Month: June 2009 (Page 18 of 58)

A golf-resort developer named Ken Jowdy duped two dozen former and current NHL stars by taking roughly a $25 million investment from the players and blowing it on lavish parties packed with porn stars, hookers and ex-baseball players, which included all-round standup guy Roger Clemens.

The 19 former and current stick-handlers — including an all-star roster of Rangers and Islanders — are demanding that Las Vegas-based golf-course mogul Ken Jowdy return the $25 million they invested, plus fork over $15 million in damages for failing to build two luxury resorts in Mexico that are seven years behind schedule.

Instead, the players say, Jowdy got rowdy, squandering their cold cash on “lavish parties” that included “various female porn stars, escorts, strippers [and] party girls” to impress Clemens, Jackson, banned star Pete Rose and ESPN announcer Joe Morgan, one of the suits filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges.

The suits also allege that Jowdy:

Put a Clemens gal pal named Adrian Moore, described as a “regular party attendee who was close to Clemens,” on his payroll “as a personal favor” to the former Yankee Cy Young winner.

Bought three private planes to fly himself, childhood pals, the baseball players and their “female companions” to Mexico, Palm Springs, New York and Las Vegas.

Paid himself an $800,000-a-year salary — plus travel and entertainment expenses — while his brother-in-law, Connecticut lawyer Bill Najam, took in $650,000 annually without having a role in the project.
Hired Brian McNamee — the one-time Clemens trainer who told Congress he supplied the ballplayer with steroids — as a fitness trainer.

Paid the projects’ sole construction manager, Ken Ayers, a $550,000 salary, even though Ayers spent fewer than 20 days at the sites in seven years.

So if you’re Jowdy, one, you must be incredibly insecure if you’re spending millions of dollars of investors money on porn stars and parties for Roger Clemens and his steroid-producing trainer. Two, you also must be a gigantic idiot to believe the players you suckered wouldn’t eventually ask you, “Hey, remember that golf course that you were supposed to build for us? Yeah – where the hell is it?”

Jowdy must have figured that at some point he would get busted for all this but until then, he was going to party his ass off. Personally, I think there are better ways to blow through millions of dollars than to fly Clemens all over the country for free, but hey, that’s just me.