So, you remember how the reason the Mets couldn’t spend any money to improve their team was because the Wilpon family lost so much money in the Bernie Madoff scandal? Pretty much everyone reported this: Michael Schmidt of the Times, whose supposedly sealed PED results well has dried up since David Ortiz, wrote back in December that “several people with knowledge of Wilpon’s business dealings revealed concern about significant problems that Wilpon and the Mets could encounter because of the reported fraud.” Author Erin Arvedlund actually reported that the Wilpons would have to sell the team, they lost so much money to Madoff. Well, guess what: Turns out, the Wilpons actually made money from Madoff.
Only the Mets, right? Seriously, though: Everyone had the Wilpon story wrong.
The owners of the New York Mets baseball team made about $48 million in dealings with swindler Bernard Madoff, court documents showed.
The Mets Limited Partnership, which is connected to the Wilpon family, led by Mets owner Fred Wilpon, deposited $522.8 million in two accounts with Madoff and withdrew $570.6 million, according to a Monday filing by court-appointed trustee Irving Picard.
A Talking Points Memo reader was just looking into the Wilpon finances last month and was predicting dire outcomes, though the validity of that reader’s dogged journey is somewhat undermined by the fact that the end of the story links to an obvious parody story about the Wilpons asking players for money and reports it as truth. (We love it when that happens.) So it appears that the Mets were right all along, and their attacks on Arvedlund — who wrote a book about Madoff, but never seemed to understand how baseball finances worked — were righteous in their indignation.
Mostly, we would just like to point out: Other than signing Johan Santana, the smartest thing the Mets have done in the last five years has been investing with Bernie Madoff.
A Talking Points Memo reader was just looking into the Wilpon finances last month and was predicting dire outcomes, though the validity of that reader’s dogged journey is somewhat undermined by the fact that the end of the story links to an obvious parody story about the Wilpons asking players for money and reports it as truth. (We love it when that happens.) So it appears that the Mets were right all along, and their attacks on Arvedlund — who wrote a book about Madoff, but never seemed to understand how baseball finances worked — were righteous in their indignation.
Mostly, we would just like to point out: Other than signing Johan Santana, the smartest thing the Mets have done in the last five years has been investing with Bernie Madoff.