Billy Corben’s Screwball documentary uses eight-year-old actors to mock the Biogenesis scandal, where unlicensed "Dr. T" Tony Bosch (sentenced to four years for fraud) and whistleblower Porter Fisher clashed over a $4,000 debt—exposing MLB’s corruption, including Jerome Hill’s illegal tactics. Corben pivots to Miami’s scam culture, from Cocaine Cowboys-era gun violence to Medicare fraud by figures like Rick Scott, and critiques Florida’s impunity, where police exploit loopholes while politicians like Kathy (26 years in office) avoid accountability. The scandal’s absurdity mirrors broader societal issues: exploitation thrives when institutions fail, and even role models like A-Rod—who taught inmates nutrition in Alabama’s prison—can’t escape the cycle of deceit. [Automatically generated summary]
And to boot, so, you know, we've done some sports docs in the past.
We did, you know, some of the ESPN 30 for 30s, like the U. And when you do a sports doc, I mean...
I don't want to say it's easy, because making documentaries is a challenge, but sports docs are pretty paint-by-numbers.
It's like you interview some players, you interview some coaches, some journalists, they mention a bunch of games, and you show a bunch of game footage.
It's a pretty...
Straightforward process.
With this one, it's not about baseball.
It's baseball adjacent, I guess, but it's about shit that went down in nightclubs, in shady clinics with fake doctors, hotel rooms, bars, locker rooms.
So you've got a bunch of talking heads in your documentary, but then you've got nothing to cut to.
You've got no B-roll.
So I'm like, we're going to need to shoot recreations here, which is...
To me, I don't know.
It's like when you're doing non-fiction filmmaking, it's fake shit when you film recreation.
So it's like, I'm like, how do we do this in a creative way that's consistent with the tone of the movie, which was always called Screwball, meaning it was always like a farce, you know, like a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, Coen Brothers-esque sort of Florida fuckery farce.
And so we just wanted to keep in that mode.
So I'm watching the characters.
So we got Tony Bosch.
Who is the fake doctor and Porter Fisher who is the whistleblower who stole the medical records and started this whole thing.
They were then stolen from him and then sold to not the highest bidder but any bidder and every bidder they were sold to and they're talking and I'm noticing That they had like a very similar storytelling style.
Like for example, a guy will be like...
So I walk into his office and I say, I want my money.
And he says, I don't have your money.
And I said, well, you better get my money.
And he said, what are you going to do about it?
And I said, I'm going to break your net.
And I'm like, oh shit.
They're so vivid and in the moment and talking dialogue.
So we could drunk history this, right?
We could...
We can edit together the doc and then have the actors lip syncing the actual interview dialogue and all the actors will be eight years old.
And I don't know, like, I've always wanted to do it.
Like, way back, Spike Jonze, 1997, Biggie video, Sky's the Limit.
Biggie had just been murdered.
He was faced with this challenge of producing a posthumous video.
And so Spike Jonze was like, okay, we'll just do a straight up Classic Bad Boy Records circa 97 music video.
Cars, Versace, wardrobe, girls, mansion, hot tub, but they'll all be eight years old.
And the guy, what a bizarro personality he was who would just tan every day and hang out at this doctor's office in the waiting room telling everybody how great it was.
Well, I say the great thing about Miami is it's so close to the United States.
But, like, it's...
It's also like it's America's Casablanca.
Like, just people kind of flee to Miami from like all over the country and all over the world, usually leaving some kind of criminality in their wake.
And, you know, come here and kind of there and reinvent themselves, you know?
Like, it's just...
And then you have all of these criminals there who then kind of baking in the sun, you know, in this kind of multicultural fucking paella, you know, that we have.
And then they just like, and then they start putting their minds together and brainstorming and they hatch just the most inane schemes and scams.
Like that's our primary export from Miami is just schemes and scams.
Well, there certainly was before the Great Recession, when a lot of them started shutting down.
But most of them have rebounded.
One of the clever things some of the real estate developers did was they opened their own bank.
Literally their own bank.
They had a bank where the entire board of the bank were all real estate developers, and over 90% of the loans the bank made was insider loans, just to the board.
And then, of course, they went belly up in the Great Recession, and what happened?
Real estate who loaned themselves money that wound up being backed ultimately by us, by the taxpayers.
Yeah, I mean, that's the old.
Remember, I mean, you hear that line all the time now that, like, you know, people used to rob the bank from the outside in.
Now it's from the inside out.
But none could be truer than that story.
And that's a Miami story.
And when the Great Recession happened, the FDIC had to open an office in Florida because we had more bank closures than any other state in the union.
Because we were like, you could go down there and you could buy a fucking mortgage for your dog at a drive-thru in Miami in the late 90s, early aughts.
And I remember interviewing a guy who were working on a project called Ponzi State about the state of Florida as a case study in the Great Recession years ago.
We never finished it, unfortunately.
But we're interviewing this guy.
And he says, you know, we were, and this is pre, like, Big Short.
Like, this is before anybody sort of knew a lot about this.
And he said, we were down here in Miami setting fires, and Wall Street was trying to read our smoke signals.
That's why I say, like, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
Every time I go there, I always go, I forgot how fucking crazy this place is.
You really should have to have a passport.
But I love it.
I really do love it.
It's a crazy place to do stand-up.
I did this joke because I was doing a Netflix special, and I was doing it a couple months after I did this gig in Miami, and so I was using those yonder bags.
You know what those are where people have to put their cell phone into this magnetic bag?
You keep the phone, but you hold the phone in the...
If you want to use it, you just have to step outside.
They open up the bag and they give you your phone.
In every other city, it made for a better show because people just sat down and watched the show.
In Miami, it made for literally 40% of the crowd at any given time was getting up and going to the back and using their phone and coming back in.
If you were a cop or a lawyer or a journalist or an ER doctor, I remember talking to an ER doctor once.
He tells me a story.
1980, shortly after the Mariel Boatlift started, which I think everybody's kind of pop culture frame of reference for the Mariel Boatlift is Scarface.
Tony Montana was a Marielito.
That's the beginning of the movie when Castro is ranting and raving that he's flushing the toilets of Cuba onto the United States, specifically to Miami.
He was working at the trauma center at Jackson Memorial, our emergency room in Miami, and he said he got a Marielle refugee.
These guys would stand on the beach.
It looked like Havana in South Beach.
There's that coral seawall, and it had a really Havana vibe.
So they would chill mostly at these flop houses south of 5th Street in Miami Beach, where the cops would literally be leaving after a stabbing at one of these places.
And they'd be three blocks away.
They'd get a call to go back because now there was a shooting or something else.
They would be going there like all around the clock.
And they would just get in gunfights.
Like literally it would just be like someone would cheat at Domino's and they would just pull out a gun and one guy would shoot the other guy.
And so he has a Mariel refugee who comes in to the emergency room with a gunshot wound.
And he knew Spanish.
He was bilingual.
He said to the guy, he said, you're really lucky.
Because if this bullet had hit, you know, a few centimeters or whatever, this way, you would have died immediately.
You would have bled out right there on the scene.
Died instantly.
And guy splits.
A few days later, another Mariel refugee comes in with a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot where he had told the other guy that if he got hit there, he would have died.
Could never prove it, never was able to trace it back, but he was pretty well convinced that it was a revenge shooting.
For the other shooting, and the guy knew exactly where to shoot him and kill him because the doctor had told him where to do that.
But that was like every day in Miami.
The lady who cuts my hair, for Christ's sake, she said, Billy, I was so naive in those days.
I cut people's hair.
They come over, kiss her goodbye, and put a tip in her pocket.
And she'd go home, turn her pockets inside out, have our little crumbled bills and everything.
And one day she finds a little baggie of white powder.
That's something that one of her clients had slipped into her pocket as a tip.
And she said to her girlfriend, she says, what the hell is this?
And her friend said, oh shit, that's worth more than gold.
We got all these Brickellista thousandaires driving their rented fucking Lambos and blowing the engines out on South Beach because they don't know how to drive them.
Listen, it's a fake it till you make it kind of town.
And there's nothing really to make there.
You can't really, other than a real estate hustle, money laundering, drugs, politics, being a corrupt politician, there's really no other way to make it in Miami.
The disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the income gap is widest and getting wider in Miami-Dade County than just about any city in the country or any metropolitan area in the country.
And that's why I said that Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
If you want to know what challenges we'll face as a nation or calamities will befall us in the years to come, you need only look at Miami.
T.D. Allman called it the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether.
And so, you know, when the election was playing out, the cycle in 2016, I was like, you know, all my friends are just like, this can't, this Trump thing can't happen.
I was like...
Hang on.
I was like...
Florida elected, and in fact re-elected, Rick Scott to be governor.
He is the biggest Medicare fraudster in the history of the United States.
Everybody knows it.
Everybody's aware of it.
It's very well publicized.
We re-elected him.
We elected him twice as the top fucking executive in our state.
What makes you think that the United States of America wouldn't do that?
And I know it's fair to say...
If you're going to be the governor of a state, you should know a little something about the largest industry in the state.
Like, if you're going to be the governor of Michigan, you should have some familiarity with the automobile industry and manufacturing.
In Florida, if you're going to be the governor, arguably you should know something about our biggest industry.
I mean, you could argue that he's the most qualified man for the job.
Oh yeah, we got like...
Medicare fraud is one of the largest industries, has been for decades.
I mean, we have billions and billions of dollars in fraud that just comes out.
So you'll go into like Little Havana or Hialeah, for example, in a municipality in Miami-Dade, and there'll be a little abuelita sitting behind a desk, half asleep.
And she'll be surrounded in this tiny little one-room office by little mailboxes.
You know, like P.O. boxes.
And a mailman comes in every day and just puts checks in the boxes.
And they're like...
In some cases, they've stolen social security numbers and, you know, stolen identities, basically.
And some cases, they're just old people who aren't aware that their mail is being forwarded to this location.
And they've just got they I think Miami for a while.
We had more Medicare payments for HIV and AIDS medication than every other part of the country combined.
And it's all just old people.
So it's like, you would have to assume that 100% of our elderly population suffered from HIV, had HIV, were HIV positive.
I mean, it's fucking impossible.
You had female patients getting penis pumps that were paid for by Medicare.
And it's fine if you pay for it and then videotape it for distribution, because then that's porn.
I don't really...
First of all, it's a contract between two consenting adults.
If we're talking about...
Yes.
offer acceptance consideration as with anything else the stigma as you mentioned a lot of that is part and parcel of the prohibition the illegality of it is what brings the seediness it's what brings the danger right the Because it's forced underground, you introduce all of these elements that don't have to be there.
They could take place in clean environments.
Instead of in the black market and underground, it could take place where you can protect all the participants involved.
But it's been true of...
It's been true of prostitution, which they call, for a reason, the oldest profession.
The second we introduce the prohibition, it creates a level of danger and a threat to society that wouldn't exist if you're like, well, wait, what if you just let me smoke this?
What if you just let me drink this because I'm an adult making a responsible decision for myself?
What if you just let me engage in sexual activity with this person who is perfectly willing to do it in exchange for some remuneration?
You go all the way back to the alcohol prohibition, to what's going on right now with the cartels.
I mean, how much would it fix if they made all drugs legal?
How much would it fix?
I mean, we'd have a real problem in the beginning with access, where there would be so much more access, you'd probably You know, you would lose people.
Apparently there's some significant spikes in usage, but the problem is it correlates to a significant spike in population of the state.
A lot of people moved to Colorado just because of marijuana.
They moved to become a part of the business and because they just wanted to be free.
And then California...
We've had medical weed forever, and now we have legal, legal weed, and I don't think it's changed much here, but you do have...
There's some issues.
There's definitely...
I mean, I don't think it's beneficial in any way to sugarcoat the fact that having legal drugs makes people have more access to those drugs means maybe there's going to be a few people, whatever the number is, who do those drugs who wouldn't have had access to them without it.
Okay, if you really want to celebrate the baby Jesus, though, let's hear me out.
I watch a lot of TBN because I'm a lunatic.
And I always wondered, if the Jews were on television all the time, if we were on television going like, send us money!
What would they say about us?
But for some reason, I don't know why, Jesus needs a lot of money.
Because we're always on TV now.
Telling you to send your money to Jesus, right?
So, I'm thinking, if you really want to do something for Jesus, Chick-fil-A, open on Sunday, And donate all of your revenue to Jesus, to churches.
Think of the money just the after church crowd alone.
Everybody would flock, no pun intended, right to the Chick-fil-A and stock up and they'd have all their money.
They can even have people volunteer to work those days and donate all your money to Jesus because he apparently needs, I don't know what he needs with it, but he needs a lot of money.
Well, I don't know if the Chick-fil-A guys, the people who own it, are of the same ilk as the Trinity Broadcast Network folks, because those TBN folks, I don't think you're being mean by saying they're shysters.
I think that Chick-fil-A guy is a legitimately religious person who really truly believes that he's saving the world from gay folk marrying each other.
That was the dude, you tweeted about him years ago, that was the dude who was out in the world getting donations because he needed to update Or upgrade his G4 to a G6. And I was like, G6 Christ.
This fucking, this guy.
It was going to say, I need to donate because I need to spread the gospel.
And so you need to give me money so that because my G4 just ain't cutting it anymore, I need to upgrade.
I wish he had gotten a 737 MAX 8, but that's just me.
It's just so amazing that that hustle still works.
The prosperity ones are so gross because they go after people that are so poor and destitute that they can't pay their bills, and they tell them, if you just send me money, God will pay you back tenfold.
And I know what you're saying.
You don't have any money, but you do.
You do.
You take that money.
You send it to Jesus, and Jesus will bring prosperity in your life.
And then they have all these folks that are giving testimonials about how I was down on my luck.
I didn't have money for rent.
I didn't have money for food.
But I knew that Jesus needed this money.
So I sent Jesus the money, and Jesus paid me back tenfold.
And now my life is filled with joy and prosperity.
Yeah, but I think for some people, there's like, I mean, this is older, wiser me, right?
When I was younger, I would agree with you 100%.
But I think at this point, I think there's some benefit to like having...
Community, and having this environment where everybody goes to be humbled, and everybody goes to agree that they're going to be good people that follow the ethics of Jesus, and you put a little money in the dish, and they have to keep the operation running.
I think there's a lot of churches that do a lot of good.
But I think for every one or two that do a lot of good, there's these motherfuckers that are just stealing money and driving Rolls Royces and living in giant fucking castles.
That Joel, whatever his name is, what's that guy's name?
I don't know how it feels, but it must be wonderful to believe in something like that so devoutly, without any evidence, without any indication or proof whatsoever that what you so firmly believe in is true.
But it's the hypocrisy of it that I just can't abide by.
It's probably one of the hardest things that a grown adult has to do is to recognize that the paradigm, this framework they've been living their life under is utter horseshit.
I mean, the Mormon one is so crazy, too.
It's like...
The results are great.
The people are so nice.
They're the nicest cult members of all time.
But then you go back and look at the actual framework of the religion itself.
You're like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
He was 14?
You're like, hold on.
Joseph Smith was 14 in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic rock?
Well, I'm a big fan of Willie D from the Ghetto Boys, and he has a quote that I always like to use.
You gotta let a hoe be a hoe.
And I think, in that sense, like, you gotta let dummies get fleeced.
It's just part of it.
And part of it is there for us to see.
Part of it is there for you to go, what?
They gave away all their money?
Aw, shit.
Like, there's something to that.
It benefits us.
Like, I'm not a fan of these videos where kids try to skateboard off the side of a building and they slip and fall and land on their head and everybody's like, oh, shit!
But...
But those videos serve a purpose.
And that purpose is not everybody gets to do the handstand on the side of the building and survive.
Some people fall and they land on their fucking head and they're never the same again.
And then they're left with like a third grader's IQ for the rest of their life.
It's all of us are experiencing this life together.
And there's some folks that are just, they're going to do a shitty job of it.
And part of me thinks that, because there is no utopia, right?
There is no enlightened people.
There's no one civilization that's got it all nailed and everybody gets along together and everyone's totally fine with every single choice everybody makes.
First of all, I don't believe anybody that says, any artist or anybody out in the world creating something and putting it out there for people to react to it.
I don't believe anyone who says they don't read their reviews or their own reviews.
I read all of the reviews and I read the bad ones twice.
Because that's where you learn the most.
They could be right, they could be wrong, but I feel like It's where you fuck up that you learn the most from it.
I feel like as a white man in America, all the time I have to keep myself in check the way you were describing earlier about how like, you know, what if you just come to realize that maybe the world isn't exactly the way you perceive it.
And that maybe there's a lot of other people who have very different experiences from the ones that you have.
And so maybe the reality of the world is different for those people.
And you can be a more enlightened person by being more empathetic and trying to understand those perspectives, trying to walk, you know, a mile in their shoes.
And I just feel like...
I've learned so much more from the mistakes that I've made and the failures that I've had, certainly, than any of the successes.
In my home, I have no...
I have movie posters, but they're like art.
They're other people's movies.
I have none of my own movie posters at home.
That's at the office.
That's not what home is for.
Except I had one for a while.
I had one poster of one of my movies...
That I hung in the bathroom over the toilet.
Because it was my least favorite.
And I just wanted to be reminded that that was the time I took a shit.
I became a comedy fan in no small part because I have been to shows where I've seen some of the biggest, funniest guys bomb.
And I'm like, Jesus, short of being a soldier or a cop or like a stuntman, this is one of the most dangerous, self-destructive jobs.
Like, it requires such bravery and such strength of soul and thickness of skin that, like, I went fucking Vegas.
It's like 2000. And saw Carlin.
Big, beautiful room.
Sat, like, front row.
It was weird, because, like, the stage was like a wall.
Like, I was sitting against, like, the fucking stage.
And I had to look up, and, like, Carlin's shoe would, like, pass, like, right in front of my eyeball.
Just above my eyeline.
And...
He was doing material for one of his last specials, and it was the one, I think it might have been the second to last, he had that whole bit about, like, he doesn't believe in God, but, like, he believes in, like, shit that he can see and he's afraid of.
Like, The Sun or Joe Pesci.
Like, you know, that whole bit.
And he was in this big ol' God-fearing crowd there in Las Vegas, and they were not about this.
They were not about it.
Not one ioder.
Not one little bit.
And he's trucking back and forth doing it fucking crickets.
They're supposed to be remodeling and rebuilding it.
The Seminole Hard Rock...
What's the saying?
In a casino, the house always wins.
I'm like, these Indian casinos are the only place where, like, the house never wins.
Because it doesn't matter how much money you lose there, we still, like, raped their women and stole their country.
So, like, the least you could do is, like, drop a little coin at the Indian casino.
And that's what I would do.
I'd go play.
That is the only place they have blackjack in South Florida.
So you can go there and play blackjack.
But they bulldoze the improv.
And I was there one night.
Gilbert Gottfried was there.
And I was literally the only person laughing.
But like in pain like I was in pain laughing and It was just brutal and like and I've been in these rooms were like these guys and and I was just like These are the funniest people that I know and it's happened time and time again And I've been to shows where they killed and I've been to shows where they died and I was like, this is amazing This is so amazing.
It's like the fact that Anybody gets back on stage after a night like that, it's remarkable to me.
I always say that bombing is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother, but not really, because somewhere out there there's a guy who loves sucking a dick in front of his mother, and if you put another 999, he wouldn't be that sad.
But no one wants a bomb in front of their mother.
No one wants a bomb, period.
It's just terrible.
It's a ruthless experience.
It just rips you down and shreds all your self-worth.
Makes you feel terrible.
But, again, some of my best growth periods in my career have come after eating shit.
Starting off with 12 cities on Friday the 29th, and then, I mean...
Is it LA? Oh yeah, for sure.
The Lemley Music Hall.
Oh, great.
And then, where else?
I think San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Orlando...
There's like 12 cities.
And then, I guess, depending on how well it does, it's being put out by Greenwich Entertainment, who just won the Oscar for Free Solo for Best Documentary.
So was MLB. I mean, everyone was running amok in Miami, like, just...
Hiring private investigators, running people down.
Alex Rodriguez, actually, this isn't in the documentary, but when these convicted felons stole the stolen documents from Porter Fisher, who had stolen the documents from Tony Bosch, they set him up in this whole...
It's so absurd.
It's a fucking tanning salon heist where they're like, hey, why don't you go in and try this new spray tan color?
It's Trumpian orange.
Go try it on.
And while he's in the fucking spray tan machine, they open his car and steal these documents, which have these client lists of all these famous baseball players, including the highest paid baseball player in the world, A-Rod.
And so they steal it, and then they turn around and sell these stolen documents.
To Major League Baseball.
For cash.
So MLB has this ragtag band of misfits, this internal FBI, like their own internal investigations division that they created after the Balco steroid scandal.
They're running amok.
They are seducing nurses, former nurses from Tony Bosch's clinics.
They are literally in diners.
With convicted felons handing over bags of cash from some MLB slush fund.
I don't imagine they were going to 1099 the guy and I don't know where this cash came from 125 grand and what they did was is that The felon who was doing it had a buddy at a neighboring table at this diner with his cell phone recording, video recording this transaction.
And then he turned around and went to A-Rod's camp and said, I'll sell you a video of me selling known stolen documents.
Everybody knew these documents were stolen.
So MLB's buying these stolen records, stolen evidence in the state of Florida Department of Health investigation for cash from a felon.
At some point he gets like freaked out and nervous and he deletes this video off the hard drive.
He winds up selling A-Rod a blank hard drive for six figures.
Okay?
And A-Rod sends this hard drive.
A-Rod's people send this hard drive around the world to like data recovery services to try to get this video back.
So unfortunately the felon didn't get his second six figure payment because that was the first six figures were against the recovery of the data.
But he got like Two, three hundred grand to sell A-Rod a blank hard drive.
And A-Rod's dropping money on private investigators who were like having car chases through South Miami.
It was just totally crazy.
And it's like, I always say like, you come down to the swamp and roll around, you're going to get some mud on you.
So when MLB came down to To Miami, one of the guys, Jerome Hill, the former Baltimore cop turned Florida Department of Health investigator, he says unequivocally that Major League Baseball's investigators broke the law in the state of Florida and should have been prosecuted for it and held accountable for it and never were.
I mean, it's good to be a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
Look, if they did the same sort of stringent testing with NFL players, you'd find out that everyone's on steroids.
That's just a fact.
You don't get people that big.
And they do catch them every now and then.
But I feel like it's one of those things where you know how the drug cartels, they'll let some drug shipments get busted so that the other ones will get through?
I almost feel like that's what they do with NFL players who get caught.
When you're the pioneer in something, people really...
And dude, they had a street named after him in Miami, and they quietly took that shit down in the middle of the night after decades of naming that street for him.
Well, that is a good way of looking at it, too, right?
Because, like, think about the outrage when Clinton got his dick sucked by Monica Lewinsky and compare it to Donald Trump having at least two women that we know about where he paid off that he fucked.
I was watching a documentary where there was a guy who was some Christian guy who was saying, all of these accusations are before he was born because he was born in the eyes of Christ when he accepted Christ into his life.
I feel bad for her, too, because I feel like she thought she's going to go all in on this, and then she lost the court case against him, so she owes his legal fees.
Well, they were calling her the queen of clapback.
She's going to do stand-up again.
I mean, who knows?
Maybe she's hilarious.
I think she's going to take it seriously.
I mean, you never fucking know.
I mean, as a comic, I leave the door open for all possibilities.
But, I mean, it just means to me that she got this situation where she thought, she probably was told by everybody, look, hey, you're going to win this, he's going to pay you off, everyone's going to know that you told the truth, and people are going to pay for your interviews, and...
It's to me what I think screwball is about in the end, meaning like, yeah, it's fun and it's funny and it's a farce.
It's a romp.
You laugh.
But I think that there's a conversation to be had about what I call the new American values, which are lie, cheat and steal and get rich or get ahead and.
And these are values that we're teaching our children now.
Not honesty, integrity, tell the truth, do unto others as you'd have done to you, the golden rule.
We're now showing them be a bully.
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you could be the biggest, highest paid baseball player of all time.
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you could be the commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Lie, cheat, and steal, and you two kids can be president of the United States.
And I think this toxicity of the new American values is going to do damage to...
For generations.
And we're not going to be able to fully comprehend or understand or analyze the damage it's done for some time.
And it was like after Clinton.
Clinton redefined what sex meant.
And we were adults, you could laugh at it, but the truth is that he said oral sex wasn't sex.
And we saw the spike in sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers and young people, mostly...
Through oral sex because they said, oh, well, the president said...
You saw, following the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you saw an increase in sexually transmitted diseases through oral sex amongst younger people because the president...
It's hard for us because we see the president right now as sort of a comic.
When I say people, I'm talking about younger people.
Developing minds, impressionable youths were under the impression that you could not get a sexually transmitted disease through something that wasn't sex.
And the president reset those values.
Just like this president, I feel, is recalibrating our values.
And I think that that's what's most...
I mean, other than the potential of nuclear war.
I think that is what...
Is most dangerous and what could cause the most long-term damage from this is these new American values.
Lie, cheat, and steal.
I was literally at a Q&A with one of the kids, the little kid, Brian Blanco, who plays Tony Bosch in the movie.
Well, it's interesting because in the documentary, one of the big things, the news clippings, is George Bush discussing steroids in baseball in 2004. Was it 2004?
And he was talking about how it sends the wrong message.
That cheating in baseball sends the wrong message to the youth of America.
I thought that was silly at the time.
I was like, ah, what fucking message?
But the reality is those things do have a ripple effect.
And if you tell people that the way to become this superstar athlete is not just through hard work and dedication, but also through taking things that are illegal because they're going to pump you up and give you an edge on your competitors.
Some of those shortcuts work, like Adderall, like steroids, they fucking work, man.
You know, the UFC has had a giant problem with them for a long time, and it was exacerbated by this time period in the early 2000s where they allowed people, I guess it wasn't quite the early 2000s, it was actually later in the 2000s, where they allowed people to take exogenous testosterone under therapeutic use exemptions.
They would call it TRT. And so this famous, like, the Vitor Belfort era, when he was on TRT, just started smashing people, because he looked so ridiculous.
He was so jacked.
And during that time period, they fell into this...
There was a sort of a really...
A piss-poor way of justifying it.
The justification was these people have low testosterone.
Low testosterone is a disease.
If we give them testosterone, they can perform better.
But the way around that was these guys were actually on steroids.
The steroids crashed their testosterone.
They'd go and get a test.
Look, my testosterone's low.
Like, yep, you need testosterone.
And then they would take steroids, you know, essentially.
Not steroids, but testosterone, which has, you know, similar effects.
And then, eventually, the UFC said, look, we fucked up.
We're going to go 180 degrees the other way and hire USADA. And we're going to crawl up everyone's ass with a microscope.
We're going to find out what the fuck is up.
And, man, bodies changed.
Careers crumbled.
I mean, we saw so many people get busted in the beginning.
So many people got caught.
And still getting it.
TJ Dillashaw just got caught, who's a Bantamweight champion.
Some people have been caught for accidental contamination because there's a lot of different supplements you could buy, even creatine, standard stuff that's totally legal to take, but they're contaminated because you're buying them from cheap sources.
Tony Bosch, despite having attended what one of our interview subjects refers to as the Belize School of the Medical and Performing Arts, to get his doctorate, he was never a licensed physician in the United States, and yet he had legitimate...
Prescription pads and DEA numbers from doctors that he could then prescribe these drugs and in fact wanted to go one step further like we were talking about with the pill mills and actually sell them in-house to his clients and was buying them in the black market from some dude in a suburb of Miami making the shit in his garage.
Yeah, and he had what they call medical directors.
That's part of these.
The whole anti-aging scheme really prospered in the state of Florida, as you can imagine.
And in no small part, because there's a lot of doctors who, from all over the country, retire to Florida.
But they are still medical doctors.
So you have guys like Tony Bosch, with an entrepreneurial spirit, who want to open up these anti-aging clinics, and they need what's called a medical director.
So they go to a legitimate doctor, and they say, hey, kind of rent us.
We'll put your name on the business.
You'll get a cut of the action.
And they're basically renting out their prescription pad and DEA number so that guys, you know, these other operators who, in this case, identify themselves falsely as doctors, can...
You know, exploit that power of the prescription pad.
And so that's what was happening here.
And more problematic, he started treating high school kids.
And whose parents and baseball coaches had heard about him through word of mouth and brought these kids to him to get an advantage.
You know, we have a big immigrant community, obviously, in Miami.
We have a lot.
It's a huge baseball community.
You have people who are smuggled specifically into the country for the purpose of playing baseball and signing those big guaranteed contracts right out of high school.
And so you have parents and kids and coaches looking for every advantage who are going to this guy.
They weren't hearing about him in the high school locker room.
These were coaches and parents who were bringing their parents to.
You might say a guy who they presumed was a real doctor, but nonetheless looking to cheat to game the system.
And that's problematic.
When you have this guy who knows he knows he's not a doctor.
But he was a true believer in himself.
He really thought he was helping people.
And listen, the proof's in the pudding.
This guy could not exploit traditional advertising.
He wasn't doing billboards and TV ads.
He was strictly word of mouth.
So he had clients who were getting results, including nearly 100 cops who were referring their friends to his clinics.
So these parents came to him looking for help for their kids.
The last thing you want to do to a kid, especially one that doesn't have any sort of a real hormonal ailment, is to inject exogenous hormones into their body.
It just fucks their brain up, their emotions, their entire endocrine system crashes afterwards, it causes depressions, it leads to suicide in a lot of kids.
You have a disproportionate amount of, I mean, in the steroid use population of autism, childhood cancer, just horrible, horrible things that happen to the children of people who are on some of these drugs.
I think a lot of the folks that are looking at it in terms of a career in baseball or in any other sport where they could benefit, they go, hey, this is the price that I have to pay in order to excel at this extraordinary avenue for financial gain.
Well, Tony Bosch was treating Manny Ramirez when he was in Boston, and low testosterone, you know, he was getting on in the years, and Bosch started treating him, put him on a protocol, as he called it, take X amount of Y substance, etc., at this time each day, microdosing, as you said, so it wouldn't, in the event that they were randomly tested, it wouldn't be detected.
I don't know if that worked or not, or he was...
Giving them placebos on certain days.
I don't know what the scheme was.
But Manny starts to come back.
Again, I don't know if it was psychosomatic or he really was actually performing better.
And that's when he got his Dodgers deal.
What was that, like a $40 million deal?
Theoretically, thanks in no small part to this guy who was juicing him.
And then Manny gets busted, pisses dirty, after a surprise test before a game.
Because according to Bosch, he didn't take the micro dose on precisely the instructions, you know, that he had given him.
And so piss dirty.
And as a result of what you would assume was negative publicity from Manny getting busted and them connecting it to Tony Bosch in Miami, that was the word of mouth that got A-Rod's cousin to come to Bosch and say, hey, you should meet my cousin.
Listen, baseball is like everything else in American life now, including politics.
It's the WWE. When Bud Selig, the steroid commissioner, was on his way out the door, literally on the eve of retirement, and he's like, you know what?
I need to look like I'm doing something about this.
Because I got a great big fat asterisk by my name in the record books here, like all these players do in the steroid era.
I need to look like I did something on my way out the door.
So he calls his second-in-command Rob Manfred and says, let's do something about this.
And they go after the biggest scalp in the game, Alex Rodriguez.
And so when they needed Alex as the heel, that was the storyline.
So they nail Alex.
You know, the Vince McMahon of the Game Bud Sealy goes, oh, I took care of him, retires.
Rob Manfred, who was in charge of this whole botched, you know, quasi-legal operation, investigation, biogenesis, and Alex, gets the top gig and is now the commissioner of baseball.
And he goes, you know what would be a good storyline now?
What if I... Bring A-Rod and Pete Rose back as commentators.
And I have to tell you, we've been at this, making documentaries for like 20 years now, almost.
And so...
This is the most, as ridiculous and fucking absurd as this is, it is the most meticulously researched documentary we have ever done.
Why?
We're dealing with some very powerful litigious individuals and organizations.
So we knew we had to get this 100% right.
Not to mention the way we shot this on set, on location.
For 10 days, we had the playback on the set.
So we were committed to this dialogue, right?
And so we had to make sure...
We went and obtained transcripts that were never released publicly of sworn testimony in the case to be able to cross-check some of the stuff that we were told and we're going to put in the documentary.
And we just...
I mean, we actually shot at some of the actual locations in Miami where these real events took place.
The Fountain Blue, Live at the Fountain Blue Hotel, you know, the nightclub, the Sports Grill in South Miami, the Ritz Carlton, the Keebuskeen.
We actually took the kids there, put the facial hair on, put the fucking cop uniforms on and the pinstripes on, and we just filmed them all over town.
What's funny about it in Miami, no one looked twice at us.
No one thought anything of just us running around.
These little kids with beards and mustaches and gray hair and lab coats.
It's not a musical, but you should come down, and it's called Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy.
You might remember in the documentary, there was a hitman, Jorge Riviala, who he worked for La Madrina, the godmother of Griselda Blanco, and when we first started researching the doc in 2004, we We obtained a seven-volume, 1,300-page deposition that he gave.
And normally in a depot, You're like, the answer's like, yes, no, yes, no.
I don't remember, you know, don't recall.
This was like, he was a cooperating witness against Griselda in Miami-Dade County, state of Florida.
It was a three capital murder charges.
So three death penalties.
We're talking old Sparky cases and the electric chair.
And so he was a cooperating witness.
So it read like a monologue.
I'm reading it and going, I went to New World School of the Arts High School, which is where I studied theater, so I was reading a lot of plays, and I was like, oh shit, this would be like a great play.
And 15 years later, we turned it into Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy.
My producing partner, that's Yancey Arias from formerly, spoiler alert, he's not on the show anymore.
His character got into some trouble.
Queen of the South on USA. He's brilliant in the show.
And so my producing partner, David Sipkin, who co-produced Cocaine Cowboys and edited it with me, he's described it as a cross between Cocaine Cowboys and my Twitter feed.
That's how he described it.
It's a little reverent.
It's obviously a little absurd if you're going to put Cocaine Cowboys as a live theater event.
We acknowledge the absurdity of it and the surreal exploitation of it.
You know, the guy, Michelle Hausman, who's the director of the play at Miami New Drama at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach on Lincoln Road, he said, he said, why are we doing cocaine cowboys for the theater in 2019?
And I was like, it's a good question.
Because, like, it speaks to the relevance of, like, why do this now?
And I said, well, if you take away from the documentary, you take away the drugs and the money, it's really a story about Immigrants, children, and gun violence.
That's what it's about.
And what could be more relevant in the contemporary conversation than immigration, children, and gun violence.
And so ultimately, I wanted to make a story about the Miami of yesterday, but the America of today.
Like I said, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow.
So here's a story about Miami in the 1980s, but it really...
Resembles the America of today.
And so to do that, we had to not make it totally fucking depressing and disturbing.
We injected a lot of humor and a lot of irreverence into it.
The woman, Zila Mendoza, who plays Griselda Blanco, also plays the state attorney.
So she has this dual role as sort of these dueling antagonists against Rivie, the hitman.
And it's just a, you know, I was writing it with a friend, Oren Squire, this great TV writer and playwright.
I have a strange relationship with the state attorney in Miami-Dade County.
She's been the state attorney for about 26 years now.
And, you know, when she was first elected, she was like the first Cuban state attorney in the state of Florida.
Very ambitious.
She's been the only state attorney we've had since Janet Reno left us for the Clinton administration.
That's how long she's been state attorney.
So now she has one of those records where you examine it and you say, okay, what's actually happening in this town?
When people say to me, like, why is Miami so...
Fucking corrupt.
Why does corruption grow greater and wider than fucking oranges in Miami?
And the reason is...
When you have the top cop in town does not effectively enforce public corruption laws and does not pursue public corruption, you have an area where it's just...
You set a message of impunity.
That's the bottom line.
No trouble arresting innocent young black kids on drug charges or whatever, but when it comes to enforcing public corruption, she's just...
Non-existent.
And so what happens is you have a...
And of course it's like the broken windows theory of crime.
If you allow petty corruption to go, eventually some of these politicians wind up literally in a closet at City Hall accepting bags full of money.
And the only thing we've been able to rely on to some extent is the feds coming in and trying to help, but you have a state attorney who...
Has never in her 26 years in office charged a police officer for non-duty killing.
So it's not like it's, oh, it's not happening as often.
The incidents have exploded.
And the reason the incidents have exploded is because police know that they'll get away with it because Kathy will not prosecute them.
So the message that's being sent is a dangerous one.
And it has created a toxic effect with the relationship between, obviously, police and the citizens that they're supposed to be protecting and serving.
And it's created a very dangerous situation in the city.
And it's also created a situation where just like...
Mayor after mayor just gets away with pure fuckery, you know?
People want some sort of sexy answer, and I say, well, when the top cop is the same person for 26 years, you know, if you're looking at something...
If you want to know what's wrong in a community or with anything, you don't look at what changes.
I mean, mayors come and go, police chiefs come and go, commissioners come and go...
Killers come and go.
You know, criminals come and go.
You look at the constants.
You say, what's been the same here for 26 years?
That's got to be the problem.
And sure as shit, that's the problem.
So I wanted to make a statement about the state of Miami today and say that, you know, Also, Griselda Blanco was born in Colombia in a very difficult time in the history of that country during La Violencia, This brutal civil, brutal civil war between liberal and conservative parties that went on for like 20 years almost caused caused the horrific murders of like 200,000 people.
Some very brutal, some very public.
It's been reported that she, as a hobby with her friends and their youth, you just run around and just bury bodies that were just lying in the street or lying around.
Like that was just a hobby, something for the kids to do.
And so you grow up in that environment.
what we were saying earlier, like you grow up in a cult, you grow up in that environment, your psyche is fucked.
You know, you're not exactly born into money or power or wealth.
You know, your dad's not a judge.
You don't exactly have those benefits or opportunities.
And if you can try to make something of yourself, I mean, the problem, of course, is that Rizal de Blanco went into an illicit...
An illicit trade.
But a trade that a lot of people in Columbia were getting into from that era.
I wanted to have a discussion about...
A lot of the characters argue with each other in the play about how different everybody is.
And how Miami is like Game of Thrones and Paradise with slightly fewer dragons.
We just self-segregate and it becomes this battle of fiefdoms.
Because we're not multicultural.
We're very much...
I always say the common misconception about Miami is that we're a melting pot.
We are not a melting pot.
We are a TV dinner where sometimes the peas fall into the mashed potatoes.
We have our little kingdoms by flag, by nationality, very much so.
And so everybody's arguing about how we're different.
And the play sort of, when you walk away, you're like, okay, but this is a conversation about how we're all the same.
Some of us have different opportunities than others, and it's just a matter of what we're able to make of those opportunities.
That was sort of the comparison I was making.
Locally, it's a little scandalous, the fact that the same actress plays both of these very powerful women.
Because Kathy, the state attorney, is a very powerful, popular figure.
I think he might be on paper, so I think he might have to stick around.
I'm not certain.
Because for a while, I think he was asking permission to go to Florida when he first got released, and the Attorney General of Florida was like, no thanks.
To be fair, though, she was a blonde woman, so she was scared.
He's one of the weirdest cases in all of American pop culture history.
I mean, he is one of the weirdest cases.
You know, there's a fantastic photo that someone made a meme of of Howard Cosell with Bruce Jenner on his one side and then O.J. Simpson on his other side and Howard Cosell saying, I've seen the future, you're not going to fucking believe this.
Because it is so goddamn crazy that one of the most famous and beloved people forget before that murder, beloved.
This is something that, in the end, not to spoil it, you've been so kind to not spoil Screwball, but in the end, that's also part of the message, is the idea that, and why we use the children.
These athletes are heroes to these kids.
They look up to them.
These are supposedly role models.
And how many professional athletes do you know who you'd be like...
Ultimately, it was like 160. It was almost like basically a full season.
And the following season, he came back, played about another year.
You have to remember, he was injured for a while.
I think actually he might have been injured the following year and then came back the year after.
And then he retired.
And the Yankees made him like...
where he would mentor young players really can't make this shit up dude really yeah that is so interesting that he didn't become persona non grata like Jose Canseco did right it's I don't know how quite how to explain it and And listen, it's been one of the greatest, I think, reputation rebuilders.
Not even a rebuilder.
Remember, he was hated.
Yankees fans used to boo the guy.
He was not a beloved figure as a baseball player.
Now he's like, I mean, my mom knows him.
Who he is.
I mean, she calls him J-Lo's boyfriend, but the bottom line is she knows.
I think they're going to be studying.
This case study of image rehab is going to be studied for decades to come in PR classes.
And then some of it would just be like stream of consciousness, like middle school girl, like journal.
Like he would write his name in different fonts.
He would come up with different like business ideas and plans and...
And make signs, you know, for, like, his businesses and talk about motivational speaking ideas that he had.
And it was, like, it's a real journey, like, into his mind of a cocaine-addicted fake doctor in Miami, you know?
Which is an interesting journey, I gotta tell you.
Right.
But, like, he...
So, these composition books...
On some pages, there'd be, like, code names.
Like, you know, he had a guy that was, like, you know, that he'd name after cars or he'd name after, like, Miho or little Spanish words or things like that.
He had a player...
He bought him, like, he bought him an SUV of some kind.
So he, like, you know, he codenamed him, like, Tahoe or whatever the fucking car was, you know.
Another one was DUI because he'd just gotten a DUI. So that was, like...
But then, like, after a while, he just kind of abandoned it and then was, like...
A. Rodriguez or Alex Rodriguez.
By the way, there's a shit ton of Alex Rodriguez's in Miami.
But when you start seeing A-Rod in the books, it's kind of a tell.
He just got sloppy, you know, like fucking drug addicts do.
What does that guy do now?
Well, he's five years off of cocaine, which is good.
He went to federal prison, and rightfully so for the kids, for the high school kids.
When the judge sentenced him specifically said, you know, it's one thing for consenting adults to engage in this behavior.
It's another thing for you to drag kids into this mess and potentially poison them.
So he went to federal prison.
Get this.
He winds up in a camp so it's like minimum security federal prison in Alabama and he winds up teaching in part a nutrition class to his fellow inmates He's in there with Jeff Skilling of Enron, who's teaching a business class to his fellow inmates, and Jesse Jackson Jr., who's teaching a political science and civics course to their fellow inmates.
They say prison's the best place to learn and that camp in Alabama.
We're running out of money on this movie, and so, as you always do with movies, and so there's a couple scenes that we wanted to do that we ran out, we just couldn't do.
We had to cut them from the schedule.
So, one of them was an epilogue with all the kids in federal prison, like, jumpsuits, and, like, Tony teaching, and, like, a little baby Jesse Jackson Jr., a little baby Jeff Skilling from Enron, a little baby...
And another thing...
So, another thing Bosh was doing is he was...
Like, you see him at the beginning of the movie sitting at the bar at the Ritz-Carlton, Key Biscayne, and he's writing...
Little protocols on a fucking cocktail napkin for the bartenders on how to build muscle, how to lose weight.
So he was doing that in prison for inmates.
For like vitamins and supplements that they could buy in the commissary.
He would be like, hey, yo, Dr. T, I'm trying to build muscle mass.
And he'd be like, okay, here's the problem.
Go to the commissary, buy these vitamins or these supplements.
And there you take it this time.
Yo, Tony, I'm looking to lose weight.
What do I do?
And then guards started coming to him.
Like, hey, I'm looking at my wife wants to lose some weight.
Yeah, so I mean, he's very, I told you, he's very much a true believer in In himself.
He's got a lot of faith in himself.
And he, for a while, was planning on opening a nutritional supplement business across the street from Marlins Park in Miami.
This is pretty recently.
It hasn't happened yet, but he's looking around for new opportunity.
And Miami is a land of new opportunity.
I told you this last time I saw you that It's an old saying that I love that LA is where you go when you want to be somebody, New York is where you go when you are somebody, and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
It's not only a town of reinvention, it's just always been a sunny place for shady people.
So Queen for a Day meeting with the feds, you get a letter for it.
They're like, we're investigating.
You're a witness in an investigation.
We understand you may have participated in some illegality or committed some crimes in the course of this larger investigation, but we're not after you.
We just want you to come in, feel comfortable and free to tell the truth to our investigators so that we can pursue our investigation accurately and fairly, and we will not Anything you say will not be held against you, essentially, in a court of law.
So you're queen for a day, they call it.
You get a letter, a queen for a day letter.
They actually call it that?
They call it queen for a day.
It's the thing the feds have.
And so Alex was free to just speak.
The only thing he can't do Is lie to a federal agent.
That is a crime.
And that is, in fact, I think what George Papadopoulos was ultimately...
He lied in his Queen for a Day meeting.
The whole point of a Queen for a Day meeting is to not lie.
Because you can't get in trouble, essentially, for any crimes that you admit there about the investigation.
So that was the allegations that he actually lied.
Listen, I'm a documentarian.
People lie to me for a living.
I'm fine with that.
Especially because they spelled my name right on page six and that shit was in bold.
I don't have the juice to make that happen.
unidentified
Alex's publicist had the juice to make that happen.
And then, maybe if we just, tomorrow, in this 24-hour news cycle, in this fucking, in this world of just being, us being hammered with bad news, you know, in 240 characters every nanosecond of every day, just, shit just passes.
And they just, they, they played it just so, so beautifully and brilliantly.
And then, almost a year later, we got a call from a friend of Tony Bosch.
You guys want to meet with Tony Bosch?
He wants to talk to you about doing a documentary.
We're like, hell yeah.
So we take the meeting.
Really interesting guy.
We meet with him several times over several months.
And then he says, listen, I want to do this interview.
He goes, I'm getting sentenced to prison tomorrow.
And we knew about that, you know, that the case was ongoing.
He said, but look, I expect the judge will give me 45 to 60 days to surrender to complete this drug rehab program I'm in.
And then I'm only going to get like a year and a half, two years in prison.
And so we could find a couple days before I have to surrender to do this interview.
And I'm like, dude...
Listen, let's see what happens tomorrow.
I was like, depending on how much time the judge gives you, you're going to prison one way or another.
Maybe you want to spend some time with your kids, get your affairs in order.
Let's make a decision tomorrow whether or not we're going to take two, three, four days out of your life for this.
Maybe we'll do it when you get out in a year and a half, two years.
Federal, you do at least 80% of your time, but then you can go to halfway house sometimes for a little bit at the end, six months or as long as a year.
So he...
He goes to court, the judge says, four years, and you have not 45 to 60 days to surrender, but 45 to 60 minutes to surrender.
Give me your, you know, take off your belt and your shoelaces and surrender to the BOP. And he did, and so we backburnered it again.
Then I got a fucking email from Tim Elfrank, who was the Woodward and Bernstein of the case.
He's the journalist who got the stolen records from Porter Fisher, the whistleblower, and blew the lid off the whole thing at the beginning of 2013. He says to me, Porter Fisher called me, and he's asking me for your number to discuss possibly doing a documentary with you.
And I was like, first of all, like, We sometimes don't make documentaries about things that...
We make documentaries about things that happened like 20, 30, 40 years ago.
This felt like it hadn't ripened yet.
Like it was still a fresh wound, you know?
Like people wouldn't be willing to talk.
Like you have to kind of wait for more time to pass, you know?
And here we are.
And I'm not a spiritual guy.
I don't really believe in the universe talking to me or anything.
But I thought, man, if ever someone was trying to tell us something, it was like, you got to make this documentary.
The three...
Primary players in this major baseball scandal all independently of each other contacted us within just over a year to talk about doing a documentary about it.
Alfred jokes that in Florida when you get out of Prison.