Castrodale: Nails for sale … Lenny Dykstra and the big ripoff

Anyone who spent the late 1980s collecting Topps cards surely remembers Lenny Dykstra, the mullet-wearing Mets hero who later helped pull the Phillies out of the National League basement and into the World Series. He was rarely seen without a wad of tobacco the size of a Scottish terrier and played a kind of old-school, all-out style that saw him sliding headfirst into second base or running headfirst into the centerfield wall. He earned the nickname “Nails”, either because of his hard-charging approach to the game or because he spoke like he’d been repeatedly struck with a blunt instrument.
When he did open his mouth, he spilled more f-words than Volume 7 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and, unsurprisingly, none of them were “financial analyst.” It seemed impossible to imagine that he’d retire from the game and spend his early forties gaining a reputation as a stock-selecting guru, earning accolades from sleeve-rolling loudmouth Jim Cramer and writing his own column for TheStreet.com. A new book outs Dykstra as a both a fraud and a cheat, proving that you can’t give someone a suit and turn them into an investment adviser any more than I can staple a fish to my ass and make myself a mermaid.

In Daily Beast editor Randall Lane’s just released, impossibly subtitled book The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane, he suggests that Dykstra was given $250,000 worth of stock in exchange for recommending the company to the thousands of subscribers to his “Nails by the Numbers” newsletter. Alliteration aside, Dykstra allegedly took the bribe, talking up Automated Vending Technologies (AVT) even though the pieces of paper were, at the time, worth less than a used McGriddle wrapper. Dykstra was then hired as an “adviser” to the company, a development that he did note with his endorsement.
Although Dykstra also (allegedly) promised to introduce AVT’s president to Cramer — and promoted the stock on TheStreet.com, which Cramer owns — it’s unlikely that the CNBC host was aware of the situation. Dykstra, however, was. According to Lane, Dykstra insisted on having the stock issued in his brother-in-law’s name, proving that he was at least literate enough to know that the SEC isn’t just where Alabama plays football.
Lane’s allegations — which have earned him $100 million libel lawsuit from AVT — raise a number of questions, starting with who the hell listens to Lenny Dykstra, a man who once admitted that he didn’t read books because “it makes [him] think too much.” This is just one of the many things we can blame Jim Cramer for, on the same list with “rupturing my eardrums” and “making Gilbert Gottfried’s voice tolerable by comparison”.
In 2003, Dykstra started sending Cramer unsolicited emails and the Philly native was either starstruck or brain-dead enough to respond, touting Dykstra’s financial acumen and stupidly deciding to let one of his favorite leadoff hitters f— with his viewers’ finances. Cramer hired the unproven Dykstra in 2005 to write a column for TheStreet.com. Each installment was a heavily ghostwritten, well-edited affair, since an unattended Dykstra would’ve struggled with SesameStreet.com. This led to a members-only newsletter with a $995 annual pricetag, one that brought in over $1 million in subscriptions in its first year alone.
Dykstra boasted of a 99-1 winners-to-losers record during his time with TheStreet, but that figure was boosted by some creative bookkeeping. The one loss was well over $200K, almost wiping out the profits from the win column. In addition, Dykstra refused to count a stock as a loss unless he sold it. In 2008, Forbes questioned whether the stock picks were even Dykstra’s at all, hinting that they’d actually come from sixtysomething market analyst Richard Suttmeier. In a side-by-side comparison, the Forbes article notes that in a one month period, 11 of Dykstra’s 17 recommendations had been mentioned in Suttmeier’s own report. “I taught him,” Suttemeier said, “how to read a [stock] chart.”
Whether because of the increasingly negative press or because Jim Cramer finally realized that Dykstra hadn’t undergone a Flowers For Algernon-style brain enhancement, Dykstra was booted by TheStreet.com in April 2009. Two months later, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming $50,000 in assets against $37 million in liabilities. By August, he insisted that his only source of income was his Major League Baseball pension and was reportedly living in his car.
He hadn’t lost money taking his own advice but he had lost money, simply by spending about a brazillion times more than he earned. He bragged about living well beyond his means, abused his employees and stiffed everyone from photographers to a series of pilots for his since-repossessed private plane to swiping $23,000 from his own mother.
It’s easier to keep track of Jim and Michelle Duggar’s nineteen kids than it is to sort out the twenty-odd lawsuits that have been filed against Dykstra since 2008. Most of them are financial, although he’s in the middle of a nasty divorce, fighting his insurance company over claims that he largely destroyed his $19 million California estate, and the sexual assault allegations from his former personal assistant. Worst of all, he’s 47 and continues to use the word “bro” in everyday speech.
Dykstra has pawned most of his memorabilia, including his 1986 World Series ring, and has showed up on Craigslist more than ads for “discreet personal massages”. Given his attitude, his casual racism and his unwillingness to take responsibility for anything, it’s hard to conjure any sympathy for him. Dykstra was mentioned in the Mitchell Report as having used steroids, which was unsurprising to anyone who watched his neck gradually disappear beneath the battering ram he called a skull. Although he denied the allegations for years, Lane claims in The Zeroes that Dykstra referred to himself as “a pioneer” for steroids, admitting that he and Jose Canseco were essentially the Lewis and Clark of injectable andro.
Honestly, it’s hard to take anyone’s side. Even Lane isn’t an impartial narrator. He ran DoubleDown Media, LLC, which filed a $787,000 lawsuit against Dykstra over his ill-fated attempt at publishing a magazine. (Ironically, Dykstra wanted to teach professional athletes how to manage their money, which is kind of like Helen Keller offering to give karaoke lessons). Lane’s second bag of organically grown Sour Grapes is because he claims he gave Dykstra the idea to write a financial newsletter, an idea he took to TheStreet.com instead.
“Dykstra left us with hundreds of thousands in unpaid bills for the magazine we were publishing for him,” Lane wrote this week on The Daily Beast. “In the course of our ensuing legal fight … I stumbled across his [AVT] scheme.”
I even have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone who lost money by using Dykstra’s advice. He’s LENNY EFFING DYKSTRA, PEOPLE! There’s a cynical part of me who wonders if they’d also be surprised to learn that his Mets teammate, Doc Gooden, wasn’t actually a licensed medical professional.
In a lengthy 2008 New Yorker profile, Dykstra said that he’d hoped to “build something that can change the outcome of people’s f—ing lives.” Unfortunately, he sent them in the wrong direction. Probably headfirst.
***
Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
Also by Jelisa Castrodale …