Description
Major League Baseball has built a pipeline in the Dominican Republic to scoop up young players with the potential of superstars like Red Sox hero David “Big Papi” Ortiz. But reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts uncovered how MLB has allowed a shadow industry to flourish — one that exploits young players and their families. In this episode, Gus brings us the story of Belfi Rivera, a supernaturally talented young Dominican player who experienced firsthand how the system is broken.
Read the original stories here and here.
Transcript
Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. This transcript has been lightly edited for style.
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL BROADCAST, Announcer: Historic Fenway Park …
Jessica Lussenhop: I am a total sucker for an underdog story. My colleague Gus Garcia-Roberts, who specializes in sports investigations, he recently told me a great one.
Gus Garcia-Roberts: October 2004. It’s the Red Sox versus the Yankees.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: Keep the faith, that’s what the Red Sox and their fans are trying to do.
Lussenhop: The Red Sox — the underdogs here — had not won a World Series in nearly 100 years. They were cursed, fans said.
Garcia-Roberts: The Red Sox are down three games to none in the American League Championship Series, which is a hole that no baseball team has ever come out of.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: And yet another battle between these two …
Lussenhop: If they lost this game, the curse would hold. The Yankees would go to the World Series.
Garcia-Roberts: So the score was tied 4-4. The game has been going on for five hours. It’s after 1 a.m. It’s been a completely torturous back-and-forth game.
Lussenhop: That’s when a new hitter for the Red Sox comes up to bat.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: Now it’s David Ortiz.
Lussenhop: He’d only been playing for them for a little over a year at that point. And he’s a bit of an underdog himself.
Garcia-Roberts: Ortiz was a slugger and first baseman who grew up in poverty in the Dominican Republic.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: Ortiz into deep right field! [unintelligible], we’ll see you later tonight!
Garcia-Roberts: Ortiz hits this kind of magical two-run home run to win the game for the Red Sox 6-4.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: A five-hour, two-minute game and worth every second of it for the Boston Red Sox.
Garcia-Roberts: And Ortiz let them survive to play another game and led to this almost impossible to believe resurgence by the Red Sox.
MLB BROADCAST, Announcer: Red Sox fans have longed to hear it. The Boston Red Sox are world champions.
Lussenhop: You might say Ortiz broke the curse. The Red Sox won the World Series that year.
Garcia-Roberts: That moment, I think, cemented David Ortiz’s rise to, like, god among men status in New England.
Lussenhop: He became super famous. He gets name-dropped in everything from rap lyrics to the New York Times crossword puzzle. He even starred in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial.
DUNKIN’ DONUTS COMMERCIAL: It’s Papi time …
Garcia-Roberts: He’s known as Big Papi. He’s a large man, and he’s sort of got, like, kind of a cuddly, teddy bear persona.
Lussenhop: And Big Papi Ortiz has become a living legend to Dominican kids who have baseball dreams of their own. Here’s how Big Papi talked about it on TV.
FOX SPORTS COMMENTARY, David Ortiz: We all dream about having a career in the big league, playing for a long time, and put your family in a better situation, especially coming from, from where I come from.
Garcia-Roberts: He’s sort of this representative of the Dominican Dream.
Lussenhop: Gus has been investigating this Dominican Dream that Big Papi embodies. It’s a bit of an anomaly: In American baseball, it can feel like Dominicans dominate.
MLB BROADCAST, ANNOUNCERS: Juan Soto … and Vladimir Guerrero, coming up … what a catch, Fernando Tatis.
Garcia-Roberts: I think it’s 10% of Major League Baseball players, currently, are from this Caribbean island.
Lussenhop: And that’s not by accident. The MLB has built a pipeline for talent in the DR. They’ve made massive investments, generating as much as $400 million here annually. All 30 major league teams have a physical presence near the capital, Santo Domingo.
Garcia-Roberts: You see within 20 minutes of driving along country roads from the airport these gleaming complexes that have the names of Major League Baseball teams on them. You’ll see the Yankees logo, the Seattle Mariners.
Lussenhop: It almost sounds, like, these, like, baseball castles, like, rising up out of the, out of the ground or something.
Garcia-Roberts: I think that’s a perfect word, these castles of baseball.
Lussenhop: Major League Baseball built these castles to house and train the most promising Dominican prospects.
Garcia-Roberts: And I imagine as an ambitious Dominican boy, all you want to do is get inside those gates.
Lussenhop: But Gus has been investigating the sports industry for a long time. He’s uncovered scandals in just about every major sport: baseball, football, horse racing. He co-wrote a whole book about the Alex Rodriguez doping scandal. So he knows better than most that even the best sports fairy tales can have a dark side.
Garcia-Roberts: You don’t hear that much about what goes on in the DR and sort of how these players are produced. And I think part of the reason is because it’s a little ugly, or maybe very ugly.
Lussenhop: Gus learned that the MLB has allowed a shadow industry to flourish. And the victims are Dominican boys and their families. To really get to the bottom of it, Gus would have to go talk to young players on the island. And, he was told that there was someone else he needed to speak to. Someone who knew firsthand about some of the ugliness going on behind the scenes:
Garcia-Roberts: And his name was David Ortiz — Big Papi.
Lussenhop: I’m Jessica Lussenhop. This is “Paper Trail.”
Gus quickly learned that there are a ton of kids in the DR with stories to tell about the baseball industry. And somebody told him that there was one kid in particular who was eager to talk.
Garcia-Roberts: What this person told me was: “You should speak to Belfi Rivera. That’s somebody who is sort of like a poster child of what can go wrong in the system that is set up by baseball here.”
REPORTING CALL, Garcia-Roberts: Hola, Belfi.
Lussenhop: Gus spoke to him through a translator. At the time, Belfi was 18 years old. Tall, like 6 feet, but pretty shy. He’s the seventh of 11 kids. And Gus says he didn’t seem super comfortable talking about himself. But he did talk to Gus about music.
REPORTING TAPE, Belfi Rivera: Yo escucho a Gatillero 23. Una música de, de superación que él tiene.
“POBRE,” GATILLERO 23: Es que yo vengo de ser pobre.
Lussenhop: This is Belfi’s favorite artist, Gatillero 23. This song’s all about working hard to make it. It’s called “Pobre,” meaning “poor.” Which is how Belfi grew up. In the kind of poverty where when it’s raining outside, it’s raining inside your house. The kind of poverty where you get used to being hungry.
REPORTING TAPE, Rivera: No me importa si un día entero yo no coma. Si yo como algo en la mañana, que sea un pan, ya yo duro el día entero sin comer.
Lussenhop: Sometimes all Belfi ate in a day was a piece of bread. Belfi and some of his siblings and his parents lived an hour outside Santo Domingo, getting by on $150 a month. But his family told Gus that even from a young age, they thought Belfi could be their ticket out of poverty.
Garcia-Roberts: The thing about Belfi is, like, he’s always just been a extraordinary baseball talent, and that’s what everybody around him says. He had talent that was given by God.
Lussenhop: A talent that seemed almost supernatural. Which meant he had a real shot at the Dominican Dream.
Garcia-Roberts: This was one of the very few, if not the only, way for a kid like Belfi to achieve wealth and to bring his family up.
Lussenhop: When Belfi was just 7 years old, he got approached by his first coach. Because of all the money Major League Baseball pours into the county, there’s a whole economy around scouting super-young kids. If the kid makes it big, trainers can take up to half of their signing bonus.
Garcia-Roberts: And that’s the way that Belfi’s life went. He continually was transacted from one trainer to another.
Lussenhop: When he was 10, he moved into a kind of baseball boarding school. And not long after that he quit regular school altogether to train full time.
Garcia-Roberts: Belfi is an outfielder, a really good contact hitter and a really good fielder. Also very fast. You know, a good arm. He had all the tools that Major League Baseball scouts look for.
Lussenhop: Officially, Major League Baseball teams aren’t allowed to sign prospects until they’re 16. But when Belfi was 14, his trainer invited him and his parents to hop on an important video call. On the other side of the screen:
Garcia-Roberts: Representatives for the Arizona Diamondbacks from the United States.
Lussenhop: They say they want Belfi to be a part of their “family.” Soon after that, Belfi and his parents find out that Belfi’s trainer had negotiated a deal with the Diamondbacks. An off-the-books, handshake deal for Belfi to eventually join their baseball castle. And it would come with a nice, big check. This kind of offer is a common-enough practice in the DR that it has a name: an early agreement.
Garcia-Roberts: All 30 teams do this. I spoke to a Major League Baseball scout who said if you don’t do an early agreement, you’ll get eaten. You won’t be able to sign any desirable players.
Lussenhop: These kinds of agreements do not exist in the U.S. Here, there’s the draft. A process that starts on a set day, where teams take turns picking from the pool of eligible players, who have to have completed high school. How much money players get is mostly determined by the order that they’re picked. But the DR is different. There is no draft. Major league teams compete to lock down the most talented prospects by offering them signing bonuses younger and younger. Most kids in the DR who accept an early agreement get around $30,000 when they sign with a team. But the Diamondbacks decided that Belfi was different.
Garcia-Roberts: They are making this early agreement for $1.8 million for Belfi Rivera.
Luessenhop: $1.8 million. For Belfi’s family this was an incomprehensible amount of money. They could afford a better place to live. They would be able to send Belfi’s dad to the doctor to take care of some serious pain he’d been dealing with. They wouldn’t have to worry about putting food on the table. There was just one catch:
Garcia-Roberts: Nobody’s really looking to give him any money yet.
Lussenhop: Because the MLB can’t actually sign kids until they turn 16, Belfi and his family wouldn’t see a dime fortwo more years.
Garcia-Roberts: The parents described that as this thing that really messed with their brain. They described looking at their house, just kind of with these new eyes because they see the tin roof that water leaks through, the sort of ramshackle walls. Suddenly their money issues just feel louder to them. They just learned that they’re gonna be rich, but I think that they at that moment felt poorer than ever before.
Lussenhop: Because of how common early agreements are, there’s a big pool of families every year in this weird, brain-scrambling liminal space: soon to be rich, but not quite yet. And looking at that pool of families, some people saw a business opportunity. While Belfi was off at baseball school, one of his former trainers told his parents about a guy who could bridge the gap between their old life and their new one.
Garcia-Roberts: “You should speak to this guy, Santo Caraballo, who’s in the capital.” And so they go to Santo Domingo, and they meet with this man, Caraballo.
Lussenhop: Belfi’s parents went to Santo Caraballo’s office in a strip mall. Caraballo was dressed pretty casual, in athletic gear, but very well groomed: perfect hair, perfect eyebrows, bright white teeth.
Garcia-Roberts: Caraballo’s office is filled with, like, diplomas and certificates, none of which the parents can read or make sense of because they are semiliterate.
Lussenhop: Even though he seemed super successful, he came from humble beginnings, just like them. From a small mountain town outside Santo Domingo.
Garcia-Roberts: He moved to Santo Domingo with borrowed bus fare and built this kind of scattershot little empire.
Lussenhop: The origin story of his empire was a little murky. He dabbled in real estate and politics. But it was clear that somehow he’d gotten very well connected. He was friendly with a former president of the DR and some very important people in the baseball world.
Garcia-Roberts: Caraballo is telling them how he is a business partner of David Ortiz.
Lussenhop: Big Papi himself.
Garcia-Roberts: They felt really fortunate that they had stumbled upon this guy with such amazing connections.
Lussenhop: Ortiz has said they met when Caraballo was the manager of a gas station. They became close friends. When Big Papi was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Caraballo sat with Ortiz’s family in the audience. When Big Papi announced his divorce on Instagram, he posted a photo of himself with an arm around Caraballo and the caption:
Garcia-Roberts: “The show must go on, compadre.” Which to me, if your first post-divorce social media post is you and a buddy, that’s probably your best friend.
Lussenhop: Yeah, he’s your divorce pal.
Garcia-Roberts: He’s your divorce wingman, yeah.
Lussenhop: And Caraballo seemed to love to drop Ortiz’s name with prospective clients like Belfi’s parents.
Garcia-Roberts: He asks them about their son, about Belfi, and they tell them what they know about Belfi’s deal.
Lussenhop: The parents told Gus they shared the details of the early agreement. About how they weren’t going to see any of the $1.8 million until Belfi was older. And that’s when Caraballo makes a business proposal.
Garcia-Roberts: He wanted to buy a percentage of Belfi’s future bonus, as in, Caraballo would give them cash upfront, and then once Belfi signed, he would take that percentage of the bonus.
Lussenhop: In other words, it was a loan. A lawyer Gus talked to estimated that 80% of major league bonuses paid to Dominican prospects have a loan attached. This is a thriving subindustry. Gus found ads from lenders on WhatsApp just openly seeking families with early agreements. So the loan itself didn’t really raise red flags for Belfi’s parents. Plus, this guy was connected to David Ortiz! So, they agreed.
Garcia-Roberts: But they have a very unclear idea of how much they’re gonna have to later pay back.
Lussenhop: The parents signed a contract that they couldn’t really read. And Caraballo didn’t give them a copy.
Garcia-Roberts: What it boils down to is Caraballo was giving them $25,000 now, and when the deal came through, he would receive $180,000.
Lussenhop: They walked out of his office with a paper bag full of pesos. It was life-changing. Pretty quickly, they were able to move into a modest three-bedroom apartment right next door to their old house. After that, Belfi’s parents said Santo Caraballo started hanging around a lot. He’d show up on the weekends in different cars: a Range Rover, a Porsche, a Lamborghini. He’d help himself to whatever Belfi’s mom had on the stove. He offered Belfi advice on girls and on his baseball career. And he told them: You’re going to be so rich so soon. Why not borrow more money from me, why delay living in comfort?
Garcia-Roberts: And so he loans them $70,000 at a 7% interest monthly, which is, you know, equated to roughly 84% annual interest.
Lussenhop: Oh my God.
Lussenhop: An interest rate that would be illegal in most of the United States.
Garcia-Roberts: But there are no laws against that in the Dominican Republic.
Lussenhop: In the lead-up to his 16th birthday and his official signing day with the Diamondbacks, Belfi daydreamed about what it was going to be like.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Porque antes de yo firmar, yo dije: “Cuando yo firme, yo lo primero que voy a hacer es comprar una cadena.”
Garcia-Roberts: He told me that he had given himself a goal, which was when he got signed, he wanted to buy himself a fancy necklace. His favorite baseball player wears necklaces over his jersey, and there was something about that imagery of, like, a necklace over a dirt-stained jersey that appealed to Belfi.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Entonces, salimos a comprar la ropa con Caraballo.
Garcia-Roberts: He said before signing day, Caraballo showed up and took him out and bought him a suit.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Un saco, una camisa, un pantalón fino y uno Alessandro McQueen.
Garcia-Roberts: And he gives him a necklace to wear for the signing day made out of gold.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Entonces, cuando llegó el día, yo me levanté a las cuatro de la fiebre.
Lussenhop: On signing day, Belfi said he was so excited he woke up at 4 a.m.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Porque ese día el que firma nadie — no duerme.
Lussenhop: Belfi and his family were invited to the Arizona Diamondbacks facility. One of those gleaming baseball castles. It would be Belfi’s new home.
Garcia-Roberts: If you look at the photos of him on that signing day, he looks like a professional athlete.
Lussenhop: Caraballo is in that photo, too, standing with Belfi.
Garcia-Roberts: He looks like somebody on draft day in the United States.
Lussenhop: He made it.
Garcia-Roberts: Right.
Lussenhop: This was a big day for the whole family. Their money problems were finally over. Right? That’s after the break.
Belfi Rivera and his family showed up at the bank in high spirits. It was finally time for Belfi to collect his first official paycheck as a professional athlete. His big signing bonus. He’d get the money in two installments, so $900,000 up first.
Garcia-Roberts: Belfi and his family arrive at the bank, and Caraballo again is there too. As well as Belfi’s other trainers.
Lussenhop: They were there to cash out. Belfi’s trainers would receive a big cut of the $1.8 million.
Garcia-Roberts: They ultimately receive $720,000.
Lussenhop: Wow.
Lussenhop: And then Caraballo took his first cut of the money he says the Riveras owe him.
Garcia-Roberts: Santo Caraballo takes the $180,000. So that’s the first trip to the bank for Belfi. He leaves with nothing.
Lussenhop: Does he realize it’s gonna go this way?
Garcia-Roberts: I think that he was disappointed, but I also think that he somewhat expected that. He trusted that his parents had needed the loan that they took. Mostly he trusted that Santo Caraballo, this man who had acted like a mentor to him, was not doing anything that would take advantage of him.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Mi mamá y, y mi, y mi papá confían mucho en él.
Lussenhop: Belfi says his parents had complete trust in Caraballo, too, leading up to Belfi’s second payday four months later.
Garcia-Roberts: Belfi’s parents arrive at the Diamondbacks facility where Belfi lives to pick him up, and Santo Caraballo is there in the parking lot, says, “Jump in, I’ll give you a ride to the bank.” And as they’re driving to the bank, Belfi learns that his parents have been having discussions with Santo Caraballo, where Santo has told them: “You guys are poor. You don’t know how to manage money. So what I can do is, I can take the rest of the money.” He said: “I can invest it in a fund with David Ortiz, and I’ll pay you dividends monthly. And so then you’ll, you know, you won’t have to manage your money. We will manage it for you.”
Lussenhop: I feel like I’m, like, watching a horror movie where someone’s, like, about to walk down into a basement, and you’re like, “No, don’t do it.”
Garcia-Roberts: Right.
Lussenhop: In a private room, Belfi watched in silence as his parents arranged for him to sign over nearly his entire second paycheck to Caraballo. First, a chunk of money for what he was owed. And the rest to invest in the fund. And that’s when everything goes off the rails.
Garcia-Roberts: The scene at the bank turns chaotic, is how people described it to me. A former trainer of Belfi’s who is like a family friend of the Riveras starts yelling at Caraballo that he’s a ladrón, a thief.
Lussenhop: The family friend told Gus that he actually started chasing Caraballo around the bank. He accused Caraballo of deceiving the family, and Caraballo returned the insult — he accused the trainer of trying to get a cut from the family himself. In that chaos, Belfi made a quick decision: He put $196,000 in his own personal account, in case he ends up needing to support himself when he eventually moves to the U.S.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Yo me defiendo con eso por allá afuera y compro lo mío.
Garcia-Roberts: Santo Caraballo leaves with the rest that day, according to the family, that he says he is going to invest in this fund with David Ortiz. Leaves with his bodyguards. His hasty exit from the bank is, is like a poor sign for the parents. Partly because they rode with him to the bank and he left, he left in his car.
Lussenhop: He leaves without giving them a ride?
Garcia-Roberts: Yeah, they start to realize maybe this is not all on the up and up. From that point forward, the family said that Santo is almost impossible to reach. Whenever they reach him, he’s out of the country, the call drops.
Lussenhop: Oh my God.
Garcia-Roberts: And then as the days turn to weeks, they start to, you know, belatedly do research on Santo Caraballo. And the mom, who is kind of like the shot caller for the family, starts calling others who have taken loans from Caraballo, and they start to piece together that there are many families that have had these kind of experiences with Caraballo.
Lussenhop: Gus talked to some of these families, too. Caraballo, it turned out, was notorious. Some people talked about him as a savvy hustler, exploiting a corrupt system that Major League Baseball had created. Others described him as someone with almost magical access and connections who was not to be crossed. Gus tracked down some former employees of Caraballo who explained how the lending business worked.
Garcia-Roberts: They said that 60 or 70 families per year would make these kind of deals with Caraballo, in their knowledge.
Lussenhop: Wow.
Lussenhop: To some families, like Belfi’s, Caraballo offered extremely high interest loans. To others, he claimed he could help their sons get signed by the MLB. Gus got his hands on more than a dozen of Caraballo’s contracts, signed by the parents of players as young as 10 years old. Contracts for that kind of arrangement put Caraballo in charge of these kids’ finances and decisions about their baseball careers. And a lot of those families trusted Caraballo for the same reason.
Garcia-Roberts: As I was looking into Caraballo’s lending business, over and over again, everyone I spoke with, virtually, said Caraballo told them that Ortiz was his partner in the business, just the same way that Belfi’s parents said he had.
Lussenhop: Gus found incorporation records for a company in Florida called Big Papi Sports Group that named both men. It wasn’t clear what that company did, and it dissolved after just about a year. But around the same time, Ortiz and Caraballo made a contract with the parents of a 13-year-old Dominican prospect. They promised to train him, house him and feed him. And the contract said this boy would give Caraballo and Ortiz 35% of any future signing bonus. It also gave them a ton of control over the boy’s life, forbidding him from leaving the baseball academy and granting them power of attorney over him. The parents of that child eventually sued, saying Caraballo and Ortiz didn’t live up to their side of the agreement and their kid was never signed. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds. Many of those families who had contracts with Caraballo said that he just ghosted them, never held up his side of the bargain. That’s how Belfi’s family felt, too. When Belfi’s mom finally got Caraballo on the phone, she asked him, point blank, where is my son’s money?
Garcia-Roberts: So, he makes it clear that he’s not gonna be able to pay them the dividend that he said he had. And so it starts to dawn on them that he likely does not have any plans to pay them from this fund that he said he had. And they’ve lost all of that money.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Él me dio una cadena que yo pensaba que era de verdad.
Lussenhop: Around this time, Belfi also realized something was up with this gold necklace Caraballo gave him.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Pero esa cadena no sirve. Él me la dio, pero esa cadena se pusieron negras y la cadena de oro no se pone negra.
Garcia-Roberts: It started to turn black on his neck.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Hierro fue, que de hierro, fue una cadena, fue un hierro.
Lussenhop: Turns out it wasn’t gold. It was iron.
Garcia-Roberts: And he threw it out.
Lussenhop: So were you able to talk to Caraballo about, about any of this?
Garcia-Roberts: When I was in Santo Domingo, I went to the neighborhood where his office is. It was a Sunday morning. And I saw parked out on a street near his office a chrome blue Mercedes SUV. And you know, I knew by then that Santo Caraballo was known for his very flashy taste in vehicles. And then I saw him. I figured, why not introduce myself? And I went up to him and explained that I was working on this story about money-lending in Dominican baseball and how I had heard that he was sort of the biggest player in that industry.
REPORTING TAPE, Santo Caraballo: No, hay gente — mucha gente que presta más que yo.
REPORTING TAPE, Translator: There are a lot of people that do more loans, even more than me.
Lussenhop: Through his translator, Gus tried to ask Caraballo about his business.
Garcia-Roberts: And he was, you know, gracious enough. He allowed me to record the meeting.
REPORTING TAPE, Caraballo: No, pero está, está muy lindo lo, lo que está haciendo, la, la historia, que salga todo a, a la luz de lo que se hace con el béisbol, cómo funciona, eso está interesante.
Lussenhop: Caraballo says, it’s beautiful the work Gus is doing. Writing stories about how the system works in baseball.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: Gracias.
Lussenhop: And then Gus responds by giving Caraballo what could be interpreted as a compliment about the work he’s doing:
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: It seems to me that you’ve figured out a way to make a really lucrative business.
REPORTING TAPE, Caraballo: Parece que está confundido, porque hay, hay …
REPORTING TAPE, Translator: I think you might be confused.
REPORTING TAPE, Caraballo: Yo no, yo no, yo no hago negocio con pelotero, yo no le presto a pelotero.
Lussenhop: Caraballo said he didn’t give loans to players. I mean, how could he? They were all underage.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: But you can do them with their parents, right?
REPORTING TAPE, Caraballo: La gente cree que, como tú dijiste ahorita, un negocio lucrativo …
Lussenhop: Caraballo says loaning money to these families, it’s not that lucrative, because you don’t actually know if the kids will end up being successful.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: So you do those loans sometimes, but not, but that’s not a big part of your business.
Garcia-Roberts: Eventually he indicated he didn’t wanna talk anymore and that he would be open to an interview at his office.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: Do you not have any time today? Like maybe later today?
REPORTING TAPE, Caraballo: Yo te llamo. A ver.
REPORTING TAPE, Translator: He’s gonna call you.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: Oh, you’re gonna call me. OK, muchas gracias.
Garcia-Roberts: All my further attempts after that to reach him to do that interview, he either ignored them or hung up on me.
Lussenhop: Caraballo didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story, either. His whole business exists because of Major League Baseball. Gus says the league has known for years about the early agreements and the money lenders.
Garcia-Roberts: But what I found is that Major League Baseball does not do anything to stamp out these early agreements.
Lussenhop: MLB declined to comment to Gus about this. They directed him to previous statements from Rob Manfred, the current MLB commissioner.
SPRING TRAINING PRESS CONFERENCE, Rob Manfred: We have invested tens of millions of dollars on an annual basis engaged in chasing wrongdoing. Um, and you know, we catch people, but we don’t catch everybody. And we, there’s probably more that goes on that we don’t catch than we do. Um, because of that, I have been a believer that the second alternative is really the better one, and that is the transparency associated with a draft.
Garcia-Roberts: The league has been pushing to institute an international draft. Players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and other countries would be drafted the same way that American players are drafted, which is a very orderly, transparent process.
Lussenhop: A draft would also allow the league to have more control over how much money is spent on players. Signing bonuses would be mostly determined by the order players are picked, instead of under-the-table deals made with the families of teenagers years in advance. And money lenders like Caraballo would have to change their business model. In 2022, the MLB was actually close to doing that, implementing an international draft. It was a sticking point in tense contract negotiations between the league and the union that represents players. But back then, a retired player who still has a ton of clout got involved.
VOICE MESSAGE, Ortiz: ¿Muchachones, muchachones, cómo están todos? Happy Sunday.
Lussenhop: That’s the voice of, you guessed it, Big Papi, David Ortiz. He sent a voice memo to a group of Dominican players and trainers about it.
VOICE MESSAGE, Ortiz: Tenemos que empezar esa campaña fuerte de no al draft.
Lussenhop: Urging them to oppose the international draft.
VOICE MESSAGE, Ortiz: Ustedes saben que aquí, esta nación de una manera u otra, más de un 40% de la población come del béisbol, por no decir otro número.
Lussenhop: He said, with some Big Papi hyperbole, “You all know very well that more than 40% of the population of the DR gets food on the table from baseball.” He said a draft would destroy that source of income for generations to come.
VOICE MESSAGE, Ortiz: No es juego, no es juego. Ya ustedes saben, muchachos, cualquier vaina tírenme para seguir informando.
Lussenhop: The day after he sent out this voice memo, the league and the union settled on a contract. As a part of the agreement, they dropped the idea of an international draft. Gus was eager to reach out to him, to Big Papi, the avatar of the Dominican Dream, to ask him about everything he’d learned. Was it true that he was profiting off of the system that had ripped off Belfi’s family? And in sort of a wild turn of events, Gus didn’t even have to reach out to him.
Garcia-Roberts: David Ortiz called me because he heard about my reporting. And unfortunately, he would not allow me to record the call. You know, it started out quite friendly, like, you know, the Big Papi that I know from TV. Initially he was pretty candid about the fact that he was invested in the Dominican baseball industry with Caraballo. He did say that he had invested millions of dollars in Caraballo’s business. He wouldn’t tell me exactly how much, he also wouldn’t tell me exactly which business. I asked him about being partnered in Caraballo’s operation and lending to players, and he said that he didn’t deal directly with players. He was quite emphatic that if somebody had told me that he dealt directly with players, that he had no idea what they were talking about. The conversation turned because I was curious about David Ortiz’s advocacy against Major League Baseball instituting an international draft in the Dominican Republic, and whether that stance was motivated by the fact that he had this previously unreported stake in the Dominican baseball industry, where presumably he would profit off of the status quo there. The business model would be lost if there was an international draft. And at that point, the sort of gregariousness ended and he shortly afterwards just hung up on me.
Lussenhop: Wow.
Lussenhop: In a statement and responses sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said that his opposition to the league’s proposal wasn’t motivated by personal interests. It was based on the impact he thought a draft would have on baseball in the DR. He confirmed that he’d had a close friendship with Caraballo and a business relationship involving loans to trainers, but he wasn’t ever aware of the investment fund and didn’t agree to participate in any of Caraballo’s other business ventures. Ortiz also said, “Once I began noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate, I started distancing myself from him personally.” And he said that no new loans had been extended after that. Ortiz went on to say: “I never authorized Santo Caraballo to use my name or reputation to gain the trust of young baseball players or their families, to promote loans or investments, or to represent financial transactions as being personally backed or endorsed by me. I have always sought to make a positive contribution to Dominican baseball. I would never knowingly participate in any operation intended to take advantage of a young player or his family.”
Lussenhop: How is Belfi Rivera doing today?
Garcia-Roberts: So Belfi is still part of the Arizona Diamondbacks organization. He’s in the Dominican Summer League.
Garcia-Roberts: I went to the Arizona Diamondbacks academy to watch a game.
REPORTING TAPE, Garcia-Roberts: Bottom of the seventh, the Mariners are winning 15 to 8. And there’s one out and nobody on.
Lussenhop: Those are the players cheering.
Garcia-Roberts: It’s in front of no fans. It’s just scouts, employees and some family members. I kept waiting for Belfi to bat, and he never did.
Lussenhop: Belfi’s supernatural talent seems to have dimmed a bit. He’s 19 now. If he doesn’t improve his game, fast, he might not make it off the island. For every Dominican star we cheer on in the big leagues, there are thousands of kids like Belfi. Even if they’re lucky enough to get signed, most are cut by MLB teams before they ever leave the DR. And if he gets cut, Belfi’s only big payday in the sport will have mostly been taken by Caraballo and Belfi’s trainers. The $196,000 that Belfi had set aside is gone, too. The family spent it. Some was for urgent needs: settling debts and paying off medical bills. Belfi also wanted to enjoy having money for the first time in his life. He gave some money to friends, bought some nice things.
Belfi’s parents got a lawyer involved and filed a complaint to prosecutors. It described Caraballo’s promise to invest their money as fraud, preying on Belfi’s vulnerability as a minor. The complaint said it was obvious Caraballo never intended to invest the money. But according to Belfi, Caraballo had a plan for that, too. He sent a driver to pick Belfi up after practice one day. Belfi said the man had a gun on his hip, so when he told Belfi to get in the car, he did. The man took him to Caraballo.
REPORTING TAPE, Rivera: Y me dijo si ese caso sigue, tú no vas a poder salir del país porque tienes un caso pen- pendiente.
Lussenhop: Caraballo told Belfi that if he had an open legal case, he wouldn’t be allowed to go play baseball in the U.S. That was not true, but it scared Belfi. So he signed papers that withdrew the complaint against Caraballo. Belfi told Gus that, after this whole ordeal, his message to other families like his, to other players with early agreements, is to just wait.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Si alguien es que se acerca de mí, por ejemplo, tiene un hijo …
Garcia-Roberts: Don’t trust a guy like Santo Caraballo, to try to avoid, you know, the same thing happening to them.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: … yo lo puedo ayudar con, con eso y por eso no me da vergüenza de decírselo a cualquiera.
Garcia-Roberts: At 19, I think a lot of us, we feel like we haven’t even had the opportunity to make any mistakes and, like, our whole trajectory is in front of us. And I think Belfi’s grappling right now, while trying to play baseball, with the idea that, like, somehow he’s washed up, and he squandered his great opportunity that he had worked for so much because of decisions that were made by grown-ups, not his own. And so it’s been a sort of mental challenge for him to sort of overcome that mentally and to focus on continuing his baseball career.
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Es que, es que pa qué seguir más trabajando si, si lo que yo consigo siempre lo pierdo.
Lussenhop: Why keep working, he says, if everything you earn, you lose.
REPORTING CALL, Garcia-Roberts: How does he try to overcome that?
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Escuchar música.
Lussenhop: Listening to music, says Belfi.
“LA PRENDA,” GATILLERO 23: Ellos dicen que son atrevido …
Lussenhop: Belfi’s favorite artist has another hit song called “La Prenda,” which in Dominican slang roughly translates to “bling,” or “the necklace.”
“LA PRENDA,” GATILLERO 23: La prenda …
REPORTING CALL, Garcia-Roberts: So when he’s, when he listens to this music, it kind of makes him forget about what Caraballo did?
REPORTING CALL, Rivera: Claro.
REPORTING CALL, Translator: Yes.
Emma Talkoff: This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and me, Emma Talkoff. Editing by Julia Longoria.
Sound design and mixing by David Herman. Fact-checking by Vera Carothers. The translator you heard throughout this episode is Zahiris Priscila Francisco Martinez. Music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi and Simone Sims Longo, with additional music by Epidemic Sound. Our team also includes Sabby Robinson and Katherine Wells.
Gus and our team continue to report on the baseball industry in the Dominican Republic, and we’re opening a WhatsApp line in both Spanish and English. If you want to get in touch with our reporting team or just follow along as our next stories come out, open WhatsApp and text us “baseball” to +1 917-207-6447. Please share with anyone you know who might have a connection to baseball in the Dominican Republic.
