Collateral Damage of Liars

Liars destroy reputations.
Liars destroy careers.
Liars separate best friends.
Liars ruin marriages.
Liars steal from business owners; small business owners who's personal money and name are on the line.

Liars ruin morale.

In the biggest test, a capital murder trial, a liar can testify falsely.

Liars begin their careers in early childhood.  Nothing needs to be done to train a liar.

Nothing.

Just ignore that lies that all children tell and watch the liar hone his or her craft, from the earliest days of speech.

Doing nothing is easy.

Although some readers will find no empathy for this particularly collateral victim, others will be able to see the call of money, fame and power, and see what the end result is.

Alex Rodriguez, years ago, was accused of steroid use.  Statement Analysis concluded that he was, in deed, a steroid user.  No special techniques; just judicial and fair application of principle.  Of late, he has acknowledged some of the steroid use.  In fact, one may question whether or not his contract should be honored, or if it was tendered under false pretenses.

Here is an article from the New York Daily News about the life of his cousin, who built a 'career' waiting on A-Rod.

DANIEL PORTNOYCarmen Sucart paints disturbing picture of steroid saga.

Loyalty.

Carmen Sucart used the word over and over again as she sat at her dining room table, cradling her rosary beads and crucifix and sifting through family photographs.

“What do you think a person who’s been with you all those years know about you? Everything,” Carmen Sucart said, referring to the personal assistance her husband, Yuri, provided for one of the biggest names in baseball: Alex Rodriguez.

“Simple things,” Carmen said. “Yuri was fixing for (Rodriguez) all the stuff that he needed when he was in a hotel — the wife on one floor and the others in the other floor.”

Today the 52-year-old Sucart, who is A-Rod’s cousin, is in a Florida hospital, his legs covered in sores, a zipper-like scar running down his chest, his blood pressure dangerously low. While Rodriguez gallivants from college football games to regular workouts, getting in shape for baseball, Yuri Sucart is facing federal steroid distribution charges.

Like some of the longtime friends of Roger Clemens, Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds, Sucart is learning what it means to be the living, human collateral damage of a superstar athlete’s supersized lie. While Rodriguez can still afford the luxuries amid his disgrace, Sucart is bankrupt and vulnerable. Around the time A-Rod plans to join the Yankees’ spring training and begin collecting the $61 million remaining on his contract, Sucart is scheduled to go on trial for his role in the Biogenesis doping scandal.

It’s a perverse twist of the criminal justice system. Sucart could be jailed for supplying Rodriguez with drugs while Rodriguez got limited immunity last January for secretly helping the feds pin down Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch.

For the better part of 20 years — all of Rodriguez’s professional baseball career — Sucart was A-Rod’s right-hand man. In a famous AP photo showing Rodriguez taking the phone call telling him he has been drafted No. 1 in 1993 by Seattle, Yuri is there, grinning right behind him.

Sucart followed along as A-Rod’s personal assistant in Seattle, then Texas and finally, with the Yankees, the most storied franchise in pro sports. There were drug runs through the Dominican Republic, where Rodriguez says Sucart procured banned substances for both of them. And there were all the peccadillos and scandals in between, the strippers and celebrity paramours, the endless travel across North America, the press conferences and the drug rumors and accusations.

DOMINICK REUTER/REUTERSA-Rod is preparing to play for the Yankees next season.

Sucart was there for it all, always at A-Rod’s beck and call, right up until Aug. 5, 2014, when Sucart was arrested, tossed into jail only to suffer the indignity of sleeping on the cell floor, too weak to get up for water or to use the toilet. He was finally moved to a hospital, and in the span of a week had open heart surgery and surgery on his legs to prevent amputation.

A-Rod, meanwhile, completed his season-long doping suspension from baseball, having secretly confessed to the very doping crimes he’d spent 2013 vigorously denying. According to Carmen, A-Rod has never visited Yuri in the hospital, never called to see about Yuri’s condition or legal predicament.

After her husband’s arrest, Carmen reached out to A-Rod’s sister.

“I told her, ‘Can you call Alex?’” Carmen said. “She said, ‘Oh no, Alex is in an airplane right now.’”

The Sucarts had gotten a taste of what was to come in 2012, when the federal government, Major League Baseball and the media began looking seriously into Biogenesis and Rodriguez’s involvement with Bosch.

Carmen Sucart described a haunting comment that Rodriguez delivered late in 2012, after she and her husband refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

“He threatened me, telling me if I talk, he will destroy my family,” Carmen Sucart said. “He said that to me — ‘I got money and I got lawyers. And if you sue me? Be ready.’”

Carmen Sucart waited, holding back her thoughts on the injustice she saw unfolding. Then, early this past week, she read reports that Rodriguez had accused the Sucarts of extortion, and she went public.

DANIEL PORTNOYCarmen's very  ill husband Yuri — Alex Rodriguez’s cousin and former right-hand man — faces federal charges.

“For me, that was the little drop of water that filled the cup,” she said. “I’m here, waiting that he come and destroy me. I’m gonna be waiting for him to come and destroy me. I’m strong. Yes. He got the money, but leave the rest to the One that is upstairs.”

* * *

The Sucarts didn’t need to look far for an example of what a player of A-Rod’s wealth and status could do to them in the name of suppressing truth. All they had to do was watch what Roger Clemens had done to his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, in the previous four years.

When Clemens learned that McNamee had agreed to cooperate with federal investigators looking into steroid use by baseball players, including Clemens, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner launched a vicious legal attack on McNamee, smearing his former friend and confidant on television, in a defamation lawsuit and at the televised hearing before a congressional committee investigating Clemens and other players.

Like Clemens, Rodriguez was able to finance a team of attorneys and public relations experts to do the cold-blooded work of neutralizing a mountain of evidence by attacking the credibility of the one person who could allegedly validate it.

Like in the cases of Bonds and Armstrong, the trainers and other members of A-Rod’s entourage were some of the first people to get sucked up into the relentless vortex of a federal grand jury investigation.

Rodriguez had the money to protect himself, and he didn’t even have to get his hands dirty. Instead, his attorney, Joe Tacopina, castigated Bosch as a liar and raised questions about his alleged illicit drug use. As Rodriguez’s arbitration battle raged in the fall of 2013, his legal team tried to persuade some members of the media to publicize allegations that Bosch had used cocaine, and Tacopina himself alleged that Bosch was seeking a “multi-million dollar book deal.”

An arbitrator upheld the historic ban that MLB imposed on Rodriguez for his Biogenesis involvement, but the attacks didn’t stop there.

Front page for Friday, Nov. 7, 2014.

In a bombastic press release issued shortly after a “60 Minutes” segment aired on Jan. 12, 2014, in which Bosch told interviewer Scott Pelley of Rodriguez’s drug use and the threats he believed Rodriguez’s associates were behind, Tacopina compared MLB’s appeal process to the Salem Witch Trials. He said MLB’s persecution of Rodriguez was intended to eliminate guaranteed contracts and accused the Players Association of lacking “fortitude” because it did not adequately come to the disgraced Yankee’s defense. Tacopina claimed commissioner Bud Selig was using A-Rod to redeem his legacy after years of looking the other way when it came to performance-enhancing drugs, and he accused Rob Manfred — who will become MLB commissioner when Selig officially steps down in January — of targeting Rodriguez to further his ambitions.

“Tonight’s further expansion of Bud Selig and Rob Manfred’s quest to destroy Alex Rodriguez goes beyond comprehension,” Tacopina said.

Three days before the “60 Minutes” interview aired, Tacopina was sent a proffer letter from Miami prosecutors, telling him he could either bring his client in for questioning or wait for a subpoena. Almost three weeks later, Rodriguez, accompanied by Tacopina, agreed to cooperate, admitting his extensive drug use and relationship with Bosch to agents at a suburban Miami DEA field office.

* * *

Now Yuri Sucart has joined the pantheon of drug suppliers whose lives were destroyed when the athletes they supplied got pinched. Some see their lives quietly ruined, others carry on.

No matter what the government has on Yuri Sucart, or where the federal prosecution of a steroid ring takes Alex Rodriguez, Sucart’s wife is speaking out for her husband, who lies in a Florida hospital awaiting a trial.

When she is asked why she finally decided to talk, Carmen Sucart answers in Spanish.

“No puedo mas,” she says. “No me gustan las injusticias.”

Translated, she is saying, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t like the injustices.”

“When you are in the middle of the ocean, and you look out, it’s just water,” she says, pointing to a picture frame with a long palm leaf inside. The image of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe is on the leaf. “And you found something. I cut it and put it in a frame. That’s why I am here today, to stand up for my husband Yuri.”