Federal prosecutors pursuing the biggest university admissions fraud in U.S. history had a “raging debate” over whether to target the scheme’s mastermind or use him to go after the wealthy parents accused of buying their kids’ way into college.
In the end, Andrew Lelling, the former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who oversaw the case, went big.
Lelling decided to cut a deal with William “Rick” Singer in exchange for his cooperation. That has resulted in almost three dozen parents—from former Pimco chief executive officer Douglas Hodge to actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman—pleading guilty to spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kids into school with altered test scores or as phony athletes.
“It’s rare that you do a case that becomes part of the day-to-day conversation nationwide,” Lelling said in an interview, as the first of the parents stand trial in Boston. “It really penetrated the public’s awareness.”
The sprawling prosecution was splashed on the supermarket tabloids with the 2019 arrests of boldface names like Loughlin’s. Today, Lelling, who joined Jones Day as a partner this year, hopes the prospect of a perp walk and a prison jumpsuit will scare other parents straight.
The U.S. charged 40 moms and dads across the country, from TV stars to financial power brokers, alleging they had schemed to get their kids into elite universities from Stanford to Harvard through bribes and other trickery. The crackdown has secured 33 guilty pleas from parents, with jail sentences ranging from two weeks for “Desperate Housewives” star Huffman to nine months for Hodge.
“It’s not about the amount of jail time —it was about the fact of jail time,” Lelling said, calling it a “leveler” and referring to “these famous or super-wealthy people putting on the same orange jumpsuit as the guy who robbed the bank or sold drugs.”
The defendants in the Boston trial, now in its third week, are former Wynn Resorts Ltd. executive Gamal Abdelaziz, accused of paying $300,000 in bribes to get his daughter into the University of Southern California as a basketball player, and private equity executive John B. Wilson, who allegedly paid $200,000 to win his son’s admission to USC as a water polo player and another $1 million to get his daughters into Stanford and Harvard as athletes. They say Singer duped them into believing they were just donating to the schools.
Four more parents are scheduled to go to trial early next year. None of the colleges or students swept up in the case have been charged.
College Tour
Lelling, 51, is a parent himself, and was taking his daughter to look at colleges even as prosecutors in his office and federal agents were putting the massive case together. “That was a sort of a weird dissonance,” he said.
It began as just another white collar investigation, of a Los Angeles financier, Lelling recalled. Seeking leniency, the defendant tipped prosecutors and agents off about a Yale women’s soccer coach he said he had bribed to get his daughter into the Ivy League school. The coach would eventually lead them to Singer, who had promised parents a “bulletproof” way to get their kids into college by fixing their college board scores or turning them into phony athletic prospects.