Alex Rodriguez The RAT! Former MLB Star Snitched On Other Players & His Own Cousin In PED Scandal!

Alex Rodriguez couldn’t keep from snitching when the s**t hit the fan! Sounds like fans were right to be on team Jennifer Lopez all along…

In a stunning new investigative feature published by ESPN on Wednesday, ~~A-Rat~~ A-Rod is reportedly the one who told officials about two MLB stars who were illegally using performance enhancing drugs back in the day! Per years-old Drug Enforcement Administration docs uncovered by the outlet, it was none other than the superstar third baseman who flipped on his peers when MLB came looking for an informant! Jeez!!

So, the ins and outs of the story get pretty complicated, but basically, A-Rod met with two US Department of Justice attorneys and seven (!) DEA agents in January of 2014. That meeting came right before the MLB season in which the New York Yankees star was suspended for his own PED issues, and it was to give the feds one thing: NAMES! Presumably to save himself some time…

During their top-secret sit-down, which only just came to light on Wednesday, A-Rod informed agents about his conversations with Anthony Bosch. As baseball fans know, Bosch is the man behind Biogenesis, a disgraced sports performance company that was caught up as a distributor in part of MLB’s PED scandal throughout the 2000s.

Well, A-Rod told the feds that Bosch had mentioned to him the names of THREE players who were said to be Biogenesis’ PED clients. That list included outfielder Manny Ramirez (pictured above, bottom right), who was retired at the time, and third baseman Ryan Braun (pictured above, top right) of the Milwaukee Brewers. Interestingly, the third player A-Rod flipped on to the feds never tested positive for banned substances during his career, so ESPN didn’t out him in their report. Oops!

The weird thing is that PED use by both Ramirez and Braun was already known to MLB officials at that point. Ramirez had been suspended for 50 games in 2009 when he was a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers for a PED violation. Then, in 2011, he got hit with a 100-game suspension while he was playing for the Tampa Bay Rays. He chose to retire instead of serving that punishment, though. As for Braun, he had already been suspended for more than half of the 2013 season with Milwaukee because of PED violations.

But A-Rod’s rat job in January 2014 wasn’t to MLB officials — it was to the feds. Government agencies were trying to get to the bottom of the legal aspects of the Biogenesis scandal at the time, and how that company may have been involved in the sale and transport of controlled substances like performance-enhancing drugs. The feds didn’t care as much about the baseball side. So, A-Rod’s decision to flip on his peers potentially carried some serious legal weight!!

Also!!! During that chat with the feds, A-Rod had an attorney sit in on the meeting: Joe Tacopina. If you’re clued into American politics, you likely know that name already. Tacopina has been one of former President Donald Trump‘s go-to lawyers in recent years on various civil lawsuits and other matters in New York.

The company you keep…

Anyways, with Tacopina by his side, A-Rod was given “Queen For A Day” immunity by the feds. That’s a colloquialism that basically means nothing the Yankees slugger said in that meeting would be held against him. No matter what it was! His 2014 season-long suspension had already been announced by then, so he wasn’t worried about missing more games. And the feds made it clear they weren’t going go after him for anything legally. They just wanted names. And names he gave!!

Per the ESPN report, this meeting was also technically the first-ever time A-Rod admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during his career. He pinned that purchase connection on Bosch and Biogenesis. At his heaviest use, A-Rod said he wound up paying more than $12,000 per month for various testosterone creams, lozenges that contained human growth hormone, and more substances from 2010 through the end of the 2012 season.

In the end, the feds didn’t end up going after Ramirez or Braun, either. But they did wholeheartedly pursue one A-Rod tip-off from that meeting: his own cousin Yuri Sucart. Rodriguez told the DEA and DOJ that Sucart helped him obtain PEDs for years until accountants picked up on the cousin’s frivolous spending of A-Rod’s dough. The MLB vet fired his cousin in 2012, after which point Sucart turned around and demanded a $5 million cash payment to keep from going to the media about the PED purchases.

So, by early 2014, with his on-field suspension already in place, A-Rod was more than ready to rat out Sucart, too. He named that name as well, and Yuri eventually served seven months in prison in 2015 after pleading guilty to distributing PEDs. The federal case wound down a few years later after Bosch pled guilty to distributing testosterone via Biogenesis and was sentenced to four years in federal prison, also beginning in 2015.

As for A-Rod, he sat out that entire 2014 season as planned before returning to play the next two seasons with the Yankees. At the end of 2016, he retired and quickly transitioned into a TV gig. That’s interesting, too, because his current television role is as a host of a Sunday Night Baseball simulcast on ESPN2. So, the media org that employs A-Rod is also the one reporting on his old snitch moves.

Awkward!!

You can read the full ESPN report HERE, by the way. Reactions, Perezcious readers??

[Image via Jennifer Lopez/Alex Rodriguez/Instagram/Boston Red Sox/YouTube/MLB/YouTube]