Frank McCourt's sentimental moment
LOS ANGELES – Frank McCourt, whose combative disposition in business, baseball and, apparently, marriage helped deliver him to where he is today – on a witness stand in Superior Court – had been directed by his attorney to recount a particular period of his life.
The lawyer, Steve Susman, hadn’t seemed to mean much by the request. With nothing waiting but re-direct and more public discomfort, the suspicion from the bench to the gallery was that Susman was granting McCourt an on-the-stand break for rehabilitation and recovery.
Freed for a few hours from searing cross-examination by his estranged wife’s legal team, McCourt took a breath and repositioned his microphone. He recalled a time when his businesses went from unhealthy to robust, when his family was growing, when, wouldn’t you know, Frank Sr.’s boy was making it on his own.
The real estate industry was improving some 20 years ago. After an economic downturn that threatened his livelihood, McCourt pulled himself from the brink of bankruptcy. One son after another – four in all – were born to Jamie and him. L.A. had never heard of the Boston McCourts, the land developer and his lawyer wife, their dramas and their ambitions, and wouldn’t for at least another decade.
Behind them, they tried to believe, were the mornings when creditors would stomp to their front door, which, Frank explained from the stand, “Freaked Mrs. McCourt out, and I [didn’t] blame her.”
They’d begun to live well. They’d nearly lost their only house a short time earlier, and now they were shopping for others. Another home in Boston. A place in Vail. Property in Cotuit, on a small peninsula of Cape Cod. A condo in New York City. “And stuff,” McCourt said.
He’d begun to list these places when his voice slipped away, swallowed in the wood paneling and gravity of Judge Scott Gordon’s courtroom.
“Anyway,” he said, dismissing that time both from his head and his testimony. “We had a great life.”
Jamie sat maybe 30 feet away. Her posture revealed neither agreement nor disagreement.
In a rare genuine moment in a trial that has not allowed for sentiment – and those are the unchallenged rules of engagement – Frank McCourt had gone melancholy. He’d seemed to offer, in effect, “How did this happen? How did we get here?”
Amid testimony this week that would attempt to establish ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers, an estate-planning lawyer who spent many hours with the couple left an unflattering impression of the McCourts’ relationship. Frank yelled at Jamie. They bickered. When they didn’t, they weren’t talking at all. Frank suspected the estate planner, Leah Bishop, had aligned with Jamie, making the fight two-on-one. Jamie, it seemed to him, was readying for battle.
Broadly, her lawyers this week said Frank conspired to steal the Dodgers from Jamie. His lawyers said Jamie rode the good times as long as they were underwritten by Frank, and upon divorce is gold-digging him for more. Under questioning through parts of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday by David Boies, whom a fellow lawyer called “the greatest cross-examiner in the world,” Frank struggled to consistently recollect the life spans, iterations and intentions of the pivotal marital property agreements, particularly the one that was altered. Under questioning by her own and Frank’s attorneys, expected to continue when the trial resumes Sept. 20, Jamie will have her story to tell, and her composure to manage.
Just as it appeared Frank’s testimony might fill the entire first week, Jamie took the stand in the waning minutes of Friday’s session. She had just enough time to tell the court she never would have agreed to a contract that would allow her husband sole title of the Dodgers in case of a divorce.
“Preposterous,” she said.
The court may have expected to conclude Frank’s and Jamie’s testimony by now, in time for a two-week break, which it hoped would allowed for settlement discussions. As it stands, Susman’s team has that time to prepare for its cross-examination of Jamie.
The sides could settle before Gordon returns a decision (he has 90 days from the end of the trial), but there has been no movement – other than a pre-trial offer refused by Frank – toward that yet. In fact, a report that Frank’s side had requested a meeting to negotiate a deal this weekend brought strong denials.
With half of an $850-million franchise in the balance, and McCourt ownership of any kind teetering with it, and speculation in L.A. following that Dennis Gilbert or Mark Cuban or Mark Attanasio or Tom Werner should be loading up to step in, the petitioner and respondent in McCourt vs. McCourt seem wed to the grind of post-marital warfare.
Already there are predictions of appeals, no matter how Gordon decides.
Meantime, some of the finer details of Frank’s ownership (or co-ownership, depending on the ruling) of the club have been exposed. His own lawyer described Frank’s 2004 acquisition of the Dodgers as the most leveraged in baseball history, which Frank did not dispute. The gradual reduction of Dodgers payroll has been revealed to be not market- or strategy-based, but a plan to lighten McCourt’s economic burden. The Los Angeles Times reported the Dodgers pay millions in rent to play in a ballpark McCourt owns, that McCourt has tried and failed to secure further financing, that the organization remains heavily in debt and that its turn-around rides on a new television deal that’s three years away.
In describing his business practices in real estate, well before he purchased the Dodgers, and Jamie’s reluctance to participate in his deals, McCourt testified Thursday, “You need to have a stomach for it.”
About the Dodgers, he said, “I was really risking it all on the transaction and betting I could turn it around.”
McCourt would appear to be asking Dodger fans for the same intestinal fortitude.
Sitting in a courtroom he’d dominate for a week, he was asked about the journey, how indeed he’d gotten here.
The story stuck in his throat. For those few seconds in a room of mostly strangers, the divorce was about four boys, a relationship of 40 years dissolved, and how it all went away. Leaving this.
Unscripted, uncoached, he looked away for a moment.
“We had a great life,” he said.
