Bernie Madoff, the notorious architect of the biggest investment fraud in U.S. history, is dead at the age of 82. He had been serving a 150-year sentence at the federal medical care center, where his attorney said he was being treated for terminal kidney failure.
Madoff shocked the world when he pleaded guilty in 2009 to running a vast Ponzi scheme that prosecutors said swindled thousands out of their life savings.
Shortly after the news, Bobby Bonilla’s name started to trend on Twitter. Usually, that happens every July 1st because the Mets have to continue to pay him $1.19 million until 2035.
The former New York Mets star is trending because in 2000, the Mets owed Bobby Bonilla $5.9 million who had just come off a year in which he produced only four home runs and 18 RBI’s. Both sides wanted to end the relationship. He and his agents asked the Mets to pay him nothing for 11 years, and then to pay him $1.19 million a year between 2011 and 2035.
Mets’ owner, Fred Wilpon, was invested with Bernie Madoff at the time, and he thought he could make more money investing that $5.9 million than he would end up paying out to Bonilla. That tunred out to be an epic failure.
Madoff’s hedge fund collapsed in 2008 after it was revealed that it was a massive Ponzi scheme.
Thus, it created Bobby Bonilla Day.
