Tweet
Known around the office in Indy as the King of the Press Conference, Emmert recently received a vote of confidence from the executive committee to prop up his troubled tenure.
TYLER KAUFMAN/US PRESSWIRE
Interim enforcement chief Duncan says that both the More Cases, More Quickly mantra and the policy of encouraging "innovative techniques" are under review, and he concedes that the department is in flux. "It's been a tough time for the enforcement staff," Duncan says. "They're not immune to the struggles."
Today the enforcement division's serial humiliations are the greatest impediment to investigators, not the water guns in their holsters. "There's a new unwritten policy in place that big cases and major allegations that will open the NCAA up to a large legal or public or media relations liability won't be brought without very serious vetting," a former enforcement staffer says. "I would say now the time is ripe to cheat. There's no policing going on." Duncan disagrees. "It's never a good time to break the rules," he says. "The enforcement staff is not handicapped or debilitated. The enforcement staff is strong."
Still, the irony remains: The King of the Press Conference, who wanted high-profile cases processed on a rocket docket, now takes to podiums in a defensive posture. And he does so because the great achievement on his watch, an overhaul of enforcement, has left that department compromised. As one former enforcement staffer puts it, "Five years ago, enforcement was revered, it was respected and it was feared to a certain extent. Now it's got its tail between its legs."
COLLEGE SPORTS is lousy with sugar-daddy boosters like Nevin Shapiro, though none have been as embedded as he was. He attended the football banquet. He led the Hurricanes out of the tunnel. He prowled the sideline. He accepted a green-and-orange bowling ball from, and signed by, Shalala. After he paid for the Nevin Shapiro Student-Athlete Lounge and its couches, TVs, pool table and video games, the school put a bust of him outside the head football coach's office as if he were a legend in his own time. Which he was, after a fashion: Players called him Li'l Luke, a reference to former 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell, a notorious Miami superfan from the 1980s and '90s. (Although Campbell has admitted he bought meals for players, he denies engaging in the kind of unsavory activities associated with Shapiro-and is suing Shapiro for defamation.) Hurricanes even flashed double L gestures with their thumb and forefinger, Shapiro says, to dedicate great plays to him.
A FORMER ENFORCEMENT STAFFER BELIEVES THE NCAA WILL HESITATE TO BRING BIG CASES, SAYING, "THE TIME IS RIPE TO CHEAT. THERE'S NO POLICING GOING ON."
But as a high-stakes gambler embedded in a high-profile athletic program, Shapiro embodied the NCAA's greatest nightmare. And while he says he wasn't party to point-shaving or game-fixing, Shapiro is a kind of Rosetta Stone of corruption, someone who can illuminate the full range of the enforcement division's concerns.
Shapiro described to SI in detail bets he says he placed on 23 Miami games between 2003 and '09, using inside information from 16 Hurricanes players, four coaches and four athletic-department staffers. Further, he says, many knew what he was doing with the intelligence they shared, even if none received direct compensation for their information. Whatever he won on fall Saturdays, he says he'd usually lose, and then some, betting on other sports, and that helped lead to his bankruptcy. But thanks to information flowing out of Coral Gables, Shapiro says, he made money on each of the 23 bets, winning so reliably that his bookie eventually slipped him four Heat season tickets so he wouldn't share his picks with others. A picture emerges of an ecosystem: Hurricanes insiders funnel information to Shapiro; Shapiro gets down a high-percentage play; and many of his informants benefit from Shapiro's large living.
Shapiro says his run began with the Hurricanes' 2003 home opener against Florida. He says that four players and a mole in the athletic department told him that the school's new quarterback, Brock Berlin, wasn't ready for the job. Shapiro wagered $250,000, the same amount he had just pledged to the athletic department. As would come to be his custom, he bet against the Hurricanes, and Florida easily covered the 14-point spread in a 38-33 Miami victory during which his donation was acknowledged over the P.A. system.
Two years later, Shapiro says, he began a gambling relationship with Adam Meyer, the tout behind the handicapping website AdamWins.com. Shapiro says it started with a Nov. 19, 2005, game against Georgia Tech. Hearing from an athletic department staffer that Miami's slow defensive front would struggle trying to stop Tech's scrambling quarterback Reggie Ball, Shapiro bet heavily against the Hurricanes, and Miami, despite being a 17?-point favorite, lost 14-10. (Ball, who struggled for most of the game, ran 16 yards for the winning score.) Financial statements show that Shapiro wired $60,000 to Real Money Sports, Meyer's business, and Shapiro says he collected at least $100,000.
Bank records from 2005 to '08 show dozens of five- and six-figure sums moving from Shapiro's entities to Meyer's during football season, including more than $1.3 million in the final two months of 2007, money that Shapiro says was entirely gambling-related. "I needed Meyer [in order] to bet big, as he was in the mix with a number of gaming outlets and a cash payer," Shapiro says. Several days before Nov. 3, when favored Miami lost 19-16 in overtime to N.C. State, he learned from a coach that quarterback Kyle Wright would be benched because of a bad knee and ankle. (SI could not reach Wright for comment.) "I ran with what I knew and got hold of Meyer," says Shapiro, who says he wound up being the first to tell a stunned Wright that he wouldn't be playing. Shapiro got his bet down before the benching became public knowledge, and the line moved from 13 points to 11. "It was a bonanza," says Shapiro. Records show that, six days after the game, nine wires moved $1.18 million from one Shapiro business, Capitol Investments, to another, Ocean Rock Enterprises. It was all money from the N.C. State game, Shapiro says, that he was shuffling around to put his accounts in order.
Meyer declined comment through his lawyer, Joel Hirschhorn, who says that Meyer would place bets for Shapiro when his client was in Las Vegas. In 2011, Meyer reached an agreement with the bankruptcy trustee to pay Shapiro's defrauded investors $900,000-a sum that Shapiro calls laughably small.
Shapiro says he didn't tell Yahoo! about his gambling because, in the summer of 2011, he hadn't yet been sentenced and didn't want to expose himself to further criminal liability. (Even now, Shapiro runs a legal risk by discussing his bets.) He indicated to the FBI that he had general knowledge of gambling, but the Feds were focused on the Ponzi scheme. And while Shapiro shared some of what he knew about his gambling with the NCAA, Johanningmeier recalls him implicating only one person. "I don't remember him ever fingering or identifying a player," he says. "We did run it out with one coach he named, but there was no way we were going to be able to bring an allegation with what Shapiro told us."
A further exploration of Shapiro's betting foundered after Johanningmeier and Najjar left and the Perez mess went public. Early this year NCAA representatives were prepared to go to Oakdale to hear him out. But Shapiro insisted that his lawyer be present and, as e-mails between Shapiro and NCAA investigator Stephanie Hannah make clear, Shapiro wouldn't consent to the visit after the NCAA balked at paying for Perez to attend. If investigators had come, Shapiro says, "I would have walked them detail by detail through the whole maze."
A DOZEN YEARS ago Tom Hosty said of the enforcement process, "It's not adversarial.... You are trying to get the truth together." That's no longer accurate. Today schools lobby for evidence to be tossed or threaten to sue if they don't like the NCAA's findings or sanctions. The Southern Cal case took four years, and the notice of allegations ran some 500 pages because it included the school's challenges to assertion after assertion. To fight the NCAA, universities now turn to high-powered lawyers like Mike Glazier of Bond, Schoeneck & King, the firm that represented both Miami and UCLA in their recent cases. A former member of the NCAA's enforcement staff, Glazier has represented dozens of schools in infractions cases for over 25 years.
In theory the NCAA and its members are partners. And at first, Miami and the enforcement division seemed to be similarly aligned. As school attorney Judd Goldberg wrote Najjar in an October 2011 e-mail, "The university, like the NCAA, has the same ultimate interest in discovering the truth." Indeed, Miami's lawyers knew from the start that the NCAA was coordinating with Shapiro's lawyer to develop evidence from the bankruptcy subpoenas.
Every school supports stronger enforcement until it is the subject of an investigation. And now, with revenues from football and basketball greater than ever, a school's incentive to challenge every claim of every NCAA investigator is just as great. Miami eventually decided it had more to gain by getting feisty after news broke that the NCAA had contracted with Perez to get the depositions of Sean (Pee Wee) Allen, a former Miami student and former part-time Hurricanes equipment room employee who worked as Shapiro's gofer, and Michael Huyghue, Shapiro's partner in Axcess Sports. Hauled before NCAA investigators shortly after Shapiro went to the NCAA, Allen first denied knowing of anything improper, protestations he has since said were lies he told out of panic. Later, deposed under oath by Perez, Allen repeated some of Shapiro's claims of improper benefits. A school that really shares "the same ultimate interest in discovering the truth" might insist that such testimony be included in the record precisely because it's taken under oath-particularly when Allen would echo, in sit-downs with The Miami Herald, CBSSports.com and ESPN's Outside the Lines, much of what he said in his deposition.
Since the hostile exchange between Miami and the NCAA, two more depositions taken for the bankruptcy case-of Roberto Torres, Shapiro's former CFO, and Marc Levinson, a childhood friend and one of his lawyers-have corroborated that Shapiro entertained Miami athletes in violation of NCAA rules. "To be honest with you, I don't think I had anyone who contradicted him," says Johanningmeier, who adds that other interviewees recounted improprieties or supplied details that Shapiro hadn't known about or remembered. Even if the NCAA didn't include the most salacious charges in the notice of allegations, Johanningmeier says "we did have some individuals acknowledge what he said was correct" about visits to strip clubs where "much more went on than stripping.... If you made a movie out of it, it would have to be X-rated."
Shapiro's credibility has nonetheless remained an issue because of his crimes; Miami called him "delusional and mentally unstable" in its motion to dismiss the case. (As for his own reputation, Johanningmeier disputes media reports that he bought Shapiro a prepaid, disposable phone. He says he wired money into Shapiro's commissary account to pay for phone or Internet service, which is the only way to communicate expeditiously with an inmate-just as SI had to do.) The NCAA, Miami charged, had lied to the school and misled witnesses, and was "unable to detach its desire to believe the most scandalous and gossip-friendly allegations" while subscribing to a "belief that if someone lies twice, it somehow becomes the truth."
Shalala also argued that the Hurricanes had suffered enough from self-imposed penalties that included ruling 13 players ineligible before the 2011 season and a ban on postseason play for two years. Time was when you didn't dare challenge the enforcement division, for that only ensured stiffer sanctions when you inevitably lost. But Shalala's willingness to stand up to the NCAA played well in South Florida. And with so much money riding on big-time college sports, the quaint image of a charged school standing shoulder to shoulder with the NCAA to find the truth has given way to a determination to leverage every advantage to limit any losses.
Today the NCAA is so impotent that Miami may well skate with few further penalties. But the irony in the school's strategy to demonize Shapiro remains: If he was a conniver, he was the Hurricanes' very own conniver-someone the school was only too happy to hold close, and someone with whom athletes, coaches and staff freely consorted. Now Miami wants the world to believe that this same man is too disreputable to credibly implicate its athletic program. This week in Indianapolis, members of the committee on infractions will take the measure of that argument.
Meanwhile administrators, boosters, recruiters and prospects around the country will make another set of judgments: Does the NCAA have the standing to adjudicate cases at all? Is any cop on the beat, cyber-savvy whippersnapper or old school gumshoe, equipped to police college sports today? And if the answer to that last question is yes, does the NCAA have a better chance to enforce its rules under Mark Emmert? Or out from under him?
TYLER KAUFMAN/US PRESSWIRE
Interim enforcement chief Duncan says that both the More Cases, More Quickly mantra and the policy of encouraging "innovative techniques" are under review, and he concedes that the department is in flux. "It's been a tough time for the enforcement staff," Duncan says. "They're not immune to the struggles."
Today the enforcement division's serial humiliations are the greatest impediment to investigators, not the water guns in their holsters. "There's a new unwritten policy in place that big cases and major allegations that will open the NCAA up to a large legal or public or media relations liability won't be brought without very serious vetting," a former enforcement staffer says. "I would say now the time is ripe to cheat. There's no policing going on." Duncan disagrees. "It's never a good time to break the rules," he says. "The enforcement staff is not handicapped or debilitated. The enforcement staff is strong."
Still, the irony remains: The King of the Press Conference, who wanted high-profile cases processed on a rocket docket, now takes to podiums in a defensive posture. And he does so because the great achievement on his watch, an overhaul of enforcement, has left that department compromised. As one former enforcement staffer puts it, "Five years ago, enforcement was revered, it was respected and it was feared to a certain extent. Now it's got its tail between its legs."
COLLEGE SPORTS is lousy with sugar-daddy boosters like Nevin Shapiro, though none have been as embedded as he was. He attended the football banquet. He led the Hurricanes out of the tunnel. He prowled the sideline. He accepted a green-and-orange bowling ball from, and signed by, Shalala. After he paid for the Nevin Shapiro Student-Athlete Lounge and its couches, TVs, pool table and video games, the school put a bust of him outside the head football coach's office as if he were a legend in his own time. Which he was, after a fashion: Players called him Li'l Luke, a reference to former 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell, a notorious Miami superfan from the 1980s and '90s. (Although Campbell has admitted he bought meals for players, he denies engaging in the kind of unsavory activities associated with Shapiro-and is suing Shapiro for defamation.) Hurricanes even flashed double L gestures with their thumb and forefinger, Shapiro says, to dedicate great plays to him.
A FORMER ENFORCEMENT STAFFER BELIEVES THE NCAA WILL HESITATE TO BRING BIG CASES, SAYING, "THE TIME IS RIPE TO CHEAT. THERE'S NO POLICING GOING ON."
But as a high-stakes gambler embedded in a high-profile athletic program, Shapiro embodied the NCAA's greatest nightmare. And while he says he wasn't party to point-shaving or game-fixing, Shapiro is a kind of Rosetta Stone of corruption, someone who can illuminate the full range of the enforcement division's concerns.
Shapiro described to SI in detail bets he says he placed on 23 Miami games between 2003 and '09, using inside information from 16 Hurricanes players, four coaches and four athletic-department staffers. Further, he says, many knew what he was doing with the intelligence they shared, even if none received direct compensation for their information. Whatever he won on fall Saturdays, he says he'd usually lose, and then some, betting on other sports, and that helped lead to his bankruptcy. But thanks to information flowing out of Coral Gables, Shapiro says, he made money on each of the 23 bets, winning so reliably that his bookie eventually slipped him four Heat season tickets so he wouldn't share his picks with others. A picture emerges of an ecosystem: Hurricanes insiders funnel information to Shapiro; Shapiro gets down a high-percentage play; and many of his informants benefit from Shapiro's large living.
Shapiro says his run began with the Hurricanes' 2003 home opener against Florida. He says that four players and a mole in the athletic department told him that the school's new quarterback, Brock Berlin, wasn't ready for the job. Shapiro wagered $250,000, the same amount he had just pledged to the athletic department. As would come to be his custom, he bet against the Hurricanes, and Florida easily covered the 14-point spread in a 38-33 Miami victory during which his donation was acknowledged over the P.A. system.
Two years later, Shapiro says, he began a gambling relationship with Adam Meyer, the tout behind the handicapping website AdamWins.com. Shapiro says it started with a Nov. 19, 2005, game against Georgia Tech. Hearing from an athletic department staffer that Miami's slow defensive front would struggle trying to stop Tech's scrambling quarterback Reggie Ball, Shapiro bet heavily against the Hurricanes, and Miami, despite being a 17?-point favorite, lost 14-10. (Ball, who struggled for most of the game, ran 16 yards for the winning score.) Financial statements show that Shapiro wired $60,000 to Real Money Sports, Meyer's business, and Shapiro says he collected at least $100,000.
Bank records from 2005 to '08 show dozens of five- and six-figure sums moving from Shapiro's entities to Meyer's during football season, including more than $1.3 million in the final two months of 2007, money that Shapiro says was entirely gambling-related. "I needed Meyer [in order] to bet big, as he was in the mix with a number of gaming outlets and a cash payer," Shapiro says. Several days before Nov. 3, when favored Miami lost 19-16 in overtime to N.C. State, he learned from a coach that quarterback Kyle Wright would be benched because of a bad knee and ankle. (SI could not reach Wright for comment.) "I ran with what I knew and got hold of Meyer," says Shapiro, who says he wound up being the first to tell a stunned Wright that he wouldn't be playing. Shapiro got his bet down before the benching became public knowledge, and the line moved from 13 points to 11. "It was a bonanza," says Shapiro. Records show that, six days after the game, nine wires moved $1.18 million from one Shapiro business, Capitol Investments, to another, Ocean Rock Enterprises. It was all money from the N.C. State game, Shapiro says, that he was shuffling around to put his accounts in order.
Meyer declined comment through his lawyer, Joel Hirschhorn, who says that Meyer would place bets for Shapiro when his client was in Las Vegas. In 2011, Meyer reached an agreement with the bankruptcy trustee to pay Shapiro's defrauded investors $900,000-a sum that Shapiro calls laughably small.
Shapiro says he didn't tell Yahoo! about his gambling because, in the summer of 2011, he hadn't yet been sentenced and didn't want to expose himself to further criminal liability. (Even now, Shapiro runs a legal risk by discussing his bets.) He indicated to the FBI that he had general knowledge of gambling, but the Feds were focused on the Ponzi scheme. And while Shapiro shared some of what he knew about his gambling with the NCAA, Johanningmeier recalls him implicating only one person. "I don't remember him ever fingering or identifying a player," he says. "We did run it out with one coach he named, but there was no way we were going to be able to bring an allegation with what Shapiro told us."
A further exploration of Shapiro's betting foundered after Johanningmeier and Najjar left and the Perez mess went public. Early this year NCAA representatives were prepared to go to Oakdale to hear him out. But Shapiro insisted that his lawyer be present and, as e-mails between Shapiro and NCAA investigator Stephanie Hannah make clear, Shapiro wouldn't consent to the visit after the NCAA balked at paying for Perez to attend. If investigators had come, Shapiro says, "I would have walked them detail by detail through the whole maze."
A DOZEN YEARS ago Tom Hosty said of the enforcement process, "It's not adversarial.... You are trying to get the truth together." That's no longer accurate. Today schools lobby for evidence to be tossed or threaten to sue if they don't like the NCAA's findings or sanctions. The Southern Cal case took four years, and the notice of allegations ran some 500 pages because it included the school's challenges to assertion after assertion. To fight the NCAA, universities now turn to high-powered lawyers like Mike Glazier of Bond, Schoeneck & King, the firm that represented both Miami and UCLA in their recent cases. A former member of the NCAA's enforcement staff, Glazier has represented dozens of schools in infractions cases for over 25 years.
In theory the NCAA and its members are partners. And at first, Miami and the enforcement division seemed to be similarly aligned. As school attorney Judd Goldberg wrote Najjar in an October 2011 e-mail, "The university, like the NCAA, has the same ultimate interest in discovering the truth." Indeed, Miami's lawyers knew from the start that the NCAA was coordinating with Shapiro's lawyer to develop evidence from the bankruptcy subpoenas.
Every school supports stronger enforcement until it is the subject of an investigation. And now, with revenues from football and basketball greater than ever, a school's incentive to challenge every claim of every NCAA investigator is just as great. Miami eventually decided it had more to gain by getting feisty after news broke that the NCAA had contracted with Perez to get the depositions of Sean (Pee Wee) Allen, a former Miami student and former part-time Hurricanes equipment room employee who worked as Shapiro's gofer, and Michael Huyghue, Shapiro's partner in Axcess Sports. Hauled before NCAA investigators shortly after Shapiro went to the NCAA, Allen first denied knowing of anything improper, protestations he has since said were lies he told out of panic. Later, deposed under oath by Perez, Allen repeated some of Shapiro's claims of improper benefits. A school that really shares "the same ultimate interest in discovering the truth" might insist that such testimony be included in the record precisely because it's taken under oath-particularly when Allen would echo, in sit-downs with The Miami Herald, CBSSports.com and ESPN's Outside the Lines, much of what he said in his deposition.
Since the hostile exchange between Miami and the NCAA, two more depositions taken for the bankruptcy case-of Roberto Torres, Shapiro's former CFO, and Marc Levinson, a childhood friend and one of his lawyers-have corroborated that Shapiro entertained Miami athletes in violation of NCAA rules. "To be honest with you, I don't think I had anyone who contradicted him," says Johanningmeier, who adds that other interviewees recounted improprieties or supplied details that Shapiro hadn't known about or remembered. Even if the NCAA didn't include the most salacious charges in the notice of allegations, Johanningmeier says "we did have some individuals acknowledge what he said was correct" about visits to strip clubs where "much more went on than stripping.... If you made a movie out of it, it would have to be X-rated."
Shapiro's credibility has nonetheless remained an issue because of his crimes; Miami called him "delusional and mentally unstable" in its motion to dismiss the case. (As for his own reputation, Johanningmeier disputes media reports that he bought Shapiro a prepaid, disposable phone. He says he wired money into Shapiro's commissary account to pay for phone or Internet service, which is the only way to communicate expeditiously with an inmate-just as SI had to do.) The NCAA, Miami charged, had lied to the school and misled witnesses, and was "unable to detach its desire to believe the most scandalous and gossip-friendly allegations" while subscribing to a "belief that if someone lies twice, it somehow becomes the truth."
Shalala also argued that the Hurricanes had suffered enough from self-imposed penalties that included ruling 13 players ineligible before the 2011 season and a ban on postseason play for two years. Time was when you didn't dare challenge the enforcement division, for that only ensured stiffer sanctions when you inevitably lost. But Shalala's willingness to stand up to the NCAA played well in South Florida. And with so much money riding on big-time college sports, the quaint image of a charged school standing shoulder to shoulder with the NCAA to find the truth has given way to a determination to leverage every advantage to limit any losses.
Today the NCAA is so impotent that Miami may well skate with few further penalties. But the irony in the school's strategy to demonize Shapiro remains: If he was a conniver, he was the Hurricanes' very own conniver-someone the school was only too happy to hold close, and someone with whom athletes, coaches and staff freely consorted. Now Miami wants the world to believe that this same man is too disreputable to credibly implicate its athletic program. This week in Indianapolis, members of the committee on infractions will take the measure of that argument.
Meanwhile administrators, boosters, recruiters and prospects around the country will make another set of judgments: Does the NCAA have the standing to adjudicate cases at all? Is any cop on the beat, cyber-savvy whippersnapper or old school gumshoe, equipped to police college sports today? And if the answer to that last question is yes, does the NCAA have a better chance to enforce its rules under Mark Emmert? Or out from under him?
Comment