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Nevin Shapiro reclines on a lounge chair, hugs his fluffy robe, chews a cigar and smiles. All around him on the wooden bridge, hundreds of drunken revelers scream, dance and raise the sexual tension. They are framed by the skyline of downtown Miami, which shines atop the black depths of Biscayne Bay.
Shapiro’s Bayfront Pool is covered in plexiglass that reflects the harsh glare of a professional light fixture. Jason Ferguson, a towering tackle from the Miami Dolphins, drinks Hennessy and bounces to the hip-hop sounds of DJ Irie, the Miami Heat’s beatmaker. Crowds surround open bars and ogle $ 500 metallic bottles of Armand de Brignac champagne. Packs of gorgeous women squeak across the dance floor as Ends linebacker Joey Porter walks past. In the midst of it all, Akin Ayodele, the veteran defender whose 29th birthday they are all celebrating, puts on a characteristic smile.
It’s September 22, 2008, a day after the Dolphins lost to the New England Patriots, and half of the Miami squad showed up to Ayodele’s party to start the week off in style.
Shapiro, in his embroidered robe, makes it all happen.
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After nearly 40 years in Miami, he finally has it all: parties with Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Dolphins; lunches with police chiefs; and his name engraved on a living room of his beloved University of Miami. This is Jay Gatsby of SoBe, a self-taught runt from Brooklyn who now runs an island stronghold he rarely leaves.
Ayodele’s party was part of a beautiful drunken effect. But it didn’t last. Now, two years later, Shapiro is languishing in a New Jersey federal prison awaiting conviction for devising an $ 880 million Ponzi scheme in what may be the biggest fraud case on record. in South Beach.
Over the past five years, South Florida has become America’s Ponzi scheme – giving birth to Scott Rothstein, fueling Bernie Madoff, sheltering Allen Stanford, and incubating dozens of little schemers. Nevin Shapiro marks the local nadir of this era of flight. Unlike the others – who were spending less conspicuously or giving up their riches elsewhere – he is the epitome of a Magic City con artist: a relentless, tasteless, status-obsessed gamer with a thirst for harems of girlfriends, famous friends and of luxury yachts.
But lost in all the schadenfreude over his fall has been any consideration of where he came from – and what his crimes say about the rest of us.
The truth is, Shapiro has lived his entire life surrounded by fraud. He’s a violent and unstable liar who nearly blinded a SoBe club owner with a punch in the mid-90s and threatened his former employees. His stepfather was convicted of stealing millions of dollars decades ago, and his longtime girlfriend and business partner was indicted last summer for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars by defrauding a beauty product company.
Looking back, her life story – told through interviews with friends, family and victims as well as voluminous court files – is a neon-lit ode to Miami’s willingness to take wealth at face value. immense and sudden, for better or for worse.
“A guy like this, you can’t throw him in jail long enough,” says Jack Hulse, a Sarasota retiree who lost $ 440,000 to Shapiro and recently sold a house to recoup his losses. “You can’t tell how many people he hurt so badly, and everyone was so willing to trust him for no reason.”
Barely five-foot-six, squarely built and baby-faced, Shapiro was stuck in the back hall of Stephen Talkhouse, a club on Washington Avenue. He had just put more than a dozen of his friends through a backdoor, trying to avoid the $ 25 cover charge. But club owner Peter Honerkamp, a 41-year-old New Yorker with a handlebar mustache, caught the group in the act and asked everyone to leave.
“Are you coming to me? Shapiro asked, his deep-set eyes narrowing in rage.
Honerkamp, baffled by the question, called a bouncer for help. He turned just in time to see Shapiro’s fist hiss in his face.
Honerkamp collapsed on impact. Where does all this blood come from? he wondered, touching her face.
It all happened after midnight on April 16, 1995. Shapiro was celebrating his 26th birthday, and the explosion of violence followed a turbulent adolescence and precocious manhood. He would brag about the devastating punch for years – even if he asked the state to remove the resulting criminal charges from his record.
Shapiro was born April 13, 1969 in Brooklyn to Ronnie and Larry Shapiro, and the family moved to Miami Beach when he was young. Ronnie, his mother, was the breadwinner.
Before Nevin was 10, his parents divorced. Court records show he was raised by Ronnie alone; we don’t know what happened to his father. (An official at Larry Shapiro’s last listed address at a Bay Harbor Islands apartment complex said he moved without leaving a forwarding address.)
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