Adam Meyer's dark hair is expertly slicked, and his muscular frame is crammed into a designer suit, the white shirt unbuttoned to expose his tanned skin. The TV lights gleam off his unsmiling, sculpted face.
"I have to win," Meyer says in his dry monotone. "[It's] the personification of what I'm made of."
Meyer's entire public image is a testament to victory. His personal website: adamwins.com. His Bentley's license plate: BET ON ME. His profession: predicting which sports teams will win every night, a task he claims to succeed at "over 63 percent of the time." Meyer purports to have made $2.8 million just by picking Green Bay in the last Super Bowl.
What Meyer doesn't mention during NBC 6's fawning interview or in any of his regular media spots — from Sid Rosenberg's radio show to profiles in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel to puff pieces in national magazines such as Cigar Aficionado — is that he lost big time betting on one of the worst scammers in Magic City history.
Nevin Shapiro — the convicted Ponzi schemer now trying to implode University of Miami athletics with allegations he paid off players — sent millions to Meyer while pissing away a huge chunk of his $880 million fraud on bets, new court documents show. The gambling king lost hundreds of thousands of his own cash in the scheme and is now on the hook to pay back almost $1 million to Shapiro's victims.
Shapiro's case not only shines a rare light on Meyer's unique place atop the gray area of "sports handicappers," but also raises uncomfortable questions about whether Shapiro used his close ties to UM to aid his gambling or Meyer's betting biz. Meyer's attorney, Joel Hirschhorn, also adds new allegations that he warned the university about Shapiro's shady finances.
"It's very hard to believe that a guy like Nevin Shapiro wouldn't use his position close to the team to influence his gambling," says Robert Jarvis, a Nova Southeastern University law professor who studies gambling law. "Did he go even farther and try to influence the outcome by taking a player out the night before a game and getting him rip-roaring drunk? These are legitimate questions."
Meyer denies receiving any inside tips from Shapiro. "I don't believe Nevin Shapiro ever provided Adam with even a single bit of information," Hirschhorn says.
As long as Americans have been wagering on sports, guys like Meyer have tried to make a profit by recommending winners.
As early as the '40s, handicappers, or "touts," realized they could profit without the risks of being a bookie (the guy who actually takes the bet), a job illegal everywhere but Vegas. The mob soon got in on the action too. Frank Rosenthal, a mobster who inspired Robert De Niro's character in Casino, was one of the first famous touts in Vegas. Jimmy the Greek took handicapping national in the early '70s when he landed a gig talking up football lines on CBS.
Meyer, who was born in New York in 1972 but grew up in Fort Lauderdale, caught the betting bug at the University of Miami. As a freshman, he answered an ad for a handicapping firm called American Sports and never looked back.
"I thought I could beat everything," he told Cigar Aficionado in June. "[I] burned through millions and millions of dollars by the time I was 22."
Meyer soon saw the dark side of sports gambling too. He and his boss, a local tout named Lee Sterling (who still makes weekly picks for the Miami Herald), were too enthusiastic in trying to collect a $500 debt from a Louisiana gambler named Richard O. Evans in 1993. When Meyer said, "I'm going to be your worst fucking nightmare," the family reported him and Sterling to the feds. In April 1996, the 24-year-old was convicted of threatening communications and sentenced to 90 days in prison plus a $5,000 fine. (Also, Sterling got a three-month sentence.)
The years after his prison term didn't exactly bring quick returns either. "I went broke two or three times," he told Cigar Aficionado. "I sold my cars and my jewelry and I cried myself to sleep... When I went broke, my parents begged me to go to law school. But I knew what I wanted to do."
In the struggle between casinos and gamblers, it's all about finding an edge. To set lines — official predictions of who will win and by how much — Vegas casinos use sophisticated computer programs and analyze reams of data.
Meyer says that over the years, he figured out how to consistently beat those predictions, combining his natural skills at analyzing games with his own batch of computer programs that simulate each matchup "thousands of times." He also claims to have casino moles who warn him when lines will change and sources in every sport to give him inside info about injuries and suspensions.
All told, Meyer's intel is worth $199 a month to his website subscribers. Premium clients pay him $2,999 monthly for "last-minute, up-to-the second" updates, and Meyer claims "celebrity clients" pay $250,000 a year. "They can count on that money turning into a million dollars in winnings," he says.
Are you Adam Meyers friend? Your a dumb piece of shit. You know exactly the Adam Meyer they are talking about in this article. It's the same piece of shit at ADAMWINS.com. The same piece of shit who claims to win money. HE SUCKS... This post is from a guy who lost thousands with Adam and sucks at bankroll management and is nothing but a sleezeball fag.
No wonder Adam Meyer is suing for 20 Million dollars. Anybody that knows Adam Meyer knows this is nothing of what he looks like. Looks like they referenced the wrong guy for multiple charges! http://goo.gl/Pfwwo and http://goo.gl/vYSTG and http://goo.gl/kb4eI Wow.
It is unfortunate that in the fallout from the Nevin Shapiro escapade, there seems to be a concerted effort to villainize Adam Meyer in a number of venues. Specifically here, Mr. Elfrink's piece has such a negative bias that it reads more as a personal vendetta than as a professionally prepared piece of journalism. Mr. Elfrink while attempting to refrain from crossing the line into false accusations, exploits and emphasizes every possible derisive angle from Mr. Meyer's personal grooming to the value of his homes - noted twice for some odd reason. Even for the purpose of supporting a particular position, a seasoned, professional journalist would attempt to balance this bias by at the very least presenting an opposing view. Granted this is not the New York Times here - but he has made not even the most minimal attempt to do this. The truth of the matter is that there are many individuals and companies who have had long and short term business interactions with Mr. Meyer who have found him to be pleasant, professional and responsible. He is also a devoted and protective father and a long term business owner with many loyal employees and associates - some who have been with him for decades. But perhaps disclosing this would not have made for as 'theatrical' an article (enhanced no doubt by the 'flames of fire' image accompanying the article). The business of handicapping and its related fields is not a particularly delicate business and attracts for the most part 'hard core' personalities or those who think they are. Mr. Meyer could have taken steps to 'block out' issues he may have had in the past - but he chose not to. While some of these issues - be they transgressions of youth or poor judgement may not represent particularly admirable moments, they provide a more honest account than being exploited by third parties for questionable gain. And while he may have had professional interactions with Mr. Shapiro - that does not make him one and the same.
When you contact a bankruptcy lawyer, he helps you n more than one way. He first makes you aware of your own financial situation. He is the best person to decide whether you can file for bankruptcy or no. He will surely take out time to tell you about your rights and duties, the laws of bankruptcy of the state etc. Calculating your incomes and expenses, collecting all the information and evidence to prove your bankruptcy is all done by your bankruptcy lawyer. You can lie to anyone you want but not your doctor or your lawyer or else you will be in deep trouble.
Adam Meyer: Florida's gambling king shouldn't have bet on Nevin Shapiro...@redears:disqus my best friend's mom makes $77 an hour on the computer. She has been out of job for 9 months but last month her check was $7487 just working on the computer for a few hours. Read about it here, CashHuge. com
"By 2009, when Shapiro could no longer sustain the fraud, Meyer realized he would never see the money again. He drafted a lawsuit, but in November, Shapiro filed for bankruptcy protection" BUT Meyers lawyer said he warned UM about Shapiro in 2008? Something doesnt add up, why warn UM but not your client?
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