ONCE AGAIN, LORIA GETS RICH WHILE EVERYONE ELSE LOSES Marlins owner honed his swindling skills while prying the Expos out of Montreal

When I made the West Coast road trip with the Montreal Expos in May 2000, the Expos were on a roll. Rondell White was hot, Vladimir Guerrero was one of the dominant sluggers in the game, Carl Pavano was pitching well and Jose Vidro was doing a good job at second base and hitting a ton.

The young Expos couldn’t know it at the time, but they had already received the fatal snake bite. It would just be a while before the venom took effect. Five years later, the team would be defunct and I would be sitting in a press box in Philadelphia, covering the first regular season series played by the ex-Expos, now known as the Washington Nationals, and mourning our lost baseball team.

The snakes who killed the Expos, of course, were Jeffrey Loria and his former stepson David Samson, who have been called a whole lot of names that are too obscene for a family newspaper.

Snakes, weasels, skunks — pick your animals. When Forbes reported last week Loria had a deal in principle to sell the Miami Marlins for an astonishing US$1.6 billion, Yahoo baseball writer Jeff Passan went with the striped variety: “Over the past 18 years, as Jeffrey Loria sprayed the stench of his naked greed across baseball like the skunk he is …”

Yes, you read it right — US$1.6 billion for an initial investment of essentially nothing. For killing one franchise and bleeding another white, the penalty is Loria and Samson will be forced to laugh all the way to the bank.

Having taken the fans of two cities for a ride along with Major League Baseball, the Dade County commissioners, several leading Montreal businessmen and other victims too numerous to count, having fired a galaxy of the finest managers in the game while making a mockery of the sport they claimed to love, Loria and Samson are about to get away with it.

There was one astute observer of human behaviour who saw this coming: Felipe Alou. Less than six months after Loria and Samson announced their takeover of the Expos to great fanfare in December 1999, Alou called me into the visiting manager’s office at what was then Pac Bell Park in San Francisco in May 2000 and told me to close the door.

Alou wanted to talk about the new owners. He warned me they couldn’t be trusted and they had no intention of keeping the Expos in Montreal. Alou, as usual, was right. Here we are 17 years later, left with a bitter taste in our mouths, left to reflect also on the U.S. culture of greed that allows individuals like Loria, Martin Shkreli and Donald J. Trump to flourish to the detriment of everyone else.

(Even a sale of the Marlins may not improve the stench emanating from the franchise in south Florida. The reported buyers are Charles Kushner, an American real estate developer and convicted felon, the father and his son Joshua, younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Loria squared, in other words.)

Meanwhile, Montrealers can thank their lucky stars we were robbed only of a baseball team, while taxpayers in south Florida are on the hook for a debt load worthy of Olympic Stadium. The only financial losers in Montreal were the local owners who entered into partnership with Loria, then saw their equity in the club squeezed from 75 per cent to six per cent before Loria left town.

Loria then parlayed his stake in the Expos into a US$158.5 million investment to buy the Marlins — with MLB paying him $125 million for the Expos and providing a US$38.5-million interest-free loan to purchase the Marlins — in effect handing Loria the Miami team for nothing, the same way he got the Expos.

The rest is fodder for a course in business chicanery: Loria and Samson enriched themselves while running the Marlins on a team budget lower than some player salaries, with Miami taxpayers left with a massive debt to fund Marlins Park.

If this is, indeed, the end of the line for Loria’s involvement with Major League Baseball, he won’t be missed. Even as repellent a clan as the Kushners will be hard put to do worse. And much as we want to see baseball return to Montreal, if it’s going to involve another owner like Loria, we’ll pass. We’re still looking for the antidote for the venom left by the last one.

Alou wanted to talk about the new owners. He warned me they couldn’t be trusted … Alou, as usual, was right.