Nevin Shapiro wishes he could wear my
shorts for one day. The New Jersey-born Napoleon dubbed himself "Little Luke" in a
so-called investigative report by Yahoo! Sports claiming all sorts of
corrupt shit Shapiro committed while he was a booster of the
University of Miami athletics program.
The claims even include hooking up football
players with prostitutes and buying them bottles at Mansion. That
punk could never be me. (Update: On Thursday, Luke called the NCAA "modern-day slavery.")
First of all, I have never been a UM booster. I have never given a dime to the school. I have and always will support the players and the program out of civic pride, but I never violated any NCAA rules when I was the team's biggest fan in the '80s. And I definitely would not have ever paid for a stripper to abort a baby allegedly fathered by a UM football player, like Shapiro claims he did.
You can't be me just by reading a Dan Le Batard article in the Miami Herald from 21 years ago alleging I paid players for hits on the field. The NCAA investigated those accusations and found no wrongdoing on my part. This notion that I was paying players is false. It never happened.
If Nevin really wanted people to see him as "Little Luke," he would have dedicated part of his life to helping kids in Miami's inner-city neighborhoods get a college education. He certainly never started a youth athletic program that has been around for more than 30 years helping underprivileged parents in Liberty City mold their children.
It has never been about money for me. It has always been about community service. That's what being Uncle Luke is really about.
Read more in our December 2010 feature, "Nevin Shapiro: Miami's Caligula."
Shapiro is nothing more than a jilted groupie who fucked over a lot people. He is an opportunistic schemer who now wants to play the role of jailhouse snitch. His word isn't worth squat, especially if Yahoo! paid him for the exclusive. Nevin is angry because he couldn't get former players to invest in his Ponzi scheme or come to his rescue when his criminal enterprise was exposed.
I always had a feeling Shapiro was a sketchy motherfucker. I could see right through him two minutes into our first conversation. During one of our meetings, he was trying to get me to be a part of his sports agency because he knew I work with all the kids in the inner city playing football. He also complained that the former players didn't want to invest in his food business after he had bought jerseys and memorabilia to support the program.
He was all about himself. Shapiro wanted to use me like he was using the UM players and other celebrity athletes he courted. I knew to stay away from him. So did Randy Shannon, who warned all of his assistants that if he caught them with Shapiro, he would fire them. Randy hated that beady-eyed defamer. Surprisingly, Shannon's name was conspicuously absent in Yahoo!'s breathtaking 11-month investigation.
The NCAA shouldn't even waste any gas money on this guy. But the investigators have to do their due diligence. In the meantime, every UM fan should send a letter to Shapiro's prison warden and insist he remain in the general population.
Follow Luke on Twitter at: @unclelukereal1.
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