would consider coming in for an official sit-down with investigators.
“We asked them, ‘Why now? Why not two years ago? Why so long?’” Canseco’s attorney, Robert Saunooke, told a reporter. “They said, ‘Those are valid questions.’”
Canseco agreed to talk to the investigators, but more important, the episode sent a loud message. Two years earlier, Canseco had been vilified by baseball’s establishment. Tony LaRussa spoke for many MLB insiders’ feelings on Juiced when he called Canseco “envious and jealous” and speculated that “he’s hurting for money and he needs to make a score.”
Now, Selig’s handpicked cops were publicly admitting they’d been wrong to ignore the slugger’s warnings. This time around, they’d listen to anyone.
Mitchell had wanted DOI to become a quick-response team to budding steroid scandals. But Mullin’s team soon realized that there were numerous threats to the game beyond PEDs that investigators could tackle. But in doing so, DOI’s resources and attention were forever being stretched thin in new directions.
Take gambling. Ever since the 1919 Black Sox scandal, game fixing was viewed as baseball’s biggest existential threat, a fear reinforced by Pete Rose’s lifetime ban for betting on his own teams. Mullin could hardly direct a detail ordered to protect the sport and ignore the threat of Vegas. “We’re always worried about the integrity of the game as it relates to the dangers of gambling,” Mullin said in a deposition in 2012. “So within our department, we monitor gambling trends.”
In that deposition, Mullin revealed that DOI analysts tracked betting blogs and Twitter feeds, and every week cranked out an internal report on arrests linked to baseball betting. They also worked federal sources to get in on cases, like a mob-run bookie ring in New York whose customers, according to a wiretap, included seven major league scouts. In 2010, federal agents clued them in to the case of Charlie Samuels, a fifty-five-year-old clubhouse manager for the New York Mets who was betting more than $30,000 a month in illegal rings. Mullin’s team discovered he’d been stealing millions in team memorabilia.
Soon, the DOI was attacking even thornier problems. For decades, teams had lost millions on Latin prospects fudging their ages by wasting huge signing bonuses on players they thought were precocious teenage phenoms who turned out to be middling twenty-year-olds. In one notable 2006 case, the Washington Nationals lavished a $1.4 million signing bonus on a sixteen-year-old Dominican shortstop named Esmailyn Gonzalez, only to learn when he made it to the States that he was actually twenty and named Carlos Alvarez.
Before the Mitchell Report, teams were responsible for doing their own ID checks on prospects. If they screwed up like the Nats, they were probably out of luck.
In July 2009, though, Selig changed everything by giving Mullin’s team full responsibility for age and ID investigations—a massive, complex task that came to occupy the bulk of the DOI’s work, necessitating dozens of contractors around Latin America.
One of their first cases involved a sixteen-year-old, million-dollar-bonus baby from the Padres named Alvaro Aristy, who investigators soon proved was actually two years older and named Jorge Leandro Guzman. But unlike a real police force, baseball’s Department of Investigations was operating without any real checks or balances. And their considerable power and influence sometimes morphed into abuse. Miguel Angel Sano certainly felt he’d been scorched by the unit. In 2009, teams were preparing a bidding war over the hard-hitting, six-foot-three shortstop with power from San Pedro de Macorís. Experts thought the sixteen-year-old kid from the dirt-poor coastal market town could nab at least a $5 million signing
bonus.
Instead, a newly hired NYPD veteran named Nelson Tejada landed in the DR to investigate persistent rumors that Sano was too good to be true: too tall, too fast, too developed to be sixteen. Sano, Mullin decided, would be the guinea pig for his new plan to DNA test suspicious recruits. Tejada also started interviewing relatives and neighbors and ordered a full bone scan on the kid.
At the time, Sano was being pursued heavily by a Pittsburgh Pirates scout named Rene Gayo, whom Sano claims offered him a relatively paltry $2 million bonus but promised to get him “amnesty” from Tejada’s investigation.
Tejada, meanwhile, personally advised Sano to take Gayo’s offer and end the case, the prospect later claimed in a documentary called Ballplayer: Pelotero.
“I don’t understand why [Tejada] would tell me to sign with the Pirates and they would stop the investigation,” Sano later said. “That’s why I believe money was exchanged under the table.” (MLB denied any wrongdoing in the case. Sano ended up signing with the Twins for $3.15 million, well below his initial estimates. Tejada’s tests eventually confirmed that Sano was, in fact, sixteen years old.)
The DOI has faced other accusations back in the States. In 2011, in an incident that has not been reported until now, MLB learned of accusations that Mullin had slept with a DEA employee in California and then used that relationship to get confidential pharmaceutical information about an ongoing steroid case. The commissioner’s office was troubled enough that it hired a top New York law firm to investigate; it’s not clear what they found (and the DEA agent’s attorney declined to discuss the situation), but Mullin was never publicly punished and maintains that he has no knowledge of such an investigation. “It’s categorically not true,” Mullin says of the accusations. But similar claims arose again in South Florida on an even higher-profile case.
Controversies aside, by 2012 MLB had another serious problem on its hands: The Department of Investigations wasn’t doing much steroid busting. Senator Mitchell hadn’t asked Selig to set up a DOI to organize mountaintop raids in Venezuela, check DNA samples in the Dominican Republic, and monitor basement Jersey betting rings. They were supposed to be the commissioner’s proactive response to PEDs.
Mullin says all those missions weren’t necessarily distracting from their anti-steroid mandate. “It’s the opposite, because a lot of those other investigations lead to intel about drugs,” Mullin says. Many of the men perpetrating ID fraud in the Dominican Republic also sold steroids to prospects, for instance. “It’s all related,” he says.
But the problem was that for nonanalytic steroid investigations—like any police probe that wasn’t based on hard evidence—Selig’s cops needed whistle-blowers and solid tips. And that piece of the puzzle was not falling into place.
In the 2012 deposition—one of the rare instances in which the baseball executive divulged information about his department—Mullin admitted that almost no one was using the anonymous tip line they’d set up for players and coaches to report steroid abuse.
In three years, only twenty tips came in, he said, and not all were about PEDs.
The league’s drug-testing program, meanwhile, had started strong but had recently showed alarming signs that cheaters were catching up to the PED police. Random testing had begun in 2004 with dopers kept anonymous and sent to counseling. Public punishments started the next year, with the first big leaguer—Tampa Bay’s Alex Sanchez—suspended in April 2005. In the three seasons before the Mitchell Report, twenty-three major league players were caught by the tests, including some big names such as Rafael Palmeiro and pitcher Ryan Franklin.
The policy had grown more teeth in 2006, when federal agents raided the home of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley and alleged he’d distributed HGH. Although Grimsley hadn’t failed a test, MLB still worked out a deal with the union to suspend him for fifty games, marking the first “nonanalytic” suspension and setting an important precedent that made the DOI’s job possible.
After Mitchell’s report landed in 2007, the total number of suspensions continued to grow, with sixty-nine suspended in 2008, eighty-three in 2009, eighty-six in 2010, and seventy-three in 2011. But the vast majority were handed down to minor leaguers. Big leaguers were suddenly passing all their tests, with just eleven of those 311 suspensions hitting players on major league rosters. And those eleven “big league” suspensions included only five guys who’d actually been playing at the top level at the time they were caught: Manny Ramirez and J. C. Romero in 2009, Ronny Paulino and Edinson Volquez in 2010, and Mark Rogers in 2011.
Just a decade earlier, Ken Caminiti had estimated half of all big leaguers were doping. Yankees star pitcher David Wells put the number at 25 to 40 percent. Even baseball’s own well-publicized, easy-to-avoid testing in 2003 had nabbed almost 10 percent of players at the time. Yet since the Mitchell Report, baseball’s testers had caught just five true big leaguers in four seasons of testing.
The numbers suggested that cheaters were getting better at beating the tests; that’s exactly why Mitchell had recommended a team of investigators to supplement the imperfect science. Yet the DOI was spending huge chunks of time on ID fraud investigations in the Dominican Republic, largely because of pressure from owners—who, after all, stood to lose millions from those cases. Owners still had little to gain besides their fans’ ill will from dopers getting busted, and PED probes were few and far between.
That started to change in 2009, after Manny Ramirez was the first superstar to get nabbed for drug use post Mitchell. That Miami case marked the beginnings of DOI finding its true purpose and signaled a surge in steroid cases for the baseball investigators—though it was four years before another South Florida case gave them their first real victory.
The DOI had sprung into action after Ramirez’s failed screening for testosterone, homing in on Dr. Pedro Bosch and his son Tony. That intel gave Mullin’s team one of its first meaty PED leads to follow. But with both Bosches and Ramirez uncooperative, the investigation—led by Ed Dominguez and a small team—sputtered out.
And in the unit’s next big case, when the Canadian guru Anthony Galea was caught trying to smuggle HGH across the border, the DOI hit legal barriers. The doctor, facing potential criminal charges, wouldn’t cooperate with the DOI, and law enforcement proved equally unhelpful. The feds declined to help MLB out, keeping sealed transcripts of interviews with key players such as Alex Rodriguez.
It was frustrating. The I-team finally had steroid leads to chase down, but so far they weren’t going anywhere.
When Ryan Braun wriggled out of his positive drug test in 2011, it was an extra slap in the face to the guys trying to bring law and order to the chemically soaked sport.
As baseball headed into the 2012 season, the DOI’s antidrug mission was in danger of becoming ineffectual. If the DOI was going to raise its batting average, the detectives needed another scandal—a fat, batting-practice pitch of a case—to swing at.
• • •
Melky Cabrera scuffed his neon orange cleats into the Kauffman Stadium dirt and glared out at the pitcher. There was one out in the top of the first inning of the 2012 All-Star Game, and Joe Buck had trouble keeping an incredulous tone out of his voice as he told his national TV audience about Cabrera’s season to date.
“This is a guy who’s number one in the major leagues,” Buck intoned, “with a hit total of one nineteen.”
Buck’s confusion was understandable. The baby-faced Dominican had once been a top Yankees prospect, but he never hit for power in pinstripes. New York gave up on him after he’d notched middling totals of .249 and .274 as a starter, shipping him to Atlanta in 2010. Cabrera was even worse for the Braves. In 147 games at Turner Field, he barely cracked .250 while swatting just four home runs. In the postseason against San Francisco, he went 0-for-8. Local sportswriters thought he looked fat and disinterested. When the Braves cut him loose, one blogger speculated, “He’ll be drowning his sorrows in milkshakes.”
In 2011, Cabrer
a found himself in that Midwestern graveyard where so many ex-prospects have watched their final hopes sputter out: the then-perpetually down-and-out Kansas City Royals. But Cabrera—after spending two off-seasons working out with Alex Rodriguez in Miami—suddenly turned his career around. He didn’t just relocate his contact swing inside Kauffman, he somehow found his power switch and flipped it hard. By the end of the year, he’d recorded a .305 average, smacked twenty home runs, and logged an incredible 201 hits, putting him on a shortlist with George Brett and a handful of others among Royals to break that barrier.
Suddenly, contenders were looking at the twenty-seven-year-old and wondering: Was 2011 a crazy fluke, or was Melky Cabrera the real deal? The San Francisco Giants had rolled the dice in the off-season, shipping two pitchers to KC for the resurgent outfielder. Cabrera immediately silenced his critics. In May, he’d broken Willie Mays’s team record for hits in the month. In June and July, he’d stung balls all over the park at a record clip—even flashing his newfound power, with eight homers to start the year. The local press gleefully threw nicknames at the new star of McCovey Cove: Here comes the “Melk Man”! Fear the “Melky Way”!
And now here he was, back in Kauffman Stadium for the Midsummer Classic, this time wearing the orange-and-black of the contending Giants. Joe Buck could barely finish counting off Cabrera’s extraordinary stat line when he lashed the first pitch he saw from American League starter Justin Verlander—a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour heater—into left center field for a single. “Let’s call that one twenty on the year,” Buck said. “The guy with electric shoes is on.”
