According to a report by ESPN, the Wilpon family may not have been such a big victim in the Bernie Madoff scheme afterall. While the Mets Limited Partnership did put $522.8 million into Madoff accounts, they actually managed to withdraw $570.6 million — for an overall profit of nearly $48 million.
I had started to suspect this might be the case weeks ago, when 60 Minutes ran a piece about many investors who did the same thing. In many of these cases, the “winners” were sued to give back their profits to go into a general fund meant to compensate the real victims who had lost their original savings. While this hasn’t happened to the Mets yet, it’s quite possible it will at some point in the future, especially when talking about such a large amount of money.
So it seems like the stories about the Wilpons being ruined by the Madoff scandal may have been completely bogus; rather than losing a ton of money, they managed to turn a profit (inadvertently) at the expense of other investors. Of course, they still have over $500 million less than they thought they did, but it’s hard to feel too bad for a group that ended up ahead of the game in the end. Considering that the money they lost was sitting in an investment fund and almost certainly would never have been used for payroll or other Mets business expenses anyway, it’s quite possible that the Wilpons have been telling us the truth, and that it will have no impact at all on how the Mets are run going forward.
