by Tim Elfrink
On March 24, it all came together.
On Fischer’s three-hour drive back from Ocala, Jones called him midmorning to chat, casually mentioning that he had just installed a new spray-tan solution with “great color” at the Boca Raton salon. Maybe Fischer wanted to pop in on his way home and check it out?
With Fischer locked into a booth for ten minutes, a spout lacquering his body with orange-brown dye, St. Fleur allegedly went to work. First he bashed in the window of Fischer’s rented Toyota, police say, and then he popped the trunk and grabbed what he’d come for: the boxes full of Biogenesis’s medical files.
But he also had to make the crime look random. So he also took Fischer’s laptop and grabbed the shotgun from the trunk. Then, the finishing touch: St. Fleur busted out the window of Jones’s van as well, took nothing, and sped away.
It was almost a perfect crime. Fischer—as he gaped at the damage and then spent months agonizing over who had stolen his documents—never seriously suspected Jones, the plainspoken tanning bed repairman whose van had also been bashed in.
But police later alleged that St. Fleur had made a mistake. Just under a handle on Fischer’s rented car, beneath the shattered window, a small streak of blood marked the door.
Anthony Carbone says he and his brother had nothing to do with the break-in, and Jones did not respond to messages seeking comment. Whoever was behind the theft, it didn’t take Jones and his cohorts long to plot out how to monetize their new haul. Within the week, Mullin and the excounterfeiter were sitting yet again in Cosmos. This time, MLB agreed to pay $25,000 for the original documents.
Not a bad payday for a few minutes of highly illegal work at a tanning salon. But Jones had been playing all the angles since the first day he’d gotten involved in this caper, and his instincts said there was more profit to be made from their latest enterprise.
That’s why, as Mullin handed over an envelope full of cash and Jones deliberately passed back the box full of stolen paperwork, a cohort sat in a corner, filming every moment. Multiple sources say that filmer was none other than Anthony Carbone, though as in all things connected to the case, Carbone professes his innocence.
MLB took out its own videotaped insurance policy since they still weren’t sure who “Bobby” really was. DOI investigator Ed Dominguez sat just a few tables back from the counterfeiter and the baseball honcho, making his own amateur film of the affair. In the video, shared with the authors, a little old lady eating lunch partially blocks the view of the deal at the diner.
Dan Mullin walked out of the Pompano Beach diner for the second time with reams of Tony Bosch’s documents. In a shade more than three months in South Florida, the Department of Investigations had collected evidence that Tony Bosch had sold PEDs to scores of baseball players, and they had multiple witnesses to back them up. Bosch himself was still playing hard to get, but thanks to their lawsuit, the pressure was mounting.
But by paying cash to a convicted felon for stolen documents—evidence, in fact, that had been bound for a state investigation—Manfred and Mullin had played extremely dirty to get what their employer needed. That carried implications far more serious than impersonating cops or an investigator’s dalliance with a nurse.
But this wasn’t even the endgame. Jones and Carbone apparently also knew how valuable that evidence could be to the Yankees superstar with almost $100 million on the line.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
A Snitch Is Born
Sweat beaded across Tony Bosch’s forehead. He gulped overheated, badly ventilated courthouse air. The walls seemed to close in, sucking the oxygen from the room.
A few days earlier, Bosch had filled out a court-mandated financial survey and stared back at the brutal truth: He had just $100 left to his name. He was unemployed, and with his name plastered on ESPN every night, he was unemployable. He was bouncing from one budget hotel to another to stay a step ahead of the MLB and state investigators trailing his every move.
Worst of all, he now believed that his star client wanted him dead.
It was May 30, 2013, and as he awaited yet another child support hearing in a Miami-Dade courthouse, Tony Bosch hit the lowest moment in the epic free fall that started with Porter Fischer walking out with a stack of his records and accelerated to terminal velocity when New Times published its story in January.
For weeks, Bosch had done everything possible to protect Alex Rodriguez. A few hours after New Times posted its story online, his lawyer met with Rodriguez’s celebrity legal team and carefully toed the company line, agreeing to release a statement he knew was nonsense. The terse release insisted that the New Times piece was “filled with inaccuracies, innuendo and misstatements of fact” and added that Bosch “vehemently denied” having anything to do with Rodriguez or any other big leaguers.
Even as he helped A-Rod’s defense, though, he was already starting to worry whether he could withstand MLB’s heat. He’d pushed back against his biggest customer once, insisting on hiring his longtime friends Julio and Susy Ribero-Ayala as his attorneys rather than the corporate big shots A-Rod suggested. But Bosch wasn’t exactly declaring his legal independence from Rodriguez: One of the superstar’s attorneys arranged to help with the Ayalas’ legal fees, and in February 2013, Rodriguez wired $25,000 for that purpose.
How exactly would MLB come down on him? The question tormented Bosch for weeks as he waited for Selig’s next move, and on March 22, it came down with authority. MLB sued him, his brother, Ashley, and all of Biogenesis’s officers, claiming they’d harmed the sport by selling PEDs, and potentially seeking millions in damages. He knew the lawsuit was meant to bleed him dry, but he still hoped that as long as A-Rod kept the cash coming, he might hold out.
In the meantime, the army of investigators MLB unleashed onto South Florida made life hell for Bosch and just about everyone he’d ever met. Dan Mullin’s ex–FBI agents relentlessly stalked his parents and friends. Everyone who’d ever owned a business with him or sued him or played softball with him was barraged with phone calls and unexpected visits.
Process servers armed with deposition orders chased Tony all over Dade County. One spent days staking out his parents’ house in Coral Gables. Then, acting on a tip, he took his subpoena to a Coconut Grove hotel, pacing the hallway just outside room 304. Only pure luck had led Bosch to check out earlier. The exasperated server even ordered God knows how many Frappuccinos at the Key Biscayne Starbucks, staking out a corner seat and hoping Bosch might wander in for a coffee.
“He was living life in hiding, and he’s a very social person,” says his friend Hernan Dominguez, who stayed at his side in the months after the story ran. Bosch was nowhere to be found at the Ibis Lounge in Key Biscayne, Scotty’s Landing in Coconut Grove, or any of his other usual watering holes.
For three months, he managed to evade everyone. But, as with A-Rod’s financial largesse, he wondered how long his luck could hold out.
In April, Rodriguez tried to send another bundle of cash to Bosch’s attorneys—a hazy incident that later became a hotly debated piece of A-Rod’s case. This much is clear: On April 8, a lump sum of $49,901.51 arrived with no explanation in Susy Ribero-Ayala’s business account. MLB later called the money a “bribe” meant to keep Bosch docile. Rodriguez’s camp claims the cash was meant to pay off a debt to Roy Black, his previous attorney, and had simply been wired to the wrong lawyer.
Either way, Bosch didn’t take the money; Ribero-Ayala returned it promptly to Rodriguez. If that rejection was meant as a subtle message, Bosch gave A-Rod even more reason to worry two weeks later.
By April 29, he was sick and tired of all the running. So when ESPN reporter Pedro Gomez and a camera crew caught up with him just outside Scotty’s Landing, his favorite bayside bar next to Miami’s city hall, Bosch didn’t scuttle away. For three months, he’d hidden, taking secret meetings with lawyers and watching his name get dragged through the Internet’s darkest corners. Like Victor Conte before him, a pie
ce of Tony Bosch had always wanted to come out of the shadows, to write books and show his face as the guy who’d helped A-Rod and Ryan Braun wallop homers and overcome injuries.
He knew, of course, that he couldn’t tell Pedro Gomez about all that. But a national audience waited on the other side of that camera, and a famous journalist wanted his opinions about the national pastime. So Bosch stopped and talked. A boat bobbed in the middle distance. Bosch’s top three buttons were undone, his hair was slicked back, and aviator sunglasses hid his eyes.
The interview became Bosch’s most revealing moment in the heart-palpitating months after the New Times story broke. It showed the world a nervy, terrified man trying hard to project machismo and bravado. “I’m a nutritional advisor,” Bosch told Gomez in his husky voice tinged with Cuban Spanish.
“What is a nutritional advisor?” Gomez asked.
“I advise on any natural, nutritional properties,” Bosch replied, staring nervously at something behind Gomez and waving his hands vaguely in the air.
This was miles from the polished statement A-Rod’s attorneys had helped him to craft. This was Bosch laughing nervously, casting skittish glances while halfheartedly denying everything. “There’s been a character assassination,” he told Gomez, smiling broadly. “I’ve been accused, tried, and convicted in the media.” He was broke, he said. “My business has suffered, I have suffered, my children have suffered. . . . When you get falsely accused, tried, and convicted in the media, that’s a losing battle.”
When Gomez pressed him on his connections to MLB clients, Bosch offered a contradictory argument. First of all, reports about his relationship to them were all wrong. But Bosch also couldn’t talk about them because they were his clients and he had to respect their privacy.
Then came the key question: Had MLB approached him? “I’ve always been here, Pedro,” Bosch said with a wide grin. “They haven’t reached out to my attorneys, they haven’t reached out to me. I’ll cooperate, but there’s no one who has reached out to me.”
If A-Rod’s posse wasn’t already spooked about the clinic owner’s intentions, they had good reason to be scared after that interview. At MLB headquarters, Rob Manfred took that final quote as a not-so-subtle invitation. He quickly got a message to Bosch’s camp: “I let it be known . . . that we sure as heck did want to speak to him if he wanted to speak to us,” Manfred later testified in Alex Rodriguez’s arbitration hearing.
Within a few days, Julio Ayala called Manfred back to say that, “In fact, Mr. Bosch was interested in cooperating with Major League Baseball,” Manfred recounted.
A-Rod’s camp, meanwhile, started its own efforts to win back Bosch’s loyalty. A few weeks after the ESPN interview, Oggi asked Bosch to meet him in his apartment in Fortune House, a downtown condo development. Jorge Velazquez had always been an important intermediary between Bosch and A-Rod—it was Oggi who’d helped broker their first connection through Yuri Sucart, and it was Oggi who was a conduit to Rodriguez’s tight inner circle of old friends like Pepe Gomez. Bosch had no illusions about his former business partner at Boca Body. He knew that Oggi had a violent past and that when he flew off the handle he could be terrifying.
Bosch didn’t dare turn him down. So he met Oggi and Andrew O’Connell, the private investigator Rodriguez had hired to poke holes in baseball’s investigation. They pushed a sheet of paper his way: an affidavit stating that he’d never sold PEDs to Rodriguez and didn’t have any knowledge about the slugger using drugs. Bosch balked. He wanted his attorneys to look it over first, and he protested that A-Rod wasn’t doing enough for him. “I lost a $5-million-a-year business,” O’Connell claims Bosch said at the meeting. “I don’t have $125 million like a ballplayer.” Oggi glowered and O’Connell asked what exactly Bosch wanted, but the fake doc was noncommittal and left.
A few days later, Oggi passed along a new offer over ceviche at Aromas del Perú in Coral Gables. “They said, we think you should leave town,” Bosch later told 60 Minutes. “We’re going to get you a plane ticket to Colombia and we want you to stay there until this blows over.”
They’d pay him $25,000 a month while he was on the lam and another $150,000 when he safely returned. But Bosch was worried. Something didn’t smell right. In Miami, he wasn’t exactly safe, but at least he was surrounded by friends and family. He knew the territory. What was to stop someone in Colombia from putting a bullet in his head? He turned down this offer, too.
He hadn’t betrayed A-Rod yet. But the signs were increasingly ominous for the superstar and his entourage. They may not have known it, but even as Bosch listened to Oggi’s offers, his attorney was talking weekly to MLB. Someone decided the clinic owner needed a stronger message. It came via a text sent to his ex-girlfriend from an anonymous number. “Tony won’t live to see the end of the year,” it warned in Spanish.
MLB investigators later decided that Oggi was probably to blame. Was he acting alone, or did A-Rod authorize the death threat? Bosch, at least, had no doubts. “Nothing happens without Alex’s approval,” he later said. “I used to be in that inner circle, and nothing happens without him approving it.”
Either way, as the 2013 baseball season moved into its second month, Bosch had more to worry about than vague predictions about his mortality. Amid the lawsuits, the procession of process servers chasing him around town, and the prospects of Oggi putting one in his brain, Bosch’s court battles with his ex-wife had only gotten worse.
On April 10, he’d been called to court to explain why he couldn’t pay the tens of thousands he owed to support his fifteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. He told the judge that he “runs a clinic that does sports nutrition with high-profile clients,” but that he “lost a major contract in July 2012 and [his] income was interrupted.” He was also “under investigation” over the clinic, he admitted.
Aliette told the judge the other side of the story. Tony Bosch paid up only when he faced jail time. He viewed everything else as “a joke,” she testified. The judge ordered Bosch to pay his ex $1,250 in semimonthly installments. If he didn’t come up with $5,000 in the next six months, he’d face that jail time Aliette thought was his only motivator.
Now, a month later with zero new payments to his name, he was back in the same sticky, hot courtroom, still stewing over the death threats, the MLB lawsuit, and the question of what to do about Alex Rodriguez.
Bosch risked a glance across to the plaintiff’s table, where Aliette sat with her attorneys. She stared balefully ahead, refusing to acknowledge her ex-husband. He now owed her more than $40,000, she claimed. Worse, the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney had already lined up to support her. If Bosch didn’t make good on his debts soon, a prosecutor was ready to file charges.
It was all too much. Bosch suddenly grabbed his attorney’s arm, gasping. He told his lawyer he couldn’t breathe before stumbling to his feet and fleeing the courtroom.
He didn’t come back.
Four months after Miami New Times blew up his business and exposed his professional clients, Tony Bosch was almost literally penniless and on the run every day from creditors, cops, reporters, and athletes and their handlers. And he believed that the one guy who had enough cash and power to help him weather the storm was threatening his life. If he had any friends left, he wasn’t sure who they were.
As Tony Bosch walked out of the courtroom into humid downtown Miami, he knew only one thing for sure: He couldn’t run much longer.
• • •
Jerome Hill had Tony Bosch by the balls. Porter Fischer had given the DOH investigator everything: flash drives with Tony’s records, stacks of files, and names and phone numbers for other Biogenesis clients.
Hill also had an advantage over other cops. Unlike DEA agents or local police, Hill didn’t have to prove that Tony Bosch had broken drug laws by selling anabolic steroids, synthetic testosterone, or HGH—charges that, even with the voluminous records Fischer had taken from Biogenesis, can be difficult to establish.
<
br /> Hill felt burning shame at his department’s failure to stop Bosch twice before—once in 2009, when Manny Ramirez had sparked a probe, and again in 2011, when an anonymous complaint had opened another case into Bosch’s clinic. That probe ended with no action after another investigator had been assured by Bosch’s business partner that they were simply running a medical marketing firm; the state employee never bothered to talk to Bosch or any of his clientele. For Hill, it was enough to see Biogenesis’s cocky owner behind bars.
If there is such a thing as an open-and-shut case, this was it. Fischer was the perfect whistle-blower. He’d handed over stacks of prescription forms with Bosch’s signature on them. Nearly every regular client at Biogenesis could testify to the fact that Bosch had presented himself as a doctor. In fact, for months after the scandal broke, regular Biogenesis customers interviewed about Bosch muttered in shock when they learned from reporters that he wasn’t actually a doctor.
“Are you kidding me?” asked Betty Tejada, a longtime friend on Key Biscayne, when told that Bosch had no license. “He was Dr. Bosch. That’s how literally everyone knew him.”
Hill’s work was complicated, of course, when Gary Jones and his cohorts broke into Fischer’s car in Boca and stole the boxes of documents the burned investor had planned on handing over to the DOH. The police veteran from the streets of Baltimore was furious. Hill quickly called Boca PD’s detectives to tell them in no uncertain terms that important evidence from a state investigation had been stolen in the robbery.
But Hill also knew that between the scanned records Fischer had given him and the interviews he could conduct, he still had plenty of ammunition to go after Tony Bosch.
Once he started calling former clients, Hill found no shortage of witnesses. On April 9, he sat down with Porter Fischer for a lengthy interview. On the record, Fischer retold his whole story, from meeting Bosch at Boca Body to starting on his chemical regimen to becoming an investor and employee at Biogenesis before finally storming out with the records and going to New Times with the story.
