24 years have passed and the New York Mets are still literally paying the consequences of a bad decision in the contract of Bobby Bonilla, the player who continues to earn a significant amount of money per season despite having retired from the Major Leagues for more than two decades. Suspenders.
From 2011 onward, July 1, MLB fans know this date as ‘Bobby Bonilla Day,’ since the New York-born ballplayer receives a check from the Mets for almost $1.2 million due to a decision of the previous owner of the organization.
And it is that in 1999 the team from the Big Apple reached an agreement with the agent of the former baseball player, Dennis Gilbert, so that his client would be paid the aforementioned figure from 2011 to 2035, that was the condition that the The team agreed to allow the player to leave that season.
But the question arises, how was the player’s agent able to get the Mets to agree to this unusual deal?
Well, it all comes down to Bernie Madoff, protagonist of one of the biggest scam cases of the modern era, and the ingenuity of the owner of the Mets at that time, Fred Wilpon.
The New York Mets wanted to part with Bonilla in 1999, but that he had $6 million dollars left on his contract, something that did not matter much to Wilpon who, in that year because he thought he was receiving great returns from his investments with Madoff, but turned out to be the victim of an infamous Ponzi scheme.
The then-owner of the Mets preferred to use that money to invest in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. For his part, Bonilla’s agent negotiated with the team to defer payments until 2011, with an annual interest rate of 8%.
Thanks to this, Bobby Bonilla will continue to earn the amount of $1.2 million until 2035, by which time the former player who finished his career with the St. Louis Cardinals will be 72 years old and will have earned a total of $29.8 million.
Madoff was the mastermind of the most notorious Ponzi scheme in history. A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that uses funds from more recent investors to pay profits to previous investors, leading them to believe that their investments are part of a successful venture.
Madoff, who died in 2021, was serving 150 years in prison for the multibillion-dollar scheme he ran for decades.
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