by Tim Elfrink
And because the ACES clients who went to Biogenesis came from multiple Latin American countries and many major league organizations, there appeared to be little else linking them besides those two five-foot-eight brothers who had built a publicity-shy baseball empire on Brooklyn’s Montague Street.
Scott Boras, the czar of baseball agenthood, made pointed claims concerning Everth Cabrera, who had jumped from ACES to Boras’s agency following the 2012 Melky Cabrera debacle. “He places trust in people who represent them,” Boras said of Everth. “And that trust was violated by them, recommending that he not only use PEDs but that he continues to use it.”
(Gall is a common trait in successful agents. Boras has represented Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Manny Ramirez, to name a few known juicers. A holder of a doctorate in industrial pharmacology, Boras claims to have never known any of his players were on drugs.)
Following the Biogenesis revelations, the Levinsons again blamed former rogue consultant Nunez. “Anyone who knows us, knows that it is absolutely ridiculous to think that we would ever condone the use of performance-enhancing drugs,” said Seth in a statement. “Our work over the last 25 years demonstrates that ACES is built on a foundation of honesty, integrity, and doing things the right way. Neither Sam nor I, or anyone else at ACES, have ever met or even heard of Anthony Bosch until the recent news stories, nor does anyone have any knowledge of or connection to Biogenesis.”
But the defense that Nunez ushered ACES clients to Biogenesis without the Levinsons’ knowledge was ridiculed by rivals. “As an agent you have a responsibility to know what your clients are doing,” says one MLB-certified agent, echoing a sentiment shared by many in the industry. “It’s hard for me to believe that so many of their clients were using PEDs and they didn’t catch on that this was happening.”
There was blood in the water in Brooklyn, and the sharks were swirling. Competitors claimed to be besieged by calls from ACES clients looking to jump ship from the troubled agency, and two high-profile players did just that. Everth Cabrera and Shane Victorino had left the previous season; Cruz and Peralta left the Levinsons in the Biogenesis aftermath.
MLB once again opened an investigation into ACES, this time for its role in possibly funneling clients to Tony Bosch. When the league filed a lawsuit in late March against five primaries and associates of Biogenesis, including Nunez, the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball was not after Nunez’s erstwhile Washington Heights travel agency fortune. The lawsuit, brazen as it was, was simply used to gather information.
The league’s main goal was to gain evidence of players—especially Alex Rodriguez—juicing. But a nice side project would be fleshing out the involvement of Nunez and the Levinson brothers, and perhaps finally burying with bad publicity the agency the players union refused to punish.
By the time Biogenesis was exposed, MLBPA chief Michael Weiner had publicly disclosed that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. It ultimately killed him before 2013 was over. But even as his condition worsened, Weiner kept working—and stood by his old friends the Levinsons. For the second time in six months, he used his clout to help ACES, again by scapegoating Nunez.
“From our perspective, there is no evidence Sam and Seth have been involved in anything directly,” Weiner said. “Nobody said: ‘Sam and Seth set me up. Sam and Seth knew what was going on.’”
“I think Nunez is a snake,” Weiner added. “What he did was horrible. . . . He should have the book thrown at him.”
Other agents privately howled at the agency dodging another bullet. “A lot of us smaller agents are pretty sure that we wouldn’t have gotten the same treatment from the union,” says one certified agent, “if we had more than a dozen players where there was pretty clear evidence that we were involved in their doping.”
Any implication that Weiner let the Levinsons off the hook due to their friendship is “an absolute insult to the legacy of Michael Weiner,” ACES’ attorney Jay Reisinger says. “The Levinsons received absolutely no favoritism from Michael Weiner or anybody else.”
Though MLB hogged the Dostoevskian drama, it wasn’t only elite baseball players who were named in that initial New Times story. Pro athletes from other sports, and two civilians with high-profile links to baseball, were also caught up in the Bosch dragnet.
Tennis pro Wayne Odesnik, who was previously suspended in 2010 for doping, e-mailed New Times after the story ran, denying ever purchasing growth hormone or any banned substances from anybody, including Bosch. “The copy of the records that were provided do not show any amount paid to Mr. Bosch or to his clinic,” Odesnik wrote. (Bosch’s records indicate that Odesnik had him on a $500-per-month retainer.)
Boxer Yuriorkis Gamboa called a press conference and then quickly canceled it. Rapper 50 Cent, dabbling as Gamboa’s promoter, now had his back, implying that the only reason Elfrink attempted to smear the Cuban boxer was because of their high-profile relationship. “The additional publicity and notoriety that Gamboa has received from being in connection to me—the timing of it makes me feel like that’s a part of it,” 50 Cent ruminated.
Gamboa eventually claimed that he had no idea Bosch was selling banned substances. Unlike the ballplayers, his sport has no provision for suspending athletes unless they fail a test at a fight.
University of Miami baseball trainer Jimmy Goins was immediately suspended by the school following being named by the New Times exposé. He wrote letters to New Times and all other outlets that mentioned his involvement with Biogenesis, threatening to file a lawsuit. Soon after the story broke, the Miami Herald published a story virtually exonerating Goins of having provided PEDs to UM players, using quotes from a former university ballplayer and anonymous sourcing. “[Former UM pitcher Kyle] Bellamy, who has been in regular contact with Goins, said that he is convinced Goins is no cheater,” read the final sentence of the article.
If the Herald was attempting to appease Goins, it didn’t work. The squat, bald trainer filed a lawsuit against the Herald, Miami New Times, the New York Times, the University of Miami, Porter Fischer, and Anthony and Pedro Bosch. Oddly, he doesn’t dispute the facts in the story. Instead, he argues that his involvement with Biogenesis was not newsworthy and that when he bought HGH and other substances he was duped into thinking that Bosch was a doctor. “Anthony Bosch is not a doctor, however, while James Goins was a patient at Biogenesis,” reads one filing. “Anthony Bosch held himself out as a doctor, referring to himself as Dr. Bosch and also wearing a lab coat that said Dr. Bosch.” A judge later dismissed his claims against the media companies.
• • •
And then there was the ballad of Yuri Sucart, unemployed steroid mule.
Being once again thrust into the spotlight more than a year after being fired by his famous cousin appears to have been too much to bear.
In late February 2013, the bankrupt Sucart listed an authentic 2009 Yankees championship ring on an online auction site. “In 2009, when the New York Yankees won the World Series, Alex Rodriguez requested an additional ring,” Sucart explained in an affidavit included in the auction. “The Yankees authorized an additional ring which Mr. Rodriguez then presented to me.”
The ring, a memento from either better times or the year Rodriguez sold him out to the media, got Sucart $50,398.88. “He didn’t know that Yuri Sucart was selling one of them,” a Rodriguez spokesperson said flatly of the ring, one of several that he had distributed to family members.
That’s about when things started to get very strange between Rodriguez and his cousin, who was being constantly hounded by MLB investigators to tell them about Biogenesis. In early spring 2013, as Rodriguez rehabbed from his surgery in a mutual exile from the team, the New York Daily News and other outlets reported that Sucart was threatening to sue Rodriguez.
Sucart was said to be seeking $5 million from Rodriguez. “I know there’s a lot of friction,” Sucart’s attorney, John Ruiz, was quoted as saying. “I know that [Sucart’s] name got caught in th
e cross fire of all the allegations involving all the performance-enhancing drugs.” (Asked about the never-filed lawsuit today, Ruiz claimed to have been misquoted.)
Their relationship has never been easily parsed. “Now they’re not even associated,” says Sucart’s longtime friend Roger Ball. Still, Sucart apparently lived in his cousin’s house, rent-free. Bankruptcy records indicated that Sucart and his family lived in a $399,000 Kendall home owned by Alexander E. Rodriguez.
• • •
As the regular season began in April, nearly four months after the letters from New Times that had sent MLB executives “buzzing” into Rob Manfred’s office, league investigators were still knee-deep in an investigation that they hoped would lead to suspensions stemming from Tony Bosch’s clinic.
An ax hung over the nineteen Biogenesis-linked players. For Cesar Carrillo—once a first-round draft pick, now washed-up in the minors at age twenty-eight—a suspension would likely mean the end of his major league dream. For twenty-five-year-old Cuban Yasmani Grandal, such punishment would derail a promising new career. For Ryan Braun, an affirmation of cheating would be a death blow to his formerly good name in Wisconsin, and his mantle as a modern-era Jewish baseball icon.
(In fact, Braun’s image was removed from the cover of the children’s tome Jewish Sports Stars, replaced by the can’t-go-wrong Sandy Koufax.)
But nobody spent the following summer fighting as lonely a battle for his career as Rodriguez.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
Bad Cops
The counterfeiter and the baseball investigator met at a seedy diner.
As he walked into Cosmos, a Pompano Beach dive with greasy omelets and cracked leather tables, Dan Mullin’s back pocket bulged with cash. He carried $25,000 in loose stacks of $20 and $100 bills stuffed into an envelope.
In a corner booth, tanning bed repairman and convicted felon Gary Jones grinned and waved.
Mullin eased his large frame across the table. With a nod, he slid across a yellow envelope. Jones felt its weight and glanced at the currency inside.
A few tables over, one of Jones’s cronies silently filmed it all on his cell phone. And two booths behind him, a member of Mullin’s crew made his own secret recording on an iPad, straining to win this round of Spy vs. Spy by filming around the head of an old lady enjoying an early lunch.
• • •
Two months earlier, Mullin had flown to Florida primed for action. At his side were two senior investigators, a pair of hulking retired NYPD vets named Ed Maldonado and Tom Reilly.
It was February 1, 2013, and Mullin’s Department of Investigations had finally been called to duty. After years of chasing down identity fraud cases in the Caribbean and monitoring gambling rings in Jersey, the ex-cops, at last, had a legit steroid scandal on their hands in Miami. A decade after BALCO, another performance-enhancing drug ring was exploding.
But in stark contrast to the BALCO fiasco, this time MLB was in the driver’s seat. The San Francisco case had started with a federal raid on Victor Conte’s lab. Even if MLB had wanted to get involved, its interests would always come second to the criminal probe. In Biogenesis, Mullin had no such obstacles. Bosch’s scheme had been upended by a newspaper, not a cadre of federal agents, so whatever baseball’s investigators did in South Florida, they didn’t have to worry about stepping on the toes of an ongoing investigation.
Mullin’s mandate was simple: Get Commissioner Selig the evidence he needed to suspend every player tied to Tony Bosch.
In the days after New Times published its story, Selig made it clear that Mullin’s job was vital. The legacy-obsessed commissioner would soon announce his retirement. Allowing the Biogenesis-linked players to escape without punishment would be a public debacle nearly to the scale of the Mitchell Report—especially since the two most prominent players implicated in the scandal had already personally embarrassed the commissioner. Selig’s hometown superstar, Ryan Braun, had made the league look incompetent when his suspension was overturned in 2012. And Rodriguez—who was once supposed to be the preternaturally talented Latin American ballplayer who would bridge the gap from the Steroid Era to clean baseball—had repeatedly dominated headlines with steroid scandals for which he had gone unpunished.
For Mullin, job number one was getting their hands on Bosch’s records. Under the union’s contract, players can be suspended for “nonanalytical results”—but only with enough evidence to convince an arbitrator the player had doped.
That evidence was out there. New Times had the records. The newspaper’s anonymous source had them. And Tony Bosch presumably had loads of them.
MLB started with the newspaper, though they knew it was a long shot. On February 4, Manfred and MLB’s chief spokesman, Pat Courtney, visited the New Times office in midtown Miami and made their pitch to the editors in a conference room lined with faded plaques from Florida press awards. The paper had already made history by exposing Tony Bosch’s clients, they argued. Why not help ensure those cheaters got punished?
The paper’s editor, Chuck Strouse, was receptive. But he ultimately rejected the idea as journalistically unsound. On March 14, he penned a column telling MLB they’d have to find their own evidence. “We would be handing over the product of our reporting to a for-profit group with a seamy past. What if baseball improperly used our work? What if it decided to punish some players and not others?” Strouse wrote. “ . . . We would be sending the wrong message to future anonymous sources. . . . Our source for this article fears for his safety. How could we subject him to greater risk by losing control of the information he had provided?”
So the investigators turned their attention to Biogenesis’s owner. Tony Bosch proved an elusive target. He’d abandoned his Key Biscayne condo. Neighbors told the ex-cops they hadn’t seen him since the New Times story had landed. A stakeout at Pedro Bosch’s Coral Gables home had also come up empty. If Bosch was hiding out with his parents, he wasn’t going outside.
So Maldonado and Reilly approached their South Florida assignment like any criminal probe in New York City. With their chief suspect on the run, they built the case from the outside in, through anyone who’d ever done business with him. In the case of serial entrepreneur Tony Bosch, they had dozens of names to work with. There were so many leads to follow, in fact, that MLB soon hired GSIS, a security firm founded by an ex–Secret Service chief named Mark Sullivan and co-owned by White Sox honcho Jerry Reinsdorf. Sullivan flew in dozens of his own operatives to help Mullin’s team.
Within days of the New Times story, that army of ex-cops and federal agents began chasing down everyone from Bosch’s close friends like Roger De Armas and Hernan Dominguez to short-term colleagues and casual acquaintances like Jorge Jaen. “They’d chase me, they’d follow me outside [Bosch’s] mom’s house,” Dominguez says. “They were so hungry for information. I had investigators come to my house multiple times because of my connection to Tony. I was watching my rearview mirror every day.”
The investigators pulled business records, plunged into property reports, and weren’t shy about harassing friends and family. “They showed up at every one of my relatives’ homes looking for me,” Jaen recalls. “They went to my office. At the end of the day, I had nothing to hide from them so I finally just met with them.”
When Jaen sat down with the DOI, they quizzed him about Tony’s businesses, his training, his motivations, and whether he’d ever talked to Jaen about selling drugs to big leaguers. “I told them that I wouldn’t consider Tony a con artist exactly, but he reminds me of these guys like Bernie Madoff,” Jaen says. “Madoff duped a lot of high-level investors and businessmen and Tony duped a lot of smart people in the medical field down here.”
Jaen had worked with Tony only for a few months, though, and hadn’t seen him since their business venture failed two years earlier. The witnesses who’d actually worked in Biogenesis were proving just as elusive as their former boss. From office manager Ricky Martinez to Tony’s pr
evious partner Carlos Acevedo to Oggi Velazquez, everyone had skipped town or dodged the baseball cops.
Although they sometimes seemed to forget it, MLB’s investigators weren’t real cops anymore. That distinction carried with it both drawbacks and benefits. The drawback, of course, was that they had no subpoena power and couldn’t legitimately wield the threat of arrest.
One of the benefits: They could throw around wads of cash to convince witnesses to talk. Bosch’s associates who weren’t averse to listening to baseball’s overtures soon established a market rate: $5,000 would buy investigators a meeting.
Porter Fischer, whose role as New Times’s source was still confidential, was among the first to receive a financial overture from the investigators. Fischer had fled town the day the New Times story landed, hiding out for more than a week at his uncle’s house in Ocala after Carbone’s warning that Oggi was out to kill him. Back in South Miami, Fischer’s sister, Suzanne, soon found herself peering out the door to insistent knocking from Maldonado and Reilly.
The two musclebound “goons,” Suzanne later told a reporter, hollered: “We’ll give you money!” She cowered inside. She thought the enforcers were mobsters, but reporters later found a business card they’d tucked into Porter’s door. It belonged to Maldonado and its message was none too subtle: “Please call—we know time is $. Call ASAP.”
Fischer had no intention of playing ball with MLB. After he returned home from eight days in exile, he avoided them. And he had good reason to be wary of them—and everyone else, for that matter. In fact, he had evidence that his life was in danger.
However big a story Fischer had figured the leaked documents would be, the response eclipsed it. New Times, as promised, had kept Fischer anonymous, but reporters and investigators quickly learned he had a connection to the clinic.
A week and a half after the story landed, Fischer had decided the air had cooled enough to return to the guesthouse in South Miami. Pete’s warnings from two weeks earlier still echoed in his head. He had no idea if Oggi or anyone else was really capable of putting a bullet in his head, but he didn’t intend to find out. If he stayed below the radar, he figured he could ride this out.
