U.S. college admissions scandal mastermind Rick Singer sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison | 24CA News
William (Rick) Singer, the mastermind behind the U.S. faculty admissions fraud scandal that ensnared celebrities, outstanding businesspeople and different mother and father who used their wealth and privilege to purchase their children’ approach into top-tier colleges was sentenced to 3 and a half years in jail Wednesday.
The punishment for Singer, 62, is the longest sentence handed down within the sprawling scandal that embarrassed a number of the nation’s most prestigious universities and put a highlight on the secretive admissions system already seen as rigged in favour of the wealthy.
“This defendant was responsible for the most massive fraud ever perpetuated on the higher education system in the United States,” assistant U.S. lawyer Stephen Frank advised the decide Wednesday.
For greater than a decade as an admissions advisor for rich households, Singer paid off entrance examination directors or proctors to inflate college students’ check scores and bribed coaches to designate candidates as recruits for sports activities they often did not even play to spice up their probabilities of entering into the varsity.
Those despatched to jail for taking part within the scheme embrace Full House actor Lori Loughlin, her designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, and Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman.
David Sidoo, a Vancouver businessman and philanthropist who pleaded responsible within the U.S. faculty admissions scandal, was additionally sentenced to 3 months in jail in 2020. He was discovered to have paid $200,000 US to have knowledgeable test-writer use false credentials to impersonate his two sons to put in writing their SATs.
Coaches from colleges together with Yale, Stanford, Georgetown University and the University of California, Los Angeles, admitted to accepting bribes.
Singer pleaded responsible, labored with FBI
Singer pleaded responsible to quite a few fees on the identical day the large case grew to become public almost 4 years in the past. Federal prosecutors in Boston had requested for six years behind bars.
Singer, 62, started secretly co-operating with investigators and labored with the FBI to file a whole bunch of telephone calls and conferences earlier than the arrest of dozens of fogeys and athletic coaches in March 2019. Authorities dubbed the case Operation Varsity Blues.
Singer took in additional than $25 million from his shoppers, paid bribes totalling greater than $7 million US, and used greater than $15 million of his shoppers’ cash for his personal profit, in accordance with prosecutors.
Defence lawyer Candice Fields mentioned Singer took nice private danger by carrying a wire to file conferences and “did whatever was necessary” to help the federal government in its investigation. Fields had requested three years of probation, or if the decide deemed jail time obligatory, six months behind bars.
Singer apologized to his household, the faculties he embarrassed within the public eye and others. He additionally promised to work day-after-day of his life going ahead to make a optimistic influence in individuals’s lives.
“My moral compass was warped by the lessons my father taught me about competition,” he mentioned. “I embraced his belief that embellishing or even lying to win was acceptable as long as there was victory. I should have known better.”
Before Singer, the hardest punishment for anybody concerned with the case had gone to former Georgetown tennis coach Gordon Ernst, who received two and a half years in jail for pocketing greater than $3 million in bribes.
