by Tim Elfrink
But on February 19, the radar found him. Fischer had been coming back from a workout at the gym when a strange car turned right down his mother’s block right in front of him. The one-block side street connects two other rarely trafficked blocks. No one drove that way by accident, and Fischer had memorized his neighbors’ cars. The strange vehicle made a U-turn in front of Fischer, who ducked his head, gunned his truck past the Honda, and headed a few blocks east to Pinecrest Gardens, a small botanical sanctuary, where he switched off his engine and waited.
But now, as he headed back out, he saw that the driver of the Honda had been patiently waiting just outside, ready for him to leave.
Adrenaline kicked in. Fischer had no idea who was tailing him. Reporters? MLB goons? Oggi’s guys ready with a bullet for his skull? It didn’t matter. He was determined to lose them. He ripped through a red light and sped north for the chaotic traffic on US 1.
But as he turned right on the thoroughfare, he looked back again to see the Honda a few cars back. The driver was barking into a handheld radio.
Porter called the only guy who came to mind who might know how to deal with a car chase. “Pete!” he screamed into his cell. “I’m being followed!”
Carbone and Fischer hadn’t been on good terms since the story had landed. After he’d told Fischer he’d given the original Bosch notebooks to “A-Rod’s people,” Fischer had lost any trust in his friend. He’d been banned from Boca Tanning after nearly coming to blows with Carbone in a fiery argument.
But, as Fischer suspected, the tanning guru couldn’t resist a high-speed chase. He jumped into a car plastered with an ad for his salon and told Fischer what to do.
Porter listened, and then coasted into a nearby Winn-Dixie parking lot, turning his truck off. The Honda followed, stopping nearby as the driver talked again into the radio. But he hadn’t counted on Fischer having backup. Carbone leapt from his car, pounding on the Honda’s window, hollering, “Why the fuck are you following us?”
The driver, with a panicked look, peeled out of the lot as Pete ran to Fischer’s car. They had to follow them! But why not throw them off the scent? Fischer hopped into Pete’s car, while Carbone took his truck.
For fifteen minutes, Carbone, Fischer, the mysterious Honda driver, and an unseen backup team chased one another through the usually staid suburbs of Miami. They dodged the aggressive midafternoon traffic crawling up US 1 alongside the University of Miami’s main campus and headed toward the looming financial skyscrapers in Brickell.
But then Carbone found himself boxed in, hemmed into the curb, and finally stopped a few miles north with cars in front and behind him. He called the cops on his cell phone.
An appropriately confused report from the Pinecrest Police Department did at least solve one of the mysteries: The other drivers were named Lewis Perry, Ernesto Sam, and Julio Moreiras. All three worked for Precise Protective Research, a high-end private eye firm owned by Perry, a veteran Drug Enforcement Agency agent who’d spent thirty-five years chasing narco bosses in Latin America.
All they told the police was that they were “working an investigation” when Carbone started following them “in an aggressive manner.”
Carbone, for his part, told police the three private dicks had “dragged [him] out” of his car. But the cop was dubious. “Carbone changed his story numerous times,” the officer wrote.
Fischer watched it all play out from a parking lot across the street, his eyes bugging as cops interviewed the three men who’d just chased him down US 1. The incident report, which he picked up the next day, didn’t clear much up. Precise Protective Research? Who the hell had hired them? MLB? A-Rod?
One thing was certain: The high-speed game of tag made Fischer more certain than ever that the stakes were higher than just a few ballplayers getting PEDs from a shady clinic. His life was in jeopardy. From then on, he’d be doubly careful, he pledged.
When Reilly and Maldonado came calling again on February 28, Fischer opened his door to give them a piece of his mind. They were offering money, but Fischer was sure someone would put a bullet in his head if he took it. “It’s not about money,” Fischer told them. “Money doesn’t fix everything. It’s about my safety. . . . You guys can’t fucking protect me.”
The ex-cops admitted that he “may have to move to a gated community” if he helped them out but said MLB could pay for the ad hoc witness protection. Fischer told them it was a nonstarter. “If anyone finds out I’m talking to you right now, I’m a dead man,” he said.
But Fischer also knew he was in over his head, and that MLB was the most powerful player in this budding South Florida cold war. So he made a deal with Maldonado: If they could keep their mouths shut for ten days, he’d at least meet them again. But if his name showed up anywhere in the press, it was over.
Before they left, he handed over a few scanned medical records from the clinic—nothing of real interest, but enough to show them he was who he said he was.
A quiet week and a half later, he texted Maldonado and arranged to meet in a Coconut Creek parking lot. Fischer found both investigators sitting in a Chevy Tahoe and climbed into the backseat. Without a word, Reilly slid back an envelope stuffed with fifty $100 bills.
“I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is just like in the movies,’” Fischer says. “Someone is actually handing me a white, unmarked envelope full of cash in the back of an SUV.”
He briefly considered handing the cash back, especially when they asked him to sign an itemized receipt. “But then I thought, ‘Why not? I don’t have anything to hide. Everyone else is making money,’” he says.
They offered a deal: $10,000 for everything Fischer had. He laughed at them. The investigators laughed, too. “‘Hey, we had to ask.’” Reilly shrugged, according to Fischer.
The whistle-blower agreed to meet again on March 11, at a quiet park a few blocks from his mom’s house. By now, the investigators were increasingly sure that Fischer had been New Times’s anonymous source. They were determined to convince him to give up the goods. This time, Mullin himself flew back to Miami.
The big ex-cop sweated next to Fischer as they sat on a park bench and the odd jogger huffed past through the tropical heat. He made a proposal: The whistle-blower could work as a “consultant” for MLB and hand over his documents. They’d pay him $1,000 a week and hire him an attorney. When Fischer again laughed at the offer, Mullin got angry. “This stuff isn’t worth a million dollars, you know,” he said, according to Fischer.
Fischer made a counteroffer: If MLB would give him enough cash to leave South Florida and open his own tanning salon somewhere, he’d take it. Anything less wouldn’t help him stay bronzed and financially comfortable.
Mullin left, furious. A week later, on March 18, Steven Gonzalez, an MLB attorney, texted Fischer with one final bid. “We can compensate you in the amount of $125,000 for all the records and your signature on affidavits saying nothing more than necessary to authenticate the records. Time is short.”
Fischer fumed. Hadn’t he told them exactly what it would take? Just $125,000 wasn’t buying a quality tanning salon anywhere. “No thank you,” he texted back. “Not worth it.”
That rejection was the final proof Mullin needed. The carrot of cash payouts could get his investigators only so far. They needed a big stick.
• • •
By early March, Dan Mullin and his NYPD vets weren’t the only former street cops on Tony Bosch’s trail.
Jerome K. Hill was an oddity in Florida’s Department of Health, a dull bureaucracy that had been gutted by the state’s Tea Party governor.
Before he won the governor’s mansion in 2011, Rick Scott was a healthcare magnate whose company pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies and paid the largest fine in US history for defrauding Medicare. Safe to say, Scott was no fan of healthcare regulators. One of his first acts as governor was stripping $55.6 million from his state’s DOH and laying off 229 employees. His personal appointees to the department were give
n a clear mandate: Don’t mess with doctors. Even fake ones selling illegal drugs for cash.
As a result, Hill’s coworkers were mostly pencil pushers happy to spend their days looking for small violations at massage parlors and ignoring the fact that Florida had become America’s healthcare fraud capital.
But Hill was different. A stout man with a hearty laugh, he’d spent seven years as a Baltimore city officer walking the beat on North Clinton Street, a drug-torn block of row houses straight out of The Wire.
He was the type of cop who didn’t hesitate to punch a punk in the mouth, but by January 2008, that aggressive policing style had gotten one too many complaints from North Clinton’s residents. So Baltimore PD’s Internal Affairs unit set up an “integrity check.” Just after sunset one day, an undercover officer huddled on a street corner while dispatch radioed Hill to report the lure as a suspected drug buyer.
Hill strolled up to the undercover cop and walloped him on the jaw.
The assault earned Hill a Metro-front story in the Baltimore Sun, a lengthy purgatory in the records department, and by June 2010, a one-way ticket out of Maryland even though criminal charges had been dropped by a local judge.
Hill had to start over. By the end of the year, he’d moved to Miami and taken a $36,000-per-year gig with Florida’s DOH, working as an investigator in a small unit that probed complaints about unlicensed activities.
He was a hell of a long way from gritty east-central Baltimore. He spent most days looking into tips about back-alley dentists and nutritionists without licenses. But when he read the New Times piece in January about Tony Bosch and his famous clientele, something clicked.
Finally, a chance for some real police work had landed in his lap.
The evidence, from where Jerome Hill sat, couldn’t be any clearer. Dan Mullin and his team might be scrambling for documents to prove the very specific charge that Bosch had sold steroids and HGH to MLB stars, but Hill’s bailiwick was a whole lot simpler. All he had to do was prove Bosch had pretended to be a doctor. He could charge him with a felony for practicing medicine without a license—a conviction that brings a minimum one year in jail in Florida and a $1,000 fine.
For Hill, Tony Bosch was his ticket back to the game.
Even though he worked for a small-time state agency, Hill quickly nabbed something that Dan Mullin and his team never could get: Porter Fischer’s trust.
Hill met Elfrink for breakfast at a midtown Miami diner and explained what he hoped to do; the reporter replied that he couldn’t name his confidential source, but he could pass Hill’s contact along to the source in case he wanted to get in touch.
Fischer called the DOH investigator, and Hill quickly won over the Biogenesis whistle-blower by understanding something that the ex-cops had never quite grasped. Fischer hadn’t taken the documents from Biogenesis because he wanted to ruin Alex Rodriguez or Ryan Braun. He hadn’t given the evidence to New Times because he had grand schemes to get rich off the scandal. And he couldn’t possibly care less about the integrity of professional baseball.
Every single move Fischer made had been driven by one simple goal: burning Tony Bosch. Six months after Bosch had told the muscle-bound marketer to go to hell over his $4,000 debt, Fischer was still layering a revenge cake.
So Hill made Fischer a simple promise: If the tanning salon snitch would turn over the evidence he needed, the former Baltimore cop would do everything in his power to put Tony Bosch behind bars.
Fischer didn’t hesitate. He gave Hill a detailed, sworn affidavit about his entire saga with Biogenesis and Tony Bosch, handed over photos of the clinic and prescription receipts, and put Hill in touch with other patients. Hill knew he’d have a better chance of getting a prosecutor to bite with original documents from the clinic. So in late March, he asked Fischer to hand over some of Biogenesis’s medical files.
Fischer was wary of giving Hill any documents that MLB was after. Handing them over to the state meant they could someday end up on a public docket in court, which in turn meant Mullin’s investigators could get their hands on them for free.
But Fischer saw no reason not to turn over a few boxes of files from Bosch’s more ordinary clientele: the real estate agents, lawyers, and teachers who’d been the bulk of the HGH-, hCG-, and testosterone-buying customer base.
The only issue, Fischer told Hill, was that in an overabundance of caution he’d moved most of that paperwork out of South Florida to a storage unit in Ocala. He’d have to grab it and bring it back south.
On March 24, Fischer rented a silver Toyota, drove three hundred miles north to the central Florida town, and loaded the boxes into his trunk.
That evidence never made it to Jerome K. Hill.
• • •
Even though it was only March 24, it was a sweltering day in Boca Raton, with temperatures creeping north of ninety. Officer Lazarus Kimsal tooled his lit-up black-and-white Boca Raton Police car into the parking lot of 2521 North Federal Highway.
A pastel stucco–and-brick edifice fronted by a parking lot lined with unhealthy-looking palms, the address is the sort of dull strip mall that defines suburban Florida. The building houses a Starbucks, a FedEx, a cell phone store, and the Boca Tanning Club.
Although the tanning salon seemed to attract uncharacteristic trouble for a country-club town full of snowbirds—the plot-twisting beatdown of night clerk Adam Godley might leap to Kimsal’s mind—for the most part this strip mall is home to the vapid petty crimes that dominate suburbia: a shoving match in the cell phone store; a homeless guy trespassing in Starbucks; sunglasses stolen off a table at the corporate coffee shop; a Boca Tanning customer accusing his girlfriend of cheating on him with a guy named Brett, and her attacking him with Mace in response; vandals spray painting on a FedEx truck: “Fuck FedEx, Honk if ur Gay and UPS.”
These are not great American crime sagas. “Dog which was tied up to a table took off running and damaged a car,” reads one incident report.
Mostly, the house specialty that dominated Kimsal and his colleagues’ schedule at this particular strip mall was car break-ins. An unemployed tennis instructor got her BMW’s window smashed and her teal purse yanked from inside the car. The window of a Boca Tanning employee’s Honda was pried off to steal her Clinique bag. A muscular man was seen scurrying from an alarm-blaring car carrying a brand-new Apple computer. A brown leather messenger bag containing a laptop was stolen from a van. Car radios and CDs were pilfered from vehicles.
Boca Raton cops responded to most with the enthusiasm you might expect. One case was closed without further investigation because the officer didn’t write down the victim’s phone number and she wasn’t in the phone book. In another theft case, the cops had the license plate number of a suspect seen speeding away but never made an arrest.
So when Officer Kimsal responded to a 911 dispatch for an auto burglary outside the tanning club, it probably seemed like another routine day of paperwork.
As he pulled into the lot, the cop observed two vehicles surrounded by a circumference of shattered glass. The vehicles were a silver sedan and a large white box van. The sedan had its trunk flung open. Two burly white men stood at the scene.
One of the men—frantic, veiny, and sweaty—told Kimsal that his car, the silver sedan, had been broken into while he was tanning in the salon. Kimsal looked in the open trunk and saw a lid from a cardboard box, as well as an empty rifle box labeled HAWK 12-GAUGE 981R.
The rifle box had contained a shotgun, which was stolen, said the man, who gave his name as Michael Porter Fischer. And the lid was from cardboard boxes full of confidential files, which he had just picked up from Ocala, Florida. Those files had also been stolen.
The passenger-side window of Fischer’s car had been smashed. He told the officer that more files were stolen from the front seat, along with a black leather messenger bag containing an exercise strap, a loaded .32 Beretta, and a smartphone. From the rear seat, the thief had taken a red-striped black gym bag containin
g $800, gym clothes, and a laptop computer. Another bag, containing clothes and toiletries, was also stolen.
It was quite a haul for a broad-daylight robbery. But the near-tears bodybuilder seemed most upset about the loss of the files.
The van had also been broken into. Its owner said a laptop computer had been stolen. He didn’t want to file a report, so Kimsal did not record his name.
There were no surveillance cameras. There were no witnesses.
Detective Terrance Payne was given the case the next day. Through Kimsal, he pieced together a few more details about the break-in. He learned that the stolen documents “contained profiles of professional sports players tied to a steroid clinic called Biogenesis,” and that Fischer was a witness for the Florida Department of Health.
Detective Payne spoke on the phone to the DOH investigator on that case. He learned the names of a few of the players involved: Alex Rodriguez, Yasmani Grandal, and Gio Gonzalez.
A few days passed. Payne researched pawn databases looking for the .32 Beretta. No leads were developed.
Then he interviewed Fischer and got the whole story, how the bodybuilder had been offered cash payments by baseball officials, chased by private detectives, and harassed at the tanning salon where MLB investigators thought he worked because he once joked on Facebook that he was a “professional tanner at Boca Tanning.”
Payne began to see a loose plot. Fischer told him about a friend—a big man named Gary Jones—who had gotten him to stop by the salon with the records in his car.
He called Jones but didn’t leave a voice mail. He submitted some blood from the car to the crime lab for DNA testing.
A week or so passed.
Then the cop started getting phone calls from a private detective named Kevin O’Rourke. Hired by Major League Baseball, O’Rourke was interested in the case. Then Payne read about the break-in in the New York Times. And this guy Fischer was incessant, calling him and threatening to go to the media about the slow-moving burglary investigation, and about his suspicion that MLB had orchestrated the crime.
