Fallen Wall Street Lawyer Gets One Month in College Scandal
Top Lawyer Gets One Month Jail in College Admissions Scam
(Bloomberg) -- On a phone call with the mastermind of the biggest college-admissions scam in U.S. history, Gordon Caplan asked what would happen if his daughter got caught cheating on her entrance exam.
“I’m not worried about the moral issues here,” Caplan, then co-chairman of the prestigious New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, said with a laugh, according to an FBI transcript of the call. “I’m worried about the, if she’s caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”
But it was Caplan, the American Lawyer’s Dealmaker of the Year in 2018, who got caught. In federal court in Boston on Thursday, he was sentenced to one month in prison after pleading guilty in May to a fraud-conspiracy charge for paying $75,000 to fix his daughter’s ACT scores.
“What has been exposed by the government is the tip of the iceberg,” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said of the sprawling plot in which 35 parents, plus a handful of athletic coaches at elite colleges across the country, have been charged. She asked a prosecutor to repeat the total haul that the scheme’s admitted ringleader, Rick Singer, brought in.
“Twenty-five million dollars,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen responded.
“If ever there was a case of a need for general deterrence,” Talwani said, “this is one of those examples.”
She has given time behind bars to each of the four parents sentenced so far. “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman was the first, receiving a 14-day sentence, followed by two Los Angeles businessmen, who drew four-month prison terms for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their sons into school, one as a bogus water polo recruit and the other as a fake tennis star.
Caplan had asked for the same two weeks Huffman got, if he had to be incarcerated. He noted that the judge gave Huffman that term for paying $15,000 to have her own daughter’s scores rigged. Prosecutors had asked for eight months, arguing Caplan showed a striking moral indifference, especially for a lawyer at the top of his profession.
While Caplan’s crime was similar to Huffman’s, the judge noted that Caplan took an extra step. Even after gaming ACT Inc.’s accommodations for students with special needs as part of the scheme, he hired a lawyer to fight the company when it withdrew its approval for extra testing time and told him it would withhold his daughter’s scores as illegitimate.
“It was a moment where he could have backed out of it,” Talwani said, “but chose to push ahead.”
Caplan’s sentencing marks a dizzying descent for the once-highflying New York M&A lawyer. When he rang in the new year, he was a star at Willkie, which ranks 50th on the American Lawyer’s 2019 list of the top 100 law firms. The ranking cited profit per equity partner of $3.1 million. He is due to report to prison on Nov. 6.
“I disregarded the values I’ve had throughout my life,” the 53-year-old attorney told Talwani just before she sentenced him. He said “the real victims of this crime are the kids and parents who play by the rules in the college admissions process.”
In July, the Attorney Grievance Committee in New York imposed an interim suspension and will order full disciplinary action soon after the sentencing, his lawyers said. Talwani rejected the government’s argument that his crime was worse because he’s a lawyer.
“This wasn’t somebody who used their position, such as a banker to embezzle money,” she said.
The judge also found that Caplan “explicitly” refused to take part in Singer’s “side door” scheme for guaranteed admission at a coveted college. When Singer revealed he was bribing coaches to secure the placements, Caplan said he wasn’t interested.
In a phone conversation Singer secretly recorded as part of a deal with the government, he assured Caplan that lots of wealthy families were using his services. Walking him through the racket, he said his daughter would “be stupid” in a psychological evaluation in order to get a learning-disability designation. That way, she could take the exam over two days at a special center where Singer had placed one of his conspirators, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors disclosed for the first time, in court papers ahead of the sentencing, that ACT Inc. had worked secretly with them in their sting. After Caplan’s daughter had twice been denied the extended-time accommodation, the company, “acting at the request of law enforcement,” granted it in November, the U.S. said. When ACT notified Caplan that they wouldn’t score his daughter’s exam, he told Singer it was the end.
“Well we’re f---ed,” he said, according to the transcript.
The defense blamed the stress of Caplan’s “family situation,” referring to circumstances redacted in court papers, and pointed to “the outsized role that money and special advantages already play” in college admissions.
“The court is faced with the daunting task of deciding what additional punishment -- beyond his reputation, the fundamental breach of his daughter’s trust, his forfeited livelihood, and the destruction of his legal career -- is sufficient,” Caplan’s lawyers wrote to Talwani. They said he was now “a broken man.”
In addition to his prison term, Caplan must pay a $50,000 fine and do 250 hours of community service.
The case is U.S. v. Abbott, 19-cr-10117, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net;Janelle Lawrence in New York at jlawrence62@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey, Joe Schneider
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