by Tim Elfrink
Rodriguez believed that early on in the Biogenesis aftermath, the union had decided not to charge hard on his behalf, instead saving its fire for other battles with the league.
The thin-skinned Rodriguez has total recall for the times he’s been wronged. This was the last straw in his relationship with Weiner, who had irked Rodriguez with his public comments since July. “Our players that deserve suspensions, we will try to cope with their suspensions,” Weiner had said during the All-Star Game. Then he had told the Daily News: “I can tell you, if we have a case where there really is overwhelming evidence, that a player committed a violation of the program, our fight is going to be that they make a deal.”
The day after Weiner’s appearance on Mad Dog Sports Radio, Rodriguez had his legal team fire off a letter to the union expressing his “extreme shock and disappointment.”
It was the beginning of a terminal rift between Rodriguez and his union. In the good old days, Donald Fehr would have raged against the suspension, thrown the whole drug-testing program into doubt, and made Selig’s life a living hell. Rodriguez never seemed to realize that times had changed and as far as Weiner was concerned, the majority of players who were clean wanted the kinds of tests that Fehr had fought against for so long.
The way Rodriguez saw it, the Players Association should have been condemning MLB’s strategic media leaks and intimidating legal and extralegal tactics in Florida. The MLBPA “has made matters worse by failing to protest M.L.B.’s thuggish tactics in its investigation,” Rodriguez’s attorneys wrote in another letter later that month, “including paying individuals to produce documents and to testify on M.L.B.’s behalf, and bullying and intimidating those individuals who refuse to cooperate with their ‘witch hunt’ against the players—indeed principally Mr. Rodriguez.”
He asked the union not to represent him in his arbitration hearing, a request they rejected. The union then leaked the letter to the New York Times, according to Rodriguez, only infuriating him further.
On August 10, Rodriguez was drug tested. He pissed clean.
Six days later, a week and a half into Rodriguez’s return to the Yankees, 60 Minutes aired a story that was bound to make his life in a major league clubhouse yet more awkward. The show, citing “two sources with direct knowledge of the matter,” claimed that members of Rodriguez’s “inner circle” had leaked the documents implicating Braun to Yahoo! Sports.
Rodriguez attorney David Cornwell denied the allegations and called them “another attempt to harm Alex”—he didn’t say by whom—“this time by driving a wedge between Alex and other players in the game.”
But Team A-Rod, as has been stated, was the only entity with Bosch records and any conceivable motive to leak them at this time. Though 60 Minutes did not name who exactly supplied the documents to Yahoo! Sports, baseball officials were already positive (to the point of fighting him in federal court to admit the fact) that Rodriguez’s PR guru, Michael Sitrick, was the leaker.
By mid-August, Rodriguez had successfully ostracized his employers, colleagues, professional allies, and family members alike. Confidantes and loved ones who had been with him throughout his life had abandoned him. That uncle, Augusto Bolivar Navarro, who had lived in Washington Heights during Rodriguez’s first years and been like a surrogate father, had died in 2005. A-Rod’s relationship with formerly inseparable cousin Yuri Sucart had been lost to public betrayal and threats of litigation. Eddie Rodriguez, who had practically raised Alex at a Miami-area Boys & Girls Club, had finally had enough of his former protégé upon hearing about the renewed cheating, according to a mutual acquaintance. Yankees president Randy Levine, from whom Alex Rodriguez had once regularly received paternal e-mails—“U are the man. I told u that for years. U can and will do it,” is one such message from 2011—now appeared to Rodriguez as a member of the enemy cabal. Even Don Hooton, who traveled the country speaking with Rodriguez to kids about the dangers of steroids following the first scandal in 2009, had cut ties. “Once the Biogenesis news broke, we basically just hit the pause button,” Hooton says in an interview for this book. “The word that I’d use to describe my feelings is disappointment.”
Like a fat man in a brothel, it appeared that the only friends Rodriguez had left were those whom he paid handsomely. He had replaced Roy Black, the Miami attorney, and Sitrick with another extremely expensive team of specialists. An Atlanta-based sports statute wonk, Cornwell was the seasoned vet at defending athletes in doping cases. He had represented Braun in his successful fight to overturn the 2012 ban. (In the Biogenesis aftermath, Cornwell also defended Cervelli, making the situation trickier if Rodriguez was behind leaking the documents to Yahoo! Sports.)
James McCarroll and Jordan Siev of the high-profile Manhattan law firm Reed Smith were also in Rodriguez’s entourage. Ron Berkowitz, who represents Jay Z—a presumably far easier client—handled Rodriguez’s publicity.
And Rodriguez’s lead private investigator, Andrew O’Connell, was a former Secret Service agent and federal prosecutor. When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a Manhattan hotel maid, the head of the International Monetary Fund hired O’Connell. Through interviews with hotel employees and analysis of phone records, surveillance videos, and key card entries, the bald, pugnacious investigator pieced together a labyrinthine timeline of the day of the alleged attack that cast doubt on the purported victim’s story. The charges were ultimately dismissed.
Now O’Connell was in Miami, trying to unravel a case that was just as complicated.
Flanking O’Connell on these Florida fact-finding missions was a former hockey enforcer squeezed into a tailored Italian suit. Attorney Joe Tacopina became the public face of Rodriguez’s defense, a deflecting figure whose heady grandiosity made his client appear almost down-to-earth in comparison.
The “most hated lawyer in New York,” as Tacopina was dubbed by the New York Post, dresses like a playboy and wears his hair slicked straight back. A former hockey player at Skidmore College, he holds the NCAA record for minutes spent in the penalty box for brawling: 412. A Brooklyn kid who worked as a prosecutor in that borough, Tacopina—a Yankees fan—is now part-owner of the Italian soccer team A.S. Roma.
“Mr. Tacopina is to the defense bar what Donald Trump is to real estate,” a New York Times scribe once wrote. The Maserati-driving Tacopina is proud of his reputation for winning the freedom of some of Gotham’s most villainous characters. In his office in a Madison Avenue high-rise, he’s framed the cover of the New York Post from the day after he gained the acquittal of two NYPD officers charged for their alleged roles in the 1997 sodomy of prisoner Abner Louima. JUSTICE DEFILED, screams the headline. Next to that—and a Yankees-branded bat signed by Alex Rodriguez—is a framed op-ed for the Daily News in which Tacopina wrote that a Florida jury was correct to acquit George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
In an interview for this book, Tacopina did not veil his hatred for Bud Selig. “He’s the world’s biggest hypocrite,” Tacopina said. “Here’s a guy who’s been found guilty of collusion, and he wants to talk about the integrity of the game.”
But Tacopina’s national television debut performance in defense of Rodriguez did not go well. On August 19, Tacopina was interviewed by Matt Lauer on the TODAY show. In a gambit he had tried on shows with lesser audiences, Tacopina lamented that he couldn’t talk about Biogenesis, or Rodriguez’s drug-testing history, because of the confidentiality agreement between the union and the league. “If the vice president of Major League Baseball would be good enough to waive the confidentiality clause,” Tacopina told interviewer Matt Lauer in his tumbling cadence, “I would love nothing more than to talk about Alex’s Rodriguez’s testing history and various things.”
MLB was clearly prepared for Tacopina’s bluff. Lauer indicated a document in his hand. “Joe, that office sent us a letter overnight saying they are willing to do exactly that,” said Lauer, handing the paper to Tacopina.
The letter stated that with Tacopina’s signature
, both Rodriguez and league officials would be permitted to fling open Rodriguez’s closet full of skeletons: the results of every drug test he’d taken, all prior violations of the drug program, all documents and messages related to Rodriguez’s treatment by Bosch, all documents related to Rodriguez’s treatment by Anthony Galea and Victor Conte, and all evidence of Rodriguez’s obstruction of the MLB investigation.
Unsurprisingly, Tacopina did not sign the letter unleashing the records.
Gaining less ink was the fact that Rodriguez’s story had now changed. Immediately after the Biogenesis exposé, Sitrick had released the statement denying any “purported relationship” between Bosch and Rodriguez. It was a lie that became more bold-faced when Bosch showed that Rodriguez had wired him just under $75,000 soon after the New Times article. (Roughly $50,000 was returned, as a purported error.)
And now Tacopina told Lauer of Rodriguez and Bosch: “There was a relationship, obviously, but these facts will be answered at an appellate process hearing.”
Later, in an appearance on CNN, Tacopina reiterated: “Clearly there was a relationship—a consulting relationship.” Even if you believed that Bosch had aided Rodriguez only on nutritional matters, which became Team A-Rod’s new story, there was no denying that Rodriguez had initially lied.
A bruising day turned literal as, on the evening after Tacopina’s TODAY appearance, the Yankees traveled to Fenway Park for their first game against the loathed Red Sox since Rodriguez’s return from injury.
The first pitch Rodriguez saw from Red Sox starter Ryan Dempster just missed his knees, sending him skittering out of the batter’s box. Three pitches later, Dempster corrected his aim, beaning Rodriguez in the left shoulder. Fenway erupted in roaring approval.
An umpire issued warnings to both teams but didn’t eject Dempster, causing Yankees manager Joe Girardi to race out of the dugout cursing, getting tossed from the game himself as a result.
Rodriguez seethed silently as he took first base. It was clear Dempster was expressing the shared opinion of the Red Sox pitching staff: that Rodriguez shouldn’t be allowed to play while his appeal was pending. “I’ve got a problem with it,” Boston pitcher John Lackey had told reporters. “You bet I do. How is he still playing?”
In the sixth inning, with the Yankees down 6–3, Rodriguez got what he later called “the ultimate payback” by slamming a pitch from Dempster ten rows deep into Fenway’s center-field bleachers. The homer sparked a comeback in a wild game that ended with the Yankees winning by a score of 9–6.
Wearing a business suit in front of his locker after the game, Rodriguez excoriated Dempster in his Leave It to Beaver–under-pressure speaking style. “Whether you like me or hate me, what’s wrong is wrong, and that was unprofessional and silly,” he declared.
Asked if Dempster should be suspended for beaning him, Rodriguez entered a Catskills comedy routine. “I’m the wrong guy to be asking about suspensions,” said a wide-eyed Rodriguez as the crowd of beat reporters burst out laughing. “Holy mackerel!”
So he would never be Derek Jeter. But Rodriguez was making the slightest inroads toward being sympathetic again. Considering he had started his season as the most loathed active athlete in pro sports, there was nowhere to go but up.
• • •
By mid-September, AROD Corporation—the corporate entity that controlled his little empire—was firmly in the clandestine information-gathering business. If MLB was going to unleash an battalion of ex-cops and former FBI agents on Miami to take down Rodriguez, the slugger decided he’d deploy his own squad of underlings to outwit baseball’s detectives. Their job was simple: Collect evidence that MLB had screwed up in its unfair crusade to snare A-Rod. That evidence was later shared with these authors.
O’Connell, Oggi Velazquez, and Pepe Gomez, among other Rodriguez associates, had retraced the MLB investigators’ warpath through South Florida. In May, Team A-Rod had gotten Pete Carbone to sign a sworn affidavit stating that MLB investigators had harassed him and his tanning salon customers, and that Porter Fischer was “mentally unstable and an abuser of alcohol and drugs.”
Now as Rodriguez prepared for his arbitration hearing, they had Albir sign an affidavit declaring that the MLB investigators “repeatedly pressured, harassed and threatened me and my family” and impersonated cops in their attempt to get the former UM player to talk. Collazo signed a document for Team A-Rod in which he said he had been “intimidated” by MLB, which had threatened to involve his family and go to the media.
Robert Davis Miller dished on his old party buddy’s alleged prolific cocaine use and provided the photo of Bosch and two baggies of white powder resembling cocaine.
And Lorraine Delgadillo provided an affidavit describing her tryst with Mullin. “After dinner we drove back to my home. There, Investigator Mullin and I had sex,” read a couple of lines of her account, which, by the very nature of being an affidavit, is not extremely romantic.
As the MLB investigators had, Rodriguez attained these testimonials by throwing around great gobs of baseball profit. A game’s salary to Rodriguez was a life-changing sum to an average person. For Delgadillo’s affidavit, the Valentine Mullin had left at her door, and her cell phone containing text messages between them, Team A-Rod gave Delgadillo $105,000.
MLB and Rodriguez played human tug-of-war over a potentially important witness. Since May, Major League Baseball had been collecting the testimony of Bruli Medina Reyes, the Dominican trainer who Rodriguez had met at the 2009 World Baseball Classic. Sucart had arranged for Reyes to train Rodriguez in 2010 and 2011.
MLB investigators first showed up at the door of his home in the DR in the wake of the Biogenesis exposé. They flew him to New York City, where he sat through marathon debriefing sessions at MLB headquarters. They had Reyes sign an affidavit describing Rodriguez’s relationship with Bosch, and having personally observed Sucart and Bosch injecting Rodriguez.
Reyes was looking like a star witness, and MLB stalked him across the globe, visiting him in Florida and Canada and bringing him and his family back to New York on baseball’s dime in September. That’s where he learned that the league intended to have him testify against Rodriguez. Reyes later claimed that MLB investigators threatened to jeopardize his US work visa if he refused.
Pepe Gomez found Reyes in the New York City hotel where MLB had him holed up. He told Reyes that Rodriguez would “take care of him,” according to a later arbitration document, arranged for the trainer to be moved with his family to another nearby hotel where MLB wouldn’t have control over him, and took over his legal and New York living expenses.
Reyes had switched sides. When he did speak at the arbitration, it was about how MLB made him sign their bogus affidavits. An arbitrator ultimately declared Reyes moot, saying “his demeanor under oath and contradictory declaration rendered all of his testimony suspect and unreliable.”
Rodriguez tracked these cold war chess moves while suited up for the Yankees. These were bizarre characters to have dealings with one of the world’s wealthiest athletes: a tanning salon owner, a convicted counterfeiter, an ex-con who bragged about cocaine use. But Rodriguez—he of Pepe, Yuri, and Oggi—has never surrounded himself with only the glossy hangers-on that might be in the orbit of somebody like David Beckham.
Besides, Rodriguez was less ballplayer and more litigant as the summer wore on. In forty-four games for the Yankees in 2013, Rodriguez did show some pop. He hit seven home runs, and on September 21 even passed Yankee legend Lou Gehrig for the all-time grand slam record when he hit the twenty-fourth of his career. The Yankees lingered in playoff contention until late in that month but were ultimately shut out of the postseason for only the second time since 1994.
Rodriguez spent the last three days of the 2013 baseball season riding the bench in Houston. His legs were stiff, so he watched from the dugout, surely plotting, as the Yankees played three absolutely unimportant games against the lowly Astros.
On September 30, the day after
the season ended, Rodriguez reported to his arbitration hearing while Team A-Rod made its largest, and seemingly most important, purchase in Florida.
Bobby from Boca had, earlier in the summer, reached Rodriguez and offered to sell him stolen Biogenesis records. Rodriguez had turned him down, likely because he already had a set. But now Bobby—real name Gary Lee Jones—had something else to sell.
Jones signed an affidavit in which he detailed Dan Mullin’s purchases of two sets of stolen records—the flash drive that he claimed Porter Fischer had given him, and the records that were pilfered from Fischer’s rental car—for a total of $150,000 of baseball’s money. (In his own account, Rob Manfred has put the figure at $125,000. Also, Jones did not say how he got possession of the stolen docs, only that he “obtained” them.) He described Mullin pushing him envelopes of cash at Cosmos Diner. “The cash was loose, in fifties and hundreds,” Jones added.
Jones described in the affidavit a later meeting with Mullin in which the investigator, apparently without irony, warned him of his legal liability. “They told me that I could be arrested for having been involved with stolen property,” wrote Jones.
Then, with Rodriguez at MLB headquarters on the first day of his fight for his baseball future, Jones sold a member of Team A-Rod video of Mullin purchasing one set of the documents. The film had been surreptitiously recorded by Anthony Carbone one booth over, according to multiple sources familiar with the video.
Gary Lee Jones demanded $200,000 for the film. (A source close to Rodriguez denies that they received the full video. The source says Jones was paid only a “deposit” for the film but never produced the entire recording.)
MLB may have bought itself all the evidence it needed to try to boot A-Rod from the game, but the slugger had purchased his own evidence that baseball’s investigators had skirted ethics and broken the law to do it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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