Cousin Yuri now in
MAJOR LEAGUE Baseball’s lawyers can question Yuri Sucart — the cousin Alex Rodriguez said helped him procure steroids — about the anti-aging clinic at the heart of baseball’s latest doping scandal, a Florida circuit court judge ruled on Wednesday.
MLB attorneys want to depose Sucart because his name appeared in records prepared by Anthony Bosch, the founder of now-defunct Biogenesis, the South Florida clinic that allegedly supplied performance-enhancing drugs to Rodriguez, Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun and around 20 other big-league players.
Sucart’s attorney, Jeffrey Sonn, said he will appeal the decision by Judge Ronald Dresnick because he believes the lawsuit MLB filed against Bosch and other defendants does not belong in Miami-Dade County circuit court. The suit, filed in March, claims Bosch and the other defendants interfered with baseball’s basic agreement with the Players Association by providing banned drugs to ballplayers.
Sonn told the Daily News that federal labor law requires issues involving the drug program MLB operates in conjunction with the Players Association to be handled by the grievance procedure outlined in the basic agreement. He said Dresnick told him that Sucart does not have standing to make that argument because he is not a party to the suit.
He said he does not know why lawyers representing defendants in the case have not raised the issue. “If I win the appeal, in my view it would be the death of the case,” said Sonn, who is representing Sucart with Don Jones, another lawyer at his firm, Sonn & Erez.
Attorney Martin Beguiristain, who represents a defendant in the suit, Bosch’s former business partner Carlos Acevedo, said he is aware of the legal theory raised by Sonn on Wednesday. “Lets see what happens in the next week or two,” he said when asked why he has not raised it with the court.
Meanwhile, papers filed with the court earlier this month indicate that MLB attorneys deposed Tirzon
Nunez, the brother of defendant Juan Carlos Nunez, on June 19 in Manhattan.
The attorneys most likely questioned Nunez about Sam and Seth Levinson, whose Brooklyn-based ACES Inc. is one of baseball’s most prominent agencies. The union censured the Levinsons last year for failing to properly supervise Juan Carlos Nunez, a consultant who acknowledged he attempted to help ACES client Melky Cabrera avoid a positive drug test. Cabrera, now with the Toronto Blue Jays, is one of the approximately 20 players who have been tied to Biogenesis.
Sources told the Daily News that MLB continues to investigate the role the Levinsons have played in that scandal, and that while they escaped decertification from the union, they could still face discipline from baseball.
As the Daily News first reported last year, Juan Carlos Nunez created a fictitious website for a supplement Cabrera said had inadvertently caused him to test positive for elevated levels of synthetic testosterone. The bizarre attempt to avoid a 50-game drug suspension fell apart when MLB officials began investigating the former Yankee’s claims.
The News reported that Nunez, whom the agents have described as a “paid consultant” and not an employee of their agency, paid $10,000 to acquire the website, which he then transformed into a phony site purporting to sell a sports cream that contained an undisclosed infusion of testosterone. The Levinsons were not involved in the scam, Nunez said. The Levinsons also denied involvement. Cabrera’s attempted scam resulted in a 50-game suspension.
Tirzon Nunez, a former infielder at Brooklyn’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School who later played in the Montreal Expos farm system, worked frequently with his older brother.
Sports Illustrated reported in 2009 that Rodriguez had tested positive for anabolic steroids during the 2003 season, when MLB and the union conducted survey testing to determine the extent of banned drug use in the sport. Rodriguez acknowledged he had used steroids from 2001 to 2003 and said Sucart — his driver and go-fer — had helped him obtain and administer the drugs. The Yankees banned Sucart from the team’s chartered flights, buses and facilities.