Megdal: Wilpon puts Mets money woes ‘in the rear-view mirror,’ all evidence to the contrary

After years of crushing debt brought on by the evaporation of their holdings with Bernie Madoff, Wilpon took in the Florida sunshine, smiled, and announced to reporters that the team’s financial difficulties were over.

“It’s all in the rear-view mirror,” Wilpon said, after arriving at the team’s spring-training complex in Port St. Lucie.

“The family is in great shape,” he said. “The family really is in great shape. Sometimes luck is the residue of design.”

This would be great news for Mets fans, who have watched their team decline as the Wilpons’ problems ravaged the Mets’ payroll.

If it were true. Which publicly available evidence suggests it isn’t.

“It wasn’t, as people have written, the reason,” Wilpon said about bank debt. “It was a balance there, because we had to make sure the banks got paid off all of the debt. There’s no one in my family”—there’s the Katz family, the Wilpon family, kids—”[that now] has any personal bank debt. Zero. Everything has been paid. We don’t owe a dollar to anybody. We have mortgages on buildings and stuff like that, but we don’t owe a dollar.”

If that’s true, it all happened since the beginning of this week.