Top

news

Stories

 

Adam Meyer, Florida's Gambling King, Shouldn't Have Bet on Nevin Shapiro

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. He says 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 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 South Florida history.

Nevin Shapiro — the convicted Ponzi schemer now trying to implode University of Miami athletics with allegations he paid off players — spent millions with 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 it 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 1940s, handicappers called "touts" realized they could profit without the risks of being a bookie, a job illegal everywhere but Vegas. The Mob soon got in on the action. 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 1970s when he landed a gig talking up football lines on CBS.

Meyer was born in New York in 1972 but grew up in Fort Lauderdale. He caught the betting bug as a freshman at the University of Miami, when 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. (Sterling also served three months.)

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.

It's difficult to tell how much of Meyer's edge is legit and how much is show biz. Nationally, more than a thousand professional handicappers like Meyer make millions selling sports picks, but few if any consistently beat Vegas.

1 | 2 | All | Next Page >>
 
My Voice Nation Help
29 comments
Sort: Newest | Oldest
jaheim
jaheim

 When you are stuck in a situation where nearly every month your money inflow is very less or close to zero and your money outflow still remains the same. This will lead you to a state where soon you will have no money and then you start receiving calls from one and all to repay their money. You are bankrupt when you are in a situation like this. But for you to be called bankrupt and for you to be exempted from some of your debts you have to be legally termed as bankrupt.

Matt Murray
Matt Murray

Adam Meyer is a slimeball and should be locked up in a cell with his buddy Nevin Shapiro. They deserve each other. They are one in the same. Shapiro ran a ponzi scheme while Meyer has been deceiving sports bettors and the public for decades.

Ms. Truthy Saidit
Ms. Truthy Saidit

To whom it may concern,    Whatever!! Like whatever go and gamble your money anyway like we care about this story. Like he totally made himself unavailable for me when I like through myself at him. Like there is nothing wrong with me!!! LOSER like go find yourself another SLUT machine to gamble over I'm gonna find me a man!Till next time I'm just hear to tell the Truth, the Truth that Grandaddy always told me to do.Best of Luck,Ms. Truthy Saidit 

Rmd5158
Rmd5158

It's obvious that BBD is either an employee, friend or Mr. Meyer himself. Let me relate my experiences in which my clients have had interactions with Mr. Meyer or his company. The experiences have been life changing. The only problem is these experiences were all where they felt they were either taken by Mr. Meyer or one of his employees. In every experience they were told Mr. Meyer had special access to games that won at over 70%, 85% or even 95% of the time and Mr. Meyer had access to information not available to the public. In every instance my clients lost life changing money. I'm talking anywhere from $20,000 to almost one million dollars. A few of my clients dealt with Mr. Meyer in real estate transactions or because of loans or his role in other failed businesses.I work in South Florida as a Private Investigator and have been contacted or hired to investigate Mr. Meyer by almost a dozen people over the last decade. You would think people would do a google search before they send money to a sports tout or person with such a checkered past but it seems very few people do. If you do a google search with Mr. Meyer's name and add key words like Fraud, Scam, Ripoff, Avoid and Is he reputable, you will have reading material that will keep you busy for many, many hours and possibly days.Have you heard the saying if it sounds to good to be true? That should apply to Mr. Meyer and his working crew at Real Money Sports D/B/A Adam Wins. In every instance the client went in with modest expectations and then Mr. Meyer or one of his workers would fill their head with thoughts that with Mr. Meyer's "Special" games they wouldn't have to work again or make life changing money in a very short period of time. It's amazing Mr. Meyer has gotten away with this type of behavior for so long a period of time. His track record of unpaid debts and problems span now almost two decades. The article just touches on a few. He's had many other problems that didn't make this article or the papers. This isn't the type of person in my opinion as a private investigator that anyone wants to deal with on a professional level. In my investigations we found Mr Meyer to have no source of ANY special information in which to make his clients money.In fact it appears not one person has every come up with any facts that Mr. Meyer can win them even a little bit of money. Most people become clients after hearing Mr. Meyer on the radio or were cold called where he made unfound claims of winning streaks that were mathmatically impossible to attain. You would think only people with  2nd grade educations would fall for his tactics but he does get his fair share of gullable marks. He claims to have hundreds of employees when in fact we found only about a dozen at a time work for him. In every case of checking on an employee they were either a lower entry level type skill level employee and quite a few convicted felons. The band of employees is so unskiiled that I doubt even 25% even have a two year degree from a community college. It's debatable if half the employees even know how to operate a computer. In the hundreds of hours where we were doing surveillance on Mr. Meyer he never seemed to be meeting with any information people that could better his chances of becoming a more skilled handicapper. Instead he likes to spend most of his day doing errands, eating lunch out and coaching sports teams. In over 40 days of surveillance we estimated he spent less than 90 minutes daily in the office and I doubt if much of that was actually studying information to gain an edge, talking to his  "special" sources or talking or gathering clients. It's obvious he doesn't have thousands of clients as most clients last days or weeks at the longest until they realize that they could probably do better selecting their bets on their own.Mr. Meyer even makes quoted statements in this and other articles to try make it sound like he is an educated professional who had other options. Meyer claimed during a low point in his career where he went broke his parents begged him to go to law school. This appears to another one of Mr. Meyer's dreams. He had so few credits in college and such a poor GPA that it's as likely that Mr. Meyer would have ever been a practicing lawyer as the next person signing up for Mr. Meyer's pick pack would soon become a millionaire off betting his fairy tale picks. Mr. Elfrink isn't much of a writter but at least he gave the public a little insight into what a bad person Mr. Meyer really is.I obviously make money by investigating people like Mr. Meyer but I also don't like seeing people hurt over and over again and my hope is one day he's taken off the street and housed at one of our local or state prison facilities.

Susan34
Susan34

The author should check the Adam Meyer with the right birthdate. On some of these alleged cases (that were dismissed anyway) the birthdate for Adam Meyer is born in 63. The Adam Meyer who is all over radio and tv was born in 1972. Wow i hope he sues your asses

Tim Elfrink
Tim Elfrink

All the cases in the story involve Adam Meyer of Adamwins.com. The police reports indeed show that his birthdate is in 1972.

Dtm5
Dtm5

Adam Meyer is one of the most kind, good hearted men i have ever come across. Not that it matters, but he bought his house for 2 million

BBD
BBD

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.  

ami hermann
ami hermann

scammer

kevin moss
kevin moss

U rock adam...people are haters.....keep doing what ur doing..........

 
Browse Voice Nation
  • Voice Places Broward / Palm Beach

    Voice Places

    Find everything you're looking for in your city

  • Happy Hour App

    Happy Hour App

    Find the best happy hour deals in your city

  • Daily Deals

    Daily Deals

    Get today's exclusive deals at savings of anywhere from 50-90%

  • Best Of

    Best Of...

    Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city