This article can be found in “At the Ballpark,” a collection of New Yorker baseball stories for the iPad.
Nearly a decade ago, Fred Wilpon, the chairman and chief executive of the New York Mets, had his first meeting with the architects of what would become Citi Field, the team’s new ballpark, in Queens. “The first day the architects came to the site, they started saying blah, blah, blah, and I said to them, ‘Let me tell you how this is going to work,’ ” Wilpon told me recently. “ ‘The front of the building is going to look like Ebbets Field. And it’s going to have a rotunda—just like at Ebbets.’ And then I said, ‘Guess what. Here are the plans for Ebbets Field.’ And I handed them over.”
As we spoke, Wilpon was walking through the rotunda of the new stadium, which opened in 2009. The façade does indeed resemble that of Ebbets Field, the home of the late Brooklyn Dodgers. The rotunda serves as a memorial to the life and work of Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier when, in 1947, he joined the Dodgers, and who, for his achievements on and off the field, remains Wilpon’s hero. Photographs of Robinson line the rotunda walls, and in the middle of the vast room an aluminum sculpture of his number, 42, rendered in Dodger blue, stands as a kind of shrine.
When Citi Field opened, the Brooklyn focus drew some criticism. After all, the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957, and Ebbets Field was demolished shortly thereafter. Only the very oldest fans have any first-hand memory of the place. The Mets, who had been in existence for almost a half century, were virtually ignored in their own home. “All the Dodger stuff—that was an error of judgment on my part,” Wilpon told me. Still, the ballpark combined the guiding preoccupations of Wilpon’s professional life—baseball and real estate. More than that, the stadium, in its architectural homage to Ebbets Field, underlined the omnipresence of Brooklyn, where Wilpon grew up, in everything that followed.
Wilpon, who is seventy-four, has run the Mets since 1980—for more than half his adult life. He has the rolling, slightly pained gait of an ex-athlete, a well-trimmed crown of silver hair, and a taste for fine tailoring, even in casual clothes. He walks the corridors of Citi Field with such a proprietary air that it’s not necessary to make out the bodyguard, hovering at a discreet distance, to recognize that he is the boss. Wilpon has a deft touch with fans. “I bet my husband that you were the guy who owns the Mets,” a breathless woman said to him. “You win,” Wilpon replied.
In the past two years, the Dodger problem at Citi Field has largely been addressed. The team added a Mets Hall of Fame, just off the rotunda, and plenty of banners and photographs of the Mets’ storied and eccentric existence are now spread around the ballpark. The Mets are a family business, run by Wilpon, his brother-in-law Saul Katz, the president of the team, and his son Jeff Wilpon, the chief operating officer. Jeff supervised the construction of Citi Field on a day-to-day basis, but Fred has an almost tactile sense of every inch. “See the floor here?” he said, as we walked in the corridor outside the Mets’ locker room. “The concrete we put in was too slippery for the guys when they got out of the showers.” So a new, pebbly surface was added, in the Mets’ colors of orange and blue.
Wilpon was making a circuit to visit players and coaches before a mid-April night game. The Mets were off to an awful start. A loss the previous evening had given the team the worst record in the National League. (“THAT STINK? IT’S THE METS,” read the headline in the Post.) Wilpon stopped at the coaches’ locker room and chatted with Mookie Wilson, the first-base coach and long a favorite of both Wilpon and the fans. Mookie (who has almost never been known by anything but his first name) came up with the team in the early eighties and played in the Mets’ last World Series victory, in 1986. (“You want to talk about old?” Wilpon said later. “When Mookie came up, he always had this little kid running around his ankles in the locker room.” That was Mookie’s kid Preston, who went on to play for a decade in the major leagues. “Now that little kid is retired!” Wilpon said, with a laugh.) Wilpon inquired after the health of Mookie’s wife, who has been ailing, then commiserated about the team’s troubles. “We didn’t see these problems in spring training,” Wilpon said. He chuckled with Dan Warthen, the pitching coach, about a member of the staff who tends to dawdle on the mound. “Tell him to throw the fucking ball!” Wilpon said. As we walked on, toward the training room, he said to me, “Those guys are proud. They are teachers. It drives them crazy to lose.”
Three pitchers, including Jason Isringhausen, at thirty-eight the senior member of the staff, were perched on training tables, their arms iced and swaddled in yards of Ace bandages. Wilpon asked how they were doing.
Fine, they said, almost in unison.
“What are you doing in here if you’re fine?” Wilpon said.
They all laughed.
“C’mon, guys,” Wilpon said, more seriously. “One game at a time, one game at a time.”
He repeated the message when he stopped in to see Terry Collins, the manager, and Sandy Alderson, the general manager, who are both new this year, their predecessors having been dismissed after several seasons of dismal results. Wilpon stepped through the tunnel and onto the field, where the Houston Astros were finishing batting practice. He came upon Pedro Beato, a boyish six-foot-four-inch rookie pitcher with a broad smile displaying a mouthful of braces. Beato, who is twenty-four, was born in the Dominican Republic but went to high school in Brooklyn. Wilpon had shaken hands with the other players, but he gave Beato a hug.
“Brooklyn boy!” Wilpon said. “My man!”
It isn’t a Brooklyn boy but, rather, a son of Queens who now threatens to undo Fred Wilpon’s life’s work: Bernard Madoff. Wilpon and Madoff had much in common. Wilpon is just a year and a half older than Madoff, and both grew up as outer-borough strivers. Three decades ago, when they met, the two men were already rich and respected beyond their youthful dreams; both were poised to become leaders in their fields. Sterling Equities, Wilpon’s company, became a national power in real-estate development, and also acquired interests in biotech, cable television, and, of course, baseball. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, L.L.C., developed a pioneering electronic stock-trading operation, and Madoff himself operated a separate money-management business, which he made available to a select group of investors. Fred and his wife, Judy, and Bernie and Ruth Madoff became friends, if not intimates, sharing occasional trips and dinners a few times a year. Both families had vacation houses in Palm Beach, and they enjoyed a landmark night at the movies there. “It was the first time I ever got in as a senior citizen,” Wilpon recalled. “We were going to meet them at the movie theatre in West Palm. And I remember going to the booth to buy the tickets. And Bernie was of senior-citizen age at that time, too, but I didn’t think Ruth was. So I bought three senior citizens and one regular, and we laughed about it.”
Mostly, though, the relationship was about business. Starting in the mid-eighties, Wilpon, along with his partners, his family, and his friends, began sending money to Madoff to manage. The returns were not spectacular, but they were steady; indeed, that was the core of Madoff’s appeal. In bull and bear markets, Madoff returned about ten per cent a year to Wilpon. He and his partners used Madoff as a bank, sending spare cash Madoff’s way until it was needed for investments or to make a payroll. Sterling employed an accountant whose responsibilities included managing the many accounts that the firm and its partners and associates had with Madoff. The investments took place automatically, without any specific orders from the Sterling partners.
The Wilpon stake with Madoff grew to be enormous. There were eventually some four hundred and eighty Sterling-related accounts with the firm: three hundred or so belonged to Wilpon, his partners in Sterling, and their family members, trusts, and charities; the other accounts were owned by close friends, employees, and business associates. In all, the Sterling cluster was one of the largest groups of Madoff investors. On December 11, 2008, the day that Madoff’s money-management business was revealed to be the largest Ponzi scheme in American history, Wilpon and his partners’ stake was listed at five hundred and fifty million dollars. On that one day, it all vanished.
That was bad enough. Then, last December, Irving Picard, a lawyer at the firm of Baker & Hostetler, who is the bankruptcy trustee charged with salvaging assets to compensate Madoff’s victims, filed a lawsuit against Wilpon and his partners. “There were thousands of victims of Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme,” Picard wrote. “But Saul Katz is not one of them. Neither is Fred Wilpon.” Instead, according to Picard, Wilpon and Katz were enablers, virtually Madoff’s accomplices in the vast crime, who “willfully turned a blind eye to every objective indicia of fraud before them.” For the Madoff investors, Picard had adopted a formula whereby the “net winners”—that is, those who cashed out more than they put into their Madoff accounts—would pay back their winnings to compensate those who were net losers. By this standard, the Wilpon people would have had to repay approximately a hundred and sixty million dollars in profits that they had taken out of their Madoff accounts over the years. (The precise amount is in dispute.) However, Picard was treating Wilpon the way he treated those he believed to be complicit in Madoff’s fraud. From this group, Picard was seeking a refund of their Madoff principal, not just their profits. In other words, they would have to make good even on the money they had lost in the scam. Specifically, he was demanding that the Wilpon group pay damages of approximately a billion dollars.
Fred Wilpon is rich, but he is not Michael Bloomberg. He cannot simply write a check of that size to make the case go away. The mere filing of Picard’s lawsuit forced Wilpon into a painful financial reckoning. Most important, the lawsuit compelled him to put a big piece of his beloved Mets up for sale. For decades, Wilpon has lived in the fraught and contentious worlds of New York real estate and professional sports and has had an enviable reputation: thoughtful, decent, philanthropic, even kind. But now, in the later innings of his life, he must rise to an unseemly challenge: to salvage his reputation and his fortune, Wilpon must prove that he was a dupe rather than a crook.
The headquarters of the Wilpon empire resembles an English manor house transplanted to a high floor in Rockefeller Center. Wood panelling, thick carpets, and pastoral landscapes in heavy frames offer a serene contrast to the hubbub below. Soft drinks are decanted into crystal glasses. (No Coke; Pepsi is a Mets sponsor.) True, the muted television in the reception area is set to SNY—the Wilpons’ successful cable sports channel—and there is the obligatory LeRoy Neiman painting. But the Neiman shows the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, rather than his customary jock kitsch, and the over-all feel of the offices is boardroom, not locker room. The suite previously served as the aerie of the late Steve Ross, when he was chairman of Time Warner. “I liked Steve,” Wilpon told me. “He got his start in the funeral business, so we had that in common.”
Unlike many rich men, Wilpon is an asker of questions as much as a dispenser of opinions. He learns about people’s backgrounds—their home towns, schools, parents, kids—and makes connections from his own wide-ranging life and contacts. It’s a winning trait, especially useful for a salesman. As for the Ross connection, it was actually Wilpon’s father, Nat, who made his living among the deceased—as a manager of Sherman’s Memorial Chapel, which is still welcoming customers on Coney Island Avenue.
Every spring, Wilpon takes a half-dozen or so close friends to Florida, to the Mets’ training camp, at Port St. Lucie, for a long weekend of baseball and Italian food. The men, who call themselves the old farts’ club, have found success in varying fields—Jim McCann founded 1-800-Flowers; Robert McGuire is a former New York City police commissioner—but the similarities among them are striking. All are self-made, grew up in the outer boroughs of New York City, and can now look back on middle age. (Ray Lamontagne, the chairman of the board of City Center, comes from New Hampshire, but otherwise fits the profile.) During one recent lunch together, the old farts had a contest of sorts to determine who grew up in the most modest circumstances. They had all shared a bedroom with siblings, but Wilpon was deemed the winner, because he was the only one who had to share with his sister.
The Wilpons lived in Bensonhurst, and Fred grew up on the baseball fields at the Parade Grounds and in Dyker Park. He pitched for Lafayette High School and for sandlot teams, and quickly drew notice as a professional prospect. Wilpon was so well regarded that he was invited to pitch batting practice to the major leaguers. When he threw at Ebbets, he would get an extra ticket to the games, and he often brought along a friend from high school, Sandy Koufax. “Sandy was one of the best basketball players in Brooklyn,” Wilpon said. “The only reason he joined the baseball team was so we could hang around together. Sandy played first base.”
“I really didn’t play much baseball at all,” Koufax told me. “I didn’t go out for the baseball team until my senior year, when basketball was over and I didn’t have anything better to do. Fred was the baseball player.” Koufax won a basketball scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. There he took up baseball more seriously and stopped playing the infield.
The Dodgers tried to sign Wilpon in high school, but his parents insisted that he go to college. The University of Michigan had a good team, and offered Wilpon a partial scholarship, which he accepted. Before his sophomore year, though, he blew out his arm and was unable to pitch again. Ray Fisher, the baseball coach, made sure that the school converted Wilpon’s athletic scholarship into an academic grant, and he was able to graduate on time, in 1958. Wilpon and Judy, whom he met in Ann Arbor, are loyal alums. In 2008, they supplied most of the funds for a nine-million-dollar renovation of the Michigan baseball stadium, which is named after Fisher. The Wilpons also underwrite dozens of scholarships every year. Fred’s ringtone is the Michigan fight song.
After graduating, Fred tried to sell primitive calculators door to door in midtown Manhattan, and Judy worked as a secretary. One day, Fred decided to try to find Judy a new job. He stopped in at 680 Fifth Avenue, where Branch Rickey, the former president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was attempting to bring a new team to the city. “When I introduced myself to the secretary, I heard Rickey’s big, booming voice in the background saying, ‘I remember him—send him in!’ ” Wilpon recalled. A half-century earlier, Rickey had graduated from Michigan’s law school and had also coached its baseball team; he said he would be happy to have Judy come by for an interview. Rickey hired her as a secretary for his new operation, which was a predecessor of the Metropolitan Baseball Club. Later, the name was shortened to the Mets. (Judy left the job after a few years to raise two sons and a daughter, but she never gave up her love of baseball. “We’ll be together at dinner in Sun Valley or somewhere, and you’ll look over at Judy and you think she’s zoned out—she’s staring at her lap,” Jim McCann said. “But she is monitoring every pitch in the Mets game on her phone.”)
“These were the days when there was a lot of anti-Semitism in New York, so I knew I had no shot at banking or insurance,” Wilpon said. “But when I walked around the city I would look up at the buildings and see names like Rudin and Minskoff. So after work every day for about three months I went to the public library, on Forty-second Street, and read everything I could about real estate.” Wilpon hooked up with a developer who was trying to build office space above the old Paramount Theatre, in Times Square. That project led to others. In the meantime, Fred’s sister, Iris, had married Saul Katz, who was also trying to break into real estate.
Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz were in their conference room, in Rockefeller Center, talking baseball, continuing a conversation that has gone on for about fifty years. The subject was Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ great closer, who owes his success to a single pitch, the cut fastball.
“One pitch,” Wilpon said.
“I don’t get that,” Katz replied.
“What do you mean?” Wilpon answered. “You can’t hit that pitch.”
“But they know it’s coming.”
“Still can’t hit it.”
“I don’t get it.”
Wilpon took out a baseball—there is often one within reach—and demonstrated how Rivera grips the ball. (“I don’t claim to know everything about baseball,” Wilpon said to me at one point. “But I do know pitching.”) Wilpon demonstrated how the ball rolled off Rivera’s fingers. “It can break either way,” he said.
“Still don’t get it,” Katz replied.
As Steve Greenberg, the Mets’ investment banker, put it, “It’s the Fred-and-Saul vaudeville act.” By now, the roles are well established. Wilpon is the statesman, calm and deliberative; Katz is the street guy, terse and combative. In part, these roles play off the physical contrast between them: Wilpon, lithe, graceful, with the Mitt Romney-plus-twenty-years hair; Katz, bald, bull-necked, with a build like an oil drum. To be sure, the act reflects a measure of truth. Mid-century Brooklyn still flavors Saul’s speech and deportment much more than Fred’s. (“Let me tell you something,” Katz said less than five minutes into our first meeting. “I have a big set of balls.”) But Wilpon didn’t make millions in the cutthroat world of New York real estate without plenty of guile, and Katz brings more than just bluster to the table. He spent much of his time in the past fifteen years on a charitable venture that required as much tact as moxie—integrating the North Shore Health System and Long Island Jewish Medical Center into a single enterprise that now includes fifteen hospitals. In light of the stresses of the past year, a doctor asked Iris Katz whether her husband was sleeping. “She’s a Wilpon—she worries,” Saul Katz said. “I sleep like a baby.”
Katz graduated from Brooklyn College, picked up a C.P.A. degree, and went to work for a real-estate developer. “We didn’t have much money, of course,” Katz said. “We had a choice. We could live on our own and drive a crappy car or stay with her parents and get a new car. We got the new Pontiac Catalina, and lived in the basement for three years.” Before he was thirty, Katz was itching to make his own deals. By the late nineteen-sixties, both Katz and Wilpon had moved to Long Island, and they would drive into the city together. If they happened to be wearing the same suit, Wilpon would ask Katz to change his. Then as now, both men had clothes made by the famous Brooklyn tailor Martin Greenfield, although Katz pairs his suits with braces depicting the Statue of Liberty. Through decades of increasingly complex financial undertakings—Wilpon’s 2010 tax return was more than two thousand pages long—the deal between Saul and Fred is based on only a handshake.
The two men founded Sterling Equities in 1972. “Great time to start a business,” Katz said. “Economy falling apart, then the oil embargo. Our first project was town houses in Tarrytown”—the Westchester suburb. “No one thought they could be built. We were too stupid to know that we couldn’t do it.” In fact, the project was a great success, which presented the two men with a problem of sorts. “Because we had built condos, the money we were making was taxed as ordinary income, so, in order to protect against paying the tax, we started travelling all over the country buying what we thought were tax shelters,” Katz said. More or less unwittingly, Sterling was buying real estate at the bottom of the market. “The ‘tax shelters’ turned into cash cows,” Katz said.
Wilpon was living in Roslyn Harbor, in prosperous obscurity, when, on October 4, 1975, Joan Whitney Payson died. After the Giants and the Dodgers left for California, in 1957, Payson began agitating for a replacement National League franchise to be brought to New York. She won the rights to a new team, and the Mets made their début in 1962. Mrs. Payson, a doughty heiress, became the public face of the team. She presided over the hundred and twenty losses (still the major-league record) in the tragicomedy that was the team’s inaugural year, and over the Miracle Mets’ World Series championship of 1969.
Wilpon had kept a hand in baseball, but barely. Jeff Wilpon went to Roslyn High School and inherited his father’s passion and talent for the game, though he was a catcher, not a pitcher. Fred decided to introduce his son to Joe Pignatano, the Mets’ bullpen coach at the time, who was an old friend of Fred’s from Brooklyn and a former catcher for the Dodgers. Pignatano was impressed by the teen-ager’s skill, and he invited Jeff to catch occasional batting practice for the Mets, just as Fred had pitched as a boy for the Dodgers. Fred starting visiting Shea Stadium more often, and he chatted with Joe Torre, another friend from Brooklyn days, who was now the Mets’ manager. From Torre, Wilpon learned that Mrs. Payson’s husband had no real interest in running the club, so it was likely that the Mets would soon be up for sale.
“I went to Saul, and I said, ‘I have this idea,’ and he was ‘Oh, God, now what?’ and I said, ‘No, really, I think we can get the Mets,’ ” Wilpon said. (“This was Fred’s dream, it always was,” Katz said. “I grew up and I couldn’t even afford to go to the movies, so what did I want with a baseball team?”) After a frantic couple of weeks of negotiations, Wilpon emerged, in December, 1979, as the top bidder for the Mets, at $21.1 million. But Wilpon and Katz put up only six hundred and fifty thousand each. They still had to find investors who were willing to sign on, even though Wilpon was going to control the team.
At the time, Wilpon’s younger son and his daughter attended Green Vale, a tony private school on Long Island, and Fred was serving on the school’s board of directors, with two other local luminaries: John Pickett, who then owned the New York Islanders hockey team, and Nelson Doubleday, the publishing heir. Pickett told Wilpon that Doubleday’s company would finance the rest of the bid, and it did. Wilpon became chief executive of the Mets before Opening Day in 1980.
At around the same time, another event took place that turned out to be nearly as important. It happened in the cafeteria at Roslyn High. “It was my junior year, and I was talking with a friend about how we were going to be in Palm Beach over Thanksgiving break, and we were saying we were going to rent a boat to go fishing,” Jeff Wilpon said. “And this little kid came up to us, and he said he was going to be in Palm Beach, too, and he had a boat, and we could go fishing together. He was a freshman, so we basically ignored him. We told him sure, sure, but we never thought anything was going to happen.
“But, when we got down to Palm Beach, all of a sudden a light bulb went off,” Jeff continued. “Maybe we wouldn’t have to pay to rent a boat. Maybe we should call this kid up. Next thing you know, we’re hanging out with this freshman down there. We became friends. It was a weird, freak thing.” The freshman was Mark Madoff.
“Jeff and my sons all went to Roslyn High School together,” Bernard Madoff wrote to me in an e-mail from federal prison in North Carolina, where he is serving a sentence of a hundred and fifty years. “Although Jeff was a couple of years older, they all had many of the same friends and grew up together. Jeff was always a lovely boy and well liked. He was quite an athlete. I first met Fred in the 80’s thru our sons. We both were very family oriented and had many similar interests.”
According to Fred Wilpon, “Jeff was in school and was friendly with Mark Madoff and Andy Madoff—mostly with Mark, because Mark was more his age. Andy was a little younger. And Jeff introduced me to Bernie.” Although Fred Wilpon and Bernie Madoff came out of the same world—during the nineteen-forties, Madoff’s father started a business called Dodger Sporting Goods Corporation—for a few years they had contact only through their sons. Then Madoff made a casual offer to manage some of Wilpon’s money. After Madoff made the invitation a second time, Wilpon happened to have lunch with an old friend named Howard Squadron. Squadron, who died in 2001, was a prominent New York lawyer and was also president of the American Jewish Congress.
“I was having lunch with Howard one day at the Century Club, where he belonged, and he said something to me about Bernie Madoff,” Wilpon said. “He and his partners were investing now for years and they were doing great. ‘And Bernie is an amazing investor. And he’s got a strategy that is a very safe strategy.’ And I said, ‘Describe the strategy to me. I don’t know too much about that kind of stuff.’ Howard certainly wasn’t looking for major, major returns. He was looking for safety. So he said, ‘You ought to consider investing with him.’ ” Wilpon made his first investment with Madoff in 1985. “So we decided to jump in,” he said. “And we jumped in very small. And, as the years went, it became more and more and more and more.”
For one thing, Wilpon had more and more to invest over the years. He and his partners bought the Mets just before the real-estate market began a sustained boom. And he didn’t anticipate that owning the Mets would boost his seemingly unrelated business interests. “No one had heard of us before we bought the Mets, and afterward the change was dramatic,” Wilpon told me. “I don’t think someone has not returned one of my telephone calls in thirty years. It’s a small club, owning a baseball team, and people want to be near it.” As Katz told me, “You take the chairman of the board of a bank, with his grandson, on the field to meet David Wright, and make that grandfather a hero, and you do business the way we do business, it opens up everything.”
Fred and Judy Wilpon moved from Roslyn Harbor to an estate in Locust Valley, on Long Island Sound. Commercial air travel gave way to private planes. In 1993, the Wilpons invited their friends the Madoffs to join them in Europe. “For Fred and Judy’s wedding anniversary, we all flew to Hotel Du Cap in the South of France,” Madoff told me in an e-mail. They were assured that “the weather in October was the absolutely best then,” he went on. “After four days of solid rain and wind Fred decided he should try and find nicer weather. This led to us climbing on his plane and going to Athens and then to London, where we finally found sunshine. It certainly was an interesting trip, but we all had a fantastic time in spite of the weather. We retired Fred as our weather man.” Later, the two families were also in Japan at the same time—“when Fred kept drinking the water in his finger bowl after each course was served, to the astonishment of the meek young lady serving,” Madoff wrote.
Real estate remained the heart of the Sterling operation, and, thanks to the cachet of owning the Mets, Wilpon finally started playing on the big stage of midtown Manhattan. In 1986, working with partners, he built the Lipstick Building, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, on Third Avenue; in 1992, 450 Lexington Avenue, next to Grand Central Terminal; and, later, the tower for Bear Stearns, on Madison. Madoff took three floors in the Lipstick Building. In all, Sterling came to buy or develop 25.2 million square feet of commercial property, sixty-five thousand residential units, 8.7 million square feet of retail property, and sports complexes. In 2001, as a sort of dry run for Citi Field, Wilpon built the stadium for the Mets farm team in Coney Island; it was the first new stadium in Brooklyn since the demise of Ebbets Field.
“In New York real estate, there is a small group of people who are in their own league—Vornado, SL Green, Tishman Speyer,” Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said. “But Fred is in the very next group, with the Rudins, the Resnicks, and the Zuckers.” Wilpon’s reputation transcends the extent of his holdings. “Everybody likes Fred, there is tremendous respect for Fred, people listen to what he has to say, and I don’t know of anybody who has ever had an open fight with him,” Spinola said. “They’d all like to beat each other out, but I have never heard a negative thing said about Fred Wilpon.” William Rudin, the chief executive of Rudin Management, said, “Fred’s reputation in the real-estate community is top tier. He couldn’t be more of a gentleman.”
The Mets were another story. As a business enterprise, the team was a peculiar undertaking. In any given year, it made or lost a small amount of money; Wilpon ran it as a roughly break-even operation. But the over-all value of the franchise has soared. The Mets changed hands in 1980 for $21.1 million. In 1986, Wilpon and Katz and Doubleday became even partners, in a deal that valued the team at a hundred million. Then, in 2002, they bought out Doubleday’s half, in a transaction that put the value at $391 million. Today, as Wilpon negotiates with possible investors, he says it’s clear that the team is worth more than a billion dollars. “There’s one National League franchise in New York,” he said. “Fifty years from now, there’s going to be one National League franchise in New York. That’s a very valuable thing.”
Then, there is the matter of the quality of the Mets teams. At one point, I mentioned to Wilpon the theory that the Mets might be cursed. He gave a sort of half laugh, and said, “You mean”—and then pantomimed a checked swing of the bat.
Any Mets fan (I am one) would understand the reference. The Mets took the 2006 National League Championship Series to a seventh game against the Cardinals. On October 19th, in the bottom of the ninth, the Mets were down, 3–1, the bases were loaded, and Carlos Beltran, the team’s star center fielder, came to the plate. With two outs and the count 0–2, the Cards’ pitcher, Adam Wainwright, threw a looping curveball on the outside corner. Beltran twitched, froze, and watched strike three. The ignominious conclusion did more than end the Mets’ season; it seemed to set off a kind of karmic cyclone from which the team has yet to emerge.
In 2007, the Mets led their division by seven games, with seventeen games left in the season. They collapsed, going five and twelve, and missed the playoffs by a single game. The following year, the team again had a chance to make the playoffs on the last day of the season, and lost. In 2009, when Citi Field opened, the Mets eliminated the customary suspense by finishing fourth, with a 70–92 record. They were fourth again last year. So far, they have spent most of this season in fifth—i.e., last—place in their division.
Only one team wins the World Series each year, so there’s no shame in falling short, but the Mets have, in recent years, displayed a kind of baroque futility. On June 12, 2009, with the Mets leading the Yankees by a run in the bottom of the ninth, there was Luis Castillo’s dropped two-out pop-up to allow the tying and winning runs to score. There were bad contracts, like three years and $36 million for the pitcher Oliver Perez. (Castillo and Perez were released this spring.) There was a plague of injuries. (Johan Santana, the team’s ace, has yet to throw a pitch this season.) There was the closer Francisco Rodriguez’s assault on his former girlfriend’s father last August, at Citi Field. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges, and agreed to undergo anger-management counselling—which might be useful for the team’s fans, too. “Fred suffers,” Saul Katz said. “He really thinks they should go one sixty-two and oh.”
Fred Wilpon, Katz, and Jeff Wilpon watch games from three adjoining boxes just above the screen behind home plate. They also share an elegant dining room at the ballpark, which is used for corporate and charity functions and is furnished with antique porcelains that Fred bought at Christie’s. At the entrance to Fred’s box are the blueprints for the construction of Ebbets Field, now framed; inside, there’s a photograph of Jackie and Rachel Robinson, which Rachel inscribed, “To Fred, my hero.”
Even with the current difficulties, Wilpon still shows at times an almost childlike delight in the wondrous course his life has taken from Bensonhurst. Shortly after we took our seats in his box, we ate burgers from Shake Shack, which has an outlet at the stadium. A little while later, he whispered to the attendant in the box, “You know, I’m going to have a hot dog, too!” (There may be a different attitude toward displays of wealth in the next generation. In Jeff Wilpon’s office, overlooking center field, he shows off a half-dozen models of private jets; Saul’s son David enjoys big-game hunting as a hobby.)
Notwithstanding his obvious partisanship, Wilpon displays a deep and unsentimental knowledge of the game. “He’s happiest when he’s talking baseball, arguing about baseball,” Omar Minaya, whom the Wilpons fired as the team’s general manager after last season, told me. “I always felt best when we were arguing over a player and Fred would say, ‘Omar, you’re full of shit.’ ”
In the game against the Astros, Jose Reyes, leading off for the Mets, singled sharply up the middle, then stole second. “He’s a racehorse,” Wilpon said. When Reyes started with the Mets, in 2003, just before his twentieth birthday, he was pegged as a future star. Injuries have limited him to a more pedestrian career, though he’s off to a good start this season. “He thinks he’s going to get Carl Crawford money,” Wilpon said, referring to the Red Sox’ signing of the former Tampa Bay player to a seven-year, $142-million contract. “He’s had everything wrong with him,” Wilpon said of Reyes. “He won’t get it.”
After the catcher, Josh Thole, struck out, David Wright came to the plate. Wright, the team’s marquee attraction, has started the season dreadfully at the plate. “He’s pressing,” Wilpon said. “A really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar.”
Wright walked.
When Carlos Beltran came up, I mentioned his prodigious post-season with the Astros in 2004, when he hit eight home runs, just before he went to the Mets as a free agent. Wilpon laughed, not happily. “We had some schmuck in New York who paid him based on that one series,” he said, referring to himself. In the course of playing out his seven-year, $119-million contract with the Mets, Beltran, too, has been hobbled by injuries. “He’s sixty-five to seventy per cent of what he was.” Beltran singled, loading the bases with one out.
Ike Davis, the sophomore first baseman and the one pleasant surprise for the Mets so far this season, was up next. “Good hitter,” Wilpon said. “Shitty team—good hitter.” Davis struck out. Angel Pagan flied out to right, ending the Mets’ threat. “Lousy clubs—that’s what happens.” Wilpon sighed. The Astros put three runs on the board in the top of the second.
“We’re snakebitten, baby,” Wilpon said.
In the rear of the box, there is a folded American flag, which reflects Wilpon’s commitment to the welfare of veterans. Several years ago, flying back from an old-farts outing to Florida, Wilpon and his friends decided to start a charitable project. The idea evolved into Welcome Back Veterans, a charity aimed at providing mental-health assistance to service members returning from tours overseas. In less than a decade, the group has raised eighteen million dollars, including a ten-million-dollar commitment from Major League Baseball. Still, the federal government, especially the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been reluctant to coördinate fully with the organization.
Wilpon has made several trips to Washington to try to coax the government into taking a more supportive role, and sometimes he has brought his friend Robert Morgenthau, the former Manhattan District Attorney, to lobby with him. “We never got anything,” Morgenthau told me. “We got a lot of promises, but we never got any money. I thought Fred was extremely naïve with the V.A., when they told him it was a good idea. I thought they were blowing smoke up his ass. He spent a lot of time and effort. I thought he was too trusting. That turned out to be one of Fred’s problems.”
The first time Bernie Madoff called me, the grinding sounds of a floor buffer in the background nearly drowned him out. “It’s a prison,” Madoff said. “You wouldn’t think they need to wax the floors every day.” Madoff paused to ask his fellow-inmate to steer the machine elsewhere while he talked on the phone. Madoff would call me collect in the morning, before he started work filling orders and taking inventory at the commissary, a convenience store for the inmates. “It’s probably the best job they have here,” he told me.
Madoff is contrite—sort of. “I don’t think Fred could be a nicer guy than he is,” Madoff told me. “A family man, very straightforward and honest, he obviously loves baseball and loves the team. And it’s really tragic, and I feel terrible about everything that he’s going through. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have good things to say about him.
“Our backgrounds were very much identical,” Madoff went on. “Our family values were identical. We had lots of things in common, even in the later years. And neither of us was the kind of guy who flaunted things. I was worth a billion dollars before any of this nonsense started. I had my apartment, a beach house, my yacht, a small house in France. It was very conservative compared to what I could have afforded. We were all making a lot of money. I spent what fit in with our family life styles. He was just a regular guy, and that’s what he likes about me.”
To this day, Madoff talks about his investment strategy as if it were a finely tuned instrument that just went a little off at some point. There remains some dispute about when Madoff turned his operation into a Ponzi scheme. Prosecutors say the nineteen-eighties; he says the nineties. Either way, Madoff was running an extravagant fraud for a lot longer than a decade, and maybe for as long as twenty-five years. Still, he speaks about his financial acumen with unmistakable pride. “The strategy that I was using for them, whether it was real or not, was not something that anyone would understand if you were not an expert,” he said. As he put it in an e-mail, “Fred was not [at] all stock market savvy and Saul was not really either. They were strictly Real Estate people. Although I explained the Strategy to them they were not sophisticated enough to evaluate it properly, nor were most of my other individual clients. They were not in a position to perform the necessary due diligence and did not have access to necessary financial info or records.”
In a later phone call from prison, Madoff said, “He must feel that I betrayed him, as do most of my friends who were involved. Hopefully, they will understand the pressures I was under. I made money for them legitimately to start, but then I got trapped and was not able to work my way out of it. It just became impossible for me to extricate myself, or even try and extricate myself.”
There are many levels of self-delusion here: that Madoff was basically a good man and a skillful manager who simply made a mistake; that he was a victim of forces outside his control; that he was somehow obligated to continue his fraud, year after year, drawing ever more investors into what he knew was a death spiral. But to date neither prosecutors nor Picard, the bankruptcy trustee, have been able to prove that any of Madoff’s customers knew that he was running a Ponzi scheme. At first, Picard charged that Jeffry Picower, a billionaire who died in 2009 and was one of Madoff’s oldest and biggest clients, should have known about Madoff’s fraud. But when Picard settled with Picower’s estate, for $7.2 billion, the trustee said that he had “no basis to pursue” his earlier complaint against him. As for Wilpon and Katz, Madoff e-mailed me, “Fred and Saul were only guilty of trusting their friend and I will live with that guilt and shame forever.” Of course, Madoff has credibility problems, to put it mildly. Still, his exoneration of Wilpon and Katz, while not dispositive, is certainly relevant evidence in the question of their knowledge and culpability.
For their part, Wilpon and Katz are steadfast in their insistence that they had no hint that anything with Madoff was amiss. Though Madoff was little known to the public before his fraud came to light, Wilpon and Katz point out that he was a respected figure in the securities industry. In the early nineties, he served three terms as chairman of Nasdaq. He was also investigated and cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission several times. Wilpon and his partners earned steady returns with Madoff for more than two decades. They deposited and withdrew money without difficulty. Wilpon insists he had no way of knowing that Madoff’s operation was a fraud: “We certainly wouldn’t have had five hundred and fifty million dollars invested in something that’s a Ponzi scheme, when you know it can only evaporate at some point. We didn’t know.”
Wilpon and Madoff rarely talked about business, even though a great deal of money passed between them. “Because we had this personal relationship, once a year Saul and I would go to visit him, and it was sort of a schmooze, you know?” Wilpon told me. “We’d have a sandwich at his office and ask him how things were going.” They rarely went to baseball games together. “He was really not a baseball fan,” Wilpon said. “On one hand I can count the times that Bernie was at a baseball game with us.”
One of the annual visits by Wilpon and Katz to Madoff in the Lipstick Building, probably around 2000, was significant. According to Wilpon, “Saul asked Bernie, he said, ‘Bernie, you operate this business.’ ” Mark and Andrew operated the electronic stock-clearing operation, which was separate from his money-management enterprise. “So Saul said to him, ‘Well, what happens when you get tired of doing this and you don’t want to do this anymore?’ ” Wilpon went on, “He said, ‘I’ll send you your money back and you’ll take your money and you’ll go elsewhere.’ And we’re going down on the elevator and Saul looks at me and I look at him, and Saul says, ‘Holy shit, what are we going to do? We gotta prepare for that now.’ ”
Through his work for the hospitals, Katz had come to know Peter Stamos, an economist and former chief of staff for Senator Bill Bradley. In 2002, Wilpon and Katz recruited Stamos to become, in essence, an alternative investment adviser for part of their fortunes. They set up a new firm, Sterling Stamos, which became successful and started taking in other money to manage. In 2007, Merrill Lynch acquired almost half the company, a transaction that valued it at about five hundred million dollars.
Most important, Sterling Stamos gave Wilpon and Katz a way to diversify their liquid assets. By December, 2008, the Sterling partners had about four hundred million dollars in Sterling Stamos accounts and about five hundred and fifty million with Madoff. “We had the two pockets of liquidity,” Wilpon said. “You don’t have liquidity when you own a baseball team. You don’t have liquidity when you own a TV station. You don’t have liquidity if you’re in the real-estate business, unless you sell, and that’s not what we do. So that was liquidity for all of the businesses that we were in.”
On the afternoon of December 11th, Wilpon was at home planning for a celebration. One of his granddaughters was going to hear at 5 P.M. whether she was admitted to her first-choice college. “At twenty minutes to five, I got a call from Emily, who’s been my assistant for thirty-five years, and she said, ‘I can’t believe what I just heard,’ ” Wilpon said. Madoff had been arrested that morning. “That was absolutely astounding. So I said, ‘Well, I’m going to wait for this call, but I’ll be in touch with Saul and the rest of the guys as soon as I can.’ And I get this call about ten minutes after five.” His granddaughter had been admitted. “She’s off the charts. She’s jumping through hoops, her skin, hitting the ceiling, you know.”
Wilpon took his family to dinner, and said nothing about Madoff, because he didn’t want to spoil the day. “That was like eating a Japanese dinner with someone who put a serrated knife in my heart and was turning it, you know?” he said. “Put the knife in my heart that cleanly went in the way I presume a knife would go in.” That very day, even after Madoff was arrested, the people at Sterling, following their usual procedures, had invested another million with him. Wilpon tried to stop the transaction, but it was too late.
Shortly after Madoff was arrested, Irving Picard was named bankruptcy trustee. He would be responsible for accumulating assets to compensate Madoff’s victims. Madoff’s investors had deposited roughly twenty billion dollars in principal in the Ponzi scheme. According to the records that Madoff provided to his investors, the sum had grown to around sixty-five billion, but that number was entirely fictional.
A bankruptcy trustee occupies an unusual niche in the American legal system. “On the one hand, the trustee is supposed to be like a prosecutor, because he’s supposed to make sure that justice is done, not just pursue any claim for the sake of pursuing it,” Troy McKenzie, who teaches bankruptcy law at New York University School of Law, said. “On the other hand, he’s also kind of like a plaintiff’s lawyer. He has to step into the shoes of those who may have a claim. He has not just the power but also the obligation to pursue all the assets he can find.” Picard and his law firm are compensated on an hourly basis, not on a percentage of what they recover.
For most of the Madoff investors, Picard devised a straightforward formula for compensation. He ignored the amounts reflected on the statements that the investors had received from Madoff, and relied instead on what he called “cash in/cash out”—the amount of cash deposited into their Madoff accounts less any amounts already withdrawn by them. (For customers with small accounts—under five hundred thousand dollars—their losses were generally covered by a kind of insurance provided under the Securities Investor Protection Act.) Burton Lifland, the bankruptcy judge supervising the case, approved Picard’s plan.
After Picard put forward his cash in/cash out approach, Wilpon believed that he could survive the Madoff losses with the structure of his businesses intact. The five hundred and fifty million in the Madoff accounts was gone, and Sterling, as a net winner over many years, would probably have to pay back somewhere around a hundred and sixty million. But the losses would not affect Wilpon’s ownership of the Mets. “I’m fine, my family’s fine, my business family’s fine,” Wilpon told the Times after Madoff was arrested.
“The team is not for sale, not a piece of it, not a part of it,” Jeff Wilpon said at a news conference in December, 2008. “We are not for sale. We have no reason to sell.”
Then, late in 2010, Picard’s representatives informed Karen Wagner, one of Wilpon’s lawyers at Davis Polk & Wardwell, that the trustee would be seeking a great deal more than a hundred and sixty million from the Sterling investors. Negotiations failed, and in December Picard filed a complaint against the Wilpon group that ultimately ran to more than three hundred and eighty pages. According to Picard, Wilpon and his partners “made so much easy money from Madoff for so long that despite the many objective indicia of fraud before them, the Sterling partners simply chose to look the other way.” Picard claimed that the group “benefitted from Madoff’s fraud with approximately $300 million of other people’s money and withdrawals of over $700 million in principal during the six years” before Madoff was exposed.
Judging from Picard’s complaint, the key witness against the Wilpons was Peter Stamos, their partner in the Sterling Stamos money-management business, which they had started as an alternative to their Madoff investments. According to the complaint, “Sterling Stamos personnel repeatedly warned the Sterling Partners that Madoff was ‘too good to be true.’ ” In particular, “Stamos had candid discussions with Saul Katz regarding not only his concerns about Madoff, but the astounding amount of cash that Sterling had invested in [Madoff’s company] that was potentially at risk.”
Picard’s complaint raised as many questions as it answered. Most important, if Wilpon and his partners had so many reasons to suspect that Madoff was a fraud, why did they leave so much money under his supervision? Their huge commitment of money to Madoff’s care seems to suggest that they thought Madoff was legitimate, not that he was running a Ponzi scheme. “I don’t think Fred knew Bernie was about to go out of business,” a person close to Picard said. “Bernie was paying as he did in the past. There was no way to know that there was a run on the bank.” In Picard’s view, Wilpon had bound his fortunes so closely to Madoff’s that he simply could not—or would not—disentangle himself, despite the risks. “You have to put this in context of what’s going on in the whole financial community,” the person close to Picard said. “People were creating new products. Bernie was just another one. He was coming back with twelve to thirty per cent a year. There is no way he could have done that every year legitimately. Sure, Fred and Saul didn’t understand what Bernie was doing. They didn’t care, because they were getting their returns.” (Picard and Stamos declined to comment, and Wilpon’s attorneys dispute both Picard’s computations and his legal theory.)
The Wilpon team believes that Picard and his top deputy, David Sheehan, have shown excessive zeal in pursuing the case. Madoff agrees. “When Sheehan and his assoc. were down here taking my statements for four days, I kept on insisting that Fred and Saul knew absolutely nothing of my crime,” Madoff e-mailed me. “He kept on rolling his eyes at me. I have always said that there is a big difference between the Banks and Funds (who had complete access to my financials in their files, and the sophistication to realize that the information they disclosed did not reconcile with their individual clients’ financials, including their [Madoff company] account statements), and the individual clients who had no access to that information, ie: Fred and Saul as well as most other individuals who were not complicit.” The person close to Picard denies any improper motive or conduct in the investigation.
There is something troubling, however, about the way the Picard complaint portrays Stamos as the Cassandra of the Madoff scandal—the person whose persistent warnings were ignored by Wilpon and Katz. Wilpon’s lawyers at Davis Polk discovered that Stamos had given a deposition during Picard’s investigation, and the transcript gives a very different picture of Stamos’s state of mind from that portrayed in Picard’s complaint. “I’m embarrassed to say that I said to Mr. Katz on a number of occasions that my assumption is that Mr. Madoff is . . . among the most honest and honorable men that we will ever meet,” Stamos testified. “And number two, that he is perhaps one of the—my assumption is he’s perhaps one of the best hedge fund managers in modern times. . . . All the way to the time when the fraud was discovered, I had the same conclusion.” In fact, it appears that no one in the Stamos firm had any words of warning about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme until after his fraud was discovered.
Complaints in civil cases are designed to be argumentative documents, but Picard’s words about Stamos seem typical of an approach that seems to find malevolent intent in virtually everything Wilpon and Katz did. Picard notes, for example, that the Sterling accounting department “created what was known at Sterling as the monthly ‘Hell Sheet,’ which calculated” the balances in all Madoff accounts. According to Sterling, the document was known as the “Hell Sheet” because it was compiled by a bookkeeper named Helene. Last week, in a new brief filed in the case, Picard again mocked the “implausible” notion that “the Sterling Partners are unsophisticated investors who were duped by a trusted friend.” He argued that Wilpon, who had served on the board of directors of Bear Stearns, and his partners “were anxious not to ‘look behind the curtain’ as they profited at the expense of Madoff’s new victims.” Picard also pointed out that the Sterling group, in 2001, had considered purchasing fraud insurance for its Madoff accounts, though it ultimately decided against doing so. The trustee asserts that in the case against Wilpon his legal burden is modest. He says he must show only that a reasonable investor would have been “on notice” that Madoff was a fraud.
Picard must be doing something right: he has already achieved considerable success in recovering funds for Madoff’s victims. According to a press release he issued in early May, he has recovered “more than $7.6 billion, representing 44 percent of the approximately $17.3 billion in principal that was lost in the Ponzi scheme” by customers who filed claims. To do so, Picard has filed more than a thousand lawsuits. Many of these cases have settled; none have yet gone to trial. Picard has also said that he expects his own investigation to cost more than a billion dollars. His law firm has already billed more than a hundred and forty-five million in fees.
From Wilpon’s perspective, the Picard lawsuit could scarcely have come at a worse time. In addition to the losses from his Madoff accounts, the Sterling real-estate portfolio has been hurt by the recession. The Mets’ troubles have also taken a financial toll. In 2009, the year Citi Field opened, the Mets drew about 3.2 million fans. Last year, attendance fell to 2.6 million. This year, with another poor team, the Mets are on track to draw perhaps 2.4 million, though their payroll remains a hundred and forty million dollars, one of the highest in the major leagues. Last year, the Mets were forced into the embarrassing position of having to borrow twenty-five million from Major League Baseball, to tide them over for the year.
At the moment, Wilpon and his lawyers are full of brave talk about how they will force Picard to prove his case in court. Settlement talks, which are being mediated by Mario Cuomo, the former governor, appear to have gone nowhere. But, as Picard and his team surely knew from the outset, the filing of the case imposed its own penalty, especially with all the other bad news that Wilpon is facing. So, on January 28th, Wilpon announced that he was putting a non-controlling stake in the Mets—between twenty and twenty-five per cent—up for sale. “I thought that we should get fresh capital in while we were fighting the wars in a lot of different places,” he told me. This was another humiliating reversal, given his and Jeff Wilpon’s assurances when the Madoff scandal broke.
“It’s been really, really tough for Fred,” Steve Greenberg, the team’s investment banker, and a Mets board member, said. “You’d have to be very thick-skinned for something like this not to upset you. Especially for someone like Fred, whose reputation has always been immaculate, and who could always walk around with his head up, because he never dealt unfairly with anybody.” Jim McCann, one of the old farts, said, “Fred is a very sensitive man, not only sensitive about himself but also about others. It’s been extremely painful for him.” Wilpon shared the opportunity to invest with Madoff with close friends, and their losses have wounded him as well. (Wilpon did not operate a “feeder fund,” and thus took no commissions for money he steered to Madoff.) One of Madoff’s victims was Sandy Koufax. “I didn’t put in a large amount, but to me it was a substantial amount,” Koufax told me. “That money gave me a kind of independence. It allowed me to do what I wanted to do, rather than what I had to do.”
Koufax met Madoff at Fred and Judy Wilpon’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration, just a few months before the scandal broke. “I had a chance to say I was very grateful for what he had done for me,” Koufax recalled ruefully. Insurance has covered some of Koufax’s losses, and he holds nothing against Wilpon. “I don’t believe he would ever do anything unethical. I don’t believe he would have allowed me to put what limited money I had into something that was illegitimate,” Koufax said. He calls Fred and Judy regularly to see how they’re holding up.
In the years since high school, Jeff Wilpon and Mark Madoff had remained close friends. “We spent almost every New Year’s Eve together—that was our thing,” Jeff said. The warmth extended to Mark’s father. “It’s sort of weird to admit this, but I’d get a hug and a kiss from Bernie when I saw him,” Jeff said. The day Bernie was arrested, Jeff Wilpon e-mailed Mark right away, but soon lawyers for the Wilpons suggested that Jeff cease contact with Mark. “You didn’t want to see a picture of us together in the New York Post,” Jeff said. “I wrote Mark an e-mail saying why I had to back away. It caused some angst. I knew it bothered him. But I knew that at the end of this Mark and I would have a friendship again. It was not a matter of if, it was a matter of when.” On December 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, Mark Madoff committed suicide, by hanging himself in his apartment in lower Manhattan. None of the subsequent investigations have established that Mark and Andrew Madoff were complicit in, or even aware of, their father’s crimes.
The current public perception of Wilpon’s team might best be summed up by a billboard for Manhattan Mini Storage, which is known for its witty advertising: “WHY LEAVE A CITY THAT HAS SIX PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAMS, AND ALSO THE METS?” Still, even this beleaguered franchise appears to have drawn significant interest from investors. And Wilpon has now suggested that he may be willing to sell up to forty-nine per cent of the team. The combination of his financial troubles and the value of the Mets—perhaps more than a billion dollars—has driven speculation that he will have to surrender control of the team.
After all, why would a wealthy person pay hundreds of millions of dollars for an asset he had no say in running? “There hasn’t been a New York baseball team on the market in a generation or more,” Steve Greenberg said. “And the number of people out there who have made a lot of money and are dyed-in-the-wool Mets fans is very large.” Most baseball teams these days have some form of joint ownership, with a lead partner controlling the team. The Steinbrenner family reportedly owns only about sixty per cent of the Yankees. It is this situation that gave rise to the quip by John McMullen, who was once part of the Steinbrenners’ ownership group, “There is nothing in life quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner.”
So Wilpon will be taking on limited partners, though he says he will not treat them in the imperious Steinbrenner manner. “We’ve always worked with partners in the real-estate business, and I’m sure we’ll do fine with one in baseball,” he told me. In any event, the Mets’ situation may not be as dire as the mockery suggests. This year looks bleak—David Wright is now on the disabled list—but next season the contracts for Perez and Castillo will expire, as will Beltran’s seventeen-million-a-year deal. That opens up about thirty-five million for new free agents. Wilpon also pledges that the money from the new outside investor will go directly into the Mets, rather than be shared with other Sterling ventures. An increase of just two hundred thousand fans would also add about twenty-five million to the team’s coffers.
In other words, the future of the Mets holds some promise, even as the present, for the team and its owner, looks dismal. Wilpon can press his lawyers to fight on against Picard, but the owner’s risks far outweigh the trustee’s. For Wilpon, the imposition of a billion-dollar court judgment would be cataclysmic, and would certainly require the outright sale of the Mets; for Picard, a loss to Wilpon would be little more than an embarrassment. Some kind of settlement seems likely, if not inevitable. In the meantime, Wilpon can do little but stew, defend his reputation, and brace himself for another long season at Citi Field.
In the game against the Astros, the Mets clawed back to a 3–3 tie, but the visitors added a run in the eighth. With the Mets down, 4–3, in the bottom of the ninth, Jose Reyes led off with a single, his fourth hit of the game. The crowd of remaining diehards—attendance was announced, generously, at 27,380—focussed on the Mets’ speedster dancing off first base.
To build a run and tie the game, the Mets would do one of two things: either Reyes would try to steal second base or Josh Thole, the Met catcher, would try to move him along with a sacrifice bunt. But which one? Wilpon didn’t need to consult a scorecard to review the options and give his view. “Jose has two stolen bases tonight already,” he said. “And Thole throws right but hits lefty. With a lefty, it’s harder for the catcher to throw to second. I’d have him steal. We’ve had three blown bunts already tonight. I don’t like bunt here.”
Thole squared to bunt, and Reyes dashed toward second. Thole’s jab at the ball resulted in a meek line drive toward the pitcher, who caught it and fired to first base for an easy double play. Wright flied to right field for the game’s final out. “Not a good ending,” Wilpon said. ♦
