In the ongoing saga of the sad-sack Mets and their Bernard Madoff-related financial troubles, the NY Times has a story about how much the Mets owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, relied upon those fake Madoff profits. And it all surrounds the "vig."
The trustee in charge of recovering Madoff victims' money, Irving Picard, is about to file final papers to a lawsuit against Wilpon and Katz. According to the Times:
Vig, or vigorish, is a gambling term, meaning the money a bookmaker collects on every bet taken, regardless of the outcome — a kind of dependable handling fee...
The trustee, Irving H. Picard, asserts that Katz and Wilpon took out bank loans just to invest the borrowed money with Madoff, confident that their returns would be better than the interest on the loan. That was the vig at work.
Katz and Wilpon, according to the trustee, structured player contracts to draw out the timing of their payments. They would then invest the money they owed the players with Madoff and make a profit across the many years of the contract payments. That, too, was the vig.
The men, real estate moguls, also invested the excess proceeds from mortgages they refinanced with Madoff’s brokerage operation on the belief that his returns would be greater than their mortgage payments. That was the vig.
Finally, instead of paying disability insurance premiums for key players on the team, the trustee says, Katz and Wilpon put the money into an account — called “Saul’s cookie jar” — to pay injured players. That, as well, was the vig.
We know what happened to Bernard Madoff. And that's probably why Mets GM Sandy Alderson is looking to drive downhill.
