FILE - In this March 12, 2019, file photo, William "Rick" Singer, founder of the Edge College & Career Network, departs federal court in Boston after pleading guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal. Singer, 62, who pleaded guilty in March 2019 to charges including racketeering conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, is scheduled to sentenced on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston for running the scheme that federal investigators dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)
The college admissions scandal that sent celebrities and wealthy Bay Area parents to prison for paying bribe money to get their average kids into elite universities is finally coming to a close after nearly four years as the mastermind behind the scheme, Rick Singer, is set to be sentenced today in a federal court in Boston.
Singer made $25 million off those desperate, prestige-obsessed parents, then ratted them out by wearing an FBI wire and is now asking for a sentence lighter than the ones imposed on some of his clients.
Federal prosecutors are asking for six years behind bars and a $10 million fine. Singer’s defense lawyer asked for six months. Singer, who sold his luxurious Newport Beach home at the height of the scandal and was tracked down by the Bay Area News Group last summer living in a mobile home park in St. Petersburg, told a neighbor he was expecting a light sentence.
In a sentencing document, federal prosecutors said that Singer paid more than $7 million in bribes, and spent $15 million of his clients’ money for his own benefit. He also created a phony charity to funnel the bribe money so parents could deduct it from their taxes.
“Staggering in scope, Singer’s scheme was also breathtaking in its audacity and the levels of deception it involved,” prosecutors wrote. “His corruption and manipulation of others were practically limitless. Singer is far and away the most culpable of the Varsity Blues defendants – by orders of magnitude – and is therefore deserving of the longest sentence.”
Singer, 62, started his career as a college admissions consultant in Sacramento, and quickly tapped into the anxiety of parents who wanted their children to be admitted, without the qualifications, to the best universities, and the bragging rights to go along with it. Many paid upwards of a half million dollars for what Singer called the “side door” to admissions – not the front door where teens would be admitted on their own merits, or the “back door” when parents donate millions to universities and get their names on buildings. Instead, Singer arranged for expert proctors to take SAT exams, often without the students’ knowledge, and to bogus athletic credentials, sometimes with Photoshopped images of the teens participating in sports they never actually played. Former Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer, the only defendant who didn’t personally pocket bribe money from the scheme, was sentenced to one day after admitting to holding open two spots for Singer’s unqualified clients.
In a letter to the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, Singer said his “moral compass was broken,” he thrived at “winning at all costs” and “choosing right over wrong became less important than doing whatever had to be done to be recognized as the “best.” He blamed, in part, unspecified “suppressed childhood trauma.”
Some 50 parents and college administrators involved in the scheme have already been sentenced, from as little as probation to as much as 30 months in prison. Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman served 14 days in prison in 2019 after pleading guilty to hiring Singer to fraudulently boost her older daughter’s SAT score. Lori Loughlin, the Full House star, served two months in prison after she and her fashion-designer husband admitted to paying Singer $500,000 to have their two daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as crew team recruits though they weren’t rowers.
The scandal, dubbed “Varsity Blues” by federal agents, ensnared a number of wealthy Bay Area parents, including Mill Valley private equity investor Bill McGlashan who served three months in prison after paying Singer to inflate his son’s ACT score. He also talked to Singer about getting his older son into USC as a football kicker using doctored photos. Elizabeth Henriquez, whose husband, Manuel, resigned from his Palo Alto venture firm when the couple was caught, served 7 months in prison after the couple paid more than $500,000 for test cheating for their two daughters and to bribe the Georgetown University tennis coach to admit the older girl as a phony player.
Check back for updates on this developing story.
Originally published at Julia Prodis Sulek