"Yanks Don't Need to Give More Stadium Documents" NY Times 7/31/9

Yanks Don’t Need to Give More Stadium Documents

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: July 31, 2009

An Albany judge has quashed a subpoena demanding that the Yankees provide two Assembly committees with far more documents about the financing of the new Yankee Stadium than the team has provided.

The subpoena was a central part of the contentious exchanges between Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky and Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, over more than $1 billion in city-issued, tax-exempt financing for the stadium, and new jobs creation, ticket prices and the appraised value of the stadium’s real estate.

State Supreme Court Justice John C. Egan Jr. rejected the Yankees’ argument that Brodsky lacked the legislative authority to issue the subpoena. But in an opinion dated Wednesday, he wrote, “I do believe the Yankees have made a good-faith effort to comply with the subpoena, culling through and producing a great deal of documents for inspection by the Corporations Committee,” which Brodsky chairs.

Egan called it “unreasonable” for the Yankees to go through more than 2,000 boxes of documents and more than one million e-mails to comply with the “overly broad” subpoena.

“Subpoenas should not be used as fishing expeditions,” he wrote. He added that the more appropriate target of Brodsky’s investigation into public financing of stadiums for privately-owned businesses like the Yankees should be the city and not the team.

Jonathan D. Schiller, of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, who represented the Yankees, said: “Brodsky lost big time. His subpoena was quashed after an evidentiary hearing.”

“It would have been better had we gotten the documents,” Brodsky said from Montana.