I watch The Fox Business shows. When Lenny would come on, the other so called
experts would tell him to go back to baseball. They would grand slam him pretty
good. I never knew who to believe till I saw Bernard Goldberg expose him on HBO
this week. People wanted to believe Lenny and for a while they gave him the
benefit of the doubt. Below I have put together a combination of the
investigative work of Bernard Goldberg , Ben McGrath and ESPN's Mike Fish.
These men have punctured the final holes into Lenny Dykstra's supposed financial
genius

If ever a major leaguer perfectly fit the personality of his team, it was
animated outfielder Lenny Dykstra, who served as the "Energizer bunny" of two
freewheeling World Series squads: the 1986 New York Mets and the 1993
Philadelphia Phillies. Leaving the game in 1996, Dykstra went head-first into
the business world, embarking on another winning career. Most recently, he
became a prominent, remarkably successful stock investor and consultant, writing
a column for TheStreet.com, and serves as president of several privately held
companies.

The first time Ben McGrath met Lenny Dykstra, the former Mets and Phillies star,
he nearly stood me up for lunch at the St. Regis Hotel, in New York. Dykstra is
a luxury-hotel junkie—a self-proclaimed "robes-and-room-service kind of guy."
When I finally reached him, forty minutes after our scheduled appointment, he
wondered what time it was, and said that he'd be down as soon as he could put on
a suit. Five minutes later, he called back and, to assuage his guilt, suggested
that I go ahead and order steak and lobster. He still had to put on his suit. I
waited a few minutes longer, then ordered. The food arrived. I let it sit, and
eventually—slowly—began to eat. I finished. The waiter cleared away my plate. At
last, as I was about to signal for the check, Dykstra emerged from the elevator,
lugging three briefcases. For reasons that were not immediately evident, he
started showing me glossy photos of airplanes, and mentioned something or other
about Dubai. "Sorry about the hecticness," he then said. "I shaved. I cleaned up
for you."

Mets fans of a certain age will recall a popular poster from 1986, bearing the
word "Nails" in bold letters across the top, and featuring a shirtless Dykstra,
wearing eye black and holding a bat against his shoulder. The nickname referred
to his tenacity and also to his peculiar Southern California lexicon. He was
wiry then; he used to complain that Lenny might as well have been his middle
name, given how often it was preceded by the word "little": Little Lenny
Dykstra. He is lumpy now. Referring to his suit, which was pin-striped, he said,
"It gets a little tighter, you know?" His hands tremble, his back hurts, and his
speech, like that of an insomniac or a stroke victim, lags slightly behind his
mind. He winks without obvious intent. In his playing days, he had a term for
people like this: fossils. Nothing about his physical presence any longer
suggests nails, and sometimes, as if in joking recognition of this softening, he
answers the phone by saying, "Thumbtacks."

For many ballplayers, the growing-up point does not arrive until after
retirement, when all the freebies vanish and equipment managers and hotel maids
can no longer be relied upon for regular laundry service. Dykstra last played in
the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a
successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best
car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet"). The occasion for our lunch, however,
was a new venture: Dykstra was launching a magazine, intended specifically for
pro athletes, called The Players Club. This idea was not very successful and
shut down after he started losing over $500 thousand a month. Finally we have
the evidence that completely undermines those phonie stories with disturbing
facts. One of the most disturbing: Dykstra recently used his mother's credit
card to charge $23,000 to order to charter a plane ride back to his home in
California from Cleveland. She has not been paid back. Nor have his brothers,
many of his business partners, and plenty of other people who became seduced by
Dykstra's supposed business acumen. Although it's not like Madoff, Dykstra's
financial recklessness is lengthy and deliberate, dating back to his car wash
days.

Some of the carnage:

• "Just in the past two years, Dykstra has been the subject of at least 24 legal
actions, including 18 since November. Three suits hit the courts on Jan. 29.
He's been sued by publishers and print companies, by three different groups of
pilots and by a Maryland-based financial and litigation consulting firm that
offered expert testimony on his behalf in an earlier lawsuit. He's even been
sued by a die-hard Mets fan who was the best man at his wedding 20-some years
ago, though that New York investor claims there is no bad blood."

• "Dr. Festus Dada, a Nigerian-born gastric bypass specialist, who filed a
fraud/breach of contract suit and alleges Dykstra kept a $500,000 deposit after
a deal fell apart to purchase a Southern California car wash and retail center
then owned by Dykstra. Dada walked away from the transaction, claiming in the
suit that Dykstra had made significant changes to the final escrow agreement,
including the insertion of a five-year contract for Dykstra's old Phillies
teammate, Pete Incaviglia, to serve as general manager under the new ownership."

• "Two Players Club vice presidents filed claims for unpaid wages after they
quit in January. The Minneapolis-based firm hired to design his Players Club Web
site alleges Dykstra stiffed it on a $1 million contract, and then bounced two
separate $125,000 checks."

• "Dykstra borrowed $250,000 from New York literary agent David Vigliano last
May with an agreement to repay him $300,000 in November — a robust 40 percent
annual percentage rate. Vigliano filed suit after Dykstra didn't come up with
the money."

• "The high-powered global law firm K&L Gates, which waged many of the legal
skirmishes on Dykstra's behalf, withdrew its representation late last year
because it was "not paid current," according to his former lead counsel, David
Schack."

• "The Gretzky estate that Dykstra bought for $18.5 million — he planned to flip
it for a sweet profit before the housing market belly flopped — now sits vacant
and is listed at $16.5 million. According to public records, four notes and
deeds of trust are held against the property, totaling more than $13 million.
One of the note holders, Index Investors LLC, filed a default notice in March,
alleging Dykstra was behind on his payments in the amount of $422,436."

That's not all. Fish isn't charitable at all with Dykstra's unpolished demeanor
— the dude-isms, the farts, the loopy mannerisms — and keeps them in the proper
context at all times.

What's sad is that some people have their money tied up in Dykstra's "Nails On
The Numbers" financial scheme. The newsletter costs $1,000 a year and is
something that Dykstra has handed off to many of his magazine employees in lieu
of actual payment for work.. When asked if his articles were accurate,one
individual said, if anything, it didn't come close to revealing some of the
bizarre things Dykstra pulled with The Player's Club: non-payment, constant
dropping of racial epithets, overpaid employees, underpaid employees, and an
utter lack of any sort of editorial vision or oversight. It's a disaster of epic
proportions and is hurting a lot of people Dykystra's used everyone in his
family to funnel money and, according to my friend, paid him for one story out
of the checking account from his son, Cutter Dykstra.

Please be careful when choosing a financial advisor. Just because someone is
famous doesn't mean they can manage money.

Good Luck MarketTraders