LENNY “Nails” Dykstra, the former big-league outfielder turned financial-stock picker and glossy-magazine publisher, is drowning in a sea of bad debts and lawsuits that have pushed his total indebtedness to around $50 million, according to one source.
In the latest legal skirmish, Dykstra was accused in Manhattan federal court of failing to pay a total of $183,770 to five people who worked with him in various capacities on the launch of The Players Club, his glossy lifestyle and financial-advice mag aimed at wealthy pro athletes.
Among those he allegedly stiffed are Arthur Hochstein, Time magazine’s art director who helped Dykstra with the design concept, and Mary Anne Golon, former Time magazine head of photography, who had helped with the photo work for the debut issue’s Derek Jeter cover.
In the latest case, sources say Dykstra convinced Hochstein to put a $7,000 Xerox laser printer on his personal credit card, and never reimbursed him for the expense.
“It’s still sitting in his living room,” said one friend. After the inevitable falling out between Dykstra and Hochstein, Dysktra tried to send someone from The Players Club to pick up the printer and bring it to the magazine’s offices — even though he hadn’t paid for it.
Other plaintiffs in the latest dust up are Wayne McLean, restaurateur Marco Canora — who owns East Village hot spot Hearth, as well as the Insieme Restaurant in the Michelangelo Hotel on the West Side — and Mitchell Shostak, who runs a design studio that was involved in the launch of the magazine when it was still being produced by the now-bankrupt Doubledown Media.
Sources said that Dykstra threw a $400,000 launch party at the Mandarin Hotel in Manhattan to introduce The Players Club. He convinced Canora to make the scene as a celebrity chef. Canora ran up about $15,000 in expenses. Dykstra wrote a check to cover it — but the check allegedly bounced.
Several attorneys who have worked with Dykstra in the past have apparently dropped him as a client over non-payment of bills. He is said to have recently hired the law firm of Gumm & Green, which specializes in family matters and bankruptcy. By presstime they had not returned calls for comment.
ESPN.com also ran a damning piece on the string of unpaid bills left behind by Dykstra. In one, Dykstra hired a corporate flight attendant, Caroline Cain, and then convinced her to put a $10,600 flight on her credit card.
When they got to Cleveland, he asked her to put another $30,000 on her card in order to help him pay a $227,000 charge he owed on his Learjet. When she refused, he fired her on the spot, then called his estranged mother to borrow $23,000, which she put on her credit card.
In an earlier lawsuit reported in Media Ink, legendary New York literary agent David Vigliano filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Dykstra, after Vigliano loaned $250,000 to Dykstra with a promissory note that said it would be repaid with $300,000. Vigliano eventually recouped part of the loan by withholding $106,000 from a literary advance payment for a yet-to-be-written book of financial advice.
As the storm of bad debts swirled, Dykstra was dismissed from his lucrative job writing his thrice-weekly Internet column for TheStreet.com, Nails on the Numbers. He had boasted that the subscription newsletter was netting him up to $3 million a year.
Hot Food
Hearst Magazines looks like it may have its biggest hit since the launch of O, the Oprah Magazine, as it launches the Food Network Magazine on a regular publication schedule this week.
Earlier, the company had raided Readers Digest’s Everyday with Rachael Ray to sign Millie Carpenter as editor-in-chief and put out 300,000 copies on newsstands only. Results were strong.
The company had field-tested Spoon as a potential title, before going with the unimaginative but effective Food Network Magazine.
The magazine is a 50-50 joint venture with the cable network.
The first test issue last fall sold about 70 percent of its copies, and the second issue had a 55 percent sell-through rate.
“This has been a blast off with consumers,” said Hearst Executive Vice President Michael Clinton.
The rate base for the new mag will be 400,000 and it has 62 pages of ads from Kraft, American Airlines and Kohls.
The company plans to publish bi-monthly this summer and move to monthly by year’s end.
Maer moves
Former Radar magazine head honcho Maer Roshan, last seen doing some west-coast legwork for Tina Brown‘s ad-free news Web site The Daily Beast, has a new full-time gig back in the Big Apple.
He’s just been hired to be the editor of TheWeek.com, the Web site of the Felix Dennis– owned weekly news digest. And while he doesn’t have the top job anymore, this gig looks a lot more stable.
Though many scoffed when lad-mag publisher Dennis, who then owned Maxim, introduced The Week, the mag is prospering. In the first quarter, the weekly posted a 42 percent gain in ad pages — one of just 15 magazines to report an ad-page rise, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. keith.kelly@nypost.com