LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA: José Lima, who struggled with the Mets in 2006 and died in 2010, was known for having an eye for the ladies — lots of them. (Reuters)
LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA: José Lima, who struggled with the Mets in 2006 and died in 2010, was known for having an eye for the ladies — lots of them. (
)
Wearing a silver suit and a feathered fedora, pitcher José Lima strutted into New York Mets’ spring-training camp in Port St. Lucie, Fla., in 2006.
He was a flesh-and-blood knuckleball, an unpredictable, crazy, merengue-singing hurler who loved being the center of attention.
“Get out of here! Really, we signed him?” teammate Pedro Martinez laughed minutes before Lima landed in his flashy garb — complete with gaudy diamond earrings.
“Oh no, mamma mia! Things are going to go crazy over here. This is going to be a crazy clubhouse.”
Lima boasted to reporters that he had 2,000 more ostentatious choices in his closet.
“I’ve never worn the same one twice,” he grinned. “I give the old ones to my brothers. They wear the same size that I do.”
Among the finer things in his life, Lima — in every sense of the word — was also collecting a string of stunning women, each eventually giving birth to another legacy, right up until the day of his untimely death on May 23, 2010.
When the 37-year-old suffered a heart attack, he left behind at least six children by six women, kicking off a battle for his assets and benefits.
Since 1999, he played for the Houston Astros, the Detroit Tigers and the Mets — bringing home more than $31 million in contracts, records show.
Now one of his longtime lovers is taking a swing at her share of the pitcher’s legacy — she plans to sue the Major League Baseball Players Association Benefit Plan for a cut of the cash reserved for beneficiaries that she feels is rightfully due to their child.
In his native Dominican Republic, Lima was a baseball god. His showmanship became known there and in the States as “Lima Time.”
In 1994, the Tigers signed him at the age of 21, but the peripatetic player continued to pitch for the Dominican winter-league team Las Aguilas Cibanas and also in a Mexican league.
When he fell in love with model and beauty-pageant queen Dalla Leclerc at a car wash in Santiago, he neglected to mention that he already had a wife for seven years, had two sons by two different women, and another by a paramour on the way.
On that steamy day in 2003, a mutual friend introduced them, and they were cooling off with a few drinks at a bar inside the car wash.
He excused himself to use the bathroom and then sneaked up behind her. “Whatever you want, I’ll pay for it,” he whispered in her ear.
He picked up the tab for a few beers — for a start.
“I didn’t want to be like all the rest,” Leclerc says today. “I sort of ignored him. I was being strong, but deep down inside I wanted to talk to him because he was José Lima, the big star in the Dominican Republic.”
“And it worked, because we were together for seven years.”
Not that he bought her everything she wanted.
“He always used to say that he would give me the ring,” she told The Post on a recent visit to New York.
“Men,” she sighs. “Famous men.”
Like her mother, 4 1/2-year-old Kammiell Lima Leclerc catwalks on tiny platform espadrilles. She is extremely bright, curious and talkative — a trait inherited from her daddy.
“I know when he died, his heart went to sleep,” she said when asked about her dad. “He’s watching me from the sky.”
Lima used to provide for her, but now that he’s gone, Kammiell, a Dominican citizen, receives a $625 monthly stipend from Lima’s American Social Security benefits.
The players union, Leclerc claimed, refuses to recognize their out-of-wedlock, foreign child.
At the time, Leclerc says, she had no clue that Lima was out scoring with other women. She claims that she didn’t even know that he was married. During their relationship, she enjoyed reserved seats to Aguilas Cibanos games, but Lima told her that her visa to travel to the States was denied. She never attended a major-league game.
At the time, Lima was married to a beautiful blonde, Melissa Lima, and had a son, José Jr.
It took one look at Melissa to win him over. It was 1994, his first year as a Detroit Tiger. He was boarding the team bus when he spotted her and hopped right off.
“Oh, my gosh,” he said. “I couldn’t let you go. Could I call you later?”
Smitten, she turned over her digits.
“I want to see you soon,” he said.
But then he looked at her and said, “I don’t know if you noticed my finger. I just want you to know that I’m married.”
He kept his promise to divorce his first wife, Betzabel Clark, and in 1996 married the gorgeous Texan. José Jr. was born three years later.
When other women began to cry paternity, he denied it.
“Melissa,” he said, “there are all these kids. But they don’t look like me.”
Even though the two divorced in 2005, they continued an on-again, off-again relationship up until his death in 2010, she said, providing pictures as evidence.
She kept all of the names of her son’s possible half-siblings and asked him whether he wanted to meet them.
“My son José Jr. wants nothing to do with them,” she said.
He is almost 14 and graduated junior high school Thursday. He wrote a note to his father on Facebook about the occasion.
“Dad, how’s heaven? I miss you a lot. Guess what? I’m a ninth-grader now. I bet you are so proud of me.”
In Santiago, Lima carried on his love affair with Leclerc, whose face graced advertising campaigns for products like Johnnie Walker, cigarettes and clothing.
By the time she conceived in 2007, she already knew of two of his sons, José Jr. and Elijah José, a boy four years older by another mother.
Once she broke the news to him that he’d be having his first girl, he came home with an armful of red roses.
When Kammiell came into the world, Lima was in playing ball in Mexico. Leclerc said he popped in one day unexpectedly while she was sitting in her house with her mother and aunt.
“Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?”
He scooped up tiny Kammiell and kissed her.
Four months later, an attorney came looking for Lima with a picture of a another baby girl that looked a lot like him.
The attorney showed the photo to Leclerc. By the time Lima came home from the field in Santiago and fed Kammiell a bottle, Leclerc was crying.
“I want you to tell me the truth,” Leclerc sobbed. “Do you have another daughter?”
“She says that that’s my daughter. I don’t know,” he said of yet another baby mama. “That’s what’s she’s claiming. She’s a married woman.”
“After [that] woman had the baby the woman left her husband,” Leclerc says today. “When the girl was about 5 or 6 years old, she came around. José didn’t know he had another daughter.”
The little girl, Brianna, his fourth child, was born in 2007 before Kammiell, Leclerc says.
Lies came to the surface one after another.
Lima’s mom confessed about boy No. 3, she said. His mother initially covered up for her son back in December 2004, the week of Leclerc’s 25th birthday.
“No, don’t believe it. It’s a lie,” she said at the time.
For all those years, she believed everyone. She forgave his infidelities, but then even after Kammiell was born he did it again. Lima got a sixth woman pregnant. Leclerc had had enough.
“At that point I broke it off. It’s not a pretty story.”
When Lima died at his home in California, he was living with another girlfriend, Dorca Astacio. His body was flown back to the Dominican Republic where throngs of people filled the streets to say their final goodbyes. His funeral was televised. His ex-wife Melissa decided not to attend for safety reasons.
Astacio called her to comfort her. “All he does is talk about you all day. If I could only be half the woman you are.”
Astacio also called Leclerc. “You’re the only woman that José ever spoke of,” she said.
When asked by reporters, Astacio described herself as Lima’s wife (though they weren’t married) and great love.
He spread the love in life, but Leclerc says that the benefits arm of the union refuses to do so in death. It refuses to acknowledge Kammiell as Lima’s daughter even after his mom and sister gathered a year’s worth of receipts for $500 a month. Because they lacked his signature, the union won’t accept them as valid proof.
“José worked very hard for his retirement and paid a lot in taxes here, and now that he’s not here our daughter is left out in the street without anything,” she said. “The only ones that are recognizing her are the government.”
“The light of his eyes was his daughter. I lived with him for seven years, I put up with him for seven years and I’m left with nothing because I was not married to José.”
Additional reporting by Angel Chevrestt