The $4,000 Deal Gone Sour That Is Likely to Result in Alex Rodriguez Getting Suspended from MLB

By Steve Eder

In October, Anthony P. Bosch, a troubled businessman who had a permanent suntan and a white lab coat with his name embroidered on it — though he had no medical license — clashed with an investor in his small anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla.

Bosch’s modest business, Biogenesis, promised to make Floridians feel stronger and younger. But Porter Fischer, a former client turned partner, felt spurned over a $4,000 investment gone sour, and he wanted to embarrass Bosch, “to take him out.”

What began as a small-time dispute on the fringes of the medical world has become a major doping scandal, ensnaring some of the biggest figures in Major League Baseball, including Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees.

Ryan Braun, a Milwaukee Brewers outfielder, recently accepted a season-ending ban stemming from his ties to the clinic, and this week baseball officials are expected to suspend at least eight players, Rodriguez among them, because of their relationship with Biogenesis.

The scandal has already badly damaged the reputation of the league and some of its iconic teams, and it has further tarnished a sport long troubled by doping violations.

Baseball investigators think Bosch provided performance-enhancing drugs to Braun, Rodriguez and others. Some of the players’ names appeared in Biogenesis documents that Fischer provided to Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his falling out with Bosch.

“I wanted Bosch, his reputation and his cocky attitude taken down,” Fischer wrote in a sworn statement to the Florida Department of Health in April. “I knew I had the information to take him out, so I began working with the paper on a story about him.”

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