PORT ST. LUCIE — You may remember the catchphrase of choice that grew around Rex Ryan this year like a fungus, as the Jets coach kept clearing his throat and emptying his brain of any and all thoughts and opinions trapped inside. “He’s writing checks with his mouth,” the saying went, “that his team can’t cash.”
At the end of the day, of course, it was all fun and games: sometimes Ryan’s predictions were dead on, and sometimes they dissolved into the ether, and in the end nobody was hurt and the Jets went on with their business before the next reservoir of outrageousness percolated around Ryan’s tongue.
Across the first two days of pitchers and catchers at Digital Domain Field, at a time when most Mets fans would honestly like to have the words “Madoff,” “Ponzi” and “clawback” stricken from their collective consciousness (alongside “Ollie” and “Castillo”), Wilpon pere and fils have taken to the campaign trail, trying to bold face a message that they’ve become the targets of a witch hunt by the trustee representing the victims of Bernie Madoff’s con.
I can understand that. There is no gag order attached to the proceedings, the suit is there in black and white for anyone and everyone to see. Some 700,000 pages of documents sit before the careful eyes of Mario Cuomo. Even if both Wilpons usually prefer to stay in the background and off the record, it’s easy to see how the potential of a billion-dollar bludgeoning can bring out the chatterbox in us all.
But there’s something a little desperate and disingenuous to the defiance that both Jeff and Fred Wilpon have deemed their default position now. Time and again yesterday — five times by my unofficial count — Fred Wilpon declared, “We will be vindicated!” — the exclamation point his, not mine.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Fred said. “If anything, we trusted a friend for a very long time.”
And then, with more than a trace of sourness in his voice, he added: “The one thing that no one ever, ever, in 50 years in business, questioned was my integrity. And you all” — here he looked at the assembled media, maybe 70 people — “have questioned my integrity. And I intend to go through with whatever is necessary to vindicate that, and get on with our lives.”
See, this is where I fear Fred Wilpon is wrong — perhaps fatally wrong. Irving Picard may well question his integrity. Certain factions of the angry group Picard represents may feel that way. I suspect most reasonable-thinking people — save a partisan pundit or two — wouldn’t dare presume what was or wasn’t in Wilpon’s soul, or in his conscience, when Madoff’s fraud was going on. That’s for either Cuomo to determine in mediation, or a judge to figure out in court.
I do think it’s fair to wonder how a man with 50 years of almost ceaseless success in business — specifically, the business of real estate, where the meek get massacred and the simple slaughtered — could allow himself to be taken in so completely, to the point where the family’s chief defense now seems to be “We weren’t guilty, just gullible.”
So I asked him that: Were you really that naive?
“I would say, in retrospect, yeah,” he said.
In the end, unless you’re a sadist with an extra-long mean streak, that’s really where you have to root, right? The idea that he’d have willingly put a 50-year career — plus his family’s future — in such naked peril is almost too much to absorb. I am not a lawyer. But my gut and my instincts tell me Fred is telling the truth here: We weren’t deceitful. Just dumb. And I don’t think that qualifies as being “in on it.”
But that’s not really what’s at issue here. It’s if the Wilpons benefited — knowingly or not — from Madoff’s fraud. If they have an ethical and moral compulsion to pay a breathtaking fortune in fines. And the hard truth is this: On one hand, they truly may receive the vindication they crave — and on the other, may still have to write a check they won’t be able to cash.
This time, quite literally.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com