NEW YORK – With spring training just weeks away, nobody’s working harder to prepare for the New York Mets’ future than their lawyers.
A March trial may decide how much the team owners’ disastrous investment in the fraudulent business of imprisoned financier Bernard Madoff will cost the club.
“It’s going to garner tons of attention and comes at a horrible time for the Mets. It’s not a great way to start the season,” said Neal H. Levin, who heads the fraud team at the Chicago law firm Freeborn Peters and is not involved in the case.
A court-appointed trustee is trying to recover money for investors in the massive Ponzi scheme in which 4,900 investors were told their $20 billion investment had grown to $68 billion by November 2008. But when investigators finally reached him, only a few hundred million dollars actually remained in Madoff’s accounts. Madoff admitted the fraud and is serving a 150-year sentence.
To the trustee, Irving Picard, the Mets owners were winners in Madoff’s multi-decade fiasco, pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in fictitious profits.
Picard has demanded more than $1 billion for investors, saying Mets co-owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz either knew or should have known Madoff was
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