by Tim Elfrink
The scene ran through Fischer’s head as he fumed over his lost investment. “That’s when it hit me: He needs the files. This motherfucker should get hit where it hurts,” Fischer said. “I took an empty box I had at home, took a full box at the clinic, and put an empty box back in its place.”
Once Tony noticed the files were gone, Fischer figured, he’d have to pay back his loan one way or another.
• • •
Porter Fischer’s phone rang late on Saturday, January 26, 2013, about two months after his first meeting with Elfrink. He let it ring through, and then it rang again. He glanced around his darkened guesthouse. He’d carefully armed the alarms at the front and back doors. His two pet Rottweilers were chained up outside. His Beretta 3032 Tomcat was loaded and sitting on the kitchen table.
He had good reason to be on edge. Earlier that day, he’d gotten a call from Elfrink. Ever since that first meeting in November, they’d met almost every week at the same sports bar, going through Tony Bosch’s handwritten notebooks over Michelob Ultras and talking through everything Fischer knew about Biogenesis.
Elfrink had a conundrum: The more time he spent combing through the records Porter had taken from the clinic—and then copied onto a flash drive and given to the reporter—the less doubt he had that they were legit. But what they suggested was beyond explosive. Miami New Times, the sister paper to New York’s Village Voice and nine other alternative weeklies around the country, had just three staff writers. New Times was well known for hard-hitting local investigative stories, but this was a tinderbox on a whole new scale. If Elfrink was going to write a piece accusing some of the richest men in professional baseball of cheating, he’d better be damned sure he knew what he had. He needed to prove the records were real. As the newspaper’s full-time attorney gently put it, if the notebooks were faked they’d all be fucked.
Along with his editor and the attorney, he came up with a plan to confirm the validity of Porter’s documents. Elfrink would call the scores of ordinary patients listed in Bosch’s handwritten notes and typed business records. If enough of them confirmed their own entries were accurate, it would be powerful proof that Bosch’s notes about selling banned drugs to A-Rod, Cabrera, Cruz, and the lot were also correct.
That reporting took two months, during which time Bosch closed up Biogenesis—unable to pay the rent thanks to his disappearing MLB clientele—and largely disappeared. While most patients Elfrink called declined to talk, by early January he’d found a half dozen willing to confirm that their own interactions with Biogenesis matched what was listed in Bosch’s records. Fischer also set up a meeting with another former employee at the clinic, who asked to stay anonymous but confirmed his story.
Taken as a whole, it was more than enough to convince readers—and, just as important, the New Times attorney. The story would run, New Times editors decided, on February 6. But first Elfrink needed to give everyone a fair chance to comment. On Friday, January 25, he sent detailed letters to every big leaguer they planned to name in the story as a Biogenesis client.
Multiple teams forwarded the letters to MLB front offices. In his arbitration testimony, Rob Manfred described league counsel Dan Halem and public relations chief Pat Courtney “buzzing into my office . . . because between the two of them they had received a number of virtually—either identical or virtually identical letters that had been sent to individual teams.”
No one responded, although Elfrink did get a mysterious call from a Los Angeles area code late that Friday night. The caller, who identified himself only as an associate of Alex Rodriguez’s, sounded breathless and slightly panicked. Was New Times really going to write all these things about A-Rod? Everything that was in the letter would be in the story, Elfrink confirmed. “But that’s really bad!” the man cried. He asked vaguely if there was any way to forestall the piece, promised to call back, and then never did.
The next morning, it became clear that team or league offices had leaked word of the pending firestorm. Both the New York Daily News and the South Florida Sun Sentinel ran vague stories quoting anonymous sources speculating that baseball officials were investigating a major PED ring centered on Miami, possibility connected to the father-and-son Bosch operation originally linked to Manny Ramirez.
Everyone tied to the clinic now knew the truth: Their secret was about to become very public. Belatedly, Bosch’s camp started frantically reaching out to Fischer. Ashley Bosch, Tony’s brother, called and offered to personally pay back all of Fischer’s money if he’d give Tony his notebooks back. Ricardo Martinez also called to plead his case. “He was like, ‘Please, please, please, can you stop the story?’” Fischer says. “I told him, ‘Look, I told Tony there would be collateral damage.’”
Then Elfrink called with the news: It was go time. New Times editors realized their own story would never hold until February 6—it had to go to press that Monday. Instead of another week to prepare, the story was going to land much sooner. As he sat at home in South Miami after the call, Fischer felt increasingly paranoid.
Other than Elfrink, he’d trusted only one person through the process: Pete Carbone, his buddy from Boca Tanning. Fischer liked Carbone, but he also saw something useful in his tanned, aviator-wearing friend. He seemed like the kind of guy who knew what to do in a crisis. With his tough-guy New York attitude, he wasn’t likely to get rattled. Besides, when Fischer confided in him what he was up to, it had won him major street cred with the salon owner, who considered himself something of a scheme connoisseur.
Weeks before, Fischer had given Carbone a flash drive with copies of Tony’s notebooks, just in case something bad happened to him before the story could run. He also confided his fears in Pete.
Now, late on the Saturday before the news would go to print, Pete—the unflappable tough guy—was frantically calling Fischer’s phone over and over, refusing to leave a message. Finally, Fischer answered.
“Dude, I need to talk to you now. About that New Times story. You’ve got to stop it!” Fischer recalls Pete saying to him. “Fucking Oggi has been calling me all day, texting ‘nine one one.’ You have got to make sure Oggi’s name is not in this. You don’t understand how fucking huge this is. This is not pretend, this is not wannabe shit, this is real gangster shit. You are gonna end up dead. He is gonna have you killed.”
Fischer panicked. He’d spent weeks running through all the ways exposing Tony Bosch’s clinic—and the ballplayers connected—could land him in hot water. He’d imagined theft charges for relieving the clinic of its records. He’d imagined A-Rod coming down on him with big-money lawyers. But now, with Pete’s warning in his head, he was suddenly worried that Oggi was a violent mobster who could have him whacked.
His mind reeling, Fischer agreed to have Pete over to his house to talk out the situation. Right away, Fischer unloaded his anxiety.
“I don’t need this anymore,” Fischer says he told Carbone. He went to a closet and, from a top shelf, pulled down the four handwritten notebooks he’d taken from Tony Bosch.
Fischer recalls: “Pete sat on the couch and blows out his breath. ‘Fuck, dude. Do you know what I’m holding? This is huge.’”
Carbone said he had an idea to save Fischer’s ass. He’d get the notebooks back to Tony Bosch. New Times had agreed to keep Fischer’s name out of the story and to protect him as an anonymous source. If he got the originals back in Bosch’s hands, who could prove that Porter was even involved in the imminent Biogenesis news leak?
Carbone left with the four notebooks.
The next day, Carbone called and told Fischer to come by Boca Tanning. When he arrived, Carbone grinned and handed him an envelope with $4,000 inside. Fischer asked him if he’d gotten the money from Bosch. Carbone said he’d visited Bosch on Key Biscayne, where the soon-to-be-exposed fake doctor was “freaking out” with Ricky Martinez.
“So you gave him the books?” Fischer asked again.
“Oh no, I told him they were destroyed,” said Carbone, still gr
inning.
“So what did you actually do with them?” demanded Fischer.
“I gave ’em to A-Rod’s people,” Fischer says Carbone responded.
Fischer’s stomach dropped. “Right then and there, a fucking chill went over me. I was like, ‘Holy shit, I was fucking played the whole fucking time.’”
Pete Carbone has refused to tell his own side of this story, either to a reporter or in a legal deposition. His brother, Anthony, pleads nearly complete ignorance of all things Biogenesis.
According to MLB’s arbitrator, Oggi later told Tony Bosch that Fischer had sold his original notebooks to A-Rod’s newly hired celebrity attorney, Roy Black, for $10,000. Fischer vehemently denies that and claims that the Carbone brothers engineered the sale.
It certainly wasn’t the first time the tanning salon entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to profit from Tony Bosch’s imploding existence.
• • •
A little after six P.M. on Monday, January 28, 2014, New Times designers sent PDFs of the week’s cover to the printing presses. It showed a bucolic small town’s ballfield shadowed beneath a barrage of syringes rocketing through the sky like a Soviet missile launch. The headline read: THE STEROID SOURCE.
Inside the paper’s midtown Miami offices, Elfrink went through his usual Monday-afternoon routine, trying hard to ignore the pit of anxiety growing in his stomach. He’d spent hours on Sunday frantically rewriting and fact-checking the five-thousand-word story, calling and re-calling sources. Today, he’d gone through every name and piece of evidence in the piece time and again with his editor and the company’s lawyer.
Now, it was done. By nine A.M. the next morning, the story would be online.
In Manhattan that night, MLB officials hunkered down to plan their response, and A-Rod hung on the phone with his PR advisors and lawyers. From Detroit to Seattle to off-season haunts like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, front-office executives and players alike waited uneasily for whatever the paper might print.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
* * *
A New Steroid Era Exposed
Joe Girardi literally felt the decision in his stomach. He’d been planning it since the day before and even dropped hints of his thought process to beat reporters before the game so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. The young Yankees manager knew it was the right move, even if he would be excoriated in the press the next day if it didn’t work.
That still didn’t make the short walk through the dugout, as the packed Bronx house rocked with tension around him, any easier.
How do you tell one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game—and a notoriously sensitive one at that—that you’re taking him out for a pinch hitter in the ninth inning in the playoffs?
On October 10, 2012, the Yankees were down to their last two outs, trailing the Baltimore Orioles by one run. The best-of-five American League Division Series was tied at one win apiece, so the outcome of this game was pivotal. It was the sort of hero-making situation for which the Yankees had traded for Rodriguez, and his monster contract, nine seasons earlier—and then given him a $275 million extension four seasons after that.
But Rodriguez’s spark was gone in the Bronx. The thirty-seven-year-old Rodriguez had spent a quarter of the 2012 season sidelined with a hand injury. Every year for a half decade, some ailment or another had landed him on the disabled list.
His slugging percentage was the lowest it had been since he was a twenty-year-old kid in Seattle. An A-Rod homer had become the Fabergé egg of baseball: He hit only eighteen in 2012, each one costing the Yankees about $1.6 million.
And after leading the Yanks to a championship in 2009—with Anthony Galea’s surreptitious assistance—Rodriguez had spent each postseason since reclaiming his title as October’s reigning underperformer.
The night earlier, with two outs in the ninth and the Yankees down by one, Rodriguez had flailed at Baltimore closer Jim Johnson’s sinker to end the game. So far in the Series’ three games, he had one hit in twelve at-bats with a grimace-inducing seven strikeouts. It had been a Bronx monsoon of boos, with tabloid columnists and sports radio callers urging the Yankees to figure out a way to trade him after the season.
With Johnson again on the mound and slugger Raul Ibanez on the Yankees’ bench, Girardi wasn’t going to again let Rodriguez play the goat. The manager later described his dugout conversation. “You’re scuffling a little bit right now,” he told Rodriguez. “Raul’s been a good pinch hitter for us and I’m just going to take a shot.”
The words likely sounded hollow. Rodriguez had suffered humiliation in the past for his poor postseason performance, when in 2006 then-manager Joe Torre dropped him to eighth in the batting order, a spot usually reserved for scrawny defense specialists. But removing Rodriguez altogether in such a crucial situation was an even greater slight.
Rodriguez took the news from Girardi graciously. It was only later revealed how bitter he was.
Then Girardi made an even more unusual call. On the dugout telephone, he rang the stadium press box. When a pinch hitter comes in, it’s customary for the announcer to name both the new batter and who is being replaced. But now, Girardi asked the announcer to say only that Ibanez was batting and not mention that he was hitting for Rodriguez.
The little moment of eggshell walking revealed how familiar the Yankees were with their highest-paid star’s fragile ego. It was also the last time any member of the team’s management cared about Rodriguez’s feelings.
As it turns out, Girardi’s lineup move was genius. Ibanez belted a game-tying home run to right field. And in the twelfth inning, as Rodriguez watched from the dugout, Ibanez hit another solo home run to win the game on a walk-off.
After the game, Rodriguez swore that he was not offended by Girardi’s decision, and that he felt ready to break out of his slump. “I wish it was me hitting two home runs tonight, but I’m still feeling good,” he said. “I was relaxed tonight. I’m ready to break out.”
But privately, Rodriguez was certain that his poor play was a result of an undiagnosed injury so painful that he was popping painkillers throughout the playoffs. He complained to Yankees team doctor Christopher Ahmad that he felt pain in the right hip, the same one that had undergone surgery in 2009. At eight forty-five the next morning, Rodriguez underwent an MRI at the New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.
The procedure revealed that Rodriguez’s left hip was actually more problematic, according to medical records provided to this book’s authors by Rodriguez’s attorneys. “Partial evaluation of left hip revealing superior labral tear with small paralabral cyst,” reads a note written by a radiologist.
Ahmad reviewed the radiologist’s findings. If he was concerned by the torn labrum—meaning hip joint cartilage—revealed by the MRI, he still cleared Rodriguez to play that night in the Bronx. Rodriguez later claimed that amounted to medical malpractice.
Rodriguez went hitless and struck out twice in four at-bats. In the bottom of the thirteenth inning with two outs and the Yankees down by one, Rodriguez was once again lifted for a pinch hitter. This time, pinch hitter Eric Chavez lined out, the Yankees’ loss sending the series to a decisive Game Five.
Girardi benched Rodriguez altogether in the rubber match. To reporters, the manager blamed Rodriguez’s horrid recent batting against right-handers. There was no talk of a possible injury. Ace C. C. Sabathia threw a gem, and the Yankees got the victory that allowed them to squeak on to the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers—no thanks to their highest-paid player.
Rodriguez’s struggles only intensified against the Tigers. In the series’ first two games, played in New York, he managed one single in seven at-bats and struck out three times. The Bronx fans booed him lustily every time he stepped to the plate. Humiliation was now routine: He was dropped from third to sixth in the lineup and was once again pinch-hit for, again by Eric Chavez.
This time there were no press box phone calls from Gi
rardi to coddle his feelings. The Yankees lost both games. As the team flew to Detroit to try to piece together a comeback, Rodriguez was at his lowest point as a major league ballplayer. He was no longer a valuable asset to the Yankees. Instead, he was just a very expensive liability. He hadn’t been so marginalized since he was fourteen years old, pushed off the varsity squad by Brother Herb Baker.
Maybe the Yankees doctor wouldn’t do anything for him. But the pseudomedical hustler whom Rodriguez kept on retainer was always on call.
• • •
Since that furtive meeting in a Tampa hotel two years earlier, when Yuri Sucart and Oggi Velazquez had introduced him to the PED peddler, Rodriguez and Bosch had grown extremely—and brazenly—close. In Rodriguez, Bosch had found a patient as willing to experiment as the fake doctor was eager to administer bizarre treatments.
According to information provided by a source familiar with his later arbitration testimony, Bosch recounted meeting with Rodriguez more than a dozen times in New York City and Miami. Rodriguez is a real estate connoisseur, and his treatments took Bosch to a procession of the athlete’s newly bought or rented homes in New York’s Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Greenwich Village, and the ritziest enclave in Miami Beach.
For the New York meetings, Sucart drove Bosch, who often had a hazy idea of where he was. In 2011, according to Bosch’s testimony, Bosch met Rodriguez at an apartment overlooking the Hudson River. Sucart told Bosch to remove his shoes, and once inside, he realized why. The entire apartment, including the wood floor and all of the decor, was bright white.
There, Bosch says he met Bruli Medina Reyes, a Dominican trainer hired by Rodriguez. They played pool for hours while waiting for Rodriguez to arrive. When he finally showed up, Bosch set up an IV that infused Rodriguez with human growth hormone and peptides, according to Bosch’s later testimony.
These infusions—which have not been reported as part of Rodriguez’s regimen until now—were prominent in Bosch’s treatment of the superstar. Bosch believed that by administering the drugs with a mixture of dextrose, he could more effectively deliver them than via his more regular doses of creams and troches. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned the use of all IV infusions by the athletes it governs. MLB has no rules against IVs of substances that aren’t banned, of course.
