For the owners of the Mets, their involvement with Bernard L. Madoff’s giant investment fraud has been embarrassing and costly. They are being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars, and have been accused of having been, at minimum, willfully ignorant of what Madoff was up to.

But for the owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, it is not the first time they have had their names and personal fortunes roughed up in a Ponzi scheme. An investment firm started by the two men had to pay back nearly $13 million two years ago when a hedge fund run by the scion of a wealthy New Orleans family collapsed in what was then regarded as one of Wall Street’s more brazen frauds.

The $13 million figure — modest when set against the damage the owners of the team face in the Madoff case — still made the firm one of the biggest losers in the $450 million scheme orchestrated by Samuel Israel III, and it turned out to be the largest settlement to date among investors who withdrew money from the fund. Israel, who is serving a 22-year term in federal prison, tried to avoid being incarcerated by faking a suicide in July 2008.

For Wilpon and Katz, the episode did not garner anywhere near the public attention their entanglements with Madoff have, but there are striking similarities. Indeed, a review of court records and interviews suggests the debacle with Israel’s hedge fund, Bayou, was a painful precursor to the Madoff case.