It’s everybody’s and especially Bobby Bonilla’s best time of the year when he checks his bank account and sees a massive $1.19 million in there from the New York Mets.
Bonilla hasn’t picked up a professional baseball glove in 19 years but he’s still picking up a paycheck. The former slugger retired in 2001 with the St. Louis Cardinals, but he has been collecting a check from the Mets every year on July 1 for almost a decade.
It’s all due to a contract negotiated by his agent that will go down in history as the best athlete deal of all-time. Bonilla, a former All-Star who last played with the Mets in 1999, will be 72 when his contract with the team expires.
It went down when the Mets wanted to part ways with Bonilla in 1999, but he still had $6 million left on his contract.
Instead of paying Bonilla outright, the Mets opted to defer payments so that the money could be unwittingly invested into Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme.
Bonilla’s agent Dennis Gilbert negotiated with the team to defer payments until 2011, with an 8% annual interest rate.
Madoff is serving 150 years in prison for the multibillion-dollar scheme that he ran for decades.
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In total, Bonilla will walk away with a $29.8 million payday because of Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s blunder.
