The Mets And Madoff

The NYT looks into the business interests of Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz through the Madoff Trustee's lawsuit against them (via the Big Picture):

The trustee representing the victims of the Bernard L. Madoff fraud, Irving H. Picard, has changed that. His attempt to win $1 billion from Wilpon and Katz — whether it bankrupts them or they prevail in court and keep the Mets a family legacy — has revealed much about the histories and personalities of the team’s owners, and how they made and managed their money.
The empire of this inseparable tandem, it is now clear, stretched well beyond real estate.
Sterling Equities, their family-run company, invested millions in things as varied as biotechnology and renewable energy, including a project that turns animal waste into fuel.
Wilpon and Katz, his brother-in-law, also own a chunk of a hedge fund that manages billions of dollars, and in recent years they held their enterprise out to the public as an expert investment operation.
And in one of the more striking revelations to come to light, it was disclosed that Wilpon and Katz, who fought long and hard to make the Mets an exclusive holding of their family, once offered a piece of the team to Madoff.

This is an interesting investigation, but it makes me a little squeamish.  These guys were close to Madoff, but did they actually know it was a scam?  They leased offices to Madoff in one of their developments.  They were heavily invested with him.  Did they suspect him?  We don't know.  I can understand that if they cashed out money from the Madoff "investments," that is pretty fair game.  It just seems like a very challenging thing to sort out in this case, and it is one with a billion dollars on the line.