The Times describes how the Mets funneled “friend” investors to Bernie Madoffs—all the while never allowing them any actual contact with Madoff.

…to be among those referred by the Mets’ owners, one had to agree to odd and puzzling terms that restricted direct contact with or questioning of Mr. Madoff. Sterling Equities, the family company that owns the Mets, would administer all the referred accounts and handle the transactions between the investors and Mr. Madoff’s firm.

Those invited into this rarefied club — including relatives of Sterling management, an investment banker who is also a supper club entertainer, a technology entrepreneur and a theater industry executive — would not send money to Mr. Madoff. Instead, it would be filtered through the Sterling partner and the Mets board member Arthur Friedman, a certified public accountant with a law degree who served as the liaison to Mr. Madoff’s operation.

At the time of Madoff’s arrest, in December 2008, Friedman was handling 178 separate Madoff accounts of friends of the Mets, in addition to 305 accounts set up by the Sterling partners for themselves and their confederates.

Friends of the Wilpons and Katzes, including Sandy Koufax and Larry King, insist that the Mets owners couldn’t have known.

“I still love Freddie [Wilpon],” Mr. King said. “If you look up ‘mensch’ in the dictionary, you will see Freddie’s picture.”

I suspect that if you look up “crook,” you’ll also find Wilpon’s picture. Because as we all know from Madoff himself, it’s entirely possible to have people trust you completely and yet be a con man. (That’s what con men do.) And there’s something deeply odd about the idea of managing Madoff accounts for 180 friends. What were the Mets getting out of it? Because you can’t imagine that Wilpon and Katz were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts—soliciting clients for Madoff, negotiating the terms of the arrangements, maintaining and managing the accounts?

Then there’s the fact, as the Times reports, that the Mets owners explicitly sought unsophisticated investors, not people who might smell a rat.

They also screened out those who they thought might present problems, according to the lawsuit. Certain types of more sophisticated investors — those who might have wanted to engage Mr. Madoff about his strategy and his handling of their fortunes or more modest savings — were kept out….

Here’s what I imagine happened: The Mets owners got a kickback from Madoff in exchange for sending him referrals that kept the pyramid scheme running. (He seemed to have similar arrangements with other close investors.) Or they simply knew, on some level, that it was a pyramid scheme and wanted to keep it going to enlarge their own profits.

A third possibility? That they themselves were “unsophisticated investors,” too dumb to realize that no one gets 18% returns every year for a decade when they can’t even explain their investing model.

(They are affiliated with the Mets, so this last is impossible to rule out.)

None of these options bode well for the Mets…