New to Java

Hi, im using string.replaceAll() to get rid of a load of random text from a file, however i keep getting the exception java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Illegal repetition( and where its all gone wrong)

I think its because it doesnt like me doing the 'cleanString = cleanString' bit, can I put all the expressions into 1? The only other way i can think is to have loads of variables and that would just suck.

for(;;) 
{
    while (loopCount<=84)
    {
        String testString = reader.readLine();
        if (testString.equalsIgnoreCase(""))
        {
            testString = reader.readLine();
        }
        cleanString = testString.replaceAll("@", "");
        cleanString = cleanString.replaceAll("{", "");
        cleanString = cleanString.replaceAll("}", "");
        cleanString = cleanString.replaceAll("=", "");
				
        tokenizeThis = new StringTokenizer(cleanString);
        word = tokenizeThis.nextToken();
        if (word.equalsIgnoreCase("name"))
        {
            cleanString = cleanString.replaceAll("name", "");
            cleanString = cleanString.replaceAll(" ", "");
						
            captainList[loopCount] = cleanString;
            loopCount++;
            System.out.println("Captain  " + cleanString);
        }
        else
        {
            playerList[loopCount][loopCount2] = cleanString;
            loopCount2++;
            System.out.println("Player " + cleanString);
            if (loopCount2>=6)
            {
                loopCount2 = 0;
            }
        }
    }
}

A section of the file im trying to read:
@ {
name = "john jackson",
steve smith],
thomas adams],
}

Hope you can help, been working on this for a while, thank you very much in advance!