House of Nails

by Lenny Dykstra

  Terri was speechless, as I caught her completely off guard. She never was a big spender, and kept saying to me, “Lenny, I don’t need anything that expensive.”

  I shot back, “Terri, here’s the deal: you pick out whatever diamond ring you want, or I am going to tell the guy to give me the biggest and most expensive diamond ring in the store.”

  Terri settled on a three-carat diamond ring that cost me about $50,000 when all was said and done.

  Another one of the appearances I did was for a retail chain in Amsterdam. It turned out the owner was cool as shit. (I’ll leave his name and company anonymous.)

  When I finished signing autographs and shaking hands, along with the courtesy smiles and the fake laughs, the owner said, in his thick Dutch accent, “Let’s get the fuck out of here and get a drink.”

  I rarely turned down a drink and said why not. He had a new Benz, and even though he was an older dude—I would have guessed he was about sixty—he definitely had a clue. We ended up at a fancy restaurant, and the person who greeted us at the door gave me the impression that he was the owner. The owner introduced me to the man, then waved for me to follow him.

  We went up a set of narrow stairs, and the owner pulled out a key and swung open a door. I followed them into what looked like something out of a luxury magazine: a huge room with state-of-the-art everything, very modern and very sleek. I was confused as to why we were there, but then I got unconfused real fast when twenty of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen appeared.

  The owner turned to me and said, “This is how we do it in Amsterdam.” The next thing I know, he pulls out some blow. I couldn’t believe this sixty-year-old dude brought Richards to the party. He then signaled for the girls to come over, and it was on.

  If someone would have said to me that I would end up partying with the sixty-year-old owner of a major retailer in Amsterdam, and that we would be swimming in pussy, with enough powder to make Keith Richards proud, I would have said no fucking way. The story of my life—unpredictable.

  The next stop was Paris. On advice from my limousine driver, we went to dinner at La Tour d’Argent, where four hundred years ago customers apparently dueled to get a table. It was still one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world. When I walked in, a tall, tuxedo-clad maître d’ wanted me to take off my driving cap. Thanks but no thanks. I considered it elegant. It was made by Kangol, a premier brand of hats. When I wouldn’t give it to him, he started talking angrily in French to one of the waiters.

  I knew that this guy was about to blow a gasket, so I said to my interpreter, Bob Schueller, “Tell him I have a baseball injury that it’s covering, and I don’t want to alarm the other customers.”

  The maître d’ finally relented, but he was pissed. You can probably guess what this guy thought about Americans in general, and here I was bringing the stereotype to life. But I didn’t really give a fuck.

  When they brought out a wine list bigger than The Baseball Encyclopedia, I turned to Bob and told him to order the best, most expensive bottle of wine in the whole place.

  “Their dessert wine, Château d’Yquem,” Bob said, “is the finest in the world.”

  Bob started speaking to the maître d’ in French, then looked back at me. “He will offer you a bottle of the 1936 Château d’Yquem for sixteen thousand francs.”

  “Offer me?” I said. “Sixteen thousand francs? How much is that?”

  “Three thousand dollars,” Bob said.

  “No problem,” I replied without blinking.

  Up until then, the maître d’ had been flashing me dirty looks, but after I ordered the Château d’Yquem, he became much more subservient. And at that point my Kangol hat became an absolute nonfactor.

  The maître d’ brought out the bottle of wine and explained how difficult it was to produce, requiring a rare summer heat, and an autumn of moist mornings to properly rot the grapes. Each grape is picked individually, only after it has dried and shriveled on the vine. Picking this particular crop takes care and a lot of luck.

  All of that aside, the Château d’Yquem tasted like liquid gold. I’m not kidding you. You have to drink it almost chilled, almost icy, then you sip it slow. It’s hard to explain to someone how it tastes, as there is nothing comparable.

  The son of André Terrail, the founder of this famed restaurant, stopped by our table and explained that during World War II, his father had bricked off his stash of 1936 Château d’Yquem to hide it from the Nazis. The five bottles in his wine cellar were the last ones left in the world, and I had just ordered one of them.

  “Monsieur,” said Mr. Terrail, “it has been a pleasure to meet you. You have just bought the best bottle of wine in the world.” I adjusted my hat and I said to him, “Let me get another bottle—to go.”

  I wanted a third one, but Terrail refused to sell it to me. He said that he needed it for his wine cellar, and it didn’t matter how much money I offered for it.

  I guess sometimes money doesn’t buy everything.

  Our next stop was Düsseldorf, which is one badass city. Germany was fucking cool and right up my alley. I mean, they start drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning, which to me shows that they understand the good things in life.

  We checked into this beautiful hotel, and when Terri and I got up to our suite on the twentieth floor, I was looking down on the sidewalk below, and I could see a lady walking this magnificent German shepherd. Growing up, we had German shepherds—it was the only breed of dog I ever had.

  My dad bought them and taught us all about them, and from then on, it was the only breed of dog I ever wanted to own. They are the most loyal and intelligent dogs on the planet, hands down.

  “Terri,” I said, “we’re in Germany. This is where German shepherds come from. See that lady right there with the dog? I’m going to go down and buy that dog.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said.

  “Watch me.”

  I ran to the elevator and raced to talk to the concierge, who spoke enough English to help me. I said to him, “You have to come with me and talk to this lady outside. I want to buy her fucking dog.” The guy looked at me like I was nuts, but he helped me anyway.

  We ran down the street and finally caught up with the woman and her German shepherd. I asked the concierge to tell her that I wanted to buy her dog. They started yakking in German, but she kept shaking her head no.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She says she thinks you’re crazy,” he said. “She said she won’t sell her dog for any price.”

  “You want to bet?” I asked, but didn’t give him the chance to answer. “Tell her I understand, and that I didn’t mean any disrespect. Then ask her if she would be so kind as to bring the dog to the hotel for a few minutes so my wife could at least see how beautiful her shepherd is.”

  The concierge looked at me funny and started talking to her in German again, but this time the conversation had a much nicer tone. Finally, he looked at me. “She said no problem.”

  Little did she know what she was walking into. When I want something bad enough, nobody can operate like me. As we made our way back to the hotel, I asked the concierge, “How much money do you want to bet that I get the lady to sell me her dog right in the lobby of your hotel?”

  This German dude already thought I was a little bit off, but after making that statement, he had a look on his face like I’d lost my fucking mind. “You are crazy. She already told me that there is no way she is selling her dog to you.”

  I said it again: “How much do you want to bet I own that dog in less than sixty minutes?”

  “I’ll bet you one hundred American dollars,” he fired back.

  “You got it. It’s on.”

  The next thing you know, we were standing in the lobby of the nicest hotel in Düsseldorf with this beautiful German shepherd.

  I told the concierge that I would pay her $5,000 in cash right on the spot.

  “No way. You’re cra
zy,” she said in German.

  We went back and forth, and as she started to leave, I said, “I’ll give you $75,000.”

  And just like that I owned a real, genuine German shepherd, and collected my $100 from the stunned concierge.

  Back in the U.S., I was still feeling like a goodwill ambassador. New York City, once foreign to me, was now home. The fact is, there’s really no place like the City. More important, there are no people like New Yorkers, and I loved them for the way they treated me and took me in.

  Guys like Trump would invite me to be a guest at the U.S. Open. I watched the matches from his suite with Lenny Kravitz and Puff Daddy, both of whom were cool as shit and super smart. I especially enjoyed talking about business with Puff Daddy. He makes more money by being dialed in with Cîroc vodka than he does from all his other businesses combined.

  Another guy who was tight with Trump, whom I eventually became good friends with, was Joseph Cinque, president and CEO of the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences. Cinque would fly around the world and give their Star Diamond Award to the premier hotels and restaurants. He knew everybody who was anybody. I never met a guy as dialed in as Joe. He was good friends at the time with New York City’s police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, as well as the longtime New York City fire commissioner. One time Joe Cinque was driving to the Carlyle Hotel with the police commissioner and fire commissioner in Bernie’s badass SUV to pick me up to go to dinner in Manhattan.

  The Carlyle Hotel was where a lot of the big hitters stayed, and also happened to be John F. Kennedy’s secret hideout. There was a secret tunnel built for him to access the hotel when he would meet Marilyn Monroe. As I was coming out of the lobby, Cinque turned on the siren and got on the horn with those fucking blasting speakers, and with his New York accent—the greatest accent in the world—he said, “Lenny Dykstra, come out with your hands up. We have you surrounded.”

  For three blocks the whole city froze.

  Everyone—I mean everyone—was staring at me. Joe had made it seem so real. He nearly shut down traffic on the Upper East Side.

  Today, Joseph Cinque is in his seventies and still going strong. When everything went bad for me, I called him and told him, “Joe, I want you to know that I understand that you and I can’t hang out anymore, but I’m not mad at you. You have always treated me great, and you and I had some great times. No matter what ever happens, I will always love you, Joe.” Joe got real emotional and said how much my phone call meant to him. Business is business, and I didn’t want Joe to feel like he did anything wrong, because he didn’t. Joe was a funny motherfucker—he was one of the few dudes who could make me laugh at any moment, and he will always be my friend. We had one last laugh over that prank with the police commissioner before we hung up.

  Who would have ever imagined that later on in my life, I really would have to come out with my hands up?

  18

  CAR WASH KING

  Many people don’t have the ability to be rich, because they’re too lazy or they don’t have the desire or the stick-to-itiveness. It’s a talent. Some people have a talent for piano. Some people have a talent for raising a family. Some people have a talent for golf. I just happen to have a talent for making money.

  —DONALD TRUMP

  Unfortunately, professional baseball careers are relatively short-lived. In my case, I was able to play twelve years, which is a little more than double the average—5.6 years. Being a forward thinker, I realized midway through my career that I would need to do something that would sustain me after my playing days came to an end. Ideally, I would be involved with a business that would provide me with consistent cash flow.

  Needless to say, with baseball consuming most of my life since I was a little kid, I had little, if any, business experience or training. Nonetheless, I knew I had to figure out a way to protect myself and my family in the future. Therefore, I began building my financial empire in 1993, when Lindsay Jones, my good friend at the time, convinced me to start a business with him.

  Lindsay was always smart in school, and he became a CPA working for the firm of Coopers & Lybrand. He asked me what I was doing with my money. At the time, even though I was making millions, I didn’t have a financial adviser. I had money, but no idea how to take care of it or make it grow so it would last my entire life. Lindsay was able to teach me a tremendous amount about business. I’ll give him that. He won me over with what he knew, and we decided to start a business together.

  I am from Southern California, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that we like our cars to look shiny and new. As a result, I knew that the car wash business would be recession-proof in California. No matter what the economy looks like, most Californians are still going to get their cars washed. Moreover, it’s a business that won’t be replaced by new technology.

  I knew that if we could locate a prime spot for the business, we’d make money, because Southern California was a car wash haven. The first location I bought was in North Corona. Corona, once called the lemon capital of the world, is a major suburb of Los Angeles and happened to be the second-fastest-growing city in California at the time.

  The property we found was across the street from a Costco and in the same parking lot as a Walmart, with people coming and going constantly. Bam. I couldn’t have found a better location. I paid a million for the land and started to develop my business plan.

  It was baseball-themed. The cheapest wash we called a “single,” a step up from that was called a “double,” then a “triple,” and finally, the “home run” was the most expensive. The average cost for a wash was fifteen dollars. By the end of our first year, sales at the North Corona Car Wash exceeded $1 million. Of all the car washes I built, North Corona was always my biggest producer.

  My second car wash, in Simi Valley, was the fucking Taj Mahal of car washes. Simi Valley is an upscale LA suburb, about fifty miles to the northwest of LA and home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

  The Simi Valley car wash facility was a sprawling space. I installed a large shark tank in the store. Watching those sharks swim around was something my customers really enjoyed. I also showcased more than $100,000 of the finest sports memorabilia in beveled glass display cabinets.

  I purchased the land from Shell for $800,000, which in actuality was easily worth $1.5 million, ultimately resulting in the firing of the guy who sold it to me because the price was so low. However, it took me five years to get the city of Simi Valley to give me the permits needed to build. It got so fucking bad that I showed up at a city council meeting. City council meetings are complete power plays for the council members who get off on telling people what they can or can’t do. It’s a fucking joke. Finally, I stood up at that meeting and said, “Just so we are clear, I promise you that I am not building a whorehouse. It’s actually going to be the nicest car wash in the world. But you already know that since you have been looking at the plans for five years.”

  Majestic is what it was.

  I then bought a third property at the other end of Corona from a classic little old lady who had been sitting on the lot forever. The property wasn’t even listed. Large shopping centers were being developed all around her, and she was one of the last holdouts in an area that had once been only orange groves. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out she would sell if I could somehow win her over.

  So I chartered a helicopter and created one of those enormous checks like you see in those Publishers Clearing House commercials. I landed on her property. After getting out of the helicopter, I presented her with the big check for a million dollars.

  It took her less than ten minutes to say yes. Stroke of genius, if I may say so.

  On the five acres that made up the South Corona property, I not only built a car wash but also a ConocoPhillips 76 fueling center with a world-class convenience store. It was way too nice to call it just a gas station. The fueling center was beautiful, with marble floors and countertops. Simply put, it was stunning. It put
the ARCO and Sam’s Club stations across the street to shame.

  In the third phase of development, I built a twenty-thousand-square-foot multi-tenant triple-net retail center that would be leased out. There is nothing better than a little passive income to add some consistency to your bottom line in order to see you though a seasonal business. After all, car washes in Southern California are here to stay, but it still rains on occasion.

  They were the best car washes in the world. The income they produced should have set me up for the rest of my life. The operative words here are should have.

  Because things began to go south fast.

  I came to realize that Lindsay Jones, my business partner, put self-interest in front of the partnership. Although I suspected he was stealing from me, I didn’t possess proof. Furthermore, there was a part of me that didn’t want to face that my so-called friend was capable of such backstabbing.

  Lindsay was scheming and conniving, and because I was playing for the Phillies and wintering at the Bayou Club in Tampa, Florida, I wasn’t able to oversee the car washes, and wouldn’t have known what to even look for. Lindsay was the working partner. I gave him 25 percent of the partnership to run the show while I was away playing.

  In fact, after everything was revealed, I had to go to court to legally remove him as a partner before I could fire him. I hired Dan Petrocelli as my attorney and paid him a small fortune to get rid of Lindsay. If you remember, Dan represented the parents of the murdered Ron Goldman in the O. J. Simpson civil case. Petrocelli hired the forensic accounting firm of Freeman & Mills, and they did an audit that revealed all of Lindsay’s wrongdoing. And let me tell you, it wasn’t a small number.