The decline and fall of Cecil Fielder

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ball dont lie
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What an incredibly sad story this is. It's about former Major League first baseman Cecil Fielder, father of hot prospect Prince Fielder, and how an addiction to gambling has ruined his life and his family's life. It's so bad, a process server gave papers to Prince Fielder as he was walking off the diamond after a game in Beloit, WI, because Cecil was impossible to find but was reported to be living with his son.





Something to think about:


On a February day in 1999, Cecil Fielder walked into the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City just before noon, and filled out an application for credit.

Under “Income/Assets,” he included: “Salary — $5 million.”

Under “Other Casinos,” he listed a $100,000 line of credit at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

Trump extended Fielder a $25,000 line of credit. That money, plus whatever cash he had started with, lasted a day and a half.

Fielder requested, and was given, another $25,000 line of credit.

That was gone in two hours and 40 minutes.

The casino lent him $27,500 more.

That lasted less than 20 minutes.

The casino extended Fielder’s credit by another $50,000.

The minute-by-minute records stop there, but the file contains a total. By the time the binge was over, Fielder owed the Trump casino $580,000.

Trump officials, including Ford Palmer, vice president of casino operations, and Fred Cunningham, vice president for legal affairs, said they could not discuss the case — or a casino’s obligation, if any, when a patron may be out of control.



What is a casino's obligation here? We hold bartenders responsible for continuing to serve people who are clearly drunk, something which I believe is on balance correct given the capability of a drunk person to get behind the wheel of a car and kill or maim innocent bystanders. Gamblers do not just hurt themselves - no one in the Fielder family is unaffected by Cecil's problem - but it's not usually a matter of life and death. It's clearly the ethical thing for a casino to limit the credit of an out-of-control gambler (and given the Trump's inability to collect on Cecil Fielder's debts, it's probably the prudent thing as well), but I'm not comfortable with a law to force them to do that. What do you think?

Detroit just loved Cecil Fielder, the burly T Decade of the Home Run in the earl
And Detroiters loved Fielder the family man, who doted on his son, Prince, and daughter, Ceclynn. They applauded when wife Stacey was named Mrs. Michigan, posing for pictures in her elegant Grosse Pointe Farms home. (Related item: Cecil Fielder's career highlights)

Their storybook life seemed headed for the happiest of endings — Fielder was traded to the Yankees, eventually retired with career earnings of $47 million in salary alone, and moved his family to the largest, richest mansion in central Florida.

Now, it's all gone.

All the money, the mansion — even the loving family unit.

Fielder is in hiding, with process servers stalking him. He is not in contact with his family, and many attempts by The Detroit News to reach him failed.

Why?

"Gambling caused Cecil Fielder's empire to collapse," said Al Arostegui, the Realtor who sold the Fielders their 50-room palace in Melbourne, Fla., in 1995 for $3.7 million.

"This isn't a story of a hero who went bad, but a hero who got sick. For Cecil, gambling is a disease; it's like a cancer of some sort that ate away his wealth."

Arostegui said the Fielders owe him more than $70,000 in unpaid advertising expenses from his attempts to sell their house for them. Still, he says, "The biggest losers are the Fielders themselves. They had a great dream home, a wonderful life, and now it's all gone."

Stacey Fielder said she still loves her husband, the only man in her life since her early teens, even though the two are mired in a bitter divorce dispute.

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<!--start data for usatc app<head-short>Fielder story turns sad
</head-short><last-modified>10/19/2004 2:28 AM
</last-modified><author>By Fred Girard, The Detroit News
</author><images><image src="/sports/baseball/_photos/2004-10-18-fielder-ins.jpg" width="180" height="200"><caption>During the early 1990s, Cecil Fielder was a premier home run threat for the Detroit Tigers. His life turned sour as gambling problems mounted.</caption><credit>By Duane Burleson, AP</credit></image></images>--><!-- /EdSysObj --><!--endclickprintinclude--><TABLE id=cnt_page cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=770 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=120></TD><TD width=15></TD><TD vAlign=top width=635><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=500 border=0><TBODY><TR align=middle><TD vAlign=top align=middle width=500><SCRIPT language=JavaScript>OAS_AD("FloatBottom");</SCRIPT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
 

ball dont lie
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But this isn't the same Cecil," she said. "I never saw any of this coming. I never even knew he gambled."

By the time Cecil made his first halting admissions to her that he had a problem, she says, their home had been foreclosed on by a bank, and a string of lawsuits and liens worth millions had been filed by creditors.

She is hard up financially and looking for work, she says, and she and Ceclynn, now 12, receive no money from Fielder and don't even have medical insurance.

No one interviewed by The Detroit News had an inkling that Fielder may have become a heavy gambler.

Fielder "never showed that side around me or any of his friends," said Tigers third base coach Juan Samuel, who has been close to Fielder for 20 years. "A lot of times it starts small, a little bet here and there, maybe even in the clubhouse — before you know, things get out of hand."

The origins of the Fall of the House of Fielder are spelled out in a file in New Jersey Superior Court, titled Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino versus Cecil G. Fielder. It's about one 40-hour period in which Fielder's gambling compulsion apparently broke all bounds, with a casino extending him credit every step of the way.

On a February day in 1999, Cecil Fielder walked into the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City just before noon, and filled out an application for credit.

Under "Income/Assets," he included: "Salary — $5 million."

Under "Other Casinos," he listed a $100,000 line of credit at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

Trump extended Fielder a $25,000 line of credit. That money, plus whatever cash he had started with, lasted a day and a half.

Fielder requested, and was given, another $25,000 line of credit.

That was gone in two hours and 40 minutes.

The casino lent him $27,500 more.

That lasted less than 20 minutes.

The casino extended Fielder's credit by another $50,000.

The minute-by-minute records stop there, but the file contains a total. By the time the binge was over, Fielder owed the Trump casino $580,000.

Fielder repaid some small amounts, but held off Trump's collectors on the bulk of the money until September 2000. On the 9th, he wrote a personal check to Trump Plaza for $300,000, and authorized his bank to pay a half-dozen more drafts for $25,000 each.

The next day, Fielder authorized four more drafts from his bank, totaling $130,000.

Fielder stopped payment on his personal $300,000 check. The 10 bank drafts all bounced for insufficient funds.

A spokesman for the New Jersey State Police Gaming Enforcement Division said they investigated the transactions, but determined no criminal conduct had occurred.

Trump Plaza Associates sued for the money it was owed and won, but has yet to collect. With interest and attorney's fees, the bill stands at $563,359.

Trump officials, including Ford Palmer, vice president of casino operations, and Fred Cunningham, vice president for legal affairs, said they could not discuss the case — or a casino's obligation, if any, when a patron may be out of control.

"I never knew anything about any of this until I started noticing things when I was doing the finances," Stacey Fielder said. "I'd be going over the bills with the accountant, and I'd be like, 'Hey, there's $35,000 gone from this account. What happened to it?' Then these gambling people just descended on the house one day, and started just taking things out of it. They took my truck.

"We talked about (Cecil's gambling) only a few times. I was under the impression he was going to get some help."

Life became a swirl of lawsuits, process servers, bounced checks, lien after lien filed against their property — and not even the children were spared.

As Prince Fielder, then a husky, 18-year-old first-baseman for the Class A Beloit (Wis.) Snappers, trotted off the field after a home game one day in August 2002, a man stepped out from behind the bleachers to intercept him.

It wasn't a reporter or fan. It was a process server, who for months had been searching for his dad, who was living with his son at the time. The man shoved some papers into Prince Fielder's hands, naming his father as defendant in a $387,744 lawsuit.

Although Prince Fielder wasn't a defendant in the suit, the sins of the father — poor business decisions and an unstoppable gambling compulsion — had been visited upon the son, in the form of an extremely embarrassing incident.

"Oh, my God, this is the first time I'm hearing that story," Stacey Fielder said "That's just another thing I was kept in the dark about."
 

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Prince Fielder declined to be interviewed.

In addition to the Trump judgment, the bills, all annotated in the Fielders' still-pending divorce case and other public records, eventually included:

• $716,000 to Union Bank for a warehouse mortgage, plus another $300,000 for a loan.

• $660,000 to a company listed simply as "GHF, LLC." The News reached the company's registered agent, but he declined to be interviewed or reveal the type of business involved.

$387,744 from the lawsuit served on his son — because Cecil was living with him at the time — resulting from a trailer-rental business gone bad in Wisconsin.

• $300,000 for a loan from Colonial Bank.

• $300,000 to Paris Las Vegas casino.

• $150,000 in credit-card debt.

• $1 million from a mortgage the Fielders took out on their Melbourne mansion from Standard Federal Bank.

• $1,065,864 in back taxes and a second mortgage to Comerica Bank, which won a foreclosure judgment on the estate in June, paid off Standard Federal, and now hopes to sell the property.

The liens filed by Trump Plaza and all others against the property are now worthless.

There was a welter of smaller liens as well — by unpaid attorneys, an Atlanta businessman, a Tennessee stable, and a Melbourne moving and storage company. One creditor who did get paid by the Fielders is Ed Frommelt of Melbourne, who ran the mansion's cleaning crew.

"They owed us $2,500 for our regular twice-a-week stuff, plus an all-day cleanup we did for a Super Bowl party," Frommelt said. "It was Mrs. Fielder — she just refused to pay us. We had to go to court three times, and they never showed once. We won the judgment, but then we still had to get the money ourselves. I filed a contractor's lien against the property, and they paid up right away."
 

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The pending divorce is anything but amicable.

In sworn documents filed with the court, Fielder claims his wife was "physically and mentally abusive" to him, hitting him with a broomstick, stabbing him in the side with a fork, threatening to get a gun and shoot him, and telling him she had stood over him with a knife as he slept, thinking about whether to stab him.

Fielder also claimed his wife lost $500,000 in a failed venture to open a bank, and redecorated their mansion four times in seven years, at a cost of $4 million.

In her filings, Stacey Fielder alleged her husband had engaged in "an avalanche of misconduct" that caused her angry outbursts, and asked the court to enjoin her husband "from dissipating any more assets."

Cecil Fielder also listed $19.4 million in assets in his divorce papers — although that included $9 million for the house he no longer owns; $2 million in furnishings, most of which are no longer there; and more than $6 million from a variety of businesses — Big Daddy Classic Cars, CJ Fielder Transportation, Fielder Realty, etc. — none of which is reachable by telephone.

Fielder isn't reachable either, several lawyers interviewed by The News said.

"Needless to say, it's been a challenge to track Mr. Fielder down. He's been very elusive," said Madison, Wis., attorney Robert Fleischacker — the man who took the extraordinary step of having Fielder's son served after several other attempts had failed.

Fleischacker said he also dispatched a process server to find Fielder at the baseball All-Star Game in Houston this year, but "we weren't quick enough on the draw."

The Fielders' divorce case is dragging on as well, because lawyers representing Cecil Fielder don't get paid, then withdraw from the case, according to Stacey Fielder's attorney, Lawrence Banigan of Mineola, N.Y.

"It's like wrestling in a fog," he said.

Now, the Fielders' home, sprawled across a half-dozen lots in a luxury subdivision in Florida, sits empty and decaying — although it came through the recent hurricanes with little damage.

The only memories now are the two theaters — with leather recliners in the one for the parents, a ticket booth and popcorn stand in the kids' room, and $100,000 in A/V equipment in both rooms; the 100,000-gallon pool with its own mountain and waterfall; the 4,500-square-foot guest house; the 8,000-bottle wine cellar; the game room; the disco; the playgrounds with their tennis and basketball courts.

"It's a beautiful home, and at one point in time it was worth a lot of money," said Jack Mahon, president of the Suntree development's homeowners association. "But if you wanted to buy it now, you'd find it needed a lot of work. The pool is in bad shape; all the landscaping is deteriorating because the irrigation isn't on. The lights aren't even on, that I'm aware of."

Another Realtor trying to sell the property, Karen Nierenberg, has a special interest — she built it, with her husband, Bruce, who was co-owner of the now-defunct Premier Cruise Lines in Port Canaveral. He built the largest mansion in central Florida inland in order to protect his classic car collection from corrosive sea salt.

Nierenberg admits she was saddened when she viewed the property after the Fielders left.

"But I quickly went from viewing it with those eyes to viewing it with a Realtor's eyes," she said. "All I want to do now is sell it to someone who will give it the love it needs."
 

Like a sinner before the gates of heaven
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I remember hearing this story a few months back..Sad to say the least.
 

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hmmm boy cecil sure was entertaining in the detroit area for along time,...just never get to here the stories like this until its too late,.....i would have thought he was on eeeezzy street,........if it wasnt for chat boards, i still wouldnt have known:sad3:
 

ball dont lie
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I have his rookie card from topps autographed. probably worth shit now.
 

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yeah i had no idea,......i mean its been years but if my sports memory serves me right,....i thought he was married to some beauty queen or some beauty pagent girl???,...of course it would have been awhile ago now:monsters-
 

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sad story...the guy should own up to his mistakes, get help, and find a job in the Detroit organization somewhere, as a coach, analyst, etc. I'm sure the club would be willing to help him out, and if not, the city would push for his hire.
His life isn't lost completely...
 

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old story ... i think that house that been bought and sold since then..

she is very hot.. a former mrs. america i believe ..

if she needs a penis to cry on , i'll be happy to be there for her...
 

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You just don't become an addicted gambler like that when he retired?? Wonder how much he bet on baseball while he was playing??
 

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The Brewers shook up their Arizona Fall League contingent on Tuesday, pulling left-handed reliever Mitch Stetter and first baseman Prince Fielder.



Stetter was shut down due to a tender elbow and Fielder left because of "personal issues," according to Milwaukee farm director Reid Nichols, who declined to comment any further on Fielder's situation.

Nichols said the team will send left-hander Steve Hammond to replace Stetter. Utility man Vinny Rottino already has been named as Fielder's replacement in the prospect-laden AFL.

The 21-year-old Fielder, who was rated Milwaukee's No. 2 prospect going into 2005, got married during the Triple-A All-Star break and made his Major League debut in June. But he remained estranged from his father, former Major League slugger Cecil Fielder, who has been dealing with lawsuits and financial woes. Prince told the Detroit News earlier this year that his father stole $200,000 of his $2.4 million bonus. In two stints with the Brewers, Fielder batted .288 with two home runs, 10 RBIs and 17 strikeouts in 59 at-bats, mostly off the bench. He batted .143 in his brief AFL stint, hitting two home runs with eight strikeouts in 21 at-bats.
 

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viking611 said:
Prince told the Detroit News earlier this year that his father stole $200,000 of his $2.4 million bonus. In two stints with the Brewers, Fielder batted .288 with two home runs, 10 RBIs and 17 strikeouts in 59 at-bats, mostly off the bench.

Prince got to the Bigs mainly because of his dad (who obviously created him) it must be really bad to tell the press he had 200 grand stolen from him...why not just give his old man 200 grand...I wonder if Cecil gambled that away though?

I never understand it when these athletes have millions and do not share it with the family...

I know of Mike Mussina's brother Mark who worked at a radio station I had some ties to, Mark was driving around in a 7 yr old car, and he was a great guy who was very close to Mike mussina, who was worth well over 350 million though other investments....meanwhile his kid brother is driving around in a $6,000 car.:icon_conf
 

Rx Wizard
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He should file for bankruptcy, the laws exist for just this type of situation. Get a clean slate, get the creditors off his back.
 

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Most things in moderation are not bad most things in excess are bad!

Feel bad for ole cecil but a man has to know is limitations!
 

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A very sad story. Cecil should be set for life with the money he made. He could have gambled every day for the rest of his life if he just was able to do it in moderation.
 

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I feel for the guy but anyone who has even seen an interview with the guy would know he was the "Pedro Guerro" of the 90's. He probably didn't need help signing his name, but anything else would be too much...Taking advantage of him was simply too easy by the casinos.
 

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How does one not BUY a house outright when you have that much money?

I never understand this, athletes having millions and never buying a house they can live in forever...just buy a house , it should be the first thing they think about purchasing....why do they have to live off credit when they make millions each year?
 

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Hopefully someone in his family was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and bury a nice chunk of change in the backyard.
 

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