A Major-League Divorce

August 2011 Vanessa Grigoriadis

Jamie and Frank McCourt moved to L.A. in 2004 to live their dream— as owners of the
illustrious Dodgers—then went on a massive spending spree: $74 million on four
homes, a $12 million pool, and a $10,000-a-month hairstylist. But though their team
hit an initial winning streak, their marriage cratered. With their divorce
producing a slew of unsavory financial details, why Major League Baseball is as
furious as the McCourts are with each other

Dodger Stadium was built almost 50 years ago, yet it remains one of the most
elegant sport venues. Set in Chavez Ravine, overlooking Los Angeles’s downtown on
one side and the verdant mountains of the San Gabriels on the other, the ballpark,
with its house organist, foot-long Dodger dogs, and old-timey sports announcers, is
a place where the American Dream is still palpable. Families relish their cotton
candy and popcorn, hand-crank machines stamp pennies with pictures of Dodger
Stadium, and the boys in blue down in the dugout do their best, which is often
pretty good. This is one of the most storied teams in baseball: not only one of the
first teams to move west, but the proud organization that made history smashing the
sport’s prejudices by hiring Sandy Koufax, the pitching great who refused to play
on Yom Kippur because he was Jewish; Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican player who
stoked Fernandomania in the 80s; and, most famously, Jackie Robinson, the second-
baseman who broke baseball’s color line when he debuted with the team, in 1947.

On a warm evening this spring, the Dodgers played the San Francisco Giants, their
longtime division rivals since both teams had relocated to California. It was the
kind of evening when one would have expected to see Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and
a dozen pals in the seats he reserves for his personal use, to the near right of
the dugout. But this night, McCourt—a 57-year-old with the woebegone look of a
Flemish portrait—had made himself scarce, and there was certainly no sign of Jamie,
his ex-wife, with whom he has been embroiled in one of the most expensive divorces
in California history, at nearly $20 million in attorneys’ fees. “Frank’s probably
here, but not in the open anymore,” said a television reporter, waving a hand to
take in the expanse of the stadium. “Nuh-uh, not now. I bet he’s hiding somewhere.”

You would almost pity the man if he weren’t such a scoundrel, or a schlemiel,
depending on your perspective. Always with a fine suit on, his thin lips moving
constantly as they work their way into some new sort of trouble, he’s been owner of
the team for seven years, since he blew into town with Jamie, his tense, skinny
Chihuahua of a wife who favors a look that could be described as Real Housewives
Business Casual—tight navy skirts, highlighted blond hair, and enormous handbags.
Los Angeles was initially welcoming of them, as it is of anyone with money, but
when it became clear that they were using one of the city’s biggest franchises—part
of what put Los Angeles on the map as a world-class destination—to pay their
personal expenses, among other shenanigans, the ire in the normally placid city
exploded. The McCourt breakup and financial problems with the team are covered by
newspapers here as sensationally as the decay of the Wilpon dynasty—the owners of
the Mets, who are now selling a minority ownership to a hedge-fund manager—is in
New York. The Dodgers and the Mets are each thought to be well over $400 million in
debt.

To all appearances, Frank McCourt seems essentially broke—although he is living in

a $30,000-a-month suite at the Montage hotel—and struggling to pay the team’s
bills. And, most of all, he has apparently angered Bud Selig, the commissioner of
baseball, so deeply that Selig has taken control of the team’s finances, effective
in April. Baseball is essentially a monopoly of 30 teams run by Selig, who, while
once beset by steroid scandals and the labor strike that canceled the World Series
in 1994, has proven himself in recent years to be insuperable. “Selig is able to
wrangle a room of 30 disparate billionaires, who either got their teams through
nepotism, or because they’re young entrepreneurs who made billions and thought it
would be cool to own a sports team, or have owned their teams for 50 years, and get
them all to vote with him,” says Will Leitch, the founder of the sports blog
Deadspin. “Part of how that’s happened is that Selig has ‘his guys’ in the
ownership booth. And I think it’s fair to say that Frank McCourt is no longer one
of his guys.”

In late April, Selig appointed Tom Schieffer, a onetime head of the Texas Rangers
and former U.S. ambassador to Japan and Australia, as the trustee of the Dodgers,
giving him the power to approve any checks above $5,000. (At a press conference,
Schieffer dryly noted that his experience dealing with North Korea would help him
work alongside McCourt.) A deafening chorus has demanded that Frank sell the team.
“I could take the money and run but that’s not my goal,” he claimed, furious about
Major League Baseball’s intrusion, which he initially called “un-American.” “I’ve
been humbled. I’ve been humiliated. I’ve been embarrassed.... I have a reputation
now to restore.”

But this reputation may be permanently marred, and no one is quite sure how much
money there will be to “take and run” after Frank’s tenure as owner of the Dodgers
is through. Then again, no one thought he would be able to make the $9.8 million
payroll for the last two weeks of May, but he slipped in just under the deadline,
extracting cash from Dodger sponsors by offering them discounts on their bills and
luxury box seats, according to ESPN. (Frank denies this.) And he made the mid-June
payroll, too. “There’s been a deathwatch for Frank for months now, but it seems
like he has more than nine lives,” says a source close to the situation. “He’s
running out of places to find money, but he still keeps pulling a rabbit out of the
hat.” The source laughs. “It doesn’t really matter, though. Frank is a carcass on
the ground at this point, and M.L.B. is the buzzard circling the body. It’s not a
question of whether he’s going to have to give up the Dodgers—it’s a question of
when.”

The Bostonians

This story started long ago, in a city far from Los Angeles. Frank came from
Boston, where his large Irish family has run a successful construction company for
four generations. He met Jamie Luskin, the Jewish daughter of a middle-class
appliancechain owner from Baltimore—“the cheapest guy in town,” or so claimed Jack
Luskin’s ads—in the 1970s at Georgetown University, where he majored in economics
and she in French. (She would later get a law degree, and an M.B.A. from M.I.T.)
Jamie’s parents didn’t approve of her dating a Catholic and didn’t attend the
wedding, presided over by a rabbi, at Frank and Jamie’s Manhattan apartment, in
1979. Shortly after, Frank decided they should move back to Boston, where they had
four boys (Drew, Travis, Casey, and Gavin, all of whom are now in their 20s) in
quick succession while she worked as a real-estate and family-law attorney.
Throughout their marriage, they remained professional and personal partners,
enjoying each other’s natural intelligence and craftiness in business. Life was
about the kids and making money, and compromises were rarely made with one party
feeling slighted.

Frank, whom an acquaintance describes as a “short Harvey Weinstein type, with a lot
of aggressive energy and never sure exactly what to say,” worked briefly for his
family, but soon left to try his hand at real-estate development, with Jamie
eventually acting as general counsel for the business. Some of his gambits were
failures, like a $25 million waterfront entertainment site in Baltimore that closed
within a year, but others, like the conversion of Union Wharf on Boston Harbor into
a mixed-use area with town houses, led to more opportunities.
“There’s been a deathwatch for Frank for months now_ HE IS A CARCASS ON THE GROUND
at this point, andM.L.B. is the buzzard circling.”

The McCourts were a formidable business team, unafraid to use lawsuits to pursue
their interests: they litigated against business associates, the state of
Massachusetts, as well as the contractors for their $16 million mansion in
Brookline, one of the most expensive homes in the state. (They also bought a $19.5
million estate on 100 acres on Cape Cod, a smaller home on the Willowbend golf
course nearby, and a $6 million ski condo in Vail.) Business tactics always carry
some risk, though, and after a lien was taken out on the Brookline house and a
sheriff came to the door to collect the debt, Jamie was so upset that the couple,
according to court documents, sheltered their non-business assets from their
business creditors by putting their homes in her name only.

South Boston in the 1980s was an urban wasteland, but Frank had the foresight to
spend $8 million for a 24-acre plot on the waterfront, the onetime rail yard for
the defunct Penn Central Transportation. This property became the basis of the
couple’s fortune, but as far as turning it into anything that might actually
improve the lives of Bostonians— there’s scant evidence of that. For years, the
McCourts ran around town with slide shows and promotional materials, claiming they
were going to create a “New Boston,” with the elegance of Back Bay, featuring
landscaped public plazas, and grand thoroughfares to the waterfront. “It is an
amazing opportunity. It is the intellectual opportunity, the legacy opportunity,
the family opportunity to try to contribute to what is best for the city: it is so
mega,” Jamie said in 1998.

Nevertheless, the South Boston land remained commuter parking lots, with more than
2,000 spaces in all. “Few in this town have talked the talk more and walked the
walk less,” Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey said of Frank on the eve of his
2004 purchase of the Dodgers. (Bailey jokingly encouraged readers to send in money
to “help our parking lot attendant realize his dream of owning a major league
team.”)

Frank and Jamie wanted to be more than parking attendants, of course. They loved
baseball—Frank’s grandfather had been a part owner of the Boston Braves, and Jamie,
a Baltimore Orioles fan and a jock in school, has claimed that when she was nine
years old she told her parents she would own a baseball team someday. In 2001, when
the Red Sox came up for sale, the couple competed with Charles Dolan, the founder
of Cablevision, and others for the team; they were far less flush than the
competition, but they thought their land, where a new Fenway Park could be built,
might be enticing. The owners, however, didn’t want to swap the team for a parking
lot, so the McCourts were forced to look elsewhere, considering a purchase of the
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. And then the Dodgers came up for sale.

The Dodgers are considered one of six or seven marquee franchises in baseball, and
it is important for the sport that they be in good hands. They were founded in
Brooklyn, in 1883, but left the city 75 years later. The O’Malley family, which
owned a stake in the team from the 1940s until the 1990s, had wanted to move from
their small and outdated ballpark at Ebbets Field to a plot of land on the corner
of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues (in fact, just about the same location where the
New Jersey Nets are building their new arena). When city-planning autocrat Robert
Moses refused their entreaties, offering them instead some land at the 1939 World’s
Fair Grounds in Queens, the O’Malleys accepted an offer from Los Angeles to bring
the team west. L.A. had promised the family that they’d have the opportunity to
build a new Dodger stadium, which they’d own, on the remains of a MexicanAmerican
community called Chavez Ravine, which had been razed a few years prior for federal
public housing. The housing project was put on hold during the 1950s Red Scare,
when various parties lobbied to cancel the “socialist” enterprise.
In any case, by 2003 the Dodgers had passed from the O’Malleys to the Fox
Entertainment Group subsidiary of News Corp., which had bought the team for $311
million five years earlier. Fox didn’t seem to care much about the team—Murdoch
wasn’t a fan and had never been to the stadium—but it felt it needed to block
Disney (which owned the Angels, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, and ESPN) from gaining
momentum for a new regional sports network. Fox spent money on the Dodgers, but
they were difficult owners from the beginning, making poor decisions, such as
trading away catcher Mike Piazza and awarding the sport’s first $100 million
contract to Kevin Brown, a pitcher who ended up disappointing fans. The Dodgers
finished out of the playoffs during all six years of Fox’s ownership.

When Disney lost interest in building the sports network a few years later, Fox
apparently didn’t see much reason to stay in the baseball business—the Dodgers had
been losing money, about $50 million a year. But there were few serious parties for
Fox’s $430 million price tag. Los Angeles billionaire Eh Broad dipped a toe in, but
Murdoch had already warmed to the notion of working with the McCourts, possibly
because he thought they would be easier to negotiate with over future TV deals.

The McCourts were willing to pay close to the price Fox wanted, about $421 million,
and Fox didn’t seem to care how they got to that number, even if the financing was
about as creative as the mortgage for a Miami condominium in 2006. Of the total,
Fox gave the McCourts about $71 million in loans due in a few years, plus a two-
year $125 million loan that used their Boston seaport property as collateral. (Fox
also agreed to eventually credit $50 million of the purchase price.) Under these
terms, the McCourts had to come up with only $225 million more— and they reportedly
borrowed at least $125 million of that sum, too. That would mean they put $100
million in cash in the deal, but few people think they were able to front even that
much. In fact, Frank’s lawyer, Steve Susman, has reportedly said that Frank put
“not a penny” into the deal.

In other words, the McCourts likely bought the Dodgers team, the stadium property,
the team’s spring-training facility, and the surrounding parking lots (comprising
almost 300 acres of land to the east of Echo Park, a newly gentrified neighborhood
of hipsters a few miles from Downtown L.A.) for less than the price of an
oceanfront home in Southampton.

The McCourts had to address their “love-hate relationship WITH CASH,” ONE ADVISER
TOLD them. “Love to have it, hate to keep it lying around.”

How the West Was Lost

Now that the McCourts had accomplished this astonishing swap, they decided it was
time to put their noses to the grindstone... and do more shopping. The first thing
they wanted was a slew of new homes. As usual, the couple decided to put them in
Jamie’s name. In fact, since any property that is jointly held in a marriage in
California is assumed to be shared equally between both spouses, their lawyers drew
up a post-nuptial agreement upon their move to L.A. to protect assets. Any homes
would remain in Jamie’s name, and the Dodgers, and some other property, would stay
solely in Frank’s.

Soon, the McCourts had an 11,637square-foot villa in Holmby Hills, across the
street from the Playboy Mansion, bought for $21.3 million, followed six months
later by an adjacent French-country fixer-upper of 8,385 square feet, for $6.5
million. They bought land in Cabo San Lucas, for $4.7 million, as well as a $7.7
million lot at the Yellowstone Club, the super-exclusive ski and golf resort in
Montana. For beach homes, they purchased a John Lautner-designed house in Malibu,
called the Segel residence, from Courteney Cox and David Arquette for $27.3
million. They took the beachfront bungalow next door, too—after all, it was only
$19 million. In court papers, Jamie said that they used the bungalow to house an
overflow of guests from time to time and do extra laundry.

They spent millions on renovations, shipping the kitchen from the Brookline home to
the bigger Holmby Hills house, at a cost of $180,000. They spent $12.4 million to
rip out the tennis courts and build an Olympic-size indoor-pool complex, including
a poolhouse, a sauna, and massage rooms. (The house already had an outdoor pool, as
did the Lautner house, but Jamie felt those were not suitable for the kind of long-
distance swimming she liked to do.)

That’s not all. They changed their NetJets account from Citations to the larger
Gulfstreams, logging more than 250 hours a year on the jets over two years at
$12,500 an hour. They hired a driver and a private security staff, at a cost of
over $800,000 a year. In 2007, the Dodgers paid $400,000 to an employee to oversee
one of the team’s charities, which had only a $1.6 million annual budget. (The
Dodgers later repaid the money to the charity, after the California attorney
general began an investigation.) An e-mail presented in court said the Bar Mitzvah
the McCourts were planning for their son Gavin would cost $500,000. The
organization paid a $400,000 salary to one of their sons, who worked at Goldman
Sachs, and $200,000 to another, a student at Stanford University, to do jobs with
rather elusive duties. (The couple has never been able to explain to the press what
those jobs entail.) Perhaps most shockingly, Frank and Jamie spent as much as
$10,000 a month on a haircutter who tended to their locks five days a week. This
was too much, even for Frank. “When I found that out, I couldn’t believe it,” he
stated in court papers. (David Boies, Jamie’s lawyer, claims that Frank was not
opposed to spending a lot of money on haircuts, and “the idea Frank was a frugal
husband beset by a free-spending woman is insanity.”) The couple agreed to fire the
hairdresser and hire a new one—at a mere $2,500 a month.

In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal
distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has
extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she
says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team. Much of it was taken in the
form of salaries, $5 million a year for Frank and eventually $2 million a year for
Jamie. As Bill Shaikin reported in the Los Angeles Times, Frank also divided the
stadium property into parcels and used the parking lots as collateral for a $60
million loan. He invested $10 million of that sum in the Dodgers, and used the rest
for personal real-estate expenses.

By showing the business had operating losses, the McCourts paid no federal or state
income taxes on that $108 million, causing outrage in L.A. when reported by Michael
Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times:“To everyone who claims that our wealthiest
citizens pay more than their fair share of income taxes and we should cut them a
break because they’re the ones who... create jobs in our economy, I have four words
for you: Frank and Jamie McCourt.” (Frank disputes the $108 million figure and says
the taxes were deferred.)

The McCourt advisers knew about these activities, it seems: “We have to get better
at planning and try to avoid using the business as a savings account,” one of them
told the couple, adding that they needed to address their “love-hate relationship
with cash (love to have it, hate to keep lying around).” But they seemed unable to
get the couple to show any financial restraint. By 2009 the Dodgers had taken on an
astonishing $459 million in debt.

The McCourts, particularly Jamie, were interested in making the social scene in
Hollywood, and the upper-crust Angelenos they befriended (including former Fox-
movie-studio head Sherry Lansing, and even Barbra Streisand, who sat in their box
for a game) may have been aware of their grand lifestyle—but the hoi polloi, the
Dodgers fans, were not. At first, it seemed as if the McCourts were a great fit for
the team. They raised ticket prices a bit, and gouged fans on parking fees, but the
payroll for players stayed up for the most part. Frank eventually put $150 million
into upgrading the stadium, though he made improvements primarily in the luxury
areas. He also seemed knowledgeable about the Dodgers and their history. “The
Yankees may be about winning, and the Red Sox are lovable losers, but the Dodgers
are about racial justice and integration, and were seen as a bastion of moral
superiority,” says author Neal Pollack, who writes about the team for Slate. “Frank
McCourt knew the nostalgia most of us have for that time, and when he came in, he
said what fans wanted to hear. Then he proceeded to rob us blind.”

The team finished first in the National League West during three of the first six
years of the McCourts’ ownership, due partly to incredible hitting by Manny
Ramirez, who propelled them to a division title before he tested positive in 2009
for a drug often used in conjunction with steroids. One does not know whether a
Russian energy healer hired by the McCourts to send the team good vibes played into
their success, as well. With some cost-cutting, the revenue of the team rose
dramatically—in fact, it nearly doubled, from $156 million in 2004 to $290 million
in 2009. (Many other baseball teams were going up in value, as well. Revenue for
the league jumped from $3.6 billion in 2002 to $7 billion in 2010.)

As far as the business was concerned, Frank ran the back office, and Jamie the
front office, where she pursued initiatives like having hottie outhelder Andre
Ethier teach a women’s yoga class on the Dodgers’ diamond. The McCourts enjoyed the
instant celebrity that came with owning the team, and hired a cadre of spin doctors
to burnish their image. Jamie even made plans to write a memoir, entitled Screaming
Meanie: Babes, Baseball and Busi- ness. She liked that L.A. was different from
Boston, where “people are very interested in who was your father, who was your
grandfather.” L.A. is a place where you’re judged by “where you’re going, not where
you’ve been,” she said. “There isn’t a thing I don’t love about L.A. I’m never
moving from L.A. Ev-ver.”

In the Dodgers’ offices, Jamie’s main ally was Charles Steinberg, a portly former
dentist to the Baltimore Orioles who had recreated himself as a sports-marketing
guru and was close to Selig; Jamie had hired him along with dozens of employees
from the East Coast. “My speculation is she got out here, she finally realized what
she wanted out of life, and the Dodger platform was a great way to get there, and
Charles was a great enabler,” says a source close to Frank.

Steinberg even told Jamie she should get involved in politics. In a memo titled
“Project Jamie: Tikun Olam Plan,” he told her that she should establish some goals:
“1. To fix the world. 2. Fix America. 3. Be President.” He advised that she found a
“Dodgers University” to further these goals, which would result in endorsements
from Michelle Obama and L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and talked about what her
“coalition” would be when she became involved in politics: “women, Latinos,
African-Americans, sports loving males, [and those from the] Hollywood industries.”
Another of Jamie’s advisers seconded the recommendation. “After you’ve planted all
the appropriate seeds, I think that you can leverage your eventual star power to
become Mayor of Los Angeles.... As long as a Magic Johnson-like celebrity doesn’t
enter the race, you’ll win the mayoral seat.... Next step would be Governor. And if
you get that far, well, let’s say that a female governor from California will be
instantly added to anyone’s short list of presidential candidates. ... Lots to talk
about, but much more to get done, Madam President.”

Designated Hitter

Everything would likely have chugged along this way for a while if the McCourts’
marriage hadn’t fallen apart. The strain of the huge debt was affecting their
relationship, which onlookers were already describing as increasingly bizarre—“You
weren’t sure if you were in a sitcom or an Edward Albee play,” an image consultant
to the McCourts reportedly said. The last straw was Jamie’s alleged affair with
their younger, handsome blond California-boy driver, Jeff Fuller, who was paid by
the Dodgers as “director of protocol.” Fuller had once worked as the driver for
Barbara Davis, the oil heiress. “They took my driver,” Davis told V.F. special
correspondent Bob Colacello in 2010. In court papers, Jamie says, “I would prefer
not to address such accusations or to discuss my belief as to Frank’s extramarital
activities.” Says an observer, “Tve seen Frank hanging out at the bar at the
Montage since he’s been living there, and let’s just say he doesn’t have great
taste [in the company he keeps there].”

“The idea Frank was a frugal husband beset BY A FREE-SPENDING WOMAN is insanity”
says Jamies lawyer David Boies.

Before this, Jamie and Frank had also started to butt heads over planning their
estate. By 2008, the value of the Dodgers had appreciated tremendously—though they
were still carrying a ton of debt—and Frank wanted to put money into a trust to
pass the value on to their sons. The McCourts loved the idea that the Dodgers could
become a family dynasty. But Jamie objected, arguing that she and Frank needed to
be on better financial footing; after all, the seven properties they had bought
when they came to L.A. might be worth half as much after the housing market went
bust.

Jamie went to see the couple’s estate lawyer, Leah Bishop, about this issue, but
claims she found herself in for a surprise— Frank was fully in control of all the
Dodgers’ money. Bishop told her that she had signed away her rights to the team and
its funds by agreeing to the post-nup. Bishop and Jamie now claim that Frank also
expressed surprise at this situation, saying that he had never intended to cut
Jamie off. (Frank’s side says he was expressing shock merely because the post-nup
hadn’t been superseded by a will and that he always intended to be the sole owner
of the Dodgers.)

It was tentatively agreed that Bishop would draft new documents in which all
property would be equally shared. “Frank’s big mistake, which is a mistake he’s
made throughout his life, was not saying no right then and there to Feah Bishop,”
if he had misgivings about changing the post-nup, says a source close to Frank.
“Instead, he said, ‘I’ll think about it.’” Jamie was very upset—if the Dodgers were
solely Frank’s, her net worth would be about 15 percent of his, and that wasn’t any
kind of equal marriage. “What happened there was pretty lousy,” says someone close
to Jamie, giving her side of the story. “She’s the mother of four kids, been with
her husband for 40 years, and then she realizes this person who was supposed to be
her best friend was, well, screwing her, in so many words. It was a real
heartbreak. Finally, it became clear to Jamie that Frank wanted her to always be
there like, I don’t want to say a slave necessarily, but to just be along for the
ride.”

Nevertheless, Frank wasn’t sure what to do. “I love my wife,” he reportedly said in
court. “It’s as simple as that. She was trying very hard to convince me to sign the
documents. She had basically put the marriage on the line.” Jamie was sending him
lovey-dovey messages: “We have been enormously fortunate with our love, our health,
our children, and our success together,” she wrote to him via e-mail. “I would
really like to get this annoying estate work behind us.... What about this am I
missing, because it really makes me feel that you don’t care about me? If we come
through this troubling time in our lives, we should think about renewing our vows.”

After Frank became convinced that he was a man scorned, in October 2009, he must
have wondered if Jamie had become so obsessed with estate planning because she was
scheming to abscond with her new lover. Frank said he had “confirmation” of the
affair and cut off discussions about changing the post-nup. Not only that—he
decided that he wanted Jamie out of the Dodgers’ business entirely, along with
Steinberg and about 70 staffers he perceived to be loyal to her, according to a
source. “We had all gotten apartments and car loans, and moved 3,000 miles across
the country, and then we were let go,” says Katy Phillips, a producer in the team’s
media lab and one of the ex-employees with whom Frank does not have a non-
disclosure agreement. On October 21, 2009, Frank sent Jamie a letter charging her
with “insubordination, non-responsiveness, failure to follow procedures, and
inappropriate behavior with regard to a direct subordinate.” She was fired as
C.E.O. of the Dodgers, effective immediately.

It could all have ended there, but Jamie isn’t the type to slink away. Despite the
post-nup, she was adamant that she owned half of their fortune and half the team.
Within a week, she filed for divorce, claiming “irreconcilable differences.” She
wanted 50 percent of the team’s worth, which she estimated at $800 million, and
half of the couple’s other assets, which she said were worth at least $1.2 billion.
Frank claimed he had little personal wealth, and said the team’s value was much
less, because of the debt.

@vf.com LIST: THE SPORTS WORLD'S BIGGEST DIVORCE SETTLEMENTS.

Jamie also asked the court for spousal support to cover her expenses, such as
private-jet travel, hair and makeup, and her half-dozen country-club memberships.
She received an astonishing $225,000 a month, plus $412,159 per month for mortgages
and other costs, like maids and gardeners, associated with the seven houses. She
also received exclusive rights to use their Olympic pool, from six A.M. to two P.M.
daily.

At that point it seemed that Jamie might settle the entire case, but, according to
a source close to the negotiations, some of Frank’s initial offers— that he’d keep
the Dodgers and she could have the houses, along with a cash payout of $35 to $40
million—were too low. Frank was still arguing that the Dodgers weren’t worth much,
and he felt confident that with the post-nup Jamie would get nowhere in court. But
when forensic experts started scrutinizing the actual documents, Frank’s luck began
to turn. The McCourts’ lawyer, Larry Silverstein, had had the couple sign six
copies of the postnup. Frank signed three at their home in Boston and another three
in Los Angeles two weeks later, because Silverstein felt that it would be safer to
have some copies of the agreement signed in California. Exhibit A, in all six
copies, assigned the Dodgers and all other property, except for the homes, to
Frank. The page before Exhibit A was a signature page, so the forensic experts
thought that there should be indentations from those signatures on all of the
copies of Exhibit A. But there weren’t.

In fact, none of the three copies signed in Los Angeles had any indentations, and
there was evidence that some sort of clip had previously been affixed to them, and
perhaps a note as well. When Jamie’s lawyers began looking through Silverstein’s
hies, they found the mother of all snafus. Silverstein, it seemed, had
inadvertently allowed the McCourts to sign three of the six documents with an error
in the exhibit: instead of saying that Frank was the sole owner of all their
property “inclusive” of the Dodgers, the L.A. copies said that he was the owner of
all property “exclusive” of the Dodgers. Silverstein eventually caught the mistake,
which he claims was a simple drafting error, but instead of having the McCourts
sign corrected documents, he simply switched out the exhibits for ones with the
correct language. It was a decision made for efficiency’s sake—but it cost Frank
the case against Jamie, at least in part. The post-nup was thrown out in December
2010.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 138

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 113

According to a source close to the case, after he lost on the post-nup, Frank again
offered Jamie the houses plus an increased cash payment of between $100 and $120
million, but he absolutely would not give her any part of the team. Jamie wasn’t
going to accept that. And during the course of the trial, deep resentment set in.
“For these two people, who were together for more than three decades, whose
business, professional, and personal lives were intertwined, they were actually
enormously positive about each other at first,” says Boies. “They respected each
other and thought the other was smart and imaginative—frankly, I don’t think that
either had given up hope on the marriage. It was an interesting, and unfortunate,
deterioration from there.”

Jamie, who was always skinny, began to lose even more weight. “She’s like a
lollipop,” says a friend. “Women in our community have been giving her a break even
though she had an affair, but the men are really mad at Frank for what he’s done to
the Dodgers franchise—they think he thought this was a good city to come and put
one over on anybody. But no one sees either of them as one of our own.”

Jamie has tried to rehabilitate her image. According to a friend, she put on
exclusive wine dinners for 12 friends (her pals include Wendy Goldberg, the wife of
producer Leonard Goldberg, and Florence Sloan, the wife of an ex-head of MGM),
several times a month. Frank, on the other hand, continued to slip in everyone’s
estimation. “For the billionaires along the beach in Malibu, there’s a pretty big
distinction: Frank is [widely disliked], and Jamie is [seen as] kind of sweet and a
little bit kooky,” says a friend of Jamie’s. Nevertheless, Jamie has become more
and more nervous about her future. “She’s always shaking, like a shaking dog,” says
a friend. “She knows she’s in the fight of her life.”

Bottom of the Ninth

Jamie began to receive calls from investors interested in partnering with her to
buy the team out from under Frank—she knew that the fans didn’t want her as the
face of the Dodgers anymore, but she could be a good silent partner—but time and
again, sources close to her claim, investors disappeared because Frank wouldn’t
produce any financial information about the team. In fact, Frank refused even to
tell Jamie exactly how much he thought the Dodgers were worth. “We were saying that
the Dodgers were worth more than a billion dollars, and Frank once took the
position that they were only worth a few hundred million dollars, and after the
debt was subtracted, they might only be worth $1 or $2 million,” says Boies. Says a
source close to the situation, “At one point Jamie said to Frank, ‘We’re so
exhausted from dealing with you... that we’ll take the cash, but if you can’t get
us the cash within a reasonable period of time, then you have to agree to sell the
team and divide up the proceeds,’ and his response was ‘That’s so ludicrous we’re
not even going to bother responding.’ ” The source sighs. “He has no money, so what
is the point of agreeing to take cash if he’s unwilling to provide any mechanism to
actually pay Jamie?”

But even as Frank was struggling to make payments on the Dodgers’ crushing debt,
Jamie knew that the team most likely had value way beyond the essential assets of
the team and its property. Frank had worked on different plans to leverage the
team’s value: In 2005 he had come up with a plan called “Five Ton Gorilla” to put
an N.F.L. stadium and retail complex in the Dodgers’ parking lot, with the backing
of Larry Silverstein (no relation to the lawyer), the New York real-estate
developer who owns much of the World Trade Center site. This failed because at the
time L.A.’s civic leaders were lining up behind a plan to bring the N.F.L. to the
Coliseum, so, in 2008, Frank launched a campaign to create a “promenade”—i.e.,
mallon the Dodgers’ land, with restaurants, shops, and a Dodgers museum in the area
behind the outfield, at a cost of $500 million. One problem: no one would finance
it.

Even though these plans failed, Frank had an ace up his sleeve: the television
rights for the team, which were coming up for renegotiation in 2013. And Fox was
ready to make a deal: in February 2011, the network was shocked when Time Warner
grabbed the Lakers away from it in a 20-year deal worth a rumored $3 billion. Now
Fox was desperate for the Dodgers, and they knew they could extract a good price
from Frank, one he wouldn’t have otherwise taken, because he was so hungry for
cash.

This was a bad trade, from Jamie’s perspective. The big money had always been in
creating a new Dodgers network, and Frank was throwing that away to pay the bills.
A source close to Frank has suggested that part of why Jamie has been counseled by
David Boies and a hedge-fund adviser named Joe Ravitch—both of whom were
instrumental in the creation of the Yankees’ multi-billion deal to create the YES
network, their own network in New York—was because she always had her eye on this
prize. (Boies denies this.)

Nevertheless, Frank and Fox struck a ten1 i tative deal a month later: for
somewhere in the range of $1.7 to $3 billion, Frank agreed to give Fox the right to
broadcast the Dodgers for the next 20 years—but the network had to give him a $375
million up-front payment. He needed that money.

This deal had to first be approved by Major League Baseball, and in the interim,
Frank was sweating the April payroll. So he arranged for a loan from Fox—a personal
loan of $30 million to help him fund the team through April 15. He figured that if
he didn’t take it through the team, M.L.B. wouldn’t have any reason to object.

He was wrong. Selig was livid. “Getting a personal loan is one thing, but a loan
from the company that broadcasts your team and almost every other team in
baseball?” says Leitch, the founder of Deadspin. “That’s unacceptable. Selig
negotiates with the major TV partner for the league, and he needs to know about
that. If the loan was from a local car dealership, Selig wouldn’t have been nearly
as mad.”

Within a few days, Selig declared that he was taking over the Dodgers’ finances. He
may also have been swayed by a letter from Jamie reminding him that, since she was
likely a part owner of the team, any deal that Frank had struck for 20-year media
rights with Fox might be invalidated by the courts, because she wasn’t sure whether
she was going to sign it. Ryan Kirkpatrick, a lawyer for Frank, says, “M.L.B. knew
everything about the Dodgers’ financial situation. But after the post-nup was
invalidated, they grew uncomfortable with the ongoing divorce and the publication
of Major League Baseball data, and decided that they needed to do something to step
in so the divorce didn’t linger.”

Today, Selig seems more than ready to A seize the team from Frank, once the
forensic audit that he has ordered is over. He’s within his rights to do so, as
long as he can get three-quarters of M.L.B.’s owners to vote with him to sell the
franchise to someone else. “There are good baseball owners and bad baseball owners,
but Frank McCourt really stands by himself in terms of destroying a marquee
franchise through extravagance, inappropriate expenditures, and financial
commitments,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College. “As far
as I’m concerned, the chances that Selig couldn’t get three-quarters of the owners
to vote with him on this are the same chances of peace breaking out in the Middle
East in the next few weeks.”

For once, Jamie and Frank were on the same side: Jamie was feverishly trying to
make sure that the team wasn’t seized by M.L.B., convinced that, if it was, Selig
would sell to whomever he thought was easiest to control, instead of to the highest
bidder. She went to court to ask for the immediate sale of the Dodgers so the
couple could control the process, instead of M.L.B. The parties tentatively settled
on June 17, but this issue and others have yet to be resolved. If M.L.B. approves
Frank’s TV deal with Fox, Judge Scott Gordon plans to rule in a one-day trial, on
August 4, on who owns how much of the team.

Meanwhile, Frank has developed a slew of new problems: a Dodger relief pitcher is
on the disabled list with an anxiety disorder and the rest of the team isn’t doing
well; two fires recently broke out at the stadium; and, most notably, an off-duty
paramedic from Santa Cruz was beat to a pulp in a poorly lit parking lot of the
stadium—an incident that was laid at McCourt’s feet, since he had let go of the
Dodgers’ chief of security four months earlier. The family of the victim (he’s
still in a coma) is suing the Dodgers and McCourt for millions.

On top of that, Silverstein’s firm announced that Frank owes them hundreds of
thousands of dollars in unpaid fees, and it asked a court to declare that he can’t
sue them for malpractice for screwing up his post-nup. By the way, the $10,000 a
month haircutter is suing him for unpaid fees, too.

That’s the Ball Game

If fate had shined differently upon the McCourts— if they had never gotten
divorced, and financial disclosures in the case hadn’t turned them into pariahs,
and they were heralded as geniuses for creating a new Dodgers network—they would
probably have still owned the Dodgers, with billions of dollars to share between
them. But today, there are only a few ways the curtain can fall on this sordid
saga. Frank could find a minority partner (a hedge-fund owner like David Einhorn)
to bail him out, but that’s unlikely, given his current reputation. Or he could
declare bankruptcy “it might happen, because Frank is obstinate, irrational, and
stubborn,” says a source close to the situation. “He’s acting like a financial
suicide bomber.” (A spokesman for Frank calls this characterization “inaccurate and
irresponsible.”)

Now that Frank and Jamie have finally settled, the two of them most likely will try
to get M.L.B. to approve some version of the Fox deal. But even then, Selig may not
allow them to remain the owners. “I think Frank thinks he will get to keep the team
if he settles, but Fm sure Selig has already made up his mind,” says Knight of
ESPN.

Even with the team in M.L.B.’s hands, that doesn’t mean that Frank won’t sue them
and everyone else in sight. Most likely there are many more arguments, and more
court dates, to come. And Jamie is exhausted. “At this point, all Jamie wants out
of this is enough money to keep her houses in L.A., and live comfortably, and never
have to deal with this again,” says the close source.

As far as the Dodgers are concerned, they have a chance of regaining their former
shine under new owners. Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, Boston Red Sox
chairman Tom Werner, and Chicago White Sox executive Dennis Gilbert, all of whom
live in the Los Angeles area, have been floated as possible bidders for the
franchise. Steve Garvey, an eight-time all-star for the Dodgers, has started an
investor group with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, who bought the N.H.L.’s
Pittsburgh Penguins with Mario Lemieux in 1999.

What is not in question is that the new owner will be from Southern California.
“One thing the M.L.B. wants is someone who has their finger on the pulse of our
region,” says David Carter, of the Sports Business Institute at the University of
Southern California. “They don’t want any more outof-towners taking over the
Dodgers.”

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