Having previously torpedoed the USC athletic department in a spectacular manner, Yahoo Sports published a laundry list of damaging accusations made by convicted Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro concerning any number of inappropriate benefits he lavished upon University Of Miami football and basketball players over an 8 year span. Long linked to The U, 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell tells readers of his New Times column, “that punk (Shapiro) could never be me.”
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.