So I was just hanging out in 1994, 1995 and 1996.
I didn’t have any background to get into business. All I knew was playing baseball.
Dave Stewart had played with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993 and 1994 and still had some ties up there. He invited me up there for this function some time in 1996, I believe. I got to meet Gord Ash, the Blue Jays general manager, and attended some parties and functions. My wife and children went up there with me because it was Toronto, and that’s where she is from.
At one of these parties I also got introduced to this guy named Anthony Ramsaroop. He was from Trinidad, but he was living in Toronto. He had this telecommunications business, and I just fell for it – figuring, you know, I could make some money.
The company was Nutech Inc. based in Toronto. He sold me on it by saying he was with this company in Atlanta. Motorola was a part of what they did in that company, and that we could do this on our own. He said he had been on his own, and he told me the people he was dealing with and this and that. He came down and showed me his phone that was in the stores.
So, I’m trying to get the contract together, and checking him out. I’m thinking he is legit.
I had over a million dollars when I left baseball. When you have that kind of money you never think about running out. I never thought about running out, but when my agent and I looked at it, we were estimating that with bills and everything it would only last five years. If you don’t have any money coming in and all you are doing is giving it out, then the money is only going to last for so long. I was trying to make the same amount of money that I was making when I was playing.
I started off with about $300,000 that I invested with Nutech. My agent, Jack Sands, didn’t want me to do it. He thought it was too much money. He and I had some words about it. But in my brain I was paying Jack, too, because he was paying my bills for me. So, I’m thinking how can he be critical of this deal when he is telling me he’s going to get me this and that. But I haven’t had a job, and I’m still paying him.
So, I’m thinking if I’m going to screw it up, I might as well screw it up myself – which I did (laughter). But if the money is only going to last for five yeas, I have to do something. So, I lose it all in five or lose it all in three or four. What’s the difference? I’m going to go down trying to do something. I’m not going to sit here and not do anything and just keep spending.
Anthony wasn’t guaranteeing I was going to double my money or anything at Nutech. It was a business where we sold phones. We sold DSS (digital spread spectrum) during the analog period. Digital was relatively unknown at the time. So, we couldn’t really go to bankers to get loans because they didn’t understand it.
When you are in my position, your friends are in baseball. They’re not in business. It’s not like the CEO of a company who can go to a bank and has a track record of making money in businesses. I have been a ballplayer. So, I have to put up collateral and money because I don’t have a track record. And it wasn’t like $1 million, all of a sudden. You would put in the initial investment, and then you get to a point where if you pull out, you would lose all that. So, what can you do? You put in another $150,000 here, another $100,000 there. After a while you get in so deep. What do you do?
We wanted to get the product in front of the people who would sell it, and in order to do that you have to give up a lot of money, buying product, going out and doing CES (Consumer Electronic Shows), buying a booth at those costs money.
And you have your employees – all that kind of stuff. I wasn’t getting paid. I was paying it all out. In 1997, I got a job coaching in the minor leagues in Syracuse with the Blue Jays, but I was also trying to concentrate on getting this business off the ground. So, I was commuting between Syracuse and Toronto to try and keep this business going.
One of the things that messed us up is that since it was (Anthony’s) company, I always allowed him to do the talking and negotiating. I wasn’t all that up on electronics, so that seemed like the smart thing to do. But later, as I was talking to people we had done business with, they had offered to do deals and he had turned them down – things like turning down $250,000 because he wanted $2 million.
One day I’m up in Toronto, and we had a financial guy who paid all the bills. He has this big old check book, and he shows me all our expenses. Then, he turned to the back of the book and there were a bunch of checks missing. We found out that Anthony was writing checks from the bottom in cash. That really ticked me off, and I go storming in to his office. There were a couple of other guys who worked for us who were sports fans, and they were the ones who stopped me from throwing him out the window.
You know, he was one of those arrogant kind of guys who would just sit there while you are yelling at him. That made me even more furious and irritated that he was calm – all the while knowing that he was spending my money, not his money.
What I found out later is that Anthony owed a lot of people. He was taking the money I would give him and spreading it around to things that weren’t necessarily in the business – paying his house off, stuff like that. He was a big-spending guy ... on other people’s money.
All this time I’m trying to make the business go. I’m traveling between Kansas City and Toronto, back and forth all the time. Syracuse and Toronto, back and forth. That’s when all this stuff started happening. When you aren’t always there (in Toronto) and you’re trying to worry about money and you haven’t got any money, and your wife is getting suspicious. It’s not good.
By 1998 it’s getting really bad. I had the minor-league job with the Blue Jays in 1997 to be with their AAA club in Syracuse. N.Y. Their GM Gord Ash hired me. He was a guy who came through the organization from the ticket department. That team had Roy Halladay and Chris Carpenter on it, so that was pretty cool. They ended up being pretty good guys. Then, in the last month of the season they had me go from AAA down to rookie ball or A ball in Dunedin. I don’t know. Then, that was it. It was just a one-year deal.
I had always had investments when I was playing that I bought through my agent. I owned apartment buildings in Texas, some oil rigs, and at one point I even owned some cows. So, I had stuff I had invested in, but when I got divorced, I lost some of that stuff. And I spent money on some things I probably didn’t need to spend it on. You know, you might buy a car you probably don’t need or something like that.
At one time, I invested in a restaurant back in Jersey with my friend Anthony Sereno. We had known each other since high school, and he was one of the guys who kept in touch with me through all the years – even when I was in prison. He came down and visited. So, he was a good friend – still is a good friend.
His family owned a restaurant called “Uncle Mike’s” back there. So, he knew the business. I was going to provide most of the money, and he was going to run it. So, we got everything ready and we were opening. The day we opened they started doing some road construction right in front of the restaurant and nobody could get there easily. I think it lasted only about six or seven weeks.
The things I tried to do to keep money coming in just didn’t really work out – for a variety of reasons.
You know, one of the hard things for me was that once I got to a certain position, financially, and a lifestyle I liked, there was a lot of pressure to stay there. I was trying to do everything possible to stay in that upper echelon of money, but I just couldn’t get anything going. One of the biggest things for me was the embarrassment that I wasn’t being successful, that I was losing money. So, I didn’t really talk a lot about it or ask anybody for help who might have been able to help me.
And without a college education there weren’t a lot of options of going to work for somebody else. In my brain, I was thinking if you’re going to make money, you have to invest money. I mean, it isn’t just going to be magically appearing. So, that was my thought process.
So by 1997, 1998, I was running out of money. My life was just in a shambles. By 1999 I was talking to somebody about bankruptcy because I was almost completely out of money.