Magic Johnson was waiting.

It was a November morning in 2011 and the former basketball superstar and AIDS activist was sitting in his Beverly Hills office, on Wilshire and North Doheny, wondering what was taking so long. In the decades since his career had ended, Johnson had become one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs; he had amassed stakes in, among other things, Starbucks, movie theaters, and his beloved Los Angeles Lakers. Now Johnson sought to add another business to his portfolio: he wanted a share of the Dodgers, the beleaguered baseball franchise, which had recently been put on the market. Johnson had already met with four different prospective ownership groups, each of whom pitched him on their plan to turn around the team. On this morning, he was waiting to meet with the fifth—a mysterious group that his friend Stan Kasten had refused to name in advance. Johnson trusted Kasten, a former baseball executive, enough to agree to the mysterious conclave. He was intrigued. But he was also growing annoyed. He had been waiting an hour for these guys to arrive.

L.A. traffic may be unpredictable, but the circumstances of the Dodgers’ sale were truly unprecedented. In the late 90s, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group bought the team from their original owner, the O’Malley family, in large part because its rival, Disney, had recently purchased the Angels. And while Murdoch knew how to run tabloids and cable channels, his executives proved less equipped operating a pro sports team: year after year, the Dodgers hemorrhaged money, and stumbled toward mediocrity. Murdoch’s group became so desperate to discard the team, in fact, that they quite literally paid someone to take it off their hands. In 2004, Fox sold the Dodgers to a rakish Boston real-estate developer named Frank McCourt. Not only did McCourt not put down a single dollar of his own money, but Fox lent him much of the $420 million price tag. As collateral, McCourt put up his one major asset, an undeveloped waterfront parking lot in Boston.

The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, by Molly Knight, to be published by Simon & Schuster this month.

Without wasting much time, McCourt turned his new team into a personal ATM fit to support his lavish and expanding lifestyle. Upon relocating to Los Angeles, McCourt and his wife, Jamie, paid $21.25 million for a home across the street from the Playboy Mansion; they spent an additional $14 million on a renovation that included transporting their old kitchen across the country from Massachusetts. They also purchased the house next door to help accommodate guests and do laundry. Then they bought a Malibu mansion from Courteney Cox for $27.5 million, and paid another $19 million for the place next door so that Jamie could enjoy her morning laps in a larger swimming pool. They financed a private jet on standby, daily his-and-hers home salon sessions, and a Russian psychic back in Boston whom they paid six-figure bonuses to “think blue.” In all, the expenditures put the McCourts hundreds of millions in debt, and ultimately forced the Dodgers into bankruptcy.

The spending finally caught up to McCourt on the eve of the 2009 playoffs, when Jamie filed for divorce. She claimed that her husband had mortgaged her future, and that of their team. He claimed that she had slept with her driver. Either way, Major League Baseball wanted them both gone and hired an overseer to facilitate team operations.

But unloading the Dodgers wasn’t going to be easy. McCourt had to set a price high enough so that he could pay off his wife in divorce court, then settle his debts—and then eke out enough money to live on. According to court filings, the Dodgers owed $573 million to creditors. Forbes valued the franchise at $900 million. If McCourt sold the team for near that price, most of that money would be wiped out by debts and taxes, leaving the couple with nothing. In order to square what he owed his lenders and his ex, and walk away with anything close to the money he needed to support his lifestyle, McCourt would need double what Forbes predicted the team would fetch.