Varsity Blues Exposes Bribery at Elite U.S. Schools William "Rick" Singer had always been competitive, with an incredibly strong desire to win. In 2002, Singer sold his first college-counseling business and took up coaching a youth basketball team in Omaha, Nebraska, to fill his time. His hard-driving style, including cursing his own players, the opposing team's parents, and officials, turned a mediocre team into a junior juggernaut. Singer once brought in a "ringer"-a talented player from another team-to help his team compete in a tournament. His win-at-all-costs mentality and his willingness to bend every rule in order to win led to his role, almost two decades later, as the architect of a college admissions bribery scandal that ensnared some of the United States' most prestigious universitics, including Stanford, UCLA, the University of Southern California, and Yale. 1 Fast forward to 2012. Rick Singer had started a new college admissions company, the Edge College \& Career Network, with a clear vision of exploiting the admissions system to help wealthy parents get their children into clite colleges. Singer's scheme relied on two realities: First, elitc colleges used different admissions criteria for certain groups of students, including athletes. Colleges had a "back door" for special admissions, which Singer hoped to open for the right price. Second, the wealthy were ultracompetitive and willing to blur ethical and legal lines to "win" the college application game for their children. Singer used several methods to help students gain admission. In some cases, he would pay test administrators to help students improve their ACT or SAT performance. Some administrators looked the other way as a "ringer" took the test for a student, while others would correct answer sheets before submitting them for grading. 2 Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman paid Singer $15,000 to have her daughter's SAT score altered. In other cascs, Singer worked with parents to create a false resume for their children that portrayed the children as athletes. Full House star Lori Loughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, paid Singer $500,000 to create the illusion that their two daughters were competitive crew athletes. Neither girl had ever participated in the sport. Sometimes parents paid Singer's firm directly, as in the casc of Felicity Huffiman. There scemed nothing untoward about writing a $15,000 check for test prep and admissions guidance. In other cases, such as that of Lori Laughlin, the family made large donations to the Key Foundation, owned and operated by Singer, who would then funnel the money to university admissions gatekeepers for their help in shepherding a questionable packet through the admissions process. Parents could claim a charitable deduction for their donation, which meant they committed tax fraud as well as bribery. Singer also used a variety of bribes to influence coaches and administrators. At Stanford, Singer initially approached seven different coaches about participating in his scheme. He eventually enrolled sailing coach John Vandemoer, who agreed to "recruit" two of Singer's students in exchange for donations to the sailing program. Vandemoer explained that he was under intense pressure to fund his program: "If I could take the development. [money] and get recruits at the same time that. I thought were going to help my team, I thought that was a no-brainer." 3 In other cases, Singer paid coaches directly, such as Yale women's soccer coach Rudolph Meredith. Meredith received almost $900,000 in direct bribe payments for designating Singer's clients as soccer players. In another case, Singer paid Lniversity of Texas men's tennis coach Michael Center $100,000 to designate a potential student as a tennis recruit.- By 2018, federal authorities became aware of Singer's crimes, and he agreed to help the government gather evidence against his clients in exchange for leniency. In March of 2019, the government went public with criminal indictments for bribery and fraud against parents, coaches, and admissions administrators. Operation Varsity Blues, the government's code name for the investigation, eventually charged twenty-two parents and thirty-three others with bribery-related crimes. In sentencing Loughlin to jail, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said that Ms. Loughlin had led a "fairy-tale life, yct you stand before me a convicted felon, and for what? For the inexplicable desirc to grasp cven more." 5 The Varsity Blues case introduces you to the issue of bribery. When most people think of bribery, they think of people secretly paying off government officials in some developing country; advanced countries are supposed to have moved beyond bribery. Bribery is a pervasive and global problem that affects the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Our discussion of bribery comes after you've learned about power and its abuse and conflicts of interest because bribery and related corrupt behaviors represent an abuse of power and a conflict of interest. In this chapter, you'll learn about what bribery is and what it is not. We'll spend time discussing how a bribe differs from two ethical but neighboring practices: tips and gifts. You'll learn about the legal frameworks and rules that different countries employ to stop bribery. Finally, as with each of our other applied chapters, we'll provide you tools to 3. FOR THE VARSITY BLUE CASE, WHY DID CELEBRITIES GO TO JAIL IN ADDITION TO Mr. Singer? Explain the differences between bribery, corruption and graft. Where was there tax evasion in this case