by Tim Elfrink
But Fischer maintains that the only money he ever got out of the whole Biogenesis affair was the $5,000 he took from MLB in exchange for a first meeting. After turning his records over to a federal grand jury and being ordered to stop talking to the press—a tough assignment—he quietly found another marketing job. He’s also founded a non-profit called the Porter Project, which he says will educate young athletes about the dangers of PEDs and push state legislators and regulators to keep the Tony Bosches of the world out of business.
Carbone calls allegations that he had anything to do with the break-in, or even filming Jones’s sale of the records to Mullin, a “good fairy tale.” He repeatedly said that he would tell a New York–based author “everything” if taken out for a steak dinner. He even planned his order—surf and turf—and asked if he could bring friends. But when the author arrived in South Florida ready to take Carbone to the chic steakhouse Prime 112, Carbone stalled for days, said he was in meetings, and never spoke to the author again.
If the theft of the Biogenesis records was not random, it sets up a simple calculus. Dan Mullin, on behalf of MLB and with the approval of at least top baseball executive Manfred, purchased the records from tanning club regular Gary Jones. If Jones was behind the theft of the records, a straight line implicates MLB as buying stolen property that was bound for a state investigation.
According to Detective Payne, league officials did not contact him after purchasing the records. Since the records were being investigated as stolen, league officials were legally obligated to do so, Payne indicated in an e-mail.
Shoes will be dropping all over Florida in the aftermath of Biogenesis. Anthony Bosch’s clinic is the target of both a federal and a state grand jury, which means he could face prison time for his former bustling drug empire. The Florida grand jury, according to law-enforcement sources, is focusing on distribution of PEDs to minors. That could be worrisome to Tommy Martinez and any other youth coaches whose names appear in Bosch’s records.
Biogenesis laid bare how sophisticated and prevalent doping is among teenage athletes, and resulted in changes to state regulations concerning youth competition. Florida High School Athletic Association director Roger Dearing admits that its rules were “outdated,” and language has been added to bar HGH as well as steroids, and to ban coaches who allow it. (There would still be no drug testing for student athletes.)
Even Florida’s thriving anti-aging industry might finally be regulated thanks to Bosch’s excesses—if change isn’t trampled by politics. In response to New Times reporting on Biogenesis, state senator Eleanor Sobel introduced the “Health Care Clinic Act,” which would require clinics like Bosch’s to be inspected and certified.
And Major League Baseball may still have to answer for its apparently extralegal tactics in Florida. A Boca Raton police spokesperson told an author of this book that Payne is now “investigating whether St. Fleur was acting alone.”
But what’s a little obstruction of justice when you’re trying to clean up baseball?
• • •
“You were caught in a vise,” intoned Scott Pelley, a journalist who has interviewed multiple sitting American presidents.
“Yes,” replied Anthony Bosch, “I was in a dark place. I—”
Bosch appeared to fight off tears, and continued: “I had no idea what I was going to do next.”
A later shot showed Bosch on a porch at Scotty’s Landing, poking at a propped-up iPad with a drink by his left hand. This was the pensive money shot, designed to show an elusive character now tracked down and recorded in his candid routine. But Anthony Bosch—cheeks and eyes twitching, a goofy smile now forming—couldn’t quite pull off candor, and never would be described as pensive.
Of all the strange places his doomed relationship with Alex Rodriguez had taken him, this was perhaps the most unlikely: Anthony Bosch’s 60 Minutes moment, eagerly hyped by news outlets around the country and ultimately watched by millions.
Americans had heard a lot about Bosch since the Biogenesis story broke but had seen very little of him: the old mug shot, the sweaty, full-of-lies ambush interview with ESPN’s Pedro Gomez, the photo circulated by his publicist of Bosch walking through the MLB offices before testifying against Rodriguez.
This was supposed to be Bosch’s true introduction to the nation, and it was fully managed by Major League Baseball. This Sunday prime-time, double-length segment was baseball’s uppercut in its one-two knockout of Alex Rodriguez.
The day earlier—January 11, 2014—arbitrator Fredric Horowitz had finally signed and e-mailed his decision to attorneys representing both Rodriguez and MLB. The confidential thirty-three-page decision was a dry bombshell. “It is recognized this represents the longest disciplinary suspension imposed on a MLB player to date,” Horowitz wrote at one point. “Yet Rodriguez committed the most egregious violations of the [Joint Drug Agreement] reported to date . . .”
Horowitz had reduced Rodriguez’s suspension to 162 games. This was vindication for baseball. Rodriguez would still be banned through 2014—and the rest of Bud Selig’s tenure—as baseball had originally sought. It was still the harshest punishment for performance-enhancing drug use in American team sports history.
Twisting the knife further was the fact that baseball had originally attempted to negotiate a 162-game suspension of Rodriguez if he agreed to confess to his sins, at least according to A-Rod’s legal filings. Rodriguez’s millions spent engaging in an unprecedented public fight against punishment, antagonizing the Yankees, the union, and his fellow players, had bought him only a ticket back to square one.
The key points of Rodriguez’s crusade—that Bosch was a criminal not to be trusted and that MLB used legal intimidation, graft, sex, and media manipulation to build its case against him—factored little in Horowitz’s decision. Cases were built every day on the word of worse criminals, Horowitz noted. And “resort to the legal system . . . does not amount to coercion,” he wrote of the Miami-Dade County lawsuit. Rodriguez and his camp had paid for evidence themselves, Mullin’s affair with Lorraine Delgadillo “did not yield any information relevant to the investigation,” and Rodriguez had orchestrated media leaks of his own.
Horowitz boiled down his decision to a skeleton of the reams of evidence both sides had presented him with. By his math, Rodriguez had committed three violations of the Joint Drug Agreement, one for each of the 2010, 2011, and 2012 seasons in which he had doped through Bosch, as evidenced by the fake doctor’s testimony, notebooks, phone texts, and “reasonable inferences drawn from the entire record of evidence.”
As far as obstruction, Horowitz focused only on two allegations: that Rodriguez, after issuing a false denial himself, had “played an active role in inducing Bosch to issue his own public denial” the same day the Miami New Times story broke. And that Team A-Rod, in that meeting with Oggi in a downtown Miami condo, had attempted to get Bosch to sign an affidavit stating that he had never plied the superstar with drugs or had any knowledge of Rodriguez using banned substances. “The remaining allegations of obstruction, while troubling,” wrote Horowitz, “need not be addressed because they would not affect the ultimate determination regarding the appropriate penalty in this matter.”
While MLB issued a statement of understated celebration—“we respect the decision rendered by the Panel and will focus on our continuing efforts on eliminating performance-enhancing substances from our game”—Rodriguez released a statement calling the decision an “injustice.”
His own reaction painted himself as a martyr for players’ rights, endangered by a decision that led, in his mind, to a dystopia where contracts were voided due to PED violations. “No player should have to go through what I have been dealing with, and I am exhausting all options to ensure not only that I get justice, but that players’ contracts and rights are protected through the next round of bargaining, and that the MLB investigation and arbitration process cannot be used against others in the future the way it is currently being used
to unjustly punish me,” said Rodriguez, suddenly channeling his freedom fighter father.
Though Horowitz’s decision dominated sports coverage and ran above the fold on the front page of the New York Times—RECORD DOPING PENALTY FOR TOP-PAID YANKEE, read the headline, given side-by-side placement with the obituary of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon—all that sports fans knew about the official case against Rodriguez was from the original New Times story exposing the records, and subsequent articles based almost entirely on unnamed baseball sources.
News show 60 Minutes, then, was baseball’s bullhorn to finally air the details of their case against Rodriguez, with the network television debut of their star witness. MLB was barred from releasing Horowitz’s report, but nothing stopped their chief witness from spilling his guts on air. Pelley bragged of more than five hundred text messages the CBS show had obtained from Bosch, and read a few of the more damning missives between Bosch and Rodriguez.
Bosch stammered, appeared puffy and somewhat dazed, and even Pelley observed that his subject was a heavy drinker and smoker. But he dished the scatological details, of meeting Rodriguez at a nightclub in the Fontainebleau Hotel to draw blood—he did not mention the vial lost on the dance floor—and injecting the superstar himself.
“Alex is scared of needles,” Bosch explained, in a revelation similar to Jose Canseco’s claim that he shot up Mark McGwire in a stadium bathroom. For whatever Freudian reason, few images appear to be as titillating to Americans as that of the highly paid athletic superstar partially disrobing in a bathroom stall and getting pricked with a needle at the hands of another man.
Even Bud Selig appeared on the show to condemn Rodriguez: “In my judgment his actions were beyond comprehension.”
The segment appeared neatly arranged by MLB to lay out its case against Rodriguez, with little skepticism concerning the motives and methods behind Major League Baseball’s trench warfare against A-Rod.
Most notably, Selig wasn’t questioned about the allegation that his office bought stolen documents. Manfred, who also appeared, was asked about giving a guy he knew only as “Bobby” $125,00 for the records, but only as it pertained to the documents’ authenticity. “We were eyes wide open with respect to the questions that would surround these documents in terms of authenticating them in any legal proceeding, making sure they hadn’t been doctored,” Manfred said.
If he discussed whether MLB knew the records were stolen when they bought them, that clip didn’t make it on-air. The fact that the original documents were supposed to be part of a state probe by the Department of Health—that baseball had thwarted a law-enforcement investigation—was also never mentioned.
The Players Association, despite its own unraveling relationship with Rodriguez, decried the league’s cooperation with 60 Minutes—clearly planned while Horowitz’s decision was still pending—as violating the confidentiality of the Joint Drug Agreement. “It could not resist the temptation to publicly pile-on against Alex Rodriguez,” read the MLBPA’s statement on the commissioner’s office’s participation, and said the union was “considering all legal options available to remedy any breaches committed by MLB.”
Pelley’s send-off to the 60 Minutes segment was a saccharine one. He noted that Selig was to retire at the end of 2014. “Part of his legacy is the establishment of the toughest anti-doping rules in all of American pro sports,” said Pelley, without noting the other parts of Selig’s legacy, including being lambasted by the US Congress for allowing doping to overtake baseball in the first place.
But the commissioner’s commandeered television program—on which Tacopina appeared in Rodriguez’s defense—didn’t finally blast his nemesis into submission.
Two days after Horowitz inked his decision, Rodriguez filed a lawsuit—his third post-Biogenesis—against both Major League Baseball and the Players Association, seeking to overturn the suspension in federal court. The suit claimed that Horowitz—a “hard-core baseball fan,” Rodriguez added suggestively—was in MLB’s pocket and that the union had abandoned him in its timid fight against the league. The suit specifically criticized union chief Michael Weiner, who had died less than two months earlier.
And Rodriguez saved a special ire, of course, for Selig, who had refused to testify at his arbitration hearing but appeared on national television, making “a mockery of the arbitration procedure and the confidentiality supposedly attendant to it.”
Rodriguez’s attempt to overturn the ban in federal court—where judges don’t generally like to interfere in private union matters—was a legal long shot. As a consequence, Rodriguez had to file Horowitz’s entire decision in court. The document, detailing his alleged drug regimen and incriminating correspondence with Bosch, among other previously confidential information, would have to be made public, US district judge William H. Pauley III ruled. “Given the intense public interest in this matter and Commissioner Selig’s disclosures last night on ‘60 Minutes,’” Pauley remarked, “it’s difficult to imagine that any portion of this proceeding should be under seal.”
Rodriguez had allowed public access to a document that painted him, quite convincingly, as a prolific liar and cheat. Thanks to the suit, anyone could read thirty pages of testimony about how Bosch had doped up A-Rod for years and peruse detailed breakdowns of his chemical cocktails. But strangely, after that sacrifice of what remained of his public image in order to pursue a slim chance at returning to baseball in 2014, Rodriguez’s attitude suddenly appeared to shift from sanguine to apathetic.
A couple of days after filing the lawsuit, he surfaced in Mexico City, at the opening of a new Alex Rodriguez Fitness Center, a gym franchise in which he has a stake. The gym had kept his impending arrival secret, ensuring that only local reporters would show. As he grabbed a microphone and addressed the small crowd in Spanish, Rodriguez had the air of a washed-up lounge singer, exiled from Vegas and plying his trade at a saloon in Topeka instead. “The league could have done me a favor because I’ve played twenty years without a time-out,” Rodriguez ruminated. “I think 2014 will be a year to rest mentally, and physically prepare myself for the future, and begin a new chapter of my life.”
Maybe Rodriguez had considered the notion that, after filing a lawsuit against his players union, a forced early retirement might be a rosier prospect than playing major league ball again after all. Prolonged litigation against a multibillion-dollar corporation is one thing. But summers full of fastballs to the ass?
The same day that he made that appearance, a few dozen major leaguers joined a union conference call in which they seethed about Rodriguez suing his colleagues, railed that he should be expelled from the MLBPA, and contemplated revenge in the way only baseball players can, according to an account of the phone call later published by Yahoo! Sports.
Remarked one of those players: “When he gets up to bat, you can hit him and hit him hard.”
An MLB source with direct knowledge of Rodriguez’s actions in the weeks following that Mexico City appearance clears up the reasoning behind his sudden change of heart. Soon after filing the federal lawsuit, which would bring more animosity, more embarrassing disclosures, more danger of being unable to avoid going under oath and and more legal fees, Rodriguez was feeling uneasy. So as he has always done just before being led off a cliff—though perhaps a little too late this time—Rodriguez reached out to a confidante.
According to the source, he called Jim Sharp, a Washington, DC–based attorney who Rodriguez had replaced with Tacopina back in March.
Sharp advised Rodriguez that he was being milked for more money and was going to lose.
A person close to Rodriguez boils it down to this: He still wants to be loved. And he realized that slamming the brakes on the fight now was the only way to salvage any future in baseball. Rodriguez has no doubt he will be back in 2015, when he will be turning forty years old. He’ll play on the Yankees if they don’t buy out his contract. He will collect his remaining $61 million, plus home run milestones. (W
illie Mays is only six dingers away, at 660.) And after that, Rodriguez still holds out hope that he might get a job broadcasting. Or maybe coaching, like Mark McGwire, who despite steroid notoriety is the hitting coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Heck, maybe he’ll put together an ownership group and buy his hometown team, the Miami Marlins.
Rodriguez had Jim Sharp call MLB for him and tell league officials that Team A-Rod was throwing in the towel. On February 7, 2014, Rodriguez’s attorneys dismissed the claims against Major League Baseball and the Players Association, officially ending his last shot at playing in the upcoming season. Rodriguez did not dismiss the suit against the Yankees’ team doctor, Christopher Ahmad.
Just like that, a single player’s battle against the league, which had raged louder and longer than any before it and soiled both baseball’s top offices and seemingly what was left of Rodriguez’s reputation, was over.
Rodriguez, as unpredictable as ever, did not issue a statement.
• • •
Bosch’s 60 Minutes appearance hadn’t served only to fight MLB’s public relations war. It was also the world’s introduction to Anthony Bosch, celebrity.
Bosch had laid bare his aspiration in his notebooks when he had written his plans to become “CEO / founder / chairman / lead physician / scientist / professor / author,” and master of his own fitness and nutrition conglomerate. When he agreed to cooperate with MLB, he had made sure to add a clause that allowed him to detail his doping of players in future book or movie deals.
