You might want to get on this for your new show before Dick Wolf does. According to the Associated Press, former Seattle Mariners (and not-quite-Phillies and Giants) reliever Julio Mateo, now with Fresno of the PCL, was arrested on suspicion of forgery after paying for a cab in Albuquerque using a counterfeit $100 bill.
Mateo had previously faced domestic violence charges from an incident in New York City, which he eventually pled guilty to. I’m now thinking he got nabbed for that because somebody asked him, “Julio, when did you stop beating your wife?”
According to police reports, as officers patted Mateo down in a hotel hallway early Sunday, he made a statement in Spanish to police that translates to, “I didn’t pass the bad money.”
“Before officers informed him of why we were there, Julio stated that he did not know anything about fake money,” Officer Christopher Enyart wrote in a police report….
After investigating officers received permission from Mateo to enter his hotel room, an officer saw “two stacks [of] money with $100 bills on top of the stacks,” a police report said.