by Tim Elfrink
According to a source close to Rodriguez, a hierarchy soon emerged. Gomez was no longer a “street guy,” says the source. But Oggi Velazquez was. So when Gomez needed to deal with characters like Jones or the Carbones, Velazquez was assigned the task.
Rodriguez might condo-hunt on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but he’s still South Floridian to the bone. If MLB and the media wanted to beat him, they’d have to do it on his home turf. His entourage became a machine.
Rodriguez’s team, ready to do whatever it took to exonerate him, sprang into action in earnest when the Yankees forwarded him an e-mail on January 25, 2013. It was from a reporter in Florida. “Mr. Rodriguez,” the letter began, “Miami New Times is preparing a story about a Miami-area anti-aging clinic run by Anthony Bosch called Biogenesis. . . .”
• • •
Twelve people got such letters from Miami New Times that Friday: Texas slugger Nelson Cruz, Oakland pitcher Bartolo Colon, Toronto outfielder Melky Cabrera, Detroit shortsop Jhonny Peralta, Washington pitcher Gio Gonzalez, San Diego catcher Yasmani Grandal, Seattle catcher Jesus Montero, Pittsburgh outfielder Felix Pie, former UM star Cesar Carrillo, tennis star Wayne Odesnik, UM trainer Jimmy Goins, and Rodriguez.
Of the professional ballplayers, some were kids just trying to get a lasting taste of the major leagues, like Carrillo, who was a minor leaguer in the Detroit Tigers organization. And some were MLB veterans like corpulent Dominican hurler Colon, who at thirty-nine years old in 2012 had banked more than $70 million despite his drug suspension that year.
The letters reached players in Winter League—like Cruz, who was playing for the Gigantes del Cibao in the Dominican Republic—or already in exile from MLB, like Cabrera, who had watched his Giants win a world championship on television after his steroid suspension.
That original list didn’t include every name in Bosch’s records, only those whom the newspaper had been able to verify without a doubt had gone to Biogenesis. For example, Ryan Braun was not sent a letter, and his name did not appear in the original New Times story. It was a testament to Bosch’s salesmanship that even a partial exposure of his big league client list was bound to change the landscape of the sport.
The letters were composed in a way that should have indicated that this was not the sort of story that would go away. The reporter, Tim Elfrink, knew on which date Bosch had traveled to Dallas to deliver drugs to Cruz, knew Peralta’s $4,000 balance, and knew Cabrera bought drugs including “pink cream” from Bosch on April 4, 2012.
But even as they privately panicked, not one of the ballplayers receiving letters issued a denial, or any sort of response, to New Times.
No athlete had as much evidence tying them to Biogenesis as Alex Rodriguez, who appeared in the notebooks at least sixteen times. New Times knew that on one visit, he had shelled out $4,000 to Bosch for troches, pink cream, and other substances. Rodriguez’s purchases of steroids, testosterone, and growth hormone were meticulously recorded. Sucart was also amply implicated in the records, including paying Bosch $500 for a week’s worth of growth hormone.
And when the e-mails to teams resulted in rushed and vague stories appearing in the New York Daily News and Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper on January 26, before New Times could go to print, the only player named in these information-thin articles was Rodriguez. Multiple outlets had to issue a correction after running a photo of another man whom it identified as Anthony Bosch. It was clear that in the offices of law-enforcement officials, league and team brass, major news sports desks—and, above all, in the homes of Biogenesis-linked players who were petrified about what might be coming—confusion and a sort of flat-footed panic reigned.
It must have frustrated the hell out of Rodriguez. He was always baseball’s steroid scapegoat, the man whose scowling face adorned the covers of bestselling exposés, when he knew he was only one of many superstars using growth hormones and steroids.
On January 27, as everybody in baseball kept an eye trained on Miami, an outwardly casual Ryan Braun was in Wisconsin. He wore a Brewers jersey over jeans and a sweatshirt, played a Family Feud–style game with teammates, and signed autographs for fans. He was at the team’s fan festival, revamping his image after the overturned steroid suspension of the year before.
The shindig was free that year, an overture to loyal fans who had weathered a losing team and a PED scandal in 2012. But Wisconsinites are an obliging sort when somebody deserves forgiveness, and Braun had been exonerated, hadn’t he?
“Ryan Braun skipped the Milwaukee Brewers’ fan festival last January, remaining mostly quiet while he waited for a decision in his appeal of a 50-game suspension under baseball’s drug policy,” ran the sweetly redemptive Associated Press story on his appearance. “What a difference a year makes.”
• • •
If anybody had thought the little alt-weekly in Miami was bluffing with its letters, they learned the truth on January 29, when the New Times story was published online. The story went online around nine A.M. By that night, it led every ESPN broadcast and dominated sports talk radio. It bled immediately out of the sports world and into the mainstream press, landing on the front page of the next morning’s New York Times and earning prominent playtime on NPR’s All Things Considered and CNN’s nightly broadcasts.
A mass of sports reporters booked South Beach hotel rooms and direct flights to MIA. It was a Tuesday of incessant cell phone ringing for players, agents, lawyers, team officials, and MLB investigators as other reporters attempted to catch up with the story.
Some players immediately broadcasted emphatic denials. “My son works very, very hard, and he’s as clean as apple pie,” said Max Gonzalez, the father of Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez. Max said his son was implicated by mistake because the elder Gonzalez had received weight-loss treatments from Bosch.
Others issued statements strangled in legalese by expensive attorneys. “We are aware of certain allegations and inferences,” said Farrell & Reisinger, the law firm hired by Texas Rangers slugger Nelson Cruz. The firm also represented numerous players implicated in the Mitchell Report and crafted Andy Pettitte’s strategy before he testified to Congress in 2008. “To the extent these allegations and inferences refer to Nelson, they are denied.”
And still other players simply went deep underground. Though he wasn’t usually hard to spot, SEAL Team Six couldn’t have found Bartolo Colon at this time.
Rodriguez was once again the sports world’s number one paparazzi target, as was his hapless cousin. Reporters dug through property records trying to figure out where Yuri Sucart, named in the New Times story, lived now that his home had been foreclosed.
As major outlets continued to dig into the story, A-Rod and Tony Bosch’s relationship began to take on a pulp-fiction feel. ESPN’s Outside the Lines relied on anonymous sources in painting a portrait of a tempestuous Rodriguez texting Bosch from his Miami mansion, ordering the dealer to come inject him. Rodriguez and Bosch’s relationship had ended, according to the story, after the fake doctor had clumsily failed to find a vein on the superstar and been booted from the mansion. “Tony said A-Rod was pissed at him,” the source told ESPN. “He said he was bleeding everywhere.”
Such gory coverage called for drastic measures. Roy Black contracted Michael Sitrick, a crisis management guru who is said to charge $900 an hour. Sitrick’s first move was a conventional one.
On Rodriguez’s behalf, he denied all, sending out a statement that was contradicted in totality by later statements. “The news report about a purported relationship between Alex Rodriguez and Anthony Bosch [is] not true,” read the statement. “He was not Mr. Bosch’s patient, he was never treated by him and he was never advised by him. The purported documents referenced in the story—at least as they relate to Alex Rodriguez—are not legitimate.”
At Rodriguez’s urging—and a $25,000 wire transfer for his legal fees—Bosch issued his own false statement denying their relationship.
Sitrick’s second move, at least acco
rding to baseball officials, was entirely unconventional.
The Los Angeles–based Sitrick wrote the book on media spin. Well, the full title is Spin: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage.
In the book, Sitrick, a former reporter himself, detailed the unconventional tactics that had earned him such temporarily toxic big-money clients as Michael Vick and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles—hiring reporters with whom he previously had professional clashes, doling out exclusive information in order to get stories published that are positive to his clients, and generally treating the press like an unthinkingly hungry animal. “What the successful spin doctor does,” Sitrick writes of the press, “is figure out a way to get it to want to go where he’d like it to go—or at least get it to lose interest in going where he’d rather it not poke its nose.”
Sitrick did exactly that, Major League Baseball officials believe. After Oggi Velazquez got the notebooks, the LA spin doctor on A-Rod’s payroll leaked records that turned the sports world’s attention all the way from Miami to Milwaukee.
• • •
On February 5, one hellishly long week after the New Times story ran, Yahoo! Sports had its own revelations. Reporters Tim Brown and Jeff Passan had obtained several pages of Biogenesis notes from an unnamed source.
“Baseball,” read the header for one of the notes, in Bosch’s unmistakable script. Under it, were the names of ballplayers. Three of those players—Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, and Cesar Carrillo—had already been named in the New Times story. But former UM star–turned then–Orioles third baseman Danny Valencia had not been named. Nor had New York Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli. Nor, of course, Ryan Braun.
In fact, the leaker appeared to be primarily focused on exposing Braun. Three records given to Yahoo! named the Brewers superstar. In one of the instances—under the heading “money owed”—Bosch had written “RB 20-30K” next to Braun’s name.
The third note was the seething letter Bosch had drafted to ACES employee Juan Carlos Nunez, demanding payment for Cabrera’s treatment. Where Bosch had written “This smells like the ‘Braun’ advantage,” referring to Cabrera’s recent All-Star Game MVP award, the Brewers’ name had been redacted on the New Times website. Yahoo! Sports published an untouched version of the letter. Yahoo! also publicized several instances of Chris Lyons, Braun’s Miami-based attorney, being listed in the notes.
So visible two weeks earlier, Braun wouldn’t be caught near any autograph booths in Wisconsin now. His representatives released a statement that must have stretched even his loyal Milwaukee flock’s suspension of disbelief.
“During the course of preparing for my successful appeal last year, my attorneys, who were previously familiar with Tony Bosch, used him as a consultant,” the statement read. “More specifically, he answered questions about T/E [testosterone to epitesosterone] ratio and possibilities of tampering with samples. There was a dispute over compensation for Bosch’s work, which is why my lawyer and I are listed under ‘moneys owed’ and not on any other list. I have nothing to hide and have never had any other relationship with Bosch. I will fully cooperate with any inquiry into this matter.”
The statement did not explain how Braun’s attorneys knew Bosch. It did, however, conveniently answer the question of how Braun could owe the fake doctor so much money if it wasn’t for an illicit service: Bosch had greedily asked for $20,000 to $30,000 for a “consultation,” but Braun hadn’t necessarily paid that.
The ludicrousness of one of the game’s highest-paid players seeking out the advice of an uneducated storefront biochemist apparently didn’t rattle Braun. He stood by the statement, refusing to answer questions concerning Biogenesis, even as he reported to spring training under a dark steroid cloud for the second season in a row.
In 2012, Dino Laurenzi had been collateral damage when Braun had thrown a Hail Mary that had connected to save his season and reputation. Maybe he could Brett Favre his way out of this jam, too.
• • •
From the very beginning, Major League Baseball—an agency that knows a little something about strategic media leaks—suspected that Rodriguez’s camp had fed the documents incriminating Braun to Yahoo! Sports.
Sure, it would be a rotten play even by A-Rod panic-mode, blame-your-cousin standards, especially since one of the leaked pages also implicated his Yankees teammate Cervelli.
But it was a public relations chess move, and Rodriguez’s fixer Sitrick was a Kasparov of aggressive spin. And the early timing of the leaks left few other suspects. Though Rodriguez’s attorneys have maintained that he never attained Bosch’s records or copies of the records, multiple sources contradict that.
The only known trove of Bosch’s notes circulating in the days following the exposé were the notebooks that Fischer says he gave to Pete Carbone—and that Carbone, according to Fischer, says he gave to Rodriguez’s people. Bosch also told MLB officials that he believed, due to information received from Oggi Velazquez, that Rodriguez had attained the notebooks. “Mr. Velazquez had told Mr. Bosch that Mr. Rodriguez had secured those original notebooks,” Rob Manfred testified in arbitration, “and, in sum and substance, Velazquez had assured Bosch that those notebooks would not be seen again.”
Immediately after the New Times story ran, MLB officials certainly didn’t have those documents to leak: As was later revealed, Manfred and another baseball executive were in the offices of the alt-weekly newspaper, pleading with its editor to share with them.
Any far-fetched notion that Bosch may have leaked the documents himself were dashed when the fake doctor backed up Braun’s excuse in his ill-advised interview with ESPN. “I just answered a few questions from his legal team, not from Braun or any other ballplayer,” Bosch said. Even if for whatever reason he was angry at Braun at the time, he wouldn’t have risked more trouble for himself by leaking documents only to then downplay their significance.
One of Rodriguez’s attorneys, David Cornwell, has denied that the star had anything to do with leaking the documents, calling the accusation just more staccato in “the drumbeat of false allegations.”
In later court filings, Sitrick denied ever possessing Bosch’s records in language that, as league officials pointed out, does not specifically rule out the possibility that an underling at his firm handled the leak. MLB tried to get Yahoo! Sports to reveal its source, but, unsurprisingly, the journalists refused. The league took such an interest in the origins of the Yahoo! Sports story that they ultimately battled Sitrick in federal court in an attempt to get him to confess. A judge would rule that Sitrick did not have to comply with MLB’s arbitration subpoena to turn over documents related to his representation of Rodriguez.
In that suit, an MLB attorney asked Rodriguez’s attorneys to have Sitrick sign a sworn affidavit stating that nobody in his crisis management firm ever had any Bosch or Biogenesis records. “The affidavits have been forwarded to [Sitrick] with Mr. Rodriguez’s request that they be executed,” Rodriguez’s attorney Joe Tacopina responded to the request in an e-mail. But Sitrick never signed the affidavits.
Sitrick advises clients to always respond to media allegations, though he did not take his own advice in this case. He ended an e-mail conversation when an author of this book asked him about the Braun leak.
If Rodriguez was behind the leak to Yahoo! Sports, pity Francisco Cervelli, the middling backup catcher caught up in his teammate’s elaborate plot.
On February 6, Cervelli—who made around $500,000 in 2013—opted against the high-priced legal firm and instead took a more economic approach to damage control, issuing this statement on Twitter: “Following my foot injury in March 2011, I consulted with a number of experts, including Biogenesis Clinic, for legal ways to aid my rehab and recovery. I purchased supplements that I am certain were not prohibited by Major League Baseball.”
The Venezuelan-born catcher fudged that story a week later when interviewed by beat reporters at spring training. “I just went there, talked, and
that’s it,” Cervelli said then. “I walked away without nothing in my hands.
“Well, you know, sometimes, when we got injuries we get a little desperate to come back quick, and we always want a second opinion,” Cervelli expounded. “I went there. At that moment I don’t know what kind of clinic it was. So like I said, I take my responsibility. Nobody put a gun to my head to go there, so that’s it.”
Cervelli, who doesn’t have a $900-an-hour fixer or a loyal goon squad, had just trampled on his own claim that he had bought legal supplements from Bosch. Dealing with a media catastrophe is a lot more difficult than signaling fastball or curve.
He later admitted that he bought PEDs from Bosch. But on this day, Cervelli chased down the reporters in a hallway and told them that he wanted to stand by his initial Twitter statement after all.
• • •
League honchos who had tried only months earlier to get the ACES agency punished over their ties to Juan Carlos Nunez and the Melky Cabrera website mess now had reason for renewed fury.
Of the nineteen players publicly linked to Biogenesis in the aftermath of the New Times story, nine—Jhonny Peralta, Melky Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez, Cesar Puello, Antonio Bastardo, Fautino de los Santos, Fernando Martinez, Sergio Escalona, and Jordany Valdespin—were ACES customers at the time.
Four more—Cervelli, Cruz, Jordan Norberto, and Everth Cabrera—had been clients of the Brooklyn agency in the past.
If the high number of ACES clients flocking to Bosch’s clinic was a coincidence, it worked against staggering odds. As the website SB Nation pointed out at the time, nearly 70 percent of Bosch’s publicized clients had at one point been represented by ACES. But with 107 clients listed in a major league agency database, ACES represented only 5.7 percent of big league ballplayers.
