Parents Who Cop to College Admissions Scam May Stay Out of Jail
Parents Who Cop to College Admissions Scam May Stay Out Of Jail
(Bloomberg) -- Getting your kid into Yale with bribes, fixed SAT scores and fake athletic feats is morally indefensible. But in the courtroom it may be a different story.
As the well-heeled parents in the U.S. college admissions scandal negotiate pleas -- or, less likely, fight it out at trial -- lawyers have some strategies in mind.
“You’re going to have parents saying, ‘Look, I was just trying to help my child. My intent was not to break any laws,’” said Diane Ferrone, a criminal defense lawyer in New York. “I think that the prospect of any of them serving any time in jail is highly unlikely.”
The Justice Department has already sent a signal of leniency by charging almost all the parents with a criminal complaint, which can be filed to start a case, instead of a formal indictment.
That’s “a billboard-sized shoutout inviting parents to come in, plead guilty and accept responsibility, or be dragged through an ugly formal charging process or even an indictment,” said Jacob Frenkel, a former enforcement lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission and ex-prosecutor and now a partner at Dickinson Wright in Washington.
The extent to which prosecutors will plea-bargain with the defendants remains to be seen. At a news conference last Tuesday to announce the charges, they said some parents had committed tax fraud by claiming the bribes were charitable contributions. But they also said none were charged with that crime. That gives the government leeway -- though no obligation -- to let parents bargain for a misdemeanor tax charge that may carry no prison time at all.
Frenkel called it “a shot across the bow” that “you may be facing felonies, but the opportunity is there to resolve this as a tax case,” rather than face the current charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest-services mail fraud.
In all, the U.S. charged 50 people in the nationwide scandal, calling it the biggest college admissions scam ever. That includes 33 parents from fields including law, high finance and entertainment. They are alleged to have paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and bribes to admissions consultant William Rick Singer, entrance exam proctors and university sports coaches to win their children places at elite schools such as Yale, Stanford and Georgetown -- $25 million in all.
Singer pleaded guilty to charges including obstruction and racketeering conspiracy, having agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department’s yearlong investigation by secretly recording calls with clients and wearing a wire for visits.
The charge against the parents carries a maximum prison term of 20 years, but under federal sentencing guidelines they are certain to face a far shorter time behind bars, if any. For each defendant who pleads or is found guilty, the judge will consider the nature of the crime, the sums involved and whether the parent has a criminal record, as well as mitigating factors such as a defendant’s cooperation and acceptance of responsibility, plus any health concerns.
When asked at a court appearance for Greg Abbott how much time he could face, the prosecutor told the judge 12 to 24 months. Abbott’s lawyer Jennifer Willis said zero to six months.
Willis didn’t return a voicemail or email message seeking comment.
“While the alleged conduct of the individual defendant parents varies, the ultimate question is, does this really rise to the level of being criminal?” Ferrone said. “Some of the parents may attempt to defend against the charges by saying they paid Mr. Singer for a service and were not aware of the full extent of the fraud.” Juries can be “receptive to claims of overcriminalization,” she said.
If a case does go to trial, defense lawyers are likely to attack Singer.
“He was at the center of the alleged scheme, and if the government is in the business of shutting down criminality, haven’t they done so?” Ferrone said. “Going after the parents may be a bridge too far.”
Prosecutors typically try to “flip” underlings, getting them to cooperate up the line, against superiors. In this case, they let Singer “cooperate down” against the parents, who may want to assail his motives and even argue he incited them to unwittingly commit new crimes, according to Steven Boozang, a criminal defense attorney in Boston.
“This guy made all this money. Instead of taking his medicine, he ran from the table and said, ‘How can I jam everybody else up?’” said Boozang, who has represented clients in organized-crime cases.
Still, the scandal has provoked outrage on social media and editorial pages across the country, and going to trial could take reputations and careers already badly damaged by the high-profile bust and ruin them.
Among those experiencing fallout are Gordon Caplan, accused of paying $75,000 to boost his daughter’s college board scores and now on leave from his post as co-chairman of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Bill McGlashan, who led TPG’s business focused on social good and founded its growth-investing platform. The private equity firm said on Thursday it had fired him.
Patrick Smith, a lawyer for Caplan, didn’t return voicemail or email messages seeking comment. McGlashan’s lawyer couldn’t immediately be identified.
The just-being-a-parent defense was at the heart of an open letter that playwright David Mamet posted last week in The Hollywood Reporter in support of the actor Felicity Huffman, a longtime friend and professional associate of his. She is charged with disguising a $15,000 bribe used to boost her daughter’s SAT scores as a charitable payment.
In the letter, Mamet derided the charges as blind to the “unfortunate and corrupt joke” of university admissions policies that favor the children of alumni and big donors.
“That a parent’s zeal for her children’s future may have overcome her better judgment for a moment is not only unfortunate,” he wrote. “It is, I know we parents would agree, a universal phenomenon.”
Martin Murphy, a lawyer for Huffman, declined to comment.
New York lawyer Murray Richman called the scandal “a crime without a cash benefit” and said parents may seek leniency by arguing they made no financial gain.
“Who was hurt? Society was, but a message will be sent, and these people have been embarrassed,” he said. “But nobody is going to jail on this one.”
How far parents can negotiate down any prison time will depend partly on how heavily involved they were in the scheme and how much money they paid, lawyers said.
Take Canadian dealmaker David Sidoo, who prosecutors say conspired with Singer for years to pay an impostor $100,000 to take the SAT for each of his two sons and continued long afterward with inquiries about the GMAT, the business school entrance exam. Such a long-term relationship makes an entrapment defense, for example, harder to mount.
Sidoo, the only parent indicted, is now on leave from his executive roles. His lawyer David Chesnoff, who has defended Robert Durst among others, said in an emailed statement that Sidoo would “contest both the legal and factual basis for the charge.” He declined to elaborate.
Also working against claims of being duped by Singer, and likely to spur a spate of pleas, is the trove of evidence investigators amassed in the form of recorded conversations, checks and emails, said Aloke Chakravarty, a partner at Snell & Wilmer and a former federal prosecutor who helped secure the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here,” Caplan, the Willkie Farr co-chairman told Singer about gaming his daughter’s test, according to one of the wiretap transcripts. “I’m worried about the, if she’s caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”
The first cases to make their way through the system will set the tone, Chakravarty said, with “good, creative lawyering” building a “frame of reference.”
When it comes time for sentencing, he said, he could see a judge going either way -- sympathizing with parents who wanted the best for their kids, or scorning them because “those same judges also went to elite schools, and earned their way into them.”
At least one lawyer has declared that sort of contempt for the defendants’ actions. In his 40 years as a criminal defense attorney, Gerald Lefcourt has advocated for the Chicago Seven and the Black Panthers, and believes “everyone deserves to have the best defense.”
And the parents? “I’m so turned off by this conduct,” he said.
Mamet, in his open letter, reached a different conclusion. The fairest verdict, he wrote, may be “Not Guilty, but Don’t do it Again.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net;Janelle Lawrence in Boston at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.