Outside Topic First Varsity Blues trial starts - Printable Version

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RE: First Varsity Blues trial starts - Mick - 08-12-2022

(07-02-2022, 03:50 PM)82lsju Wrote:  

Quote:A former Georgetown University tennis coach [Gordon Ernst] was sentenced on Friday to 2-1/2 years in prison for helping children of wealthy parents get into the school in exchange for nearly $3.5 million in bribes as part of a vast college admissions fraud scheme.
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It was the longest sentence to result to date from the "Operation Varsity Blues" investigation, which exposed how wealthy families went to extremes to secure spots for their children at competitive schools including Stanford, Yale and the University of Southern California.
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And unlike some of the other coaches charged in the case who were bribed in the form of money for their sports programs, Ernst pocketed almost all of the money for himself, prosecutors said. He used the bribe money to pay for his daughters' expensive private school tuition and buy a home on Cape Cod, Kearney said.
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Ernst must also serve an additional six months of home confinement upon release and forfeit $3.43 million. His lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/georgetowns-ex-tennis-coach-gets-2-12-years-prison-us-college-scandal-2022-07-01/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gordon-ernst-ex-georgetown-coach-gets-2-half-years-in-bribe-scandal/

Robert Repella was the CEO of Harmony Biosciences when he paid Georgetown tennis coach Gordon Ernst somewhere in the low six figures to get his daughter in the door as a recruited tennis player. Prosecutors wanted him to do a month in prison because he proactively bribed the coach.

The interesting part is that his daughter had excellent grades, made the tennis team, was a nationally ranked player at the IMG Academy, and actually won a singles match during the year she spent on the G'Town tennis team. While the coach was the most heavily penalized coach in the Varsity Blues scandal, yesterday Judge Allison Burroughs allowed Repella to avoid jail time, though she ordered Repella to pay a $220k fine and perform 220 hours of community service.  And she also mandated that he stay home for the rest of the summer to "make sure he does not enjoy August or Labor Day."

She said "You're going to spend what's left of the summer in your house." He can go to work, medical appointments or his community service at the local food bank, but that's it.

Four other interesting items:

1) Repella didn't conspire with Varsity Blues mastermind Rick Singer.  His payment was to the tennis coach alone.  

2) Repella testified against both Coach Ernst and fellow parent Amin Khoury, who was the only parent (out of 57 cases) who was acquitted in the Varsity Blues scandal. Khoury's attorney argued (successfully) that the government's star witness made up his testimony in exchange for softer treatment on his own tax crimes scandal and that Khoury's daughter was personally involved in the fraud, which was apparently not true.

3) The coach, Gordon Ernst, justified his role in the scheme because he no longer had free access to Georgetown's tennis courts when Georgetown tore down the tennis courts to build a new athletic center, thereby denying Ernst a tennis camp-related source of income on which he'd depended.

4) Repella's daughter graduated from Georgetown with a 3.67 GPA.

Rick Singer, the mastermind behind the whole program, is scheduled to be sentenced next month.  He faces up to 65 years in prison, and up to a $1.25 million fine. Wheels of justice turn slowly, that they do. What's interesting to me is that he assisted over 750 students into getting into college, starting in 1988, and he didn't get caught until 2019. Amazing.

Singer's background was interesting. He's from Santa Monica, played baseball and basketball for Trinity College in Texas, started coaching in his mid-twenties, ultimately getting fired as a tennis coach for D2 Sacramento State after a spectacularly bad season. But he'd been a college admissions consultant, and high school counselors in Sac'to claimed that he was shady right from the start. He started the full time criminal enterprise ("The Key") in 2007, allegedly went full time criminal in 2011 and the DoJ caught up to him in April, 2018 when they'd arrested Morrie Tobin for securities fraud, and he flipped on Singer for a reduced sentence from one year to four months.

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RE: First Varsity Blues trial starts - oldalum - 09-15-2022

And convicted USC Water Polo coach Vavic gets himself a new trial, due to some misstatements by prosecutors:
CNN article

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