Wlipons Must Pay Trustee, Go To Trial

Just sell the damn team Fred...please:

The New York Mets are preparing for the baseball season, and the team's owners will have to prepare for trial.


U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled Monday that Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon, his family, businesses and charities must pay as much as $83.3 million to the trustee trying to recover funds to net losers in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. He also ruled that the sides will go to trial March 19 over an additional $303 million that trustee Irving Picard is seeking.


Of the approximately $83 million, only $1.7 million is associated with Mets accounts. The rest is associated with other Wilpon businesses and charities.


The Wilpons' lawyers had filed a motion to have the case tossed entirely, but that was rebuffed by Rakoff in Monday's ruling.


"We are preparing for trial," Sterling Partners, one of Wilpon's holdings, said in a statement. "We look forward to demonstrating that we were not willfully blind to the Madoff fraud."


As a matter of law, Picard had contended, he was entitled to $83,309,162 in Ponzi scheme profit allegedly made by the Wilpons in the immediate two years before Madoff's arrest on Dec. 11, 2008.


The Wilpons had asserted that because they thought they had $500 million invested with Madoff at the time his scheme was discovered by authorities, they actually were losers -- despite withdrawing more money than they had deposited with Madoff.


Picard believes he also is entitled to $303 million in principal invested by the Wilpons with Madoff because, he alleges, they had warning signs a fraud might be occurring. Rakoff has set a high standard for Picard to be able to collect principal -- "willful blindness," meaning the Wilpons would have had to all but have known something was awry with Madoff and purposely looked the other way.


Rakoff wrote in Monday's decision that he is skeptical that Picard can prove to a jury that the Wilpons acted in bad faith with respect to their investment with Madoff, but Rakoff decided the trustee had enough evidence and witnesses to allow him to try to attempt it at trial.


"The Court remains skeptical that the trustee can ultimately rebut the defendants' showing of good faith, let alone impute bad faith to all the defendants," Rakoff wrote in Monday's decision. "Nevertheless, there remains a residue of disputed factual assertions from which a jury could infer either good or bad faith depending on which assertions are credited."

RELATED: $83M question: Will Wilpons lose Mets?

Citi Field Revenue Down 30 Percent Since 2009

Blame Fred Wilpon. When the product on the field sucks, esp. in a rough economy, people are not going to spend their hard-earned bucks on poor play, no matter what spiffy new stadium your team's in:

The Mets' ballpark-related revenue, including parking, concessions, stadium advertising and more, has all together dropped more than 30 percent since Citi Field opened in 2009, and premium-ticket sales have fallen almost 50 percent, according to financial records.


Hundreds of pages of documents, which Newsday obtained under the Freedom of Information Law from New York City, provide a partial window into the cash flow of the franchise, whose owners are dealing with financial challenges because of fallout from the $50-billion fraud committed by Bernard Madoff.


The records do not include some line items that would be found in other parts of the Mets' operations and are designed to show only that the Mets can repay their debts to the city. Not included is revenue from the team's television contract with SportsNet New York and minor league operations expenses and the player payroll. Other records show that the player payroll was $142 million last year and is estimated to be $90 million for the new season.