Read More: College Scandal’s Holdout Parents Aim to Put Admissions on Trial
“It was just one case among many,” Lelling said, but “once we began to learn about Singer, we began to realize the potential scope of this case, and it just grew and grew.” Ultimately he decided to strike a cooperation agreement with the corrupt admissions strategist, who the U.S. said had reaped $25 million from the racket. Under the deal, Singer agreed to secretly record conversations with the affluent parents he’d scooped up as clients.
Lelling has come in for some criticism of his decision to flip Singer against the parents—first-time, nonviolent offenders who couldn’t have engaged in the scheme without him. Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Boston, finds it “troubling” that the government let the “ringleader” cooperate and went after the parents. The strategy, which Gertner called a waste of resources, may also mean a lesser sentence for Singer than for some of the parents, sending the wrong message to other con artists, she said.
Who Is Deterred?
“Are you trying to deter the parents who are taking advantage of what Singer has offered to them, or are you trying to deter the guy who really worked out the scheme from beginning to end?” said Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It’s like the major drug dealer who ends up rolling on the street dealers. The question is whether the deterrent value would have been better if they had gone to the mastermind of the scheme.”
Gertner acknowledges that the case got “major-league publicity.”
“If what Lelling is saying is ‘I got the biggest bang for the buck by indicting all of these very fancy people,’ I suppose that’s true,” she said. But if Singer avoids prison, she said, “it will mean that if you ensnare a rich enough person, a high-profile enough person, you can wind up dealing to get out of trouble if you name that person.”
Brad Bailey, a former federal prosecutor in Boston now in private practice, said it’s “unusual to take the mastermind of an alleged sophisticated fraud and give him sentencing concessions and go after people who are theoretically below him” in the hierarchy of wrongdoing. In this case, he said, prosecutors decided to signal that no one is above the law.
“Here the whole philosophy of the government’s case is just because you’re rich and allegedly powerful, we the government are not going to let you get away with this,” Bailey said. “In their opinion, the only way to go after the Lori Loughlins and Felicity Huffmans and all these well-known folks is to do it through a Rick Singer.”
Big Impact
Lelling defends his call and the greater impact he believes it’s had.
“There is a problem we sometimes run into in complex cases where, if you don’t use one of the key targets as a cooperator, the case you charge will be relatively small,” he said. “But if you do use them, it gives you the opportunity to charge a case that’s very large.”