College-Scandal Punishment Gets Harsher With Richer Bribes
The remaining 13 parents who pleaded guilty in the sprawling corruption prosecution are likely to take note of this theme.
(Bloomberg) -- The second parent sentenced in the U.S. college-admissions scandal got four months in prison -- far longer than the two-week sentence of the first parent, Felicity Huffman -- for paying $250,000 to get his son into the University of Southern California as a bogus water polo recruit.
“This isn’t a mistake,” the judge said of Devin Sloane’s participation in the scam, also sentencing Sloane to two years’ supervised release, a fine of $95,000 and 500 hours of community service. “This is a decision and a course of action.”
The remaining 13 parents who pleaded guilty in the sprawling corruption prosecution are likely to take note of this theme as their own sentencing hearings approach. Before meting out Sloane’s term, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani grilled his lawyer on the defense’s argument that the 53-year-old Los Angeles water-systems executive was a good man lured into crime by a grifter, Rick Singer, the scheme’s admitted mastermind.
“Why does it matter, in terms of my sentencing, why someone else invited him to do this crime?” Talwani asked.
She said the defense was putting criminals into two categories: good people who make mistakes and bad people who get caught.
“I don’t sentence good people or bad people,” Talwani said. “I sentence people.”
Prosecutors had asked for a year.
The sentence comes as the government said it had filed additional charges of international money laundering and wire fraud against Xiaoning Sui, a Chinese national living in Canada who is the latest person named in the case. Sui allegedly paid Singer $400,000 to get her son into the University of California at Los Angeles as a purported soccer recruit.
Huffman laid out $15,000 to rig her daughter’s entrance-exam scores. Sloane’s crime was “far more egregious,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen told Talwani on Tuesday before sentence was passed. Sloane paid 17 times as much, he said, adding that the “Desperate Housewives” star “has owned her criminal activity, while the defendant played the victim and blamed others.”
Rosen said that Sloane literally “threw his son into the family pool,” a reference to a photo he set up to make his son look like a water polo player, and that he later tried to recover a donation he made to USC as a bribe -- an assertion the defense denied.
“Let this be a lesson learned,” Rosen said. “When you bribe someone and commit a crime, you don’t get your money back.”
The parents who pleaded guilty hope to win leniency, but those who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lock in admission to elite schools for their kids may be wondering what their sentences will look like in the wake of Huffman’s and now Sloane’s. Another 19 parents have chosen to fight it out at trial.
Sloane rose from poverty to lead a life of business success and public leadership, only to be corrupted by Singer’s proposition, he said in court filings. He grew up in a chaotic home without regular meals or stable housing, he said, working his way through college at USC and building his first fortune in the ’80s with one-stop centers for gas, a car wash and gourmet coffee. He went on to found a Los Angeles-based provider of drinking water and wastewater systems, according to court papers.
Sloane said he never wanted his son to experience the deprivation and “emotional pain” that pervaded his own childhood.
The defense asked the judge to review Sloane’s prior “extraordinarily honest” life and consider how Singer “targeted, manipulated and slowly and deliberately lured Mr. Sloane into the conspiracy.”
“There are no words to justify my behavior,” Sloane told Talwani on Tuesday, his voice wavering. “I profoundly apologize to my son and to all the aspiring young students and their parents who feel betrayed by me.”
Sloane’s lawyers sought a sentence of unusually long community service -- 2,000 hours over three years, compared with 250 hours for Huffman -- in which Sloane would develop a project for the Special Olympics. Several years ago, he sponsored 157 members of the Italian team during the games in Los Angeles, according to his attorneys.
“He is using his wealth to attempt to buy his way out of jail,” Rosen told Talwani. He said Sloane had proposed a sentence “unavailable to poor and middle-class defendants who cannot afford to give up work for three years.”
Singer, the ringleader, raked in millions of dollars through frauds on universities nationwide, from USC, Stanford and UCLA to Georgetown and Yale, according to the U.S. None of the colleges or students in the scandal were charged.
Sloane told the judge in court papers that he foolishly bought into Singer’s sales pitch that the crime was justified by an admissions process already broken by bias.
“How stupid I was to believe this,” he wrote. “The irony is that my actions helped make the system even less fair.”
Sloane must surrender on Dec. 3.
The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
--With assistance from Patricia Hurtado.
To contact the reporter on this story: Janelle Lawrence in Boston at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Steve Stroth
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