Seems these days that the only ones playing hard-ball at CitiField are the Mets owners - Fred Wilpon, Saul Katz, Sterling Equities partners  - refusing to pay $300 million in “other people’s money” to Madoff trustee Irving Picard.  One of Picard’s lawyers made the statement yesterday in an effort to persuade a bankruptcy judge not to dismiss Picard’s $1 billion lawsuit against the Mets owners.  In addition to $300 million in "fictitious profits, the Madoff trustee is seeking return of their principal invested with Madoff.

Picard contends that his case against the Mets owners stems from a bankruptcy-law concept of good faith.  The concept doesn’t require that those sued acted illegally or knew they were dealing with a Ponzi scheme, he said.

“Under bankruptcy law, a defendant did not act in good faith if what it knew about ["Madoff & Co."] gave it a reason to inquire further, but instead it turned a blind eye and continued to take money from an enterprise it should have known might be a fraud.” 

    ‘No Evidence’.   Sterling Equities rejected Picard's filing, saying he "has no evidence, and no witnesses, to support his baseless claims."  Back in March, they asked the judge to dismiss the Picard suit, saying they weren’t professional investors and saw no warning signs.

Picard counters that Peter Stamos, who ran the Sterling Stamos hedge fund and was part of the Mets owners’ inner circle, "repeatedly warned" that Madoff’s results were "too good to be true."  However, Picard chose to ignore Stamos’s testimony under oath that he assumed Madoff was “honorable” and a “legend” in the hedge fund industry - according to Sterling.  In yesterday’s filing, Picard cited additional e-mails from Stamos and reiterated his claims that the Mets owners should have suspected Madoff’s fraud. He deemed it “implausible” that the owners and operators of a baseball franchise, a sports entertainment network and real estate properties, “are unsophisticated investors who were duped by a trusted friend.”   [Bloomberg, 5/20]