Yells of “popcorn!” “hot dogs!” and “beer!” echo into the California sky. Forty-two thousand, nine-hundred and forty-one long suffering Padres and Dodgers fans have filed into the ballpark just a 20-minute drive from the Mexican border. Cool air rolls in from the nearby sea as a familiar chime reverberates from an electric organ.
It’s opening day in San Diego. The Padres’ Brad Brach is sweating on the mound as Matt Kemp, the pride of the Dodgers, raises 30-plus inches of polished timber over his shoulder and readies to add one more homer to the 128 attached to his name.
Brach takes a final look at the runner on second then straightens his back, lifts his knee and launches a pitch toward the plate. Kemp’s foot moves first. His hips follow and then his shoulders as he cracks his bat against the ball. The crowd erupts. Some happy—most not—as the ball takes off into the sky and sails toward the scoreboard behind the right-field wall. Kemp rounds the bases and gets the old high five from teammate Andre Ethier as he crosses home plate.
We’re only eight innings into the season, and it’s already clear San Diego sucks. But the Padres aren’t the story here. This isn’t a Matt Kemp story either. It can’t be, not while Frank McCourt, the silver-haired millionaire (soon to be billionaire) is sitting in a box next to the dugout. Especially not when he’s sitting next to Magic Johnson.
As he nears the dugout, Kemp looks up at Magic, who just fronted a record-breaking deal to buy the Dodgers from McCourt in what was more or less a forced adoption.
“Nice job, kid,” Magic says.
Kemp’s two-run homer pushes the Dodgers to a 5–3 win. But the victory has been spoiled. The next day’s newspapers capture the sentiment of disillusioned fans. “Just when you thought it was safe, McCourt surfaces,” reads a headline in the Los Angeles Times. Magic and his partners might be paying $2.15 billion to buy the Dodgers and their stadium from McCourt, but when that deal is done the team will still be paying him millions of dollars for years to come.
Even though this is a baseball story, it isn’t really about the game. It hasn’t been for a while now. This is a story about a messy divorce and a neglected child. It’s about the death of family ownership in baseball. But it’s also about the parking lot king who almost bankrupted a ball club and walked away a billionaire.
And like all things baseball, this doesn’t actually start in San Diego. Nor does it start in L.A. It begins in Boston and New York.
A long time ago in Boston
By most accounts, 1893 was an ordinary year in Boston. Men in top hats packed themselves and their sons into horse-drawn carriages and headed out to the ballpark. Inside the state-of-the-art South End Grounds, they munched on peanuts and cheered on the Boston Beaneaters as they took on bitter rivals, such as the Brooklyn Grooms.
But outside the stadium, Boston was in disrepair. Entire neighbourhoods were routinely wiped out by fire. This was the Boston in which an Irish-Catholic immigrant named John McCourt made his name and fortune when he founded a family construction company in the south end of town.
McCourt would live long enough to see the city rebuild itself and for the Beaneaters to change their names to the Braves and lose the majority of their fan base to Babe Ruth and the Red Sox. When McCourt died in 1917, he passed his company to his sons, Francis, Tom and John Jr. During the next 30 years, the brothers grew the family business, taking on big contracts at airports in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Francis also became the first McCourt to make a major investment in baseball as part owner of the under-performing and cash-strapped Braves.
Allegiances change, even in sport, and when the Braves left town in 1952, the McCourts, and the rest of Boston, became ardent Red Sox fans. Soon Francis passed the family company to his son Frank H. McCourt, a Georgetown University graduate, who, with his cousin, continued to expand the family empire with the intention of handing it down to their sons. That was the plan, anyway, when Frank H. McCourt Jr. was born on Aug. 14, 1953.
On that same day in Baltimore, some 650 km south, storm clouds were overhead. The U.S. Weather Bureau was advising that gale winds and high tides could soon crash into the city. All of Baltimore was being warned, including Jack Luskin, an appliance store owner and self-proclaimed “cheapest guy in town,” and his pregnant wife. Luskin was never as crazy about baseball as he was about his business. He was too busy hustling around the city, selling refrigerators door-to-door and trying to set up a chain of appliance stores. None of this concerned his daughter Jamie, a baseball-crazed tomboy who could often be found playing shortstop on neighbourhood sandlots. Years later, she’d recount how she dragged her father to Orioles games. By the time she was nine, she’d declared her intent to one day own a baseball team. And though she would have preferred it be the Orioles, she grew less picky as the years went on.
The making of a parking lot king
Jamie was 17 and studying French when she fell in love. It was 1971, and her Orioles were reigning World Series champs. Frank’s Red Sox were 53 years into an 86-year title drought. But none of that mattered, because this was Georgetown and they were freshmen and she was wearing hot pants and he was admiring her legs. Or so the story goes.
Jamie Luskin and Frank McCourt—university sweethearts from the day they met—went their separate ways after graduation. He returned to Boston to join the family business, and she went back to Baltimore to study law. Two years later, when Frank told his overbearing father he wanted to strike out as a real estate developer, Jamie lent him $1,000 to start what became The McCourt Company, Inc. “He was very ambitious,” recalls Marie Toppi, McCourt’s bookkeeper in those early days, who remembers her boss as a smooth-talking salesman who desperately wanted to acquire cheap land and build on it. She also remembers him constantly commuting into Yankee territory where his girlfriend was practising law for a small international firm.
Jamie’s Orioles had just won the AL pennant and Frank’s Red Sox were still cursed when they got married in Jamie’s midtown Manhattan apartment. It was Nov. 3, 1979. Jamie’s parents refused to attend because even though a rabbi performed the ceremony, Frank was still a Catholic and they considered their union to be a mistake. Frank showed up late. But he was always late, so Jamie let it go.
After their wedding, Frank convinced his bride to move to Boston. It would only be for a few years while he sorted out his business, which was about to cash in on the bankruptcy of a storied American enterprise: the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Long before it was a property on the Monopoly board, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest company of its kind in America. But by 1978 it had been renamed the Penn Central Railroad, gone bust and was selling off its properties, including 24 acres of neglected rail yard in south Boston. A year before his wedding, a 25-year-old Frank had partnered with two other developers to buy the property. The asking price: $3.5 million. Neither Frank nor his partners had anywhere near that much money. So they scraped together enough to buy an option on the land. But when they couldn’t raise the rest of the money required, his partners backed out. Frank refused to give up, even after the land was sold to another party—Cabot, Cabot & Forbes—who converted the L-shaped property into a swath of parking lots with space for 2,200 cars. Frank took his case to court, arguing that he had the money needed to exercise his option and buy out CC&F. Thus began a six-year legal battle. Key to Frank’s bid was his reliance on other people’s money, including that of a Connecticut-based developer named David Chase.
With three young boys running around at home, the early ’80s were memorable years for the McCourts. But they were also marred by ongoing litigation over the parking lots and by an unexpected visit from a sheriff who one day dropped in to remind Frank and Jamie that they’d best start paying their mortgage. The threat to the family home (which had been purchased with what Jamie later described as “substantial sums of money” from her parents) caused by the financial insecurity of Frank’s business was a strain on the marriage. But the couple persevered, and by 1987, Frank won his case against CC&F.
Then Frank turned on the men who had bankrolled him. “Frank was very aggressive,” recalls Chase. Eventually, Chase, tired of litigation, let Frank buy him out on the property, leaving Frank to earn an estimated $4 million a year from Boston car owners.
With Frank finally bringing in some money, Jamie went back to school. Obtaining a master’s degree in business from MIT, she was about to start her own international consulting firm when Frank asked her to join his company as an executive.
Then life got even more complicated.
Pitching for the Sox
The Boston Red Sox weren’t exactly what Jamie had in mind when she first said she wanted to buy a baseball team. By 2001, the Red Sox were a wealthy franchise with a rich heritage, but they were also in desperate need of new owners and a new home after Tom and Jean Yawkey, their long-time owners, grew old and died without establishing an heir. Having never had children, the Yawkeys treated their players like family. But when Jean died in 1992, the franchise was left to a trust and, in 2001, was put up for sale.
Jamie may have been the one who had long dreamt of MLB ownership, but it was Frank who, in the summer of 2001, tried to swap his parking lots for his favourite ball club. He began trying to win over local residents and politicians with his grand vision for a new 44,000-seat ballpark. Fenway Park was 89 years old, and many people felt the Red Sox deserved a bigger home. Frank vowed to transform his parking lots into a new stadium. “Any red-blooded Bostonian would love being involved in owning the Red Sox,” he said, portraying himself and his wife as long-time fans looking to continue the tradition of family ownership.
It didn’t take long for all involved to realize the McCourts didn’t have the money needed to match the $660 million eventually put forward by a sports investment company that included major backing from The New York Times Company.
So how ’bout them Dodgers?
Baseball was always a money game. The National Association of Base Ball Players made sure of that back in 1858, when they began charging fans 50 cents admission. But between then and now the game became consumed by profits. Broadcast rights were sold, payrolls soared and family-owned franchises got bought out by large corporate conglomerates. Jean Yawkey’s death simply punctuated the demise of an era when baseball was run by scions of families like the Wrigleys (former owners of the Chicago Cubs), the Stonehams
(San Francisco Giants) and the Carpenters (Philadelphia Phillies). After Jean died, there was just one family dynasty left, and they were running the Dodgers.
Long before they were in Los Angeles, the Dodgers played in Brooklyn. And long before they were the Dodgers, they were the Robins. And before that, they were the Grooms. No matter the name or the city, the Dodgers were always a proud franchise. They won their first pennant in 1889 and their first World Series in 1955. They tore down the colour barrier in 1947 when they signed Jackie Robinson and brought baseball to the west coast when they relocated to L.A. in 1958.
Founded in 1883 by a Brooklyn real estate magnate, the Brooklyn Base Ball Club was operated by a variety of local owners until Walter O’Malley, a Brooklyn lawyer and baseball fanatic bought into the team in 1950. For 29 years, O’Malley ran the Dodgers, winning 11 NL titles and four World Series along the way. When he died in 1979, the team was passed down to his son, Peter, who ran the club for 19 years, winning two more NL titles and two more World Series while watching as the first families of baseball disappeared from the owners’ circle and were replaced by the likes of the Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner. Then, on March 19, 1998, O’Malley sold his father’s team to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group for $350 million. Just like that, the last of baseball’s grand old families was gone.
But the Australian-born media mogul was never that passionate about America’s favourite pastime. After six years and an estimated loss of $400 million, Murdoch was ready to sell. But with an asking price of $431 million, few parties were eager to bid on the storied franchise.
Then, one spring evening back in Boston, Frank and Jamie McCourt sat their four sons around the dinner table. The couple wanted to buy the Dodgers, but only if their children were interested in inheriting the team. “Nothing in your lives will change,” Frank is said to have promised. Then Jamie piped in: “As far as I’m concerned, every single thing in your life will change.”
The McCourts go to Hollywood
Frank and Jamie McCourt never were Dodger fans. But that never mattered. Not to Frank, Jamie, Murdoch, or MLB commissioner Bud Selig.
But it mattered to the Dodger faithful who viewed the McCourts as out-of-towners whose blood ran red, not blue. Still, fans were encouraged to give the new owners a chance. After all, the McCourts seemed eager to get the Dodgers back into the playoffs. That was the story, anyway, when Frank and Jamie (who was soon labeled “Vice Chairperson”) stood side-by-side, smiled for the cameras and decreed: “Family ownership has returned to the Dodgers. The era of corporate ownership is over.”
But a pall had already formed over the transaction. On L.A. radio that day, a sportscaster was referring to McCourt as “McBankrupt,” and fans were already writing letters to the Los Angeles Times, expressing concern that the McCourts didn’t have the money to run a pro ball club. The family’s net worth remained a mystery, but it was already clear that the deal was essentially a land swap. Selig had struggled to approve the transaction after learning that Murdoch’s News Corp. was lending the McCourts more than a third of the purchase price. But in the end, the deal was done. And McCourt began making big promises. “Our most immediate goals are returning the Dodgers to the World Series and making each fan’s experience at Dodger Stadium the absolute best that it can be,” he said. “We need some players. We’re going to get them.”
It would be several years until the particulars of that day’s purchase emerged in court. Only then did it become clear that a desperate Fox had given the McCourts $196 million in loans, with McCourt putting up his parking lots as collateral. Then he had gone to the bank for the rest. As Frank’s lawyer would point out, his client paid “not a penny” for the team.
The Artful Dodgers
The 11,637-square-foot home across the street from the Playboy Mansion never did satisfy as a family home, even after the McCourts poured $14 million into the $21-million property, adding, among other things, an Olympic-sized pool and a massage parlour and literally transplanting the kitchen from their old Boston manor. So they branched out, buying the $6.5-million renovator’s dream next door, a $4.6-million chunk of land in Mexico and a $7.7-million lot at the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Montana. Then the McCourts bought Courteney Cox and David Arquette’s $27.3-million beachfront home in Malibu. And when the $19-million bungalow next door went on the market, they snatched that one up too, because they felt that property would come in handy as a guest house or, as Frank would later allege in court, a place for Jamie to throw her laundry.
It never seemed to matter how much things cost. Everything was in Jamie’s name, though, because Frank was still heavily leveraged (Fox foreclosed on his Boston parking lots in 2006 after Frank was unable to pay off his loans). As enticing as baseball ownership may have been, it was always meant to help build a family empire. So the McCourts placed their two eldest sons (Drew, now 31 and Travis, now 29) on the Dodgers’ payroll, earning a combined $600,000 in annual salaries. And though it remains unclear what the two boys (one was then a student at Stanford, the other a New York City–based employee of Goldman Sachs) were contributing to the club’s day-to-day operations, that didn’t seem to matter to their parents. Not while the McCourts were treating the team—as Jamie described in court papers—like their “personal ATM or credit card.” The McCourts were prospering. The Dodgers, however, were not. The team’s payroll, third-highest when the McCourts took over, dropped as low as 12th, landing $100 million below that of the New York Yankees.
The 2005 season ended with a 3–1 loss and the team’s worst record in more than a decade. The following year, the Dodgers grabbed the NL wildcard, only to be swept out of the playoffs by the Mets. In 2007, the team dropped back out of post-season contention. That’s when the Dodgers began making big moves. They brought in the Yankees’ manager, Joe Torre, and picked up Manny Ramirez from the Red Sox. By 2008, the team was back in the playoffs until the Phillies ended their run in the NLCS. Then Ramirez was suspended for violating MLB’s drug policy. And though Frank and Jamie had replaced all the seats in Dodger Stadium, the fans were still uncomfortable with their leadership and looked down on their Boston roots with enough disdain that at one point Jamie hired Tipper Gore’s communications director to ingratiate the family to the team’s supporters. But those fans couldn’t have cared less for the McCourts. Not yet, anyway.
Whose team is it anyway?
It never was clear when exactly Jamie McCourt began dating her chauffeur. But by July 2009, Frank and Jamie were living in separate homes. They were also taking separate vacations, he to one of the family’s estates in Cape Cod and she to Israel and France with Jeff Fuller, her driver and the Dodgers’ director of protocol.
What transpired at the Chateau St. Martin along the French Riviera is open to interpretation. Jamie has long maintained that she never cheated on Frank before they were separated, but Frank has alluded to the opposite.
Upon her return to L.A., Jamie moved into the couple’s Malibu residence. Frank, meanwhile, moved into a Beverly Hills hotel. And on Oct. 14, 2009—20 days shy of their 30th wedding anniversary—the couple announced they were separating. Both parties agreed to make no further announcements until the Dodgers were out of the playoffs. A week later, with the team nine innings from elimination, Frank signed a five-paragraph message on Dodgers letterhead and sent it to Jamie via his lawyer. “Dear Jamie,” the letter began. “This is to inform you that your employment with and positions as Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairperson of Los Angeles Dodgers LLC, as well as any and all of the positions that you hold… are hereby terminated effective immediately.
“Your actions, including, but not limited to your insubordination, non-responsiveness, failure to follow procedures and inappropriate behaviour with regard to a direct subordinate, have made this decision necessary.”
The locks to Jamie’s office were changed. Her credit cards were cancelled.
Six days later, Jamie filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. She accused Frank of having carried out “a calculated plan to try to humiliate and ostracize” her and demanded her credit cards be re-activated, her titles returned and her status as co-owner of the Dodgers recognized.
In his reply, Frank referred to himself as “the sole owner” of The McCourt Company, Inc., and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Then he explained how, two months after buying the Dodgers, Frank and Jamie signed a post-nuptial agreement giving him the team in exchange for all the family’s property.
One of the most expensive divorces in California history had begun.
The divorce
Tom Cruise’s lawyer was there. So was Al Gore’s. And Cary Grant’s, too. They were all talking. And they were all fighting. And they were all making money, an estimated $35 million over the course of two years.
The big issue: Who owned the Dodgers? At some point, that morphed into a question of how Jamie, a trained lawyer with a background in business, managed to sign away the team, only to later claim she didn’t know what she was signing.
According to Frank, it happened like this: “Jamie became adamant that her assets needed to be protected. She said that she did not want to have any risk of liability if any of my present or future business ventures, including the Dodgers, led to creditor claims against me.”
She, however, described it like this: “It was never my understanding that the purported effect of the document Frank asked me to sign in 2004 was to transfer the bulk of our assets to Frank. I was not told that by signing that agreement I was supposedly divesting myself of the vast bulk of the wealth we had accumulated during our then 25-year marriage.” She added: “I signed the document because I trusted my husband of 25 years.”
It took 14 months for a California judge to invalidate the post-nuptial agreement. Jamie appeared to have won the first round, but Frank vowed to continue fighting.
Meanwhile, the team was a mess, dropping to second-last in the NL West. But as badly as the kids were playing, their performance was overshadowed by the outrageous headlines inspired by the courtroom drama. There was the curious story of the $400,000 given to Howard Sunkin (one of Frank’s top advisers) to oversee a team charity with a $1.6-million annual budget. That revelation sparked an investigation from the California Attorney General’s office, forcing the Dodgers to repay the money. Then there was the $500,000 bar mitzvah the McCourts planned for their youngest son, trumped only by news that the McCourts had not paid income taxes on $108 million earned between 2004 and 2009. That tidbit was splashed on the front page of the sports section. So was the disclosure that the McCourts had taken out $390 million in loans against future ticket revenue. And the $120,000 a year for an on-call hairstylist. Then there was the 71-year-old Russian healer named Vladimir Shpunt whom Jamie and Frank reportedly paid more than $100,000 of the Dodgers’ cash to sit in his office in Boston and transmit positive energy toward the team. And just when it seemed that the case was getting boring, the court was told about a seven-page plan—“Project Jamie,” drafted by a Jamie loyalist within the organization—to get Jamie elected as U.S. President.
Further enraging Dodger fans was the fact the McCourts were pushing the team toward bankruptcy.
The forced adoption
The state of California defines child neglect as “negligent treatment which threatens the child’s health or welfare.” When identified, children’s services steps in and, in extreme cases, removes the child from a parent’s custody. No one ever accused the McCourts of neglecting their biological children. They were giving their sons (now aged 21 to 31) a total of $33,756 per month. But Drew, Travis, Gavin and Casey weren’t the only boys in need of support.
And so on April 20, 2011, Bud Selig announced he was removing Frank McCourt from the day-to-day operations of the boys in blue, citing “deep concerns regarding the finances and operations of the Dodgers.” He also promised a further investigation into the team’s books: “The Dodgers have been one of the most prestigious franchises in all of sports, and we owe it to their legion of loyal fans to ensure that this club is being operated properly now and will be guided appropriately in the future.”
Two months later, Frank and Jamie reached a conditional divorce settlement. Though they still couldn’t agree who owned the team, they vowed to resolve their differences on one condition, that Selig approve a long-term TV contract between the Dodgers and Fox that would resupply the couple with enough money to run the team, but divide their fortune without having to squabble over ownership.
Three days later, Selig said “no,” and the following week the Dodgers filed for bankruptcy protection. Only then was the full extent of the team’s $500-million debt completely exposed.
Frank soon found himself fighting with his wife in one court and Selig in another. While his wife accused him of trying to steal the Dodgers from her, the commissioner accused them both of “looting” $189 million from the club and alienating its fan base. (McCourt’s attorneys called the allegations inflammatory and unsupportable.)
For 112 days, Frank held onto the Dodgers while the team struggled to stay above .500.
Then, 10 days shy of the two-year anniversary of her divorce filing, Jamie, tired and frustrated by the ongoing struggle in court, gave up her claim to the Dodgers in exchange for four of the family’s homes and $131 million.
Two weeks later, on Nov. 1, 2011, Frank walked into his lawyer’s Manhattan office, not far from the apartment where, 32 years earlier, he had wed his college sweetheart. He sat down and agreed to put the Dodgers up for sale.
Corporate America lined up to bid while fans rejoiced at what they thought was his unconditional surrender.
Then, on March 28, 2012, Frank announced that he’d sold the team and their stadium to Magic Johnson and a group of corporate backers. The final bill of sale: $2.15 billion (minus $412 million in debt).
Empty parking lots
Fifty-six thousand seats line an empty ballpark in central Los Angeles. It’s May 2, 2012. The Dodgers, who are in Colorado today, are the best team in baseball. But none of that matters, not while Magic Johnson is standing in centre field, smiling for the cameras at Dodger Stadium. Corporate ownership has returned. The era of family ownership is dead. But it hasn’t been forgotten, and everyone wants to know what’s to become of the McCourts. Jamie settled for $131 million and some nice houses, while Frank just pocketed more than $1 billion. But the McCourts aren’t talking. Haven’t been for a while now.
Magic’s got some explaining to do, too. He and his friends just paid a record amount for the Dodgers and their stadium, but failed to completely buy out the surrounding parking lots. And, it turns out, the team just signed a 99-year lease to rent those lots for $14 million a year. And the people snapping pictures of Magic want to know how he and his partners allowed this to happen.
Magic smiles, and tells them everything is going to be OK. “Frank’s not here,” he says. “He’s not part of the Dodgers anymore. We should be clapping for just that.”
And they do clap, in unison.
Then they wander out of the stadium and into the parking lots. Frank’s parking lots.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.