In January 2003, a representative of the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles called to discuss a delinquent balance of more than $8,000 from a nine-day stay. In addition to the $495-a-night room, the Garveys were charged $828 for a necklace and bracelet, $189 for a bathrobe, $56 for Louis Vuitton stationery and $1,271 for dinner, according to their bill.
Andrea Messier said she worked as the Garveys' nanny from December 2002 through June 2003. At first, she said, she had no trouble getting her $100 a day, for which she shuttled the Garvey children to and from after-school sporting events, practices and play dates.
But after a couple of months, she said, things changed.
"Candace would say 'talk to Steve' and Steve would say 'talk to Candace,' " Messier recalled in a telephone interview from her home in Colorado.
At one point, Messier said, she wrote checks to pay her own rent, car payment, car insurance and other bills based on a promise that she would be paid by the Garveys the next day. The promise was not kept, Messier said, and her bank account was overdrawn.
When she told Steve Garvey what had happened, he offered to pay the overdraft charges, said Messier, now 25. But not before giving her some fatherly advice.
"Steve told me you shouldn't send your bills out until you've got money in your account," Messier recalled. "I just kinda stood there and looked at him," she said.
After helping to organize a church charity auction in 2003, the Garveys bid on several items and agreed to buy others totaling about $2,700, according to records and interviews. Despite numerous calls to the Garvey home, the bill went unpaid. Nearly a year later, a church volunteer charged with collecting the debt said she reached Steve Garvey on his cellphone. The bill was paid a few days later.
A big source of Garvey's money problems stem from a paternity suit filed by his onetime fiancee, Rebecka Mendenhall. She sued him in 1991, alleging that he was the father of her child, born in 1989.
In 1993, a judge ruled that Garvey was the boy's father and that Mendenhall was entitled to child support. Three years later, as Garvey sought a reduction in the amount he was ordered to pay, he filed the declaration stating he was nearly a million dollars in debt.
Mendenhall agreed to a reduction. But in 2000, when she heard Garvey was expected to receive $3 million in disputed pension funds from Major League Baseball, she filed court papers seeking to adjust his child support payment.
