How do you cheat the woman that raised you?
Once you make it, you usually hear of players talking about taking their parents out the hood and buying them a big, new house and a bright shiny car. Players are clearly not obligated to do that. But, you should have an obligation to NOT RIP THEM OFF! Rumeal must have been sleeping during that ethics lesson in life, since he did just that.
CAMBRIDGE – Rumeal Robinson scaled the pinnacle of American sports in April 1989, an ice-in-his-veins basketball player from the streets of Cambridge who sank a pair of pressure-packed free throws to vault the University of Michigan to a storybook national championship.
His tale was the stuff of fantasy: rescued from homelessness at age 10, given shelter and self-esteem by strangers, and presented with a new life that once seemed destined for aimless tragedy when his biological mother abandoned him. He even had the Cambridge street he lived on named after him.
That tale, inspiring and incredible, has taken a shockingly tawdry twist.
His adoptive mother wants the street, Rumeal Robinson Place, stripped of its name and rededicated to her late husband. And she wants a mural of her son, placed in honor near the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School fieldhouse, purged of his glory-days image.
Now, what could have this guy done that is that horrible? He swindled his adoptive mother out of her home…
Helen Ford, incredulous and embittered, alleges that Robinson swindled her of the sprawling old home where she lived for 35 years and raised him. She has since been evicted, lost many of her belongings and mementos, and says she is struggling to pay the rent for an apartment in Somerville. “He’s not deserving of none of this fame,’’ said Ford, 65, who has worked as a safety officer for the Cambridge schools for 30 years. “He was thought of as a nice person, but he’s not a nice person. Not after what he’s done.’’ Robinson could not be reached for comment, but his lawyer said he finds the allegation “hard to believe.’’ Boston Globe
Ford and her attorney accuse Robinson of a brazen fraud committed in June 2003, when the lawyer alleges that Ford was duped into signing over the home to one of her son’s business associates. Dennis Benzan, the attorney, said that Robinson had asked Ford to put up the home as collateral for a loan he needed to build a luxury resort in his native Jamaica. Instead, amid a flurry of documents pushed under her pen, Ford says she unwittingly signed a deed that sold the two-family home to Robinson’s associate for $600,000. Ford says she never saw a dime of the money, a later mortgage defaulted, and Ford was dumbfounded when she received an order in March to vacate the home. Boston Globe
I hear that they will cut you a great deal on property down here Rumeal....
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