On Wednesday, the trustee handling the liquidation of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme/investment firm's assets put a pair of tickets to the Mets' home opener up for auction on eBay. The seats, which retail for $525 are actually a downgrade from the seats Madoff had originally purchased, had reached a bid of $1,700 at midnight, according to the Associated Press.
It seemed like a pretty good chance for Mets fans to nab some good seats that might not otherwise be available. Thanks to Madoff's criminal scheme, the pool of bidders is much shallower than it could have been.
The auction was scheduled to end on Friday, but anyone who hoped to snag a pair of tickets with a sordid backstory is out of luck, according to Gothamist. A trip to the website this morning greets you with the message that "the listing has been removed or is no longer available. If the listing was removed by eBay, consider it canceled."
The trustee website offers no further information and just has the same link to the auction that it did on Wednesday, along with a note to check back for more auctions as the season progresses. Perhaps Mets owner Fred Wilpon caught wind of the plan and decided to try to find a way to sell the tickets himself to try and recoup losses he suffered by falling victim to Madoff's scam.
There may well be another explanation for the disappearance, but would anyone really be surprised if Madoff never had any tickets in the first place? The "tickets" were probably just graham crackers with Mets written on them in the tears of all the people he ripped off.
UPDATE: The tickets are back up on eBay, although the high bid has dropped to $1,500. No explanation has been given for the disappearance, but we're guessing that Madoff convinced someone else to donate their tickets in exchange for a promise of 10 times the tickets in return. Basically the moral of the story is to find a more reliable source of tickets than Bernie Madoff.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
