by Tim Elfrink
Now Bosch’s wild lifestyle was unraveling. Except for the thousands coming in from big leaguers, he was operating in the red. There was no way around it.
• • •
Bosch had been trying to leverage his off-the-books cash into that chain of clinics he’d always envisioned stretching across South Florida and into the Caribbean. If Tony Bosch believed, at heart, in one thing, it was that he was destined for greatness. No one was more conned by the Bosch sales pitch than Bosch himself.
His notebooks are littered with half-baked ideas of how to transform his moderate success as a local anti-aging snake oil salesman into international fame and fortune. In one note, he imagines writing books and magazines and producing merchandise for the “Hormone Response Diet,” or “Hormone Response Nutrition.”
Elsewhere, he plots a diet book with an all-too-appropriate name: Lose Like Hell.
Bosch’s own credentials are constantly inflated in his writings: “Tony Bosch, Molecular Biochemist, Anti-Aging Director,” he writes on one page. On another: “Dr. Tony Bosch, Age Management Consultant.” Even better: “Tony Bosch, Physician Scientist, Dr./CEO/President,” with specialties in “holistic nutrition, biochemical methodologies . . . sports nutrition, amino acid deficiencies, metabolic syndrome, hormone modulation.”
The most telling passage on how Bosch saw himself, though, is the full page he devotes to writing out the famous text from Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” campaign: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . the ones who see things differently—they’re not fond of rules—you can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things . . . they push the human race forward and while some may see them as the crazy ones . . . we see them as genius because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
It’s a clichéd, overcited quote from a computer corporation, but it’s also a perfect distillation of Tony Bosch’s mind-set.
A handwritten note in Tony Bosch’s notebooks
Bosch had always put himself in the same category as his cousin Orlando. He’d never countenance what Orlando had done, of course—firing rockets at cargo ships and allegedly blowing up a commercial airliner—but Orlando had also grasped the same thing as Tony: Living outside conventional lines was thrilling, and it was the only way to really make an impact in this world. Tony Bosch knew in his heart that he was not ordinary. (Of course, the scribbled lines are telling in another way, too; Tony felt the passion in them, but he also misattributes the words to Jack Kerouac, apparently never bothering to Google the quote.)
Bosch didn’t just see himself as an anti-aging guru; he imagined himself as an iconoclast. What he was doing may have been illegal, but it was also vital, he thought. On the next page, he put his own self-adulating twist on the Apple quote and referred to himself by his initials: “Mainstream is not in their vocabulary. You honor them once a year at Halloween . . . and dress like them, act like them, emulate them. Sometimes they come from afar, and sometimes as close as Queens. Here is to T. B. . . . It’s not only a name, it’s an attitude, it’s a lifestyle.”
Bosch obsessed over his credentials, plotting out how to turn his unrecognized Belize-based degree into a US medical credential, perhaps with a “BS in education” in Florida, he wrote, or with an online degree. And he fretted over the legality of his clinics, dreaming of how to “create a foolproof legal structure” with a “board of directors.”
He also scribbled lyrics and inspirational quotes into the margins, and some seem to offer a window into his increasingly stressed worldview. On one page, he penned a Lil Wayne lyric: “Life is a movie I’ve seen too many times.” Another reminds him that “time heals almost everything,” and, more important: “Smile, you don’t own all the problems in the world.”
But he had problems enough. Friends and business partners were noticing the stress.
Jorge Jaen had known Tony Bosch socially for years, running into him at the Ritz or the Ibis Club on Key Biscayne. He’d thought of Bosch as a charming character, a social magnet who always seemed to be at the right parties, always with a different hot chick on his arm.
Jaen had been working with partners to open a cosmetic surgery center, and he knew Bosch was in the medical game, so they went out to lunch one day in early 2011.
“Tony told me he’d be able to bring in all these famous people, these actresses and people from Univision,” Jaen says. He and his partners let Bosch in with a small percentage to do marketing for the clinic.
But by the end of the year, it was obvious Bosch was headed off a cliff. “He would show up with his shirt all wrinkled, smelling like alcohol,” Jaen recalls. “We had a young lady who wanted to see him about a deal and comes back out and tells me, ‘This guy is drunk. His breath smells like vodka.’”
At another meeting where Bosch was supposed to give a presentation, he showed up late and disheveled. “The guy was a disaster. He came in with this file folder with papers sticking out [in] every direction like a mad scientist. We were like, ‘What is with this man?’”
Jaen fired Bosch soon afterward.
Roger De Armas also knew his old friend was in trouble. Close since kindergarten, they were more brothers than friends. But ever since Tony Bosch had left for Belize, he’d been a changed man. The few times Roger reached out, he heard nothing back.
Years went by without seeing Bosch, who no longer showed up to neighborhood barbecues or family gatherings. When Roger did finally catch a glimpse of Tony, his old friend was lying on the sand in South Beach with a beautiful, much younger woman on his arm. De Armas quietly walked away. A few months later, he saw him at a sushi place in Coral Gables, with another gorgeous woman.
De Armas wondered what had happened to the family man he once knew. “I still have a brotherly love for him,” De Armas says. “But part of me just wanted to strangle him.”
Despite the string of girlfriends, Tony’s personal life wasn’t faring much better than his business ventures. He’d rebounded quickly in Miami after his 2007 divorce from Aliette, bouncing around the Key Biscayne social scene and eventually dating a teacher named Claudia, a deeply tanned beauty with long, bleached-blond hair who loved the Miami Heat and Coral Gables wine bars.
But that relationship fell apart for good by 2010, when Tony discovered she’d been seeing a former student and karate instructor. “I am not mad or angry,” Tony wrote in a masterfully passive-aggressive breakup letter. “I am, however, a little in shock, hurt and my ego is a little bruised.” But he wished her well, adding that “God willing, I can find true love like you did.”
He asked to stay friends. That didn’t work out, either.
In the summer of 2010, Aliette moved back to South Florida from Texas with Tony’s two kids, and—though the two didn’t get back together—he agreed to let them stay with him in Key Biscayne until they got settled.
On June 7, Aliette called the local cops. Claudia, she said, had been repeatedly harassing their twelve-year-old daughter with “derogatory” texts and phone calls, and she worried for her daughter’s safety. The night before, someone—she suspected Claudia—had even bashed in the windshield of her 2008 Cadillac, parked at the nearby Ritz Hotel. (Tony’s ex-girlfriend was never charged in either incident.)
Like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas, Tony was suffering a rightfully paranoid meltdown. The next month, he was leaving his Key Biscayne office when he heard an engine roar behind him. Heart racing, he turned around to see a guy who’d gotten into a fight with him over a girl at a bar. Bosch sprinted back to his office. His phone started ringing. When he picked up, the man hollered, “I’m strapped, and I’m going to kill you.” Bosch locked the door and called the cops.
Worse, bringing Aliette back to Miami didn’t help Tony’s terrible child support record. The lawsuits she’d started in Texas moved to a Miami court
in 2009, where she claimed he owed her $23,940 for their two kids’ upbringing. A judge in April 2010 ordered him to pay $1,250 every other month. He ignored the obligation.
Two weeks before Melky’s suspension became official—and Tony’s business faced the biggest crisis since he’d expanded into the MLB PED arena—Aliette had dragged him back to the civil courthouse downtown. Now he owed her $41,940. On June 25, a judge didn’t cut him nearly so much slack—this time, he’d have to pay her $1,200 every single week. If he didn’t, a state prosecutor would get involved.
On August 15, Major League Baseball banned Melky Cabrera for fifty games. Turns out Nunez and Melky weren’t British spy material after all: Within four days of the announcement of the suspension, the New York Daily News had publicly unwound the website plot.
Two days after that, MLB executives for all thirty teams received a memo from then–league executive vice president Rob Manfred. “Please be advised that commissioner Selig has directed that all major league clubs are prohibited from granting Juan Carlos Nunez access to their clubhouses or other nonpublic areas,” the memo read. “Nunez is affiliated with ACES Inc. sports agency. Nunez is currently under investigation for misconduct related to our recent matter under the joint drug program.
“In addition, Nunez is not certified as a player agent by the Major League Baseball Players Association,” it continued. “Clubs should not conduct contract negotiations with Nunez or otherwise deal with him regarding players on the 40-man roster.”
The Levinsons suspended Nunez from employment on August 20, 2012, according to Jay Reisinger, an attorney representing ACES. (Reisinger said he did not know whether the suspension was with pay.) Nunez was fired “shortly thereafter,” says the attorney. He says that Juan Carlos’s brother Tirzon was also fired. “I believe it was after Juan Carlos,” says Reisinger, though he does not provide the termination date of either of the Nunezes.
Nunez had been exiled. Bosch’s best avenue to big league clients was persona non grata.
• • •
Former steroid dealer Kirk Radomski spent his days on federal probation hectically driving around his hometown Long Island and New York City delivering supplements—legal ones—to bodybuilding stores. For years, he had been saying that investigating only juicing players—and not their union-certified representatives—was a sure way to make sure steroids never go away. “You’re not killing the snakehead!” Radomski yells in an interview with one of this book’s authors. “It’s the fucking agents!”
In the wake of the Melky Cabrera debacle, Radomski started getting phone calls from league investigators. Nunez’s role in the website deceit had turned the league’s attention toward ACES.
Though Radomski distrusted the league, he was swayed when MLB investigator Tom Reilly—who happened to know the former dealer from their mutual childhoods in the Bronx—convinced him to take a ride to Manhattan to meet with other investigators and league attorneys.
On September 11, 2012, Radomski sat in MLB offices and signed an affidavit detailing his allegations against the Levinsons, who he said he had known for twenty-seven years: their knowledge of his steroid “program”; Sam Levinson’s urging that “whatever you’re doing for Todd [Hundley], keep it going”; and the cash and check payments for players like Rondell White, which Radomski picked up during “dozens” of visits to ACES’s Brooklyn office.
Radomski, who also provided the two checks for $3,200 each that were made out to him from a joint bank account belonging to Paul Lo Duca and Sam Levinson and ACES Inc., was unloading the evidence that Senator George Mitchell had declined to use in his report. “I previously disclosed to United States government investigators and to former Senator Mitchell that I picked up certain payments for steroids and HGH from the ACES office,” Radomski wrote in the affidavit that was obtained by these authors, “but I was not asked to provide details regarding the Levinson knowledge of the drug use of their clients, or their role in my transactions with their players.”
But league officials had trouble corroborating the affidavit with testimony from the players involved. Hundley and White refused to talk, according to a league source intimately familiar with the investigation. Though Lo Duca made statements privately that seemed to back up Radomski’s account, the league couldn’t get him to detail his own sworn affidavit. “My stance on ACES is those guys are bad guys,” Lo Duca said in a brief interview for this book. “Baseball knows it, and they haven’t done anything about it.”
He then added obliquely, before hanging up: “I was a very good hitter and then when I left ACES I fell off—write that!”
Attorney Reisinger says that Lo Duca’s vitriol—and, in fact, Radomski’s campaign against ACES—was inspired by a dispute over finances. ACES filed a union grievance against Lo Duca in 2009, according to Reisinger, over $50,000 the former catcher owed for a $1 million signing bonus. Soon thereafter, Reisinger says, Lo Duca called the attorney’s office, “verbally threatening my assistant,” and vowing to write a book claiming that the brothers were linked to steroids. “On behalf of his buddy,” Reisinger says of Radomski, “he writes an affidavit that is not true.” (On the phone with an author of this book, Lo Duca said he hadn’t seen Radomski in years and cursed him out for dredging up old news about his doping.)
Without the assistance of former players like Lo Duca, Major League Baseball was left with little recourse. Nunez was clearly implicated in Melky Cabrera’s doping cover-up, but there was no evidence linking the scheme or the PED use to the brothers behind ACES. Discipline of agents was ultimately the purview of the union, and MLBPA chief Michael Weiner did not hide his esteem for ACES: In 2011, he had named Sam Levinson to the union’s Player Agent Advisory Committee. It was a group Weiner said in an e-mail was designed to “improve the quality of player representation, and better assist players in making informed choices regarding their representatives.”
Now Weiner “censured” the agents, a mostly symbolic gesture that did not endanger their representation of MLB clients for not properly supervising their employee Nunez. “We conducted a thorough investigation and concluded that none of the ACES principals were involved in the scheme and that there was no knowledge or involvement by Seth and Sam,” the union chief said.
ACES’ attorney Reisinger says that union investigators reviewed the agency’s business records, telephone logs, and e-mails and interviewed “most if not all” of the agency’s employees. “The Players Association made a significant investigation,” says Reisinger. “The specific finding was that [the Levinsons] had nothing to do with Melky Cabrera.”
It was only a matter of months until officials found out that Nunez’s role in PED procurement went far beyond just Melky Cabrera.
• • •
Bosch’s big league clients were already on edge following Cabrera’s suspension. Bartolo Colon’s suspension sealed the deal: Tony Bosch’s testosterone troches, his purportedly perfected “pink cream,” and his guarantee that he’d mastered the chemical combos to evade baseball’s subpar testers were seemingly no good.
Those monthly $12,000 checks from A-Rod might not be flowing in much longer, he feared. Payments from most of his other minor leaguers and pros would also dry up.
That’s why Bosch was so receptive when Porter Fischer—that persistent friend of the Carbones, always pestering him for a job in the clinic or a marketing opportunity for Biogenesis—suddenly announced he’d come into some money.
A Jaguar had smacked into him as he biked through Pinecrest, he explained to Bosch, and he had some insurance cash to invest.
In the big picture, the $4,000 that Tony agreed to take from Fischer may not have been much of a life preserver for a guy whose business world and personal life were sinking beneath the waves.
But Bosch had rent to pay just to keep Biogenesis’s doors open, another $1,200 due to Aliette Bosch to keep a state prosecutor from filing charges, and a roomful of doctors expecting their usual “fees” for using their licenses.
The only way to keep the machine chugging without the high-profit athletes was to at least pay off that immediate debt so that his regular clients could show up for their hCG weight-loss plans or their HGH/testosterone cocktails. In October 2012, that $4,000 was exactly the lifeline Tony Bosch needed to keep any hope alive. So he agreed and brought Porter on board as a staff member.
Tony Bosch had made a lot of mistakes in his life. When he took Porter Fischer’s money, Bosch had to know that the earnest, beefy bodybuilder was unlikely to ever see his investment back. As he had with so many before him, from Roger De Armas to Jorge Jaen to Carlos Acevedo, Bosch took the cash and figured he’d mend the relationship with sweet talk or deal with yet another lawsuit down the line.
Bosch had no way to know that screwing Porter Fischer was the worst mistake he’d ever made.
• • •
The e-mail landed in a Miami New Times reporter’s in-box on November 19, 2012.
“I am looking to get in contact with writer Tim Elfrink,” wrote Dave C., “for a follow up and some major new developments from some articles he did in 2009 concerning the Manny Ramirez HGH scandal. I really need to speak with Mr. Elfrink, as I need to get my information out there as safely, legally and responsibly as possible.”
A similar note went out to ESPN, with a header looking for T. J. Quinn. He never heard back from the Worldwide Leader in Sports. (Fischer even tried a follow-up note but was rebuffed by an ESPN flack, who said the network didn’t give out on-air personalities’ e-mail addresses. Quinn never saw the e-mail.)
A week later, “Dave C.” met Elfrink at a sports bar in South Miami. He was, of course, Porter Fischer.
It was about three weeks after he’d stormed out of the meeting with Tony Bosch over his $4,000 debt, when Tony had looked him in the eye and told him he just wasn’t going to get his money back that week.
Fischer’s plan for payback had come from the meeting where Bosch had ranted about needing only the boxes of patient files to run his business.
