During the early segment of 560 WQAM's Michael Irvin show, Yahoo Sports investigative reporter Dan Wetzel gave his take on convicted Ponzi schemer and former University of Miami athletic booster Nevin Shapiro, who fed the website what will arguably one of the biggest sports scandal stories of all time. Wetzel said he believes everything Shapiro told him and his colleague Charles Robinson.
"I don't recall any point [during the 11-month investigation] when he made an allegation that we later disproved," Wetzel said. "If there was something we couldn't corroborate, we didn't run it. So much of what he said was backed up."
Wetzel added he and Robinson knew from the start that Shapiro was a pathological con artist, but that they ultimately found him credible. "He is a fascinating person," Wetzel told Irvin. "I never met a guy who ran a billion dollar Ponzi scheme. He was complex. He was gregarious. He can be incredibly funny so you can see how people got sucked in."
As far as repercussions for the University of Miami football program, Wetzel thinks the "death penalty is a possibility."
Wetzel wrote two of the sidebars in the Yahoo investigation. One piece described how Shapiro publicly berated the University of Miami's compliance officer in a luxury suite during the football team's last home game at the Orange Bowl. The other story was a profile on Shapiro in which Wetzel noted Tim Elfrink's feature story on the convicted scammer called him "Miami's Caligula."
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