Fred Man Walking

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Maybe we should have known that something shady was going on with the Mets finances a long time ago.

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken us until 2oo8, and the arrest of Bernie Madoff, and the revelation that Mets owner Fred Wilpon was his biggest investor and bestest buddy for us to see that Fred & Co. were on the winning end of the world’s greatest financial fraud.

We probably should have seen some red flags back in the early 90’s, when the Mets began deferring the payments of contract buy-outs until 2011. Instead of it paying 6 million dollars to part ways with players for good, the Mets countered by paying 20+ million dollars- twenty years later.

First of all, who does that? Has any other MLB team structured a buy-out like that before? The answer is no. And if you think Fred and Jeff and Saul Katz didn’t know that Bernie Madoff was dirtier than a Texaco Men’s Room you’re fooling yourself, my friend.

Only time will tell, but as of this writing it doesn’t look good for the Wilpons. Their Sterling-Mets investment firm was heavily invested with Madoff. Bernie had roughly 1,500 accounts and 461 of them- nearly one-third- were Sterling-Mets: all Wilpon money. The billion dollar lawsuit that Fred is currently facing asserts that he “knew or should have known” that Bernie was breaking all kinds of laws and running a fraudulent investment scheme. You don’t invest hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars without knowing what you’re doing.

Even if you wanted to give Fred the benefit of the doubt you’re faced with the reality that his other investment firm Sterling-Stamos was forced to pay back 13 million dollars as a result of being found guilty of a previous Ponzi scheme back in 2oo2. Fred was specifically targeted because his firm withdrew its investment money just before the scheme collapsed, and his settlement and pay-out is all but a confession that he knew what was going on, and that he had inside information about the scam. There’s more evidence damning him, and we’ll talk about it later, but for now every good Mets fan should start facing the reality that the owners of our team may be the most sinister and greedy in the history of the sport.

So was Freddy Wilpon a financial visionary with his bizarre ballooning buy-outs? Was he blazing a trail with deferred salaries at more than 300% their original value?

No. He just knew that he’d be making an exorbitant amount of money in a few years with the help of his magical broker Bernie. It looks bad, and it’s only going to get worse. When the lawsuit on behalf of the Madoff trustees comes to trial it will reveal the depth of the Wilpons’ guilt: losing the case means Fred was guilty, settling out of court means Fred was guilty, only winning the case would prove he was innocent of fraud and deception.

And if the Mets under Wilpon have taught us anything, it's that winning is rarely in the cards.

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