Charles Robinson spent eleven months on this story interviewing and verifying the allegations of Nevin Shapiro, a convicted Ponzi schemer serving a twenty-year sentence in prison. Check out the reporting that went into this piece:
In 100 hours of jailhouse interviews during Yahoo! Sports’ 11-month investigation, Hurricanes booster Nevin Shapiro described a sustained, eight-year run of rampant NCAA rule-breaking, some of it with the knowledge or direct participation of at least seven coaches from the Miami football and basketball programs. At a cost that Shapiro estimates in the millions of dollars, he said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play (including bounties for injuring opposing players), travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.
In an effort to substantiate the booster’s claims, Yahoo! Sports audited approximately 20,000 pages of financial and business records from his bankruptcy case, more than 5,000 pages of cell phone records, multiple interview summaries tied to his federal Ponzi case, and more than 1,000 photos. Nearly 100 interviews were also conducted with individuals living in six different states. In the process, documents, photos and 21 human sources - including nine former Miami players or recruits, and one former coach - corroborated multiple parts of Shapiro’s rule-breaking.
Miami will be lucky if the NCAA allows it keep its football program. Fantastic work by Yahoo Sports.
I appreciate you writing the article about Lowell Milkin. You should know that it took navigating through 5 pages of google links to get to an article about who Lowell Milkin really is. Most of the links were all about what a great humanitarian he is. There is something terribly wrong with that. Does his wealth allow him to bury the truth? Why is that tolerated? Are we so morally bankrupt that we don't notice we are being spinned? Or is it just that we don't care?
#1 Posted by Frances Groeneman, CJR on Wed 24 Aug 2011 at 02:59 PM
http://www.reputation.com/
as heard on NPR
#2 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 24 Aug 2011 at 05:49 PM
I was linked to this article from a more recent audit note because I was interested in the UCLA situation. In response to Groeneman's comment, if you read all of the information about Lowell Milken, you see that he IS a humanitarian, long before his brother's investigation and long after all charges against him were dropped. Wealth has nothing to do with burying the truth. The truth is in all of the philanthropy Milken had engaged in over thirty + years. To discredit all of the good he has done for a suspicion of wrong doing is truly an injustice.
#3 Posted by Jaime Arnold, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 08:13 PM