by Tim Elfrink
It finally seemed to dawn on Payne that this wasn’t just another iPhone pinched from Starbucks.
On April 5, two weeks after the break-in, he e-mailed the crime lab, asking them to process the DNA more quickly.
“We are currently working a Burglary to an Auto case that occurred on 03-24-13 where medical files were stolen that may be related to a Florida Department State of Health investigation into steroid/performance enhancing drugs and their alleged use by several Major League Baseball players,” Payne typed. “I know your office is busy, but is there any chance of getting the submitted DNA expedited? Any help would be greatly appreciated.”
As spring turned to summer and then fall, this was one Boca Raton burglary finally getting traction at the police department, if at a glacial pace. And when the pieces came together, everything eventually pointed to the complicity of Major League Baseball.
• • •
As weeks passed and Bosch’s inner circle refused to crack, baseball’s investigators started using old tricks from their police days to get results. Not all of these were tactics that you’ll find in any police academy handbook.
As a roster full of Bosch associates later testified in sworn affidavits, Mullin and his team didn’t hesitate to throw their weight around in South Florida. The ex-cops pretended to be active law enforcement; lied to landlords, security guards, and parents; and threatened witnesses with lawsuits, eviction, and criminal charges.
The statements describing these purported abuses were compiled by Alex Rodriguez’s attorneys and shared with these authors. The superstar doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the witnesses. But they are also sworn affidavits, filed in court under the penalty of perjury. It’s clear Mullin’s Florida squad—Maldonado; Reilly; two other DOI detectives, Nelson Tejada and Ed Dominguez; local PI Kevin O’Rourke; and more than twenty others from Global Intelligence & Intelligence Strategies were more than willing to do whatever they thought necessary, whether or not it skirted the bounds of legality and ethics.
Marcelo Albir, the former UM baseball pitcher suspected of being Bosch’s conduit to ballplaying alumni including Ryan Braun, says O’Rourke and Dominguez showed up at his Coral Gables apartment building. The investigators told security guards there they were cops to get in.
When the pitcher avoided them, they called his father and warned him that they’d facilitate Albir’s arrest if he didn’t flip. They threatened to punish Paco Figueroa, an associate of Albir’s playing minor league ball, if Albir kept playing hard to get. In March, O’Rourke even talked his way into Albir’s apartment by pretending to be a Miami-Dade cop and then told the former pitcher MLB would sue him into destitution if he didn’t cooperate with them.
Others echoed Fischer’s tale of a good cop/bad cop routine that alternated offers of cash with threats of legal problems. Pete Carbone says he turned down $200,000 and then dealt with regular harassment from the DOI.
Even Oggi signed a sworn statement that MLB’s investigators had gotten the landlord of his latest anti-aging clinic to boot him out in retaliation for giving baseball the cold shoulder.
And the team’s leader, Dan Mullin—whose previous alleged sexual relationship with a DEA agent had caused MLB to hire a law firm to investigate him—was again accused of using sex to attain information.
Lorraine Delgadillo, a pretty blond registered nurse, spent years working for Tony Bosch, first at BioKem and later at Biogenesis. The forty-six-year-old knew the inside of his operation as well as anyone, so Mullin was thrilled when she agreed to meet in early February.
Mullin and Maldonado visited her at home and interviewed her twice about the clinic. The talks went so well that Mullin nabbed her personal cell phone number. On Valentine’s Day she was surprised to find that the divorced burly investigator had mailed her a bouquet of flowers with a handwritten note: “Thanks for all your help.”
The two began regularly texting, and the texts—which were shared with the authors of this book—soon became flirtatious. “I’ll be in tomorrow, can you get away for a drink or dinner?” he texted in one. In another, he wrote simply: “I really miss that beautiful face.”
She asked him for “personal legal advice” concerning her divorce, and Mullin—a licensed attorney in New York State—happily obliged. After an apparent visit from investigators looking into Biogenesis, she texted Mullin: “Well the DEA finally made it out to me.”
She sent him photos of her leftovers. He used emoticons.
On his visits to Miami to investigate Bosch over several months, Mullin and Delgadillo went on several dates. They ate sushi together. They went out for dinner and drinks at Town Kitchen & Bar in South Miami. They had breakfast at Big Pink, a South Beach restaurant famous for its pulled-pork omelet. (“Love that place,” Mullin waxed over text.)
And they had sex, at least twice.
The implications of their tryst are tricky to untangle. Mullin isn’t a police officer anymore, and he wasn’t working on a criminal case. Mullin says that investigators quickly realized that Delgadillo wasn’t going to be a useful witness because she had no knowledge of Bosch’s ties to ballplayers, so he saw no harm in the relationship. “I would never go out with a witness,” Mullin says. “It was so clear to me that she had nothing to do with this case.”
But Mullin was leading an MLB investigation and collecting evidence in a case with tens of millions of dollars on the line. The experienced cop had to know that a sexual relationship with a potential witness wouldn’t look good in court or in the press.
When news about Mullin and Delgadillo’s relationship reached the MLB office, league officials weren’t happy—but any discipline would come after the Biogenesis investigation was resolved.
“No dinner for us now,” Delgadillo lamented over text late one night after learning that MLB knew about their affair. Mullin replied, “Lol of course we can.”
“You risk taker u,” teased Delgadillo.
“No risk nothing wrong,” ruminated Mullin.
When she asked whether he had gotten “slack” about the rumors, Mullin responded with a happy face.
• • •
But by mid-March, it was clear that the sweet stuff—envelopes of cash and morning-after pulled-pork omelets—wasn’t getting the investigators where they needed to be quick enough. Mullin and his bosses were ready to change tactics.
Bad cop was the new name of the game. And a lawsuit in Miami-Dade Civil Court was the blunt weapon Mullin’s team needed. MLB’s attorneys filed the lawsuit on March 22 with an eccentric legal argument: that Bosch had interfered with baseball’s bottom line by knowingly selling banned drugs to its players. Bosch and his colleagues “participated in a scheme to solicit Major League Players to purchase or obtain . . . substances that the defendants knew were prohibited,” baseball’s attorneys argued, resulting in “intentional and unjustified tortious interference” with the game’s contracts.
But it didn’t take much imagination to understand why baseball had actually filed it. For one thing, MLB didn’t just name Tony Bosch. They also named Bosch’s former partner in BioKem, Carlos Acevedo; Albir; underground Dominican agent Juan Carlos Nunez; office manager Ricardo Martinez; and even Tony’s brother, Ashley Bosch.
The message was clear: Either hand over evidence as discovery in our lawsuit and tell us everything in a deposition, or nearly everybody you know will shell out tens of thousands fighting us in court. It was MLB’s billions against the crumbling finances of Bosch’s gang of grifters.
The case also gave Mullin’s crew a believable threat. Everyone from ex–UM pitching coach Lazer Collazo to Daniel Carpman, a doctor who once worked with Bosch, was hit with deposition notices. Now, when investigators went to knock on doors they could tell the witnesses the truth: Either talk now, or spend thousands on an attorney and we’ll see you under oath in a law office with a court stenographer typing away.
As useful as the lawsuit proved for the DOI, though, it also created a circus of bad publici
ty for MLB. Legal experts and sports columnists derided Selig for using the courts to get evidence. “MLB had no subpoena power. So it created some,” the Washington Times opined.
“They just want to put [Bosch] in a squeeze where they can essentially extort him,” Richard Johnson, an Ohio sports attorney, told the Times. “You’re not allowed to do that. In any sense of the imagination, that’s a frivolous lawsuit.”
In its eagerness, baseball was bungling the case. One of the codefendants they’d named was Paulo da Silveira, a “chemist” tied to Bosch. The only problem was that da Silveira was actually a thirty-year-old salesman who’d never heard of Biogenesis or Tony Bosch. “Hell no, man,” da Silveira’s attorney told a reporter who asked if he had any chemistry background. “The kid works in sales.” MLB soon admitted it had screwed up and dropped da Silveira.
Albir, for one, attempted to fight back against baseball using its own tactics. His attorney, John C. Lukacs Jr., filed a demand for depositions of MLB’s investigators, as well as documents related to the league’s probe into Biogenesis.
To not have to deal with that pesky request, MLB simply dismissed Albir from the lawsuit, prompting his lawyer to promise payback. “MLB’s investigative tactics are indefensible,” he told a reporter. “We will explore every available legal remedy to address these tactics.”
The suit didn’t do much to dredge up new information through depositions, either. Bosch skipped several appointments with MLB attorneys and Collazo and Yuri Sucart filed an appeal challenging baseball’s standing.
And when baseball was finally able to drag someone in for a depo, the league was once again frustrated by the tanning salon tycoon who claimed to have already turned down its $200,000 offer.
Just after eleven A.M. on a Thursday morning, Pete Carbone arrived for his deposition at a law office on the thirty-fifth floor of a downtown Miami high-rise, wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses. MLB senior counsel Pat Houlihan was at the deposition, revealed in previously unpublished court documents.
It began with Carbone calmly spelling his name. And then, in the two-hour deposition, which more resembled Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine than any legal proceeding, MLB attorney John Couriel almost got as far as narrowing down in which county Carbone resided.
MLB: Do you live here in Miami-Dade?
Carbone: I’m going to wait until I have my attorney present before I answer any questions.
MLB: Are you represented by counsel?
Carbone: Again, I’m going to have to wait until I have my attorney.
MLB: What’s the name of your attorney?
Carbone: That’s another question.
MLB: OK, when do you expect your attorney will be present?
Carbone: From what I understand, any questions that—like any statements that begin with “when,” “what,” “where,” “why,” I’m not going to answer any of those.
MLB: Have you ever been deposed before?
Carbone: That’s actually another one of those words.
MLB: Actually, it started with “have.”
Carbone refused to say whether he knew Bosch, Juan Carlos Nunez, or any pro ballplayers. He said he couldn’t recall whether he had driven to the law office for the deposition, or how he found the office, or even why he was there. He couldn’t say whether that was him in the BMW with Miami Heat plates that MLB investigators had been following all around town.
Eventually, he just started making noises. “I do not feel comfortable answering any questions—da, da, da. I just got to get out of here.” Carbone noticed the stenographer hammering away. “How do you type that, ‘da, da, da’? What is that? Is there a key for that?”
While Carbone laughed in MLB’s face, in the shadows, it appears he was quietly pulling ingenious strings. Along with his brother, Anthony, and tanning bed repairman Gary Jones, Porter Fischer believes Pete put together a plan that would provide both the league and Alex Rodriguez with all the evidence they’d need to bloody each other in newspapers, union hearings, and courtrooms for months to come.
And he’d make some serious cash doing it.
As the time neared one P.M., Carbone stopped responding at all to Couriel’s questions. Instead, he toyed with his wardrobe.
“I would like the record to reflect that you have put your sunglasses back on, and then taken them off, and now you have put them back on,” the MLB attorney deadpanned.
After a similarly nonverbal response to another query, Couriel remarked: “The deponent has zipped up his hoodie rather than answer my question.”
• • •
A few days after Porter Fischer rejected MLB’s final offer of $125,000, Dan Mullin got a call from a gravelly-voiced character from Boca named “Bobby.”
Bobby had an offer of his own. He had a flash drive with all the evidence New Times had cited in its story. Would baseball, perhaps, be interested in purchasing it?
Yep, baseball was interested.
Mullin and his bosses didn’t know it yet, but Bobby from Boca was Gary Lee Jones. The tanning bed repairman was actually the same swaggering fifty-four-year-old ex-con who’d done two years in the federal pen for counterfeiting more than $40,000 in twenties in the mid-’80s.
The ex-con had analyzed the playing field and saw two suckers ripe for the taking: MLB and A-Rod would both shell out absurd piles of cash to incriminate the other.
When Pete Carbone talked Fischer out of his original, handwritten Biogenesis notebooks in January with his ruse purporting a bloodthirsty Oggi, he went to Rodriguez for the first payday. Carbone had yet more evidence on his hands, though. As he was working with New Times, the always paranoid Fischer had entrusted the tanning salon owner with a flash drive copied with the documents, just in case something happened to him before the story could come out. That was not a wise move.
Jones first tried to talk Rodriguez’s people into buying the flash drive. But Rodriguez already had the originals by March, MLB officials believe, in which case he likely wouldn’t be in the market for more files. So Jones knew what he had to do with the scanned files. That’s when he called Mullin as “Bobby from Boca.”
Mullin agreed to meet the counterfeiter for the first time at Cosmos, Jones’s neighborhood diner.
“A few hundred thousand isn’t going to hurt you,” Jones reasoned with the senior investigator.
After a short round of negotiations, Mullin handed over $100,000 for the files. As he walked out of Cosmos that day, the investigator knew that after three months of detective work to little avail, his team finally had what MLB needed.
On that tiny flash drive, hundreds of handwritten pages from Tony Bosch were the key to taking down A-Rod, Ryan Braun, and every other Biogenesis client.
Indications suggest that Dan Mullin didn’t know the true identity of who he was doing business with. Perhaps it was willful ignorance. For weeks after that first sale, reporters in South Florida—tipped off by MLB investigators—scrambled to figure out who Bobby from Boca was, suggesting that the investigators themselves didn’t know that an ex-con was their bag man.
Rob Manfred later told arbitrators that he authorized the deal believing that “Bobby” was working with Porter Fischer because he’d alluded to details of MLB’s failed dealings with the whistle-blower that only Fischer would know. “His knowledge of our interactions with Porter Fischer led us to believe that Bobby from Boca and Porter Fischer were actually working together,” Manfred testified in the confidential hearing.
But why would Fischer reject $125,000 outright for the records and then promptly sell them for a lower price through a coconspirator who, presumably, would get a cut of the cash?
At the time, Fischer was also eagerly cooperating with Jerome Hill. That’s why, shortly after Jones sold the scanned files to MLB, he rented a car and drove to Ocala for the stored medical records.
During his meeting with Mullin, the lead investigator had mentioned that should Jones get his hands on any original documents from the
clinic they could be worth significantly more to the ex-cops than the scanned files. Jones said he’d see what he could do.
Truth was, ever since the New Times story had landed in January, Jones had been quietly gaining Fischer’s confidence.
Fischer and his previous confidante, Pete Carbone, had their falling-out not long after the story ran. How could Fischer trust him when Carbone had double-crossed him by selling Bosch’s original notebooks to A-Rod?
But unlike Carbone, Jones was easy to trust. Differing from most of the tanning salon crew, he was actually older than Fischer and radiated ex-con wisdom. Slowly, Fischer began unloading his troubles on the tanning bed repairman.
“He seemed to be on my side,” Fischer says. “I’m starting to freak out about everything . . . and he’s not a thirty-three-year-old like Pete. I’d try to talk to this person and that person, but no one has a perspective because the whole situation is so massive.”
As Jones said later, he saw Fischer as an easy mark from the get-go. “He was stupid,” the ex-con said. “He didn’t know how to make money. That was ridiculous going to New Times.”
So Jones acted like a “complete idiot,” he says, lulling Fischer into trusting him completely. He didn’t know precisely what to do with that trust until late March, when Fischer mentioned his plan to retrieve the files from Ocala. Then he apparently set the wheels in motion.
According to Fischer, the bait was a new spray-tan solution. And the weapon was a twenty-year-old employee named Reginald St. Fleur at Anthony Carbone’s Boca Raton outlet of the Boca Tanning Club. Reginald handed out flyers outside the club. He had a juvenile criminal record—and had once been questioned by cops about a prior theft from a car in the club’s parking lot—but no felony convictions as an adult.
