Shownotes Transcript
"Lay Them to Rest," out this October from Hachette Book Group, vividly opens up the world of forensic science. "Lay Them to Rest" brings readers to crime scenes, labs, and law enforcement offices, all in the name of identifying John and Jane Doe victims. It's written by a seasoned cold case researcher who also hosts the popular podcasts "One Strange Thing" and "The Fall Line." Readers immersed in "Lay Them to Rest" will even follow along as a victim is identified for the first time, and her family, decades later, finally get some answers.
Heartbreaking, hopeful, and insightful, Lay Them to Rest will show you how far we've come in solving the cases of the unidentified dead and how far we have yet to go. Pre-order Lay Them to Rest now, wherever you get books. This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. And this is what I did 30 years later when I founded WB21.
I created a product, I created a company that is executing my vision of changing the world, turning the financial industry in a fairer place where people from 180 countries have the opportunity to participate and get a bank account.
That's Michael T. Gastauer, a financial technology venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He's the kind of guy who measures his sleep in minutes instead of hours. The kind of guy that tries to hack every aspect of his life for maximum efficiency. The kind of guy who has coined his own personal motto. It's your mind that creates this world, he says. Makes sense coming from the kind of guy who lives in his own self-imagined reality.
They say Michael T. Gastower sometimes forgets which country he's in because of the constant travel. Such a workaholic that he keeps his clothing options minimal to save time. Speaking of time, they say Michael T. Gastower's schedule is so jam-packed that he wouldn't be able to tell you the current date if you asked him. Actually, there's a lot Michael T. Gastower wouldn't tell you.
Gastauer founded his first company in the early 90s at the age of 24 or 26 depending on which biography you read. It was an asset management business called GNS. It was based in Switzerland. And publicly Michael Gastauer claims he sold GNS five years later for $16 million to a Swiss investment firm.
It claims he used the proceeds from that sale to launch a second company that he later sold for almost half a billion dollars, which he turned into 10 billion in short order. Michael Gastower claims to be one of the wealthiest men in Germany. Those claims are dubious. In reality, GNS did exist, but it collapsed under the weight of a giant scam.
Michael Gastower had allegedly ripped off investors for more than $20 million. Gastower even scammed his own business partner, Peter Zimmerman, who soon after died by suicide. Michael Gastower was arrested in 2004 by Swiss authorities. It took five more years until he was finally convicted of commercial fraud, embezzlement, tax fraud, and forgery.
A judge labeled Gastower a quote, "shameless parasite," but only handed out an 18-month suspended prison sentence since Gastower had apologized and confessed.
By then, true to his online biographies, Michael Gastower had created a second company. It was basically a European PayPal clone. It was called Apex Global Payments. Gastower says he sold it to a Malaysian banking group for $480 million. No record of that sale exists.
But there is a record of Apex Global payments being sued by online gambling website Sportsbet in 2011 for not delivering the payments that it collected on its behalf. Michael Gastower publicly denied the allegations, dissolved Apex Global, and
and then agreed to pay $7 million to Sportsbet in recompense. Well, I had a relatively fortunate start because when I founded WB21, I had already sold my first company for $480 million. So I had the financial backing to do the seed funding of WB21. I have invested so far over $20 million in the company.
In 2015, Michael Gastower was back with a new venture that he claims he self-funded using the proceeds from the undocumented sale of APEC Global.
Gastauer has declared it his proudest achievement. It was called Black Banks, later renamed to Web Bank 21st Century or WB21. I guess x.com was already taken. You wake up one morning and decide you want to revolutionize an $80 trillion industry that's out there for a few hundred years and where major players have covered any opportunity.
And I say yes. WB21 offered an alternative to traditional banking. It was immediately available in 180 countries. Billions of people would gain access to financial services for the first time thanks to the company's proprietary real-time background check technology. Signing up only took seconds.
WB21 customers could send money locally or internationally with minimal fees. WB21 was also one of the very first banks to accept cryptocurrency. Any person, any individual out there that has access to the internet or to a smartphone is a potential customer for us. So our market is the world. Our clients are 8 billion people.
When we say today we have 5 million customers, it is impressive, but it's just the start. WB21 boasted more than 1 million customers within the first 10 months. Gastauer claimed JPMorgan Chase valued his company at $2.2 billion, a milestone that took its better-known competitor, TransferWise, more than twice as long to reach.
German startup publication Grunder Zene dug into the numbers after the celebratory announcement and found that the WB21 app only had 100 downloads on Google's Play Store. Michael Gastauer personally responded to let them know that the majority of customers did not use the mobile app, which disappeared entirely shortly after.
WB21 is my baby. It's my brainchild. I came up with this idea. The success of WB21 was undeniable, and even more so after Michael T. Gastauer took home the Global Banker Award in 2018. Wow, look at this beautiful award. Amazing. An award that has not been won by any other company before or since.
Because the Global Banker Award is not a real thing. WB21 organized the whole presentation. A celebration of one's self with piped in ovations. It seemed like Michael T. Gastower was surrounded by phony accolades. The magazine covers he's graced prominently displayed on his personal website are a bit suspect.
His Instagram account has over 2 million followers, almost certainly paid bots. There's no genuine engagement. Furthermore, Gastauer's Wikipedia page was deleted for citing unreliable sources and sponsored posts. And most concerning probably was that WB21 wasn't even an actual bank. It's stated as much in the terms and conditions that customers agreed to when opening an account.
And there were real customers. Most famously, Quadriga CX, the largest crypto exchange in Canada, whose CEO and founder Gerald Cotton died suddenly and mysteriously in 2018 while traveling in India.
He held the only key to $250 million worth of Bitcoin, which became inaccessible overnight. $9 million of that $250 million was reportedly held in an account at WB21. WB21 disputed that number and said it held more like $11 Canadian of Quadriga's stash.
The bank "provided no further information or documentation to support its claims" and had stopped cooperating with Ernst & Young, the court-appointed monitor. When independent journalist Amy Castor reported on WB21's Quadriga connection, the bank's "global head of litigation" threatened to sue her for defamation.
In the same vein, financial tech journalist Anthony Payton says a quote "thug" visited his home address and demanded he stop investigating after sending a series of questions to WB21 that were critical of the company. Yes, I mean we have been very open with those numbers because we think it's important you are transparent for the outside world.
Another one of WB21's 1 million satisfied customers was a man named Roger Knox. The Rocket, as he was known, ran an asset management company based in Switzerland called Wintercap, which was eventually revealed to be a core enabler of numerous pump and dump schemes.
More than 50 publicly traded companies, most of them shell corporations with no operations, secretly transferred massive quantities of the owner's stock to Knox and Wintercap, who helped promote and inflate the price before selling them on the open market like ordinary shares. The stock was transferred in portions of less than 5% to avoid reporting requirements, and the directors did not bother to disclose to the public that they were selling shares of their own company, as required by law.
Roger Knox collected over $164 million in these penny stock sale proceeds. He pocketed millions in fees for himself and distributed the rest to the company's owners via U.S. bank accounts controlled by Michael T. Gastauer at WB21 to help disguise the origin of the funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission caught on by October 2018 and froze Roger Knox and Michael Gastauer's assets.
Gastauer told the SEC that he had no knowledge of Knox's fraud, but they fined him $2 million for aiding and abetting anyway and seized $15 million from the bank accounts in question. Gastauer was never charged criminally. Roger Knox, on the other hand, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. He is currently awaiting sentencing.
The owners of those companies involved in the pump and dump schemes were in trouble too. Like this guy. It's amazing how many ideas, how many solutions to problems I come up with that I figure out while I'm swimming. It provides me that time, uninterrupted time, where I could basically think about different ideas, different solutions for my businesses. That's Maury Tobin, a
a 55-year-old Canadian businessman living in Los Angeles with his wife and six children. Maury Tobin owned two companies involved in the Wintercap pump and dumps, Cure Pharmaceutical and Environmental Packaging Technologies. Tobin owned and controlled virtually all the stock in both companies, and then promoted it for sale using false promises, which pumped its value.
Then he cashed in by secretly selling massive quantities of the shares he controlled, leaving the lured-in investors holding a bag of worthless securities and crushed dreams. For example, for his environmental packaging technology company, Maury Tobin organized a $1 million email and snail mail advertising campaign promoting the company's groundbreaking FlexiTank technology for transporting liquids in shipping containers.
"The Trump effect is already creating a buzz on Wall Street," the flyer read. His dedication to American business could soon push shares of environmental packaging technologies through the roof. Act now and you could grab quadruple-digit gains. Flexi-tank technology could soon return you 1,118% profits as America enters into a new manufacturing boom.
Through Roger Knox, Maury Tobin sold more than 200,000 shares of his environmental packaging stock on the first day of the promotion, June 12, 2017. He sold 66,000 more the next day. In total, he collected more than $1.5 million in proceeds.
In reality, environmental packaging had no flexi-tank technology or Trump effect. It was just a shell company that was initially set up as a valet parking business. The stock price bottomed out soon after. On June 27, 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission noticed and halted company trading.
Behind the scenes at Environmental Packaging, Maury Tobin and his co-conspirators were scrambling with Roger Knox to conceal their identities, but it was too late. The feds eventually pieced it all together. Maury Tobin's house in Los Angeles was raided in the spring of 2018. Tobin wasn't home, but agreed to fly to Boston to turn himself in.
While doing so, Maury Tobin was provided the opportunity to earn a more lenient sentence by sharing information with the authorities. They already had Roger Knox. They already had Tobin's lawyers who helped facilitate the scheme. Is there anything else that comes to mind? Actually, there was, Tobin admitted. He had been actively negotiating with the Yale women's soccer coach on the price of a bribe to get one of his daughters into the school. I'm sorry, come again?
That's right, Rudy Meredith is his name. He's been a well-respected coach at Yale for more than 20 years. Tobin told investigators that he had been paying monthly installments to Rudy for a few months now, but hadn't settled on a final price. The FBI was interested. Maury Tobin agreed to cooperate. He scheduled a meeting with Rudy Meredith in a Boston hotel room. The FBI had the entire place wired.
Agents watched as the two men agreed on a total cost of $450,000. Tobin hands over $2,000 cash and wires another $4,000 to Meredith a few days later. Boom, they got him. That's wire fraud. Coach Rudy Meredith was given the opportunity to earn a more lenient sentence by sharing information with the authorities. Who is this Rick Singer guy you mentioned in your meeting with Maury Tobin? They asked him.
Oh, Rick Singer. Why, he's a college admissions coach in Newport Beach, California, and the operator of the largest college admissions fraud in the country on this episode of Swindled.
Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
Most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. That's very specific, but get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which we've probably forgotten about.
I know I'm guilty, but thankfully, I started using Rocket Money. They found a bunch of subscriptions I'd forgotten all about and then helped me cancel the ones I didn't want anymore. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. With Rocket Money, I have full control over my subscriptions and I
and a clear view of my expenses. I can see all of my subscriptions in one place, and if I see something I don't want, Rocket Money can help me cancel it with a few taps. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you by up to 20%. All you have to do is submit a picture of your bill, and Rocket Money takes care of the rest. They'll deal with customer service for you. It's a dream.
Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash swindled. That's rocketmoney.com slash swindled. rocketmoney.com slash swindled.
Hi, my name is Rick Singer and I'm the founder of The Key. As a father myself, I understand the stress the college admissions process can put on your family. For the past 25 years, our coaches have been helping students discover their life passion and guiding them and their families through the complex college admissions maze.
My key method unlocks the full potential of your son or daughter and sets them on a course to excel in life. Getting into the right college will set the trajectory for the rest of your son or daughter's life. Don't leave it to chance. Let a key coach come alongside you and your family to truly unlock your students potential. William Rexinger has always been intensely competitive.
Armchair psychologists naturally point to his childhood as the impetus. They say that growing up short, chubby, and middle class in a wealthy Chicago suburb compelled Rick Singer to want to win at all costs. His competitive spirit truly blossomed when he enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio in 1984. Rick had abandoned his previous college try at the University of Arizona after two years. This time, he was serious.
Too serious, according to some. Rick played varsity basketball, baseball, and intramural football at Trinity. According to Nicole Laporte, author of Guilty Admissions, this is where he earned the nickname "Rick the Dick" because of his aggressive and off-putting approach to winning.
Rick Singer told Trinity's school newspaper that he wanted to be a basketball coach one day. Anyone who knew Rick would have snickered if they had heard him say that. As Laporte points out in her book, Rick Singer did not have the temperament to work with children of any age.
But he tried anyway. At 26 years old, Rick graduated with a bachelor's degree in English and physical education. He landed a job as an assistant basketball coach at a high school in San Antonio. But it didn't work out. On the sideline, Rick would argue with the parents, the opposing team, the water boy, anyone who would listen. He was fired after one season and decided to relocate to Sacramento, California.
There, he worked as a substitute teacher for a while before becoming the head basketball coach at Encina High School. Again, he was fired. The reason was never publicly divulged, but parents told the Sacramento Bee that Rick had been abusive towards the referees. Nobody was surprised.
Like many of his future clients, Mr. Singer continued failing upward. In 1989, he was hired as the men's head basketball coach at Sacramento State, but he was let go after only three seasons. At this point, Rick Singer must have taken a long, hard look at himself in the mirror. Coaching was his dream job, but maybe not in the traditional capacity. He had failed time and time again, and Rick Singer liked winning.
it was time to explore new ideas. In 1992, Rick Singer formulated a new consulting business called Future Stars College and Career Counseling. Rick's wife Allison, whom he had married a few years earlier, handled all the behind-the-scenes administrative work.
At the same time, Rick traveled around in his car, offering individualized attention and comforting guidance to high school students and their anxiety-ridden parents throughout the college admissions process. Each client earned him a couple thousand bucks.
Honestly, Rick Singer was ahead of his time.
The industry surrounding the college admissions process was still developing. It was a good idea and one that he would eventually revisit, but Rick Singer, at that current point in time, could hardly afford to pay his bills. He ended up selling Future Stars and taking a drastic career detour. Rick Singer became a middle manager at a call center. That job eventually led him to working for another call center in Omaha.
Rick was still coaching basketball on the side, screaming in middle school gymnasiums, reducing children to tears, but these call center gigs were serving him well. Rick Singer ultimately became CEO of another call center based in India. He only lost that job when the company sold to an Indian bank. Luckily, Rick owned a bunch of stock in the company, so he made out well.
Back in Sacramento, Rick Singer re-pursued his calling and launched College Source College Counseling. It was similar to his former counseling service, but now he was offering so much more. For $10,000, Singer would go so far as to fill out his clients' college applications for them. He'd exaggerate their accomplishments and lie about their ethnicities to fulfill his promise to earn them admittance into specific, highly exclusive universities.
And, most of the time, Rick Singer delivered. Word of mouth about this college whisperer spread among Sacramento's most wealthy. Rick Singer started billing himself as a life coach. He began giving presentations about his college admissions strategy to investment firms. Both employees and clients of those firms would sign up for his service.
Before long, Rick Singer had outgrown Sacramento. In 2012, he moved to Newport Beach, California in Orange County, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, about an hour south of LA. He bought a 1.5 million, 5-bedroom, Mediterranean villa-style house and lived there alone. Rick's marriage with Allison had recently ended after 22 years. They had one adopted child.
Allison hadn't been involved in Rick's business in a long time and he was hyper-focused. Not much can stand between a man and his dream. Around this time, Rick Singer renamed his business. The college source would now be called the Edge College and Career Network.
or simply the key for short. College has become so expensive and the process is much more complicated than I remember. It's not as simple as making a list of schools, taking tests, writing essays, and filling out applications. Without the help of the key, I would have never been able to sort out all the details and my son would have missed his chance to go to USC.
According to the Keys website, most of its clients were in California, but the network "has footholds in 81 American cities and five foreign countries."
including Florida. Singer had partnered with and began offering his services at the IMG Academy, a boarding school for sports in Bradenton, Florida that has produced some of the country's greatest athletes, especially in tennis. And that's one of the things I really love about being a coach for the key is I get to know my students. I get to know them on a deeper level. I get to know what their passions are. I get to know the schools they want to go and the right fit for them.
Also around this time, Rick Singer established his very own tax-exempt non-profit organization. It was called the Key Worldwide Foundation. Its mission was to quote, "provide education that would normally be unattainable to underprivileged students." The foundation's website says it funds dental care for quote, "needy Cambodians," after-school programs for children in 20 cities across the U.S., and life coaching for underprivileged girls in Los Angeles.
In reality, the Key Worldwide Foundation was nothing more than a vehicle to launder money as part of Rick Singer's new and wildly popular college admissions fraud scheme. Rick Singer had witnessed the process from every angle. He'd been a college student, he'd been a college coach, and he'd been a college counselor.
Rick had learned that athletes had an easier path into college. The academic standards were lower, quite frankly, and coaches at these universities could hand-pick kids as recruits even without granting them a scholarship. The Wall Street Journal found that athletes recruited by college coaches were accepted into the recruiting school 85 to 95 percent of the time. For everybody else, that acceptance rate was about 15 percent.
As a counselor, especially during his time at IMG, Rick Singer met a lot of college coaches. He knew how hard they worked, how underpaid they were, how frustrated they were with the fundraising process. Football and basketball are the only real money makers at the collegiate level. All the other little niche sports like rowing, sailing, tennis, soccer, water polo, etc. have to raise funds just to break even.
Rick Singer had identified the weakest entry point to many prestigious universities. It wasn't what he called the "front door." That's when a student is accepted on the basis of good grades and extracurricular activities. Traditionally, this is the most difficult way to get in, as it requires a tremendous amount of work and luck.
Getting admitted through the back door by showering the university in donations offered a little more assurance but was by far the most expensive option. On top of that, there was still no guarantee that they would give your applicant a second look.
But now, Rick Singer had introduced what he called the side door. It could guarantee admittance by arranging for a student to be recruited as an athlete, even if that student had never played a sport. That student would never have to go to practice, never have to play in a game, even though they were technically on the team. They could attend class like a regular student, and no one would ever know.
Hey, Rick. Hey there. Is this a good time for you? Yeah, it's good for me. So I just wanted you to walk me through the whole kind of water polo thing again and how is there any risk that this thing blows up in my face? No, like some article comes out that the polo team is selling seats into the school for 250 grand. Well, no, because she's a water polo player. But she's not. I mean, that's that's what I mean. Well, but she is.
Rick Singer could pull this off because he had built a network of college coaches that he could bribe to recruit his clients at seven different college campuses. The first one he convinced was Gordon Ernst, the tennis coach at Georgetown, and it didn't take much. Coach Ernst coached both the men's and women's teams for $65,000 a year.
Singer was especially excited about one of his more recent partnerships. He finally had a person on the inside at Stanford. It was the sailing coach, John Vandemoor, as you can hear during Singer's conversation with this interested parent. So I had a conversation with the Stanford sailing coach. And so I just gave the Stanford sailing coach $160,000 for his program.
And while we were having that conversation, I said, hey, I'm hoping that this 160 that I'm helping you with helps secure a spot for next year. Can I be guaranteed a spot for next year?
And he said, yes, I can send him your $500,000 that you wired into my account to secure the spot for one of your girls. I asked him for a second spot in sailing, and he said he can't do that because he has to actually recruit some real sailors so that Stanford doesn't catch on.
Right. Okay. Yeah, so that Sanford doesn't catch on to what he's doing.
Singer also worked with UCLA's women's soccer coach and Yale's women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith. But Rick's largest partner was the University of Southern California where he had Donna Heinle on his team. She was USC's senior associate athletic director and senior women's administrator. Donna held part of the final say in the athletic admissions process and she controlled a school bank account. What's not to love? This is how it worked.
Parents would quote "donate money to Rick Singer's nonprofit, the Key Worldwide Foundation, and then write it off on their taxes."
But instead of needy Cambodians, Singer, after taking his cut, would distribute the remaining funds, hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, to the various coaches who had accepted a Singer client. Most of that money went straight into the coaches' pockets. Only the Stanford sailing coach, John Vandemoor, forwarded the funds to the school's athletic program. This is how crazy it's gotten. I'm going to do over 730 of these
Wow. How many schools are you doing with that now? Is this the top 20 or 50, or is it more than that? MIT, do they have a side door? Yeah.
If the student needed academic help in addition to the side door, Rick Singer offered other services equally as unethical to build the ultimate admissions package. For $4,000 to $5,000, he could arrange for one of the psychologists in his network to certify a student as having a learning disability.
Doing so would grant that student access to accommodations such as extra time on standardized tests with the option to take them at an off-campus testing center. Statistics showed that the students' scores would improve dramatically with these additional luxuries.
and for an even larger payment, Rick Singer could guarantee a test score. It could accomplish this because he had two testing centers on the Dole, one in Houston and one in West Hollywood. Singer's clients, now classified with learning disabilities, could arrange to take their SAT or ACT at one of those centers, and Singer would send 36-year-old Harvard grad Mark Riddell to meet them there.
Riddell was the director of college entrance exams at IMG Academy. His job was to prepare kids for these tests. He knew them like the back of his hand. He was paid $10,000 a pop.
Sometimes Mark Riddell would use a fake ID and actually sit and take the exam for the student. Other times he would proctor the exam and change the student's answers after they turned it in. If the student were in on the scheme, Riddell would simply sit next to them and feed them corrections. But most of the time, the students had no idea.
It was nearly foolproof. The home run of home runs Singer called it. He fancied himself an expert on the college admissions system by this point. He wrote two books on the topic and even auditioned to be featured on a reality show about the cutthroat process
This is a game. Just realize that this is a game. The things that I see on a daily basis are amazing what's going on in people's homes across the country. My name is Rick Singer. My job is to life coach kids and families through the whole process of getting into college.
For parents, the process was already daunting and Rick Singer would paint a bleaker picture, ringing the alarm about admissions statistics, test scores and changing demographics. Some parents felt like their son or daughter stood no chance of being accepted into their preferred school unless they relied on Rick Singer. He was the key. He was the guarantee, speaking in absolutes and assurances.
protecting children and guardians alike from earth-shattering disappointment as long as they were willing to cheat. The payoff for me is knowing that these kids found the right place to go to school and they feel great about themselves, that they're empowered to be successful.
From 2011 to early 2019, Rick Singer's key worldwide foundation took in more than $25 million from hundreds of parents. $7 million was paid to coaches, administrators, test takers, and everyone else involved. Singer kept the rest. He dumped millions into other business ventures, computer-based training programs, a basketball gym in Oakland, a chain of fast casual Mexican food restaurants, and a Welsh soccer team.
It's almost like Rick Singer was looking for an exit. The side door remained open and profitable, but he desperately needed something else to take off so he could cash out and make a clean getaway. Singer knew his admissions scheme couldn't last forever. There were too many people involved and new customers every day. One wrong move by any one of them and that side door would slam in his face. Support for Swindled comes from Simply Safe.
If you're like me, you're constantly thinking about the safety of the people and things you value most. After my neighbor was robbed at knife point, I knew I needed to secure my home with the best. My research led me to SimpliSafe.com.
I've trusted SimpliSafe to protect my home for five years now, and the level of security and customer care has been incredible. I sleep better every night knowing SimpliSafe's 24-7 monitoring agents are standing by to protect me if someone tries to break in and to send emergency help when I need it most.
I want you to have the same peace of mind that I and so many listeners experience every day, which is why I've partnered with SimpliSafe to offer listeners 20% off a system. Just visit simplisafe.com slash swindled. What I love most about SimpliSafe is that it just keeps getting better. With exclusive live guard protection, SimpliSafe agents can act within five seconds of receiving your alarm and can even see and speak to intruders inside your home, warning them that the police are on their way.
As a SimpliSafe user, it's no surprise that SimpliSafe has been named Best Home Security Systems by U.S. News & World Report for five years running and the Best Customer Service in Home Security by Newsweek.
I'm a huge proponent of SimpliSafe, and I'm very happy with my security system. And you will be too. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash swindled. That's simplisafe.com slash swindled. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
Every working mom comes to me and says, how do I do it all? Well, guess what? You can't. No one is superwoman. So don't try to be. I like to think of it as thinking of yourself as a ship that you just don't want to capsize. You don't want to steer too much to one side of work or too much to the other side of home. And also don't let guilt be your guide. If you spend all of your time feeling badly because you're not at work enough, you're not at home enough, you're always going to be in the down position. And then finally, set clear limits.
Say hello to Jane Buckingham, author of The Modern Girl's Guide to Motherhood and The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations. Jane is the chief executive of an LA-based marketing company. She's a trend spotter, a self-proclaimed expert on millennials. You might have seen her on one of the morning shows, promoting her books and offering advice.
When your friends tell you to lie on your resume, you 100% do not do it. Jane Buckingham paid Rick Singer $50,000 to ensure that her son Jack scored high enough on the ACT to gain entrance to USC. I know this is craziness. I know it is, Buckingham told Singer at the time. And then I need you to get him into USC. And then I need you to cure cancer and make peace in the Middle East.
Jayne's son Jack was permitted to take the test at home, but unbeknownst to him, it was merely a practice run. His mother and Rick Singer had arranged for Mark Riddell to take the test for him somewhere else. Jack Buckingham was ultimately accepted into USC.
Rick Singer also arranged for Mark Riddell to take the SAT for both of David Sadu's sons. David Sadu was a former Canadian Football League player. He paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Singer's foundation. An early draft of one of the admission essays written by Singer included a fake story about how one of the Sadu boys was held at gunpoint by an LA street gang only to be rescued by a rival gang member named Nugget. Both Sadu's sons were admitted to the school of their choice.
Gordon Kaplan, a New York attorney named Dealmaker of the Year in 2018 by American Lawyer Magazine, is another example. He paid Singer $75,000 to rig his daughter's ACT score.
Singer instructed Kaplan to tell his daughter to act stupid in front of the psychologist he had set them up with so that they could land the learning disability classification that the process required. What has happened is all the wealthy families have figured out that if I get my kid tested and they get extended time, they can do better on the test. So most of these kids don't even have issues, but they're getting time.
The plane feels not fair. No, it's not. I mean, this is... To be honest, it feels a little weird. I know it does. I know it does. But when she gets to school and we have choices, you're going to be saying, okay, I'll pick all my kids. We're going to do the same thing. Yeah, I will.
Michelle Genovs, heiress to the Hot Pockets fortune, hired Rick Singer to help two of her daughters cheat on the ACT. She also paid Singer $200,000 to have one of the daughters admitted through the side door at USC as a volleyball recruit. And it worked. Another California couple paid Rick Singer in Facebook stock worth a quarter of a million dollars to do something similar for their daughter at UCLA.
Funny enough, Lauren Isaacson, the daughter of Bruce and Davina Isaacson, was listed on the soccer team's website among some of the best players in North America even though she had never kicked a ball.
Karen Littlefair, a socialite from Newport Beach best known for hosting high-profile Republican fundraisers, seems to be one of the few who were left unsatisfied with the Keys' performance. She paid Singer $200,000 to get her son into Georgetown, and he did so successfully. But then the Littlefair's son found himself on academic probation, so Karen rehired Singer and paid another $9,000 for them to pass four online classes for her mediocre student.
When Karen received the bill, living up to her name, she asked Singer for a discount. "The grade was a C and the experience was a nightmare," she wrote. But Rex Singer refused to lower the price, replying, "It was a nightmare for all. In the end, that C would not matter." Karen Littlefair's son landed his "ideal job" at the U.S. Treasury Department before he even graduated.
Then there's Molly Zhao, daughter of a Beijing billionaire who paid Singer's foundation $6.5 million to get Molly admitted to Stanford as a sailing recruit. It was Singer's most lucrative side door admission of all time, even though it seemed to cheapen what Molly Zhao perceived as a personal achievement.
Hello guys! This year I am admitted to Stanford. I'm very lucky I would like to say. I'd like to thank everyone that's helped me and all of that. I think that like after... I just felt like you can always achieve the things that you want to be if you try hard. Like yeah so...
These are just a few examples of the kind of people who use Rick Singer's services. They were CEOs, founders, lawyers, vineyard owners, and casino executives. Even famous Hollywood actresses. "You asking for a bribe?" "You pretending you're above that?" "I got my checkbook."
Felicity Huffman, best known for her Emmy-winning role on the TV show Desperate Housewives, paid $15,000 to have Mark Riddell correct her daughter's SAT score without the daughter's knowledge. Coincidentally, I'm told there's a scene in Desperate Housewives where Huffman's character bribes someone that same exact amount to get her on-screen twin children into private school.
Quick, name another actress who played a mother to twins on TV. I have to be honest. We may have, well, he may have, embellished, lied a bit on our application. That's right. Lori Loughlin. Aunt Becky from the family-friendly sitcom Full House. Remember little Nikki and Alex? Becky and Uncle Jesse introduced a second set of twins into the show that already featured the Olsen twins.
Kind of jumped the shark if you ask me. Anyway, in real life, Lori is married to fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, not John Stamos. They live in Los Angeles, not San Francisco. And together they have two daughters, Isabella Rose and Olivia Jade. Not twins, not boys, but Lori seems to care about them regardless.
You know what I don't ever do? I never push my kids to, I always say, do the best you can. I was never that kid. My husband, too, their dad. We were never like, at school, you've got to get straight A's. We were never those parents. We were always like, you know what? Give it your all. Do the best you can. Because in life, if you give it your all and you do the best you can, that's it. That's all you can do. And that's enough, in my opinion. Especially with kids. I think we put so much pressure and stress on them.
Olivia Giannulli, the younger daughter, was doing well for herself before even graduating high school.
Olivia Jade, as she was known online, was reportedly earning $10,000 to $15,000 for every video she posted on YouTube, where she had over 2 million subscribers. She had endorsements with hair care and beauty brands like TRESemmé and Sephora. Olivia had also signed a deal with Amazon Fashion to outfit her new dorm room at USC.
which was surprising. In videos and interviews, Olivia J. Giannulli had been very vocal about not wanting to go to college, but her parents insisted.
And then the whole college thing, yep, I'm going. I'm living in a dorm with a roommate who's so sweet. With work, it's going to be hard. Like my first week of school, I'm leaving to go to Fiji for work. And then I'll be in New York a bunch this year for work and traveling to a different country because I'm creating something with this country and that's for work. So I don't know how much of school I'm going to attend, but I'm going to go in and talk to my deans and everyone and
Lori Loughlin just thought it was a good idea for her daughters to have backup plans. She said with a straight face inside of her $35 million Bel Air mansion. Yeah, I'm sure that was a major contributing factor.
Surely it had nothing to do with what's the word I'm looking for. Clout. C-L-O-U-T. Clout. Like you have clout. You've got like, you're kind of high up there. You've got clout. Oh, is that an actual word? Like, how'd you know that? Is that like an actual thing? Clout is an actual word. Oh, I thought it was just like a social media thing. Once again, money on that education.
Oh yeah, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo spent money on Olivia's education. Bella's too. The couple allegedly paid a total of $500,000 in bribes through Singer's Foundation to have both daughters admitted to USC as members of the rowing team.
The older daughter got in with no issue, but Olivia's admittance a year later as a rowing recruit raised the eyebrow of her private school guidance counselor. Philip Petrone was aware of Olivia's YouTube channel and busy schedule. He was confident that she was not on any rowing team and never had been. Philip reached out to USC to express his concern.
USC would investigate. Donna Heinle, who was receiving a $20,000 a month retainer from Rick Singer, promised to look into it. Of course, word got back to the Giannulli family. In emails, Massimo referred to the guidance counselor as our little friend. Fuck him, he wrote. Nosy bastard.
After a confrontational visit to Philip Patron's office in which Mossimo convinced the counselor very loudly that his daughter Olivia was quite the accomplished rower, Patron retracted his concerns. He assured Moss in an email quote, I also shared with Donna Heinle that you had visited this morning and affirmed for me that Olivia is truly a coxswain. A coxswain is a smaller member of the rowing team that sits at the front of the boat, if you didn't know.
Olivia Jade was ultimately accepted into USC. Mossimo Giannulli paid $200,000 to the Key Worldwide Foundation and $50,000 directly to Donna Heinle via check to a bank account in the school's name that she controlled. Mossimo paid the same price a year earlier for Bella and sent the invoice to its financial advisor with a note, quote,
Good news: my older daughter is in USC. Bad news is I had to work the system. I don't want to do anything that one day might rear its ugly head and my children have to pay the price for that. The Olivia Jade incident wasn't Rick Singer's only close call. Other guidance counselors had expressed similar concerns to USC. Donna Heinle would typically smooth it over. Sometimes the school themselves would raise a red flag.
The registrar would contact the phony student-athletes, wondering why they signed up for a class that conflicts with their practice schedule. The easy answer, Singer instructed parents,
was to explain that the student had suffered an injury and would not be playing this year. So I wanted to give you just a quick heads up. Donna Heinl, who's the senior women's administrator at USC, she called me to give me a heads up. She was asked by admissions as to why Sabrina did not show up for women's basketball in the fall. Yeah. So she told them
that Sabrina had an injury. Yeah. And that it happened over the summer. Yeah. And that she would be out for six to eight months. Okay. So I just wanted to give you a heads up because this has happened to several of our other families that went through the side door.
Rick Singer survived another near miss back in 2014 when a student he tried to get in through the side door at UCLA was rejected. A disappointed mother contacted the school and let them know she was still interested in donating $100,000 to get her daughter admitted as Rick Singer at the key had explained to her. UCLA interviewed Rick Singer about the concerning proposal but he denied any wrongdoing and skated as he would continue to do for years.
but it was a constant tightrope act in the full view of everyone. Singer's tax returns for his non-profit, which are public information, showed that the foundation was collecting millions in donations every year, yet employed no one.
There was one independent contractor listed, Gordon Ernst, the Georgetown tennis coach, who was being paid hundreds of thousands every year. The tax forms also revealed that the vast majority of the foundation's functional expenses were going to athletic programs at universities such as USC, the University of Texas, NYU, the University of Miami, and more. It was a red flag city for everyone to see, but no one ever did.
However, probably the closest call of all happened in 2016 when Philip S. Forms was arrested. This just in, a federal jury has convicted a Florida health care executive on 20 criminal counts in a $1 billion Medicare fraud scheme. After four days of deliberating the fate of 50-year-old Philip S. Forms, the jurors just reached a verdict.
For decades, Philip S. Forms and his father owned a network of more than two dozen nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Chicago and Miami. Their business survived repeated federal law enforcement probes and investigations by the Chicago Tribune newspaper, which found that the S. Forms employed three scouts to fill their vacant beds with homeless, drug-addicted, and mentally ill patients.
The recruits were lured to the facilities and enticed to stay in exchange for Oxycontin and Fentanyl. Many received unnecessary and harmful treatments, all of which was billed to Medicare and Medicaid and paid for by the American taxpayer.
In many cases, those recruits, many of them younger, violent felons, shared rooms with elderly and physically disabled residents, unsurprisingly leading to numerous violent incidents. For example, in 2009, Thomas Donovan, a 63-year-old diabetic schizophrenic amputee, was beaten to death by his housemate just months after arriving at Burnham Health Care, a facility owned by the S-Forms family.
No one was ever charged with Mr. Donovan's murder. Four years later, in 2013, Robert Lee Verser, a 73-year-old hospice patient, was beaten to death in his bed by his 41-year-old roommate in the throes of a psychotic episode. Employees of the facility raced into the room to find Michael Pohl standing calmly in the corner with blood dripping from his hands. They allowed him to leave the scene and roam the halls alone while they tended to Mr. Verser.
Shockingly, multiple allegations of substandard care at the S-Forms facilities also existed.
The Tribune found that 20 wrongful death lawsuits had been filed against the Holmes in just four years in Miami alone. A 75-year-old man who ambled with a cane drowned in a nearby lake. Nobody knew how he got out. Also, according to the Tribune, another resident with a severe mental disorder wandered into traffic and was fatally struck by a car. The facility never alerted the family that he was missing.
That same type of neglect was also happening at the S-Forums facilities around Chicago. Esther Vazquez told the Tribune that her 89-year-old mother, Concepcion Vazquez, wasted away alone in a room with nothing more than a rocking chair and a blaring TV. Her teeth were rotted out. She had one pair of clothes. She weighed 65 pounds. She looked like one of those people in concentration camps, Esther told the newspaper. Patients were not regarded as people.
Yet Philip S. Forms continued to operate nursing home facilities for decades. He was finally arrested in July 2016 as part of a bribery scheme. Philip paid doctors and medical administrators kickbacks to refer patients to his businesses.
Those referrals generated $1.3 billion in Medicaid revenues for S-Forms, the largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought against individuals by the Department of Justice, according to Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell. Philip S. Forms was arrested at one of his homes in Miami Beach. He had another one in LA and a condo in Chicago. He traveled by private jet. He drove a $1.6 million Ferrari.
Philip S. Form's net worth at the time of his arrest was $78.9 million. During his heyday, he could buy anything he wanted, including admission for his son to the University of Pennsylvania.
During the federal investigation into the Medicare fraud scheme, detectives discovered that Philip S. Forms paid $300,000 to the men's basketball coach at U-Penn to recruit his son as an athlete to open that side door for a pain-free admission. That coach, Jerome Allen, accepted the bribe. He eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of money laundering. He was sentenced to four years probation, and he agreed to testify against Philip S. Forms at the trial.
What makes this story even more interesting is what investigators found on Philip S. Form's phone, text messages to a man named Rick Singer, a conversation about the college admissions process for S. Form's son. Law enforcement did not dig too deep into the connection at the time. It's been alleged that Rick Singer was Philip S. Form's backup plan if the coach Jerome Allen deal fell through.
S. Forms was familiar with Singer's work. He'd used the key to get his daughter admitted to USC a few years earlier, but that fact wouldn't be discovered until years later during the trial for the $1.3 billion Medicare fraud scheme in which Philip S. Forms was convicted. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He served less than two.
More breaking news. President Donald Trump in Florida tonight for the holidays as he unleashed another wave of controversial pardons tonight. Some of the 26 names on the list close to the president's inner circle. Other controversial move, commuting the sentence of former Chicago area nursing home mogul Philip S. Forms. S. Forms is accused of a billion dollar Medicare case fraud, the largest in U.S. history.
Back in 2018, Rick Singer continued to pry open that side door undetected. He was in London on business in July of that year when he received a call from one of his favorite guys. It was Rudy Meredith, the head basketball coach at Yale University. He wanted to meet in person. Rick Singer agreed just as soon as he could.
That meeting took place on September 21, 2018, at the Marriott Long Wharf in Boston. It was just Rick Singer and Rudy Meredith in the room for a while before the FBI let themselves in. They calmly laid out the charges against Rick Singer, who initially protested. He said those bribes were legit donations. This is all a big mistake. Eventually, Singer gave up, admitted everything, and agreed to cooperate fully.
So I'm calling because I'm in Boston. Uh-huh. And I, um, so what's happened is my foundation is getting audited now. Uh-huh. Which, as you know, is pretty typical. Uh-huh. Right? So they're looking at all my payments. Okay. So they asked about your payments. Um, one of them for when Mark took the test for Audrey. Okay. Okay.
payment that we made to Jorge to help Warren get into UCLA through soccer. Okay. And then the payment that we made to Donna Heinl at USC to help Audrey get in through crew. Okay. So, of course, I'm not going to tell the IRS this is where the money went. Right, right.
Rick Singer started turning over documents, making phone calls and scheduling meetings with current and former clients in late September 2018.
The FBI was listening to every word. The script called for Singer to give a heads up to the parents that his foundation was being audited and that they were questioning certain payments, but not to worry, because he definitely would not say anything about how they bribed him with half a million dollars to get their son or daughter into school as an athletic recruit, even though they were not legitimate athletes, you know, laying out the entire scheme in incredible, incriminating detail.
Singer was such an obvious double agent, but I guess believable enough to fool Hollywood actresses and New York lawyers like Gordon Kaplan, Mr. Sense of Humor over here. Is this Gordon Gekko of Wall Street? No, this is Gordon Kaplan. How are you? I'm only kidding with you, Gordon. How are you doing?
Singer continued down his client list until he called every single parent. Some ignored his messages and never returned his calls. Those clients were never charged.
As for everybody else... Tonight at 5, wealthy parents, Hollywood stars, CEOs, elite college coaches, and college prep execs are just some of the individuals accused of carrying out a nationwide bribery scheme to help students gain admission to some of the nation's top colleges and universities. The arrest started at 6 a.m. Pacific on March 12, 2019. Jane Buckingham fainted when she opened the door.
Felicity Huffman, her husband William H. Macy and their daughters were still asleep when federal agents entered their house with guns drawn. Operation Varsity Blues culminated in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Massachusetts, unsealing indictments charging 50 people, including 33 parents, with felony conspiracy charges to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. Seven additional people would be charged at a later date.
We're here today to announce charges in the largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice. We've charged 50 people nationwide with participating in a conspiracy that involved first, cheating on college entrance exams, meaning the SAT and the ACT, and second, securing admission to elite colleges by bribing coaches at those schools to accept certain students under false pretenses.
The parents charged today, despite already being able to give their children every legitimate advantage in the college admissions game, instead chose to corrupt and illegally manipulate the system for their benefit, said U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling. There can be no separate college admissions systems for the wealthy, and I'll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either. This is FBI Special Agent Joe Bonavolonta.
Make no mistake, this is not a case where parents were acting in the best interests of their children. This is a case where they flaunted their wealth, sparing no expense, to cheat the system so they could set their children up for success with the best education money could buy, literally. Some spent anywhere from $200,000 to $6.5 million for guaranteed admission. Their actions were, without a doubt, insidious,
selfish and shameful. Within six months, 47 of the 57 people charged in Operation Varsity Blues had pleaded guilty, including Rick Singer, who admitted to unethically facilitating the college admissions process for children in more than 750 families beginning in 2011.
Rick posted bail, sold his house, changed into a Speedo, and went paddle boarding. He complained about not being able to get a job because of the media attention. Rick eventually moved to Florida and lived in a trailer park for seniors to await his fate. He would be one of the last to be sentenced.
Jail time for another parent caught up in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal. Jane Buckingham, best-selling author of A Modern Girl's Guide to Motherhood, marketing guru and television personality, sentenced to three weeks behind bars, a year of probation and a $40,000 fine.
Two parents accused of helping their daughter cheat her way into Northwestern University pleaded guilty today in the National College Admission scandal. A former USC official will spend six months in prison for her role in the college admissions scandal.
A former Stanford coach pleaded guilty to his role in the scandal. Now to the breaking news in that college admissions scandal just dropping this afternoon. Actress Felicity Huffman pleading guilty to paying $15,000 to a fake charity to have her daughter's SAT scores boosted.
The public outrage lingered. These disgusting fucking pigs. How could they? As if they don't have enough already. These people think they're so important. Like we're watching their every move or something. Nobody gives a wait. Felicity Huffman is going to jail. The Felicity Huffman. Oh my god. What do you think she's going to eat?
Felicity Huffman was sentenced to 14 days, one year of supervised release, 250 hours of community service, and fined $30,000.
She offered a public apology. "In my desperation to be a good mother," Felicity wrote, "I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot. I see the irony in that statement now because what I have done is the opposite of fair. I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues, and the educational community."
Actress Felicity Huffman has now been released from prison early after serving 11 days of her 14-day sentence. Not everyone was as forthcoming with their mistakes. Some parents, such as Lori Loughlin and Massimo Giannulli, pleaded not guilty.
Their defense was that they believed that their payments to Rick Singer were legitimate donations, that they had no knowledge of falsehoods in the application process, despite sending photos to Singer of their daughters on rowing machines. Many attorneys for the parents who pleaded not guilty latched onto some notes Rick Singer typed in his phone about his FBI handlers during the phone call stings.
They continued to ask me to tell a fib, Singer wrote. Proof, the defense attorneys claimed, that the evidence had been fabricated. The Department of Justice turned up the heat on these holdouts by adding conspiracy charges to commit money laundering, substantially increasing the maximum sentence they could receive if convicted at trial. Most of the holdout parents folded and pleaded guilty soon after this additional charge was announced. But not Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli.
Loughlin was actually in Vancouver when the initial sweep took place. She turned herself in the next day. Olivia Jade was on spring break in Cabo San Lucas, relaxing on a yacht owned by Rick Caruso, the chairman of USC's board of trustees. Olivia was friends with his daughter. She excused herself when a friend called to ask if she had heard the news.
Soon after, Olivia Jade's YouTube channel went dark. Sephora, Chesame, and others ended their partnerships with the young influencer. Lori Loughlin also lost her acting roles. Sources told gossip magazines that the Giannullis were furious that people thought they were cheaters. A source told People magazine that Loughlin was in complete denial about the whole thing. Another told Us Weekly that Olivia Jade blamed her mother for ruining her career.
It's pretty juicy. Not sure how reliable those sources are, but there might have been something to it. Olivia was seen moving out of the family home about a month after the scandal unfolded. However, other reports say that Olivia J. Giannulli was fully aware of the corners her parents were cutting. And not only that, Olivia herself was no stranger to cheating.
Back in 2016, Olivia Jade appeared on a Verizon mobile channel trivia game show called "Tap That Awesome App." She played for charity against fellow influencers and lost fair and square. But according to Marissa Rachel, the influencer who won, the producers announced they had made a score miscalculation and made them reshoot the ending. This time, Olivia had magically won. Video of that episode no longer exists.
On July 29th, 2019, about four months after her parents' arrest, Olivia Jade broke her social media silence by wishing her mother a happy birthday with an Instagram post. Olivia posted a photo of herself raising both middle fingers two weeks later. She tagged various media outlets. I think she was trying to send a message, but that message was deleted after Felicity Huffman was sentenced.
Olivia Jade eventually returned to YouTube, but she said she couldn't legally speak about anything. Hi everybody, it's Olivia Jade. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. Obviously I've been gone for a really long time. As the Giannulli's October trial date approached, prosecutors released more details about their case. In one court filing, they made public a memo written by a private school college counselor who had a contentious meeting with Mossimo.
Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli finally gave up and pleaded guilty in May 2020, 14 months after they were initially charged. Breaking news, actress Lori Loughlin has just been sentenced to two months in prison for her role in the college admissions cheating scandal.
Now, Laughlin's husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, was sentenced earlier today. He received five months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and 250 hours of community service.
Lori Loughlin was sentenced to two months in prison. The judge described Loughlin as an admired, successful, professional actor with two healthy children, a long-standing marriage, and quote, more money than you could possibly need, and yet you stand before me a convicted felon, and for what? For the inexplicable desire to have even more.
That same judge sentenced Mossimo to five months in prison. You were not stealing bread to feed your family, he told him. You had no excuse for your crime, and that makes it all the more blameworthy. After both parents reported to prison, Olivia Jade appeared on Jada Pinkett Smith's Facebook talk show Red Table Talk to take her lumps.
On paper it's bad, it's really bad, the influencer admitted. But I think what a lot of people don't know is that my parents just came from a place of "I love my kids, I just want to help my kids, whatever is best for them."
I think they thought it was normal. I don't want pity. I don't deserve pity, Olivia said.
What's so important to me is to learn from the mistake, not to now be shamed and punished and never given a second chance because I'm 21. I feel like I deserve a second chance to redeem myself, to show I've grown. No matter what the situation is, you don't want to see your parents go to prison. But also I think it's necessary for us to move on and move forward. Most parents, coaches, and administrators who pleaded guilty were sentenced to a few weeks to a few months in prison.
Some of the more notable results include John Vandamore, the Stanford selling coach. He was sentenced to one day since he didn't keep any of the money for himself. Gordon Ernst, the first coach caught in Singer's web, was given two and a half years. Donna Heinle, the US administrator responsible for accepting dozens of phony athletic recruits, was sentenced to six months in prison. Before she reported, Donna was seen selling her $2 million home and driving for Lyft.
Only a handful of the parents charged went to trial. Gamal Abdelaziz, a former casino executive, and John Wilson, a private equity investor, were both convicted in October 2021. Both men appealed and their sentences were vacated on May 10, 2023. An appellate court ruled that the jurors should not have been told they considered Mission Slots as property and that evidence related to other parents' cases was introduced in their trial erroneously.
One parent, Amin Khoury, was acquitted. His attorney said the not guilty verdict showed that the jury had agreed with the defense's argument that college admissions is not a pure meritocracy. USC's former water polo coach, Jovan Vavich, was convicted of fraud and bribery, but the ruling was overturned in September 2022. He is currently waiting for a new trial.
Robert Zangrillo, the founder of Dragon Global, an investment firm, never even made it to his first trial. He received a full pardon from outgoing President Donald Trump before his case could ever be heard. In a statement, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew E. Lelling, said the pardon demonstrated precisely why Operation Varsity Blues was necessary in the first place.
Maury Tobin, the pump-and-dump mastermind whose tip exposed Rick Singer's admissions conspiracy, was not charged in Operation Varsity Blues, but he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison. I'm extremely, sincerely sorry and ashamed of my actions, Tobin told the judge before receiving his sentence. I tried to do everything possible to make amends.
The judge said he accepted Tobin's remorse, but that his motive was, quote, "...pure and simple greed." Rudy Meredith, the Yale soccer coach who led the feds to Rick Singer, was sentenced to five months in prison for accepting bribes. Meredith was also ordered to pay a $19,000 fine and forfeit $557,774.
Good afternoon. Today, after nearly four years, two trials and more than 50 convictions, the architect and mastermind behind the historic nationwide college admissions scandal has been sentenced.
Rick Singer was just sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for his role in a cheating and bribery scheme that rocked the college admissions process across our nation.
Finally, nearly four years after his initial arrest, on January 4th, 2023, William Rick Singer was due in court. The 62-year-old had pleaded guilty to four criminal charges involving racketeering, conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison, three years of supervised release,
and forfeiture of over $10 million. "I have been reflecting on my very poor judgment and criminal activities that increasingly have become my way of life. I have woken up every day feeling shame, remorse, and regret," Singer wrote in a letter to the judge. "I acknowledge that I am fully responsible for my crimes."
Singer blamed his actions on his "winning at all costs" attitude. "By ignoring what was morally, ethically, and legally right in favor of winning what I perceived was the college admissions game, I have lost everything," he wrote. "I lost my ethical values and have so much regret. To be frank, I'm ashamed of myself."
Most parents have served their time and moved on. Many students had their admissions rescinded. Others faced suspension or expulsion. Some students, like Olivia Jade, never bothered to return.
One student, Adam Cimpervivo, son of Stephen Cimpervivo, who had been convicted in the scandal, sued Georgetown University after it notified him that he was no longer allowed at their school. In his lawsuit, Adam argued that he had already attended the school for three years at a cost of $200,000. He agreed to withdraw voluntarily but wanted to keep his college credits. The school did not back down and Adam Cimpervivo dropped his lawsuit.
Two other civil lawsuits that went nowhere were filed immediately after the scandal hit. Both were class actions. In one, two Stanford students sued eight colleges, alleging that the rigged system denied them a fair chance to enroll at the elite institutions and that the scandal could tarnish their degrees. The lawsuit sought damages for any student who applied to one or more of those universities and was rejected between 2012 and 2018. The case was thrown out.
In another, a school teacher from Oakland sued Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and everyone else named in the indictment for preventing her son from being admitted to several of the colleges ensnared in the scandal. Jennifer K. Toy was seeking damages of $500 billion. Billion with a B. That case was also tossed.
In response to the scandal, universities nationwide have implemented new systems, policies, practices, review processes, fundraising guidelines, and verification protocols to rebuild the public's trust in the college admissions system. But it's still not airtight. For one, there is no national audit system verifying legitimate athletic recruits, and whatever legislation has been passed has been mostly toothless.
Secondly, there's nothing the university system can do to eliminate the fundamental inequalities. According to Time Magazine, those athletic recruited mission spots are still most likely to go to students from wealthy families. I mean, think about it. How many water polo teams are there in Gary, Indiana? Probably not many.
Even if there are, how can they compete with kids who have had nutritionist and private training since they were 13 years old? The playing field is not level, and it never will be. As long as money exists. As long as privilege exists. As long as people exist. Expect the worst. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. The Former, a.k.a. The Key.
For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at swindledpodcast. Or you can send us a postcard at PO Box 6044, Austin, Texas 78762. But please no packages. We do not trust you.
Swindled is a completely independent production, which means no network, no investors, no bosses, no shadowy moneymen, no side doors. And we plan to keep it that way, but we need your support. Become a valued listener on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify at valuedlistener.com.
For as little as $5 a month, you will receive early access to new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes that you can't find anywhere else. And everything is 100% commercial free. Become a valued listener at valuedlistener.com.
Or if you want to support the show and need something to wear on your first day of school, consider buying something you don't need at swindledpodcast.com. There are t-shirts, patches, hats, hoodies, posters, coffee mugs, and more. swindledpodcast.com. And remember to use coupon code CAPITALISM to receive 10% off your order. If you do not want anything in return for your support, you can always simply donate using the form on the homepage. That's it. Thanks for listening.
Support for Swindled comes from Orchid Toys.
Orchid Toys is a female and LGBTQIA plus friendly online adult toy store that offers quality products while making the world a better place at the same time.
Our friends at Orchid Poise encourage you to come for a cause. That's their actual slogan. A portion of every sale goes to fund a well-researched selection of charities that fight for things like victims of domestic assault, trans equality, abortion rights, reproductive health, and female genital mutilation and trafficking in Africa.
Since Orchid Toys has become a partner of the show, one of my favorite pastimes is typing a random word into their product search bar and seeing what pops up. This time I chose the word pig. Boy, have I found a treat for you. It's called the Pig Hole Squeal FF.
The description reads, "This is our biggest pluggable toyable hollow plug. This is a big toy for advanced butt-pluggers and fisting pros. The veiny outside texture keeps this plug in place. The inner texture rings are for more pleasure."
We hand pour these in small batches in Los Angeles. It's the only way to get the warm glossy liquid silicone finish. Platinum Cure silicone is the absolute best for feel and flexibility. Just the right stretch. Keeps the hole open. It doesn't collapse but flexible enough to fold for insertion.
There you go. Go get yourself an artisan butt plug at orchidtoys.com slash swindled. That's orchid, O-R-C-H-I-D, toys.com slash swindled. You'll get a 10% discount and come for a cause. orchidtoys.com slash swindled. Tell them I sent you.
Thanks to SimpliSafe for sponsoring the show. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash swindled. That's simplisafe.com slash swindled. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.