Mets Settle Madoff Case

CNNMoney reporting - The owners of the New York Mets have agreed to pay a total of $162 million to the court-appointed trustee in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, according to the federal court handling the case.

 

Could have been a lot worse for the Mets and I think there's a significant number of their fans who wish it was.

 

The Mets are settling for pennies on the dollar and Wilpon and Katz may not have to pay a penny of it. This is actually a sweet deal for them.

 

Fifty million is coming off the books and they still have a payroll north of $90M. Say what you want about the Mets, but they aren't cheap.

 

What might be most interesting about this thread is how little interest it has generated.

 

'Mets Court-Ordered Remediation Fever - Catch It!'

 

Probably because it has resolved nothing. People lost their shirts. That money isn't coming back.

 

In the middle of 2011, there were several articles about this. Jeffrey Toobin did a piece in the New Yorker about the Mets' owners. It seemed like Wilpon wanted to make his case. They knew they would have to pay back the profits they received from the top of the pyramid scheme.

The question was the level of sophistication on the part of Wilpon and Saul Katz. Irving Picard, the trustee for the Madoff case, wanted one billion. Picard's job is to recover as much as possible for people who were owed money, but one billion was a stretch. He saw the value of the Mets and probably thought this was a case of deep pockets.

$166-million was about what Wilpon expected. It might not exactly be a victory, but Wilpon was saved from a disaster.

 

The Wilpon group went from having a huge amount of assets, plus the team and the network, to no assets, giveback of "profits" and a potential devastating financial situation.

The settlement allows them to keep the team and the network and potentially pay nothing further to the trustee (because their "profits" return will be netted against what they get from the trustee). They still took a massive hit because their Madoff money is gone, but I can't see this as anything but a victory for them.

 

The Wilpon-Katz defense was that they, too were victims of Madoff, gulls of a con man just like the people represented by the bankruptcy trustee Picard. I'll bet he settled as soon as he saw Omar Minaya listed as a defense witness.

 

A team in the biggest market in the country should be making plenty of money.

 

Market size doesn't matter when your product is dull as dishwater. They couldn't even build the kind of park their customers wanted. It's a shrine to the majority owner's boyhood.