KEY WEST, FLORIDA (Fortune) -- As Major League Baseball eases in to the new season at ballparks across the country this week, a separate drama is playing out in a courthouse in this tropical paradise - one that spotlights a darker side of the national pastime.
The case, in which Gus Dominguez, a prominent Los Angeles-based sports agent, is accused of smuggling ballplayers out of communist Cuba to play professional baseball in the United States, has revealed an underworld of the baseball economy and a story that has all the hallmarks of an international thriller: treacherous boat rides, alleged illicit payments funneled through the bank account of a back-up catcher and a star witness who is an admitted drug felon and insurance fraudster.
The question for the jury will come down to this: was Dominguez just a guy looking to make a buck or a freedom fighter running a latter-day underground railroad? "This is a guy who wants to bring them in, sign them, and turn them in to an income-producing entity for him, an investment if you will," said Ben Daniel, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, of Dominguez.
Dominguez's lawyer argued the agent "worked diligently to make opportunities available to baseball players... to help them leave the regime of Fidel Castro, where they didn't have the opportunity to play sports at the level of the United States. But he did it properly, and he did it correctly."
The case has also spotlighted an intriguing issue for the business of major league baseball: the value of talent locked away in Cuba and how that talent could change the demographics of MLB if it were unleashed. Last year more than 150 players from the Dominican Republic, a country with 9.2 million people, appeared in big league games. Cuba, by contrast, has 11.4 million people is just as baseball obsessed and boasts a more sophisticated structure to nurture young players. Yet only nine Cubans appeared in the major leagues last year.
Joe Kehoskie, a baseball agent that has represented about 15 Cuban defectors, recently told Fortune that his business plan estimates that there could be half a billion dollars worth of baseball players in Cuba. (The average major league salary last year was $2.7 million.) With Castro ill, the issue has taken on renewed urgency, and MLB is actively making plans for how it would react if the island's political system collapsed. Most teams would likely set up academies on the island; another idea is to locate a minor league team in Havana, a high level MLB executive recently told Fortune.
In testimony yesterday the jury first heard from Henry Blanco, the second-string catcher for the Chicago Cubs who has bounced around the big leagues for nine years on six teams. Blanco, who immediately after testifying boarded a plan in hopes of getting to Cincinnati in time for last night's game, testified that Dominguez used his bank account to funnel some $225,000 that the government says was used to pay for bringing several ballplayers, including the current Seattle Mariners shortstop Yuniesky Bentancourt, to the U.S.
"He took $225,000 and paid it to a stranger?" asked Daniel, the lead prosecutor. "Yes," Blanco said. Under cross examination by Dominguez's attorney, Blanco said the money was eventually paid back and that he still counts Dominguez as his agent and friend.
Blanco also painted a picture of Dominguez's business - called Total Sports International - that goes beyond just negotiating baseball contracts. Blanco said he relies on Dominguez for legal services, travel arrangements, immigration advice, even for shipping scotch back to his native Venezuela for his relatives.
After Blanco, into the courtroom marched Ysbel Medina-Santos, in a light blue prison jumpsuit, to claim that he provided the operational muscle to smuggle five Cuban ballplayers to Deer Key, an area of the Florida Keys some 30 miles from the courthouse. Medina-Santos is hardly the poster child for relaxing immigration laws: a Cuban immigrant who fled the communist nation on the 1994 exodus, he faces 20 years to life on cocaine and marijuana charges and is cooperating in hopes for leniency.
He said that in 2004 Dominguez asked him to smuggle the five players out of Cuba; two of those players remain in pro ball, in the Atlanta Braves and Arizona Diamondbacks minor league systems. Before agreeing to do so, Medina-Santos demanded $100,000 from Dominguez to pay for a previous smuggle in 2003, an adventure that brought Betancourt to the United States. Dominguez, Medina-Santos claimed, paid that money through Blanco's bank account, to which Dominguez had access, ostensibly to pay the catcher's bills and make investments.
The defense, meanwhile, hammered Medina-Santos about his various criminal enterprises in a bid to attack his credibility. The cross examination will continue Thursday, and then Betancourt, who left his Mariners teammates behind in Seattle to fly here, is scheduled to testify.
Dominguez, who has a shock of thick grey hair and has been described in the media as a "Latin matinee idol," sat quietly for most of the day, occasionally passing notes to his lawyers. The agent, a former artist and marketing whiz, fell in to the baseball representation business by happenstance. In 1991 Rene Arocha, a Cuban pitcher, became the first ballplayer to defect under Castro. A Miami radio executive, asked Dominguez to find representation for Arocha. After failing to convince an established agent to represent the pitcher, Dominguez wound up doing the job himself. 
