Hiring Financier for Advice, Mets Owners Didn't Take It, Lawsuit Says.

Saul Katz, the certified public accountant who in 1972 started Sterling Equities with his brother-in-law Fred Wilpon, almost never met a Bernard L. Madoff idea he did not like, according to a lawsuit brought by the trustee in the Madoff fraud. The Katz and Wilpon families, who own the Mets, had some 90 percent of their securities positions tied up in Madoff's brokerage for the nearly 25 years they did business with him. The greatest hope the families had of figuring out that Madoff was not someone worth gambling on may have been Peter S. Stamos, a businessman with a golden resume whom they recruited in June 2002 to diversify their holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]