by Tim Elfrink
“Bosch [was] wearing a white lab coat with ‘Dr. Tony Bosch’ on the right breast,” Fischer told Hill of their first meeting in Boca Body.
Fischer spelled out the full schedule that Bosch had put him on: hCG shots five times a week, synthetic testosterone once a week, and MIC/B12 mixes twice a week, all for $375. Later, he switched to HGH and other drugs, “after ‘the doctor’ said it was OK.” (Fischer even gave Hill photos of Tony’s emblazoned lab coat and the Belizean MD degree hanging on his wall.)
Later that afternoon, Hill sat down with Alvaro Lopez Tardon’s wife, Sharon, who was waiting for her chance to testify against him in the federal case involving the Spanish cocaine ring. She described going to Bosch four years earlier and starting a regimen of HGH and other drugs, which she later blamed for her husband’s anger problems and low libido. She never doubted Bosch was a real physician, she told Hill.
“I thought Anthony Bosch was a medical doctor,” she said in her sworn affidavit.
Finally, on April 16, Hill interviewed a client identified as JG in her affidavit. She’d been diagnosed by an endocrinologist with hyperthyroidism and sought Bosch out on her own for treatment options. “Dr. Bosch introduced himself as a doctor and therefore I did not ask or inquire as to his credentials because I had no reason to doubt him,” she testified. “I have seen many doctors throughout my adult life and have never questioned them or [verified] their credentials.”
Later that same day, Hill met with Miami-Dade prosecutors at their headquarters just off the Dolphin Expressway. The case was already coming together. Hill could see the possibilities: Once they had Bosch in their grasp, the bogus doctor could drop a dime on every pharmacist and doctor who aided him in building his steroid enterprise. South Florida law enforcement could finally take a unified stand against the thriving doping industry.
Dade prosecutors, impressed with Hill’s work, made a few calls and set up a follow-up meeting for the next afternoon. At one P.M., they’d meet in Brickell with a detective from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and a representative from Florida attorney general Pam Bondi’s office. There, they could sketch a game plan for taking down Tony Bosch and everyone who’d helped him.
Hill went to bed happy.
Just three hours before his Brickell meeting the next day, the investigator got a call from his department’s Tallahassee chief. She broke the news quickly: The conference was canceled. Hill was not to meet with prosecutors or anyone else, and he was to close the case against Bosch immediately, with no further interviews.
The veteran cop was flabbergasted. The biggest case of his career had landed right in his lap. The skittish whistle-blower who’d rejected every other authority on Earth had given him the keys to take down Tony Bosch. And now his boss was shutting it all down?
“I explained [the prosecutors’] interest in the case, but to no avail,” Hill wrote in an e-mail to his supervisor two days later. “In addition, I was given direct orders to finish the case and have it written by this Friday. The report will be sent up without the quality it requires.”
On April 23, Bosch’s punishment from the State of Florida became official: a $5,000 fine—later reduced to $3,000 upon Bosch’s appeal—and a cease and desist letter ordering him to stop impersonating a doctor. Prosecutors would have to decide whether to charge Bosch with a crime.
But the DOH seems to have done everything possible to ensure that Bosch wasn’t charged. It was bad enough that they’d ordered Hill to close his case. Then, instead of sending prosecutors the full eighty-six-page report he’d compiled over two months of work, they sent Miami-Dade state attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle just a cover letter and a one-page summary.
Rundle’s office scoffed, replying that “additional investigative steps are required before this office can initiate criminal proceedings,” and suggesting, with a touch of tongue-in-cheek, that the DOH should consider obtaining “sworn testimony from a material witness.” (Which, of course, Hill had already done thrice over.)
When a television reporter later gave Hill’s full report to Miami prosecutors, a baffled spokesman admitted that he found it “very surprising” his staff had never been given the thick file and confirmed that they’d even followed up with a specific request with the DOH for more details.
Even as Tony Bosch played a dangerous game of cat and mouse with MLB and his millionaire clients, he’d yet again walked away from a state investigation with barely a scratch. But why would the DOH pass up a chance to bust a guy who’d already rubbed two previous investigations in their face?
DOH officials refused multiple requests for answers to that question. But a few facts suggest why the case was doomed from the start.
The biggest impediment to Hill’s case was Florida’s deep-seated reluctance to discourage its booming anti-aging industry. In the previous decade, the Sunshine State had grown into the nation’s capital for the legally dubious, hugely profitable market, its 549 clinics surpassing California for the most in the country. Robert Goldman and Ronald Klatz’s A4M is now headquartered in a plush, wood-paneled office space near downtown Boca Raton.
A4M’s clinics represented an important, money-generating industry for the state—sales of HGH alone had spiked to $1.4 billion a year in 2012 with a large percentage of that increase presumably coming from clinics like Biogenesis. Those profits, in turn, filter from drug companies—with Roche subsidiary Genentech banking $400 million and Pfizer and Eli Lilly taking in $300 million and $200 million, respectively, according to an AP investigation—to doctors writing prescriptions to clinic owners like Bosch.
Going hard after Bosch would send a message industry wide: Florida isn’t open for HGH business.
The fact that Hill’s bosses decided to derail his Biogenesis probe was hardly unusual. In fact, under the probusiness, antiregulation governor Rick Scott, Florida’s healthcare regulators had been castrated and actively discouraged from pursuing criminal cases.
Remarkably, the most powerful man in the state had a background in medical fraud. Scott, a Republican, had taken office in 2011. Previously, he had founded healthcare giant Columbia/HCA, and led the firm as its CEO. But in 1997, the feds built a massive criminal case against the company, alleging it had stolen nearly a billion dollars from Medicare by lying about marketing costs and overstating how much hospital space was being used. In a civil case tied to the probe, Scott appeared in a video deposition where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself seventy-five times. The company later pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay back $600 million. Scott, who was never personally charged, was forced to resign—with a nearly $10-million golden parachute and $350 million in company stock.
Yet Scott weathered the campaign commercials showing him stammering, “I plead the Fifth,” over and over, and won the governorship. And when he moved to Tallahassee, he seemed to take out all his rage over that federal case on his own state’s Department of Health. In his first year, he helped the Legislature lop $55 million out of the DOH budget, resulting in hundreds of layoffs. The managers he hired all shared his laissez-faire attitude toward regulation and enforcement.
“The people coming in were all political folks and their direction was all coming straight from the governor’s office,” says Daniel Parker, who spent fourteen years in the DOH’s Division of Environmental Health. “What was driving all this was an ideology that wants to get rid of government altogether.”
Turnover was endemic. Nearly a dozen top-level administrators resigned in the first months of 2012, including Scott’s first choice to run the department and Parker, who fired off an angry department-wide e-mail after stepping down.
One of the hardest-hit departments was Jerome Hill’s own division. The Unlicensed Activity Unit—charged with going after bogus practitioners like Tony Bosch—was racked with bad morale and divisive leadership. Former investigators describe a poisonous atmosphere where criminal investigations were heavily discouraged. One investigator
says she quit after a boss demanded she do nothing about an illegal dentistry operation she’d discovered. Another, a former cop named Christopher Knox, says he was fired before Hill opened his Biogenesis investigation when he refused to back off from an unlicensed pharmacy. “They actually ordered me not to assist the police in going after someone who was breaking the law,” Knox says.
The department’s own statistics confirm that its problems are not the imagination of disgruntled investigators. Between 2010 and 2013, the DOH referred 206 cases involving frauds like Tony Bosch to prosecutors. Just twenty-nine of those cases resulted in arrests and just four netted convictions. In other words, fewer than 2 percent of the Tony Bosches slinging drugs under the table ever faced any jail time—even when caught red-handed.
So it’s not surprising the DOH failed to present Miami prosecutors with the ammunition they’d need to lock up Tony Bosch for pretending to be a doctor.
It certainly didn’t help, of course, that Gary Jones stole a pile of evidence bound for Jerome Hill, or that MLB bought it to use in its case against A-Rod rather than return it to the state trying to lock up Biogenesis’s owner.
Then again, MLB had good reason to keep Tony Bosch out of jail.
• • •
The meeting that changed the course of baseball history, cemented Bud Selig’s last-minute flip-flop from steroid commissioner to bold antidrug reformer, and heralded the possible crashing end to Alex Rodriguez’s career took place at a dockside dive bar that serves conch fritters and buckets of Bud Light on plastic patio tables.
Tony Bosch was a wreck. He fidgeted with his beer, eyed the crowd nervously, and stuttered through his answers. Sweat pooled under his arms in the summertime humidity. Across the table, Rob Manfred and Dan Halem, baseball’s senior vice president and senior counsel for labor relations, sat and listened calmly as Bosch unburdened himself about the threats on his life and the web of criminals surrounding Biogenesis.
“Bosch’s principal concern was for his safety,” Manfred later testified during Rodriguez’s arbitration. “He felt the situation had escalated in South Florida to the point that he was concerned that harm could come to him.”
In the end, after months on the lam, Bosch had called this meeting with MLB’s top officials for two simple reasons. The first was that the pressure cooker strategy Dan Mullin’s investigative team had created to bully him into submission had worked beautifully; the lawsuit they’d filed to make Bosch’s life hell had done just that. He was broke and facing serious jail time over unpaid child support. They’d even dragged his family into it by naming his brother, Ashley, in the suit.
But there was more than just the mounting financial pain. The truth was, Bosch no longer trusted Alex Rodriguez. Even if A-Rod didn’t want him hurt, Bosch had come to believe that his life was in serious danger—if not from the Yankee star’s entourage, then from one of the entourages connected to the scores of other players to whom he’d provided illegal drugs. It wouldn’t take much of a nudge for someone to bash his head in with a pipe or pop a couple rounds into his car.
“How many hangers-on does Alex have that would love to do a solid for Alex?” Hernan Dominguez asks. “And then there’s at least fourteen other players out there, all with their own relatives who want to do a solid for them.”
Cooperating with MLB went against every fiber in Tony Bosch’s being. He’d made a career out of beating its testers, and the thrill of cheating the system almost equaled the pleasure of knowing he was helping superstars with their game. He was loyal to a fault. And he knew the second he flipped, he’d become one of the most famous snitches in history.
“Tony knew he only had two options: to tell the truth, or to keep his mouth shut. For months, he held out because he wanted to see if it would blow over,” Dominguez says. “Tony finally realized that you can’t go against Major League Baseball and their billions of dollars. . . . They’re going to come after you until they get you.”
But on the day that he hyperventilated and ran out of his latest family court hearing with Aliette, Bosch knew they’d already gotten to him. He simply couldn’t trust A-Rod to keep him safe. That left only one option: MLB. Bosch’s attorneys had sent word to Manfred. He’d meet him in person to talk the terms of his surrender.
They met at Scotty’s Landing, the same waterfront dive where ESPN had caught up to him a month earlier. Manfred later called the meeting “one of those get-to-know-you, can-I-trust-you meetings.” Bosch, Ayala, and another attorney sat across from Manfred and Halem and began sketching out an agreement: MLB would drop Bosch and his brother from its lawsuit and promise not to force any of his family members (“children, parents, siblings, ex-spouses,” reads the agreement) to testify. They’d pay for his attorneys and protect Bosch from whatever civil litigation might come his way. And they’d pay up to $2,400 a day on bodyguards to keep him safe for a year. That last piece was vital.
In the extraordinary proffer between a private corporation and an informant under federal and state investigation, MLB also promised to vouch for Bosch to any agency that might threaten him with arrest. “MLB will inform such agencies of the value and importance of Bosch’s cooperation in its efforts to achieve the important public policy goal of eradicating [performance-enhancing substances] from professional baseball, and request that such agencies consider his cooperation with baseball,” reads the agreement, a copy of which was obtained by these authors.
Bosch had good reason to ask for a good word from the commissioner. As the public learned two months later, a federal grand jury had been convened to probe whether Bosch should face criminal charges for his clinic. A separate Miami-Dade County investigation by prosecutors was launched months after this.
As part of the deal, Bosch was required to turn over all “notes, photographs, journal or diary entries, electronic communications . . . text messages, telephone records . . . audio or visual recordings . . . prescriptions, courses of treatment, receipts or ledgers”—in short, absolutely any shred of evidence that would incriminate “any Player or individual acting on such Player’s behalf regarding the prescription, purchase, sale, consumption, administration, or possession of any [performance-enhancing substance].”
Rodriguez later claimed that Bosch’s agreement also included millions of dollars, but that’s not strictly true. Bosch’s attorneys later collected more than $1 million in fees from MLB, according to an estimate by Manfred in Rodriguez’s arbitration, but the agreement sketched out over beers at Scotty’s included no cash payouts. Manfred was clear that it would hurt his credibility. “Our interest in him was as a witness,” Manfred later testified. “Therefore, we could not pay him. That was just off the table from the beginning.”
Still, getting the lawsuit off his back and a bodyguard at his side at least helped to keep the sharks at bay. Within a few weeks of Bosch’s baseball summit over cheap beers in Coconut Grove, a Miami-Dade prosecutor filed an update to his child support case. That $5,000 overdue bill to Aliette, the cause of so much grief and so many hours in court, had suddenly been paid in full.
On June 3, Bosch signed on the dotted line. Halem signed on behalf of the league. MLB had its witness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
Singled Out
By his usual primped standards, Alex Rodriguez was haggard—heavier than usual, with gray stubble flecking his chin and a blue velour warm-up thrown over a V-neck T-shirt. Sitting alone at a folding table, he looked like an insomniac poker player.
Through a career marked by humiliating revelations and media feeding frenzies, Rodriguez’s go-to demeanor under fire has been as the wide-eyed innocent. Going into full-bore attack mode didn’t fit Rodriguez. That’s what he paid men with law degrees to do.
But Rodriguez wanted reporters—several dozen of whom were crowding him in the bowels of a tiny minor league baseball stadium—to know that he was angry. “I will say this,” began Rodriguez. “There’s more than one party that benefits from me never stepp
ing back on the field. That’s not my teammates and not the Yankee fans.”
As the newly flush—and newly flipped—Tony Bosch paid off his child support in Miami-Dade County, Alex Rodriguez was on the comeback tour in Trenton, New Jersey.
His hip surgery rehab assignment, baseball’s method of easing major leaguers back by having them play in minor league games, had already taken him to Tampa and South Carolina. On the night of August 2, 2013, he was finally back in the tri-state area. Though he had dominated the back covers of New York tabloids for eight months since the Biogenesis story broke, his only communiqués to date had been statements issued by representatives and the odd tweet.
The plan was for Rodriguez to play two games for the Trenton Thunder, the Yankees’ double-A team, and then rejoin the Bronx squad. But speculation was rampant that despite A-Rod’s best-laid plans, he would never play another game for the Yankees.
Everyone knew that Tony Bosch cooperating with MLB was a game changer. No doping supplier had ever helped MLB get his clients punished. Armed with his evidence, the biggest round of suspensions in sports history would start cascading through MLB ranks. And Bud Selig’s leaky office had already clued everyone in to when that punishment would start raining down: on the following Monday, the same day Rodriguez was scheduled to finally suit up for the Yankees.
News articles were even quoting Major League Baseball sources suggesting that Selig might hit Rodriguez with a lifetime ban, making him the Pete Rose of PEDs.
The confluence of imminent return and imminent exile had turned this double-A baseball game into a strange spectacle. The bandbox stadium was at its capacity of nine thousand. Those in attendance didn’t know if they might be witnessing the curtain call of the great A-Rod’s baseball career, here on the banks of the Delaware River, separating the grittier edges of both New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
