Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors, and Phonies behind the College Cheating Scandal
By Nicole LaPorte

The crime:

Throughout the 2010s a college application counsellor named Rick Singer got some of his wealthiest clients to pay him to arrange their children’s acceptance into prestigious American universities. He did this primarily through two different “side-door” processes: (1) the creation of fake athletic profiles that were sent to coaches who were in on the fix, or (2) having a professional test-taker complete the standardized entrance exams, boosting the applicant’s score into the highest percentiles. The FBI investigation into the conspiracy, codenamed Operation Varsity Blues, resulted in over 50 charges being laid, with the mastermind Singer sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison plus forfeiture of over $10 million.

The book:

This was actually the second major book about the Varsity Blues scandal, the first being Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit and the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, which Nicole LaPorte cites several times as a source. Both books were “timely” though, being published quickly to take advantage of public interest in the case. As it is, things break off here with the March 12 2019 announcement by the FBI of the results of the investigation and then, in an “Author’s Note,” dashing through some of the highlights from the pleas and sentencings.

When the story first broke I remember being underwhelmed by it. Nothing about it struck me as surprising, or particularly heinous. Just a bunch of very rich people who thought – not unreasonably – that they could buy anything. When I went to university there were various incidents of cheating that I could never get that exercised about. I was there to learn something; what other people were up to, what shortcuts they might have been taking just so they could get their piece of paper, didn’t interest me. It didn’t bother me at all if they weren’t doing the work. If they were there paying tuition then it was all good as far as I was concerned.

The admissions scandal was something a bit different in that less qualified students were getting into elite institutions and in doing so taking spots away from stronger applicants who were playing by the rules. But even so, it’s understood that there’s no level playing field when it comes to going to the top colleges and universities. There are legacy admissions, or the “front-door” expedient of just making a huge donation. There are the “special accommodations” made for testing students with “anxiety,” something which overwhelmingly afflicts the wealthy. And then there is the vast gray area full of ways of playing the system that aren’t illegal or even frowned upon that tilt the odds in your favour. Who can afford independent counselling that can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the first place? And what do such counselors do? I laughed out loud, for example, at this little gem: “Independent counselors don’t write a student’s college essay, but rounds of edits and proofreading are provided, giving the student a distinct edge over those who are left to their own devices.” I’ve worked as an editor and I can assure you that “rounds of edits,” especially on a short piece written by someone who can’t write, amounts to, you know, a total rewrite. And given how much they’re being paid, and what’s at stake (including their own reputations), I’d imagine most of these counselors are doing more than that.

I could only wonder at how obsessed the wealthy families LaPorte describes are with status. Despite the fact that going to a top university isn’t going to affect any of these children’s lives, their parents were “just as desperate about college admissions as families without their wealth and connections.” Why?

Because of their high-profile names and the company they kept – the jobs they held, the philanthropy circles they ran in, the country clubs they were members of – having their child anointed by a top-tier school wasn’t a preferable option; it was considered essential in order to keep the family name intact, and the aura of success and perfection. It was status maintenance of the highest order. In many cases, parents simply felt it was their right, something  they were entitled to, regardless of what means were required to reach that end.

Ah, “entitlement.” Along with its close companion “privilege” it shares a special place in today’s language of opprobrium. But behind all of its perversities and delusions there’s a reality that LaPorte is alert to. That reality is fear.

The anxiety isn’t limited to wealthy parents living in Bel-Air or Beverly Hills. It’s an endemic that’s become a universal among almost all the parents who plan to send their child off to a four-year institution in the hopes of launching them successfully into the world. Indeed, for middle-class families, who don’t have a cushion of wealth and resources to fall back on, one of the most significant rites of passage for an American teen has become fraught with fear. The fear stems from the extreme wealth divide in our country, and the belief that simply getting a college degree – any college degree – no longer implies upward mobility the way it once did. Given the current state of affairs in the United States – the endless headlines about burdensome student debt, the high cost of living, and the growing unemployment rate for college graduates – the desire for an impressive college degree is not just a lofty wish; it’s a do-or-die imperative.

This is fine as far as it goes, but that fear grounded in an awareness of “the current state of affairs in the United States” and its “extreme wealth divide” has a deeper resonance. It’s not just the fear of not getting in or being left behind but also the fear of falling. White people, a former Stanford dean opines, are “terrified, because they’re losing a privilege that they never realized was a privilege” (a pretty good definition of entitlement). And those lucky enough to have found themselves living in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are only sure of one thing: they never want to lose any part of the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus . . .

Status maintenance is then a priority for those suffering from status anxiety, and the parents profiled here had the worst possible case of that. After all, by their actions they as much as admit that they don’t believe in the notion of America as a meritocracy. Indeed, they see such notions as being for suckers. How then to stay on top? By rigging the game.

Guilty Admissions is an eye-opening tour of the epicenter of the affluenza pandemic. And it’s an insider’s account too, as LaPorte is resident in the same neighbourhood, with her two kids attending one of the exclusive schools she describes. Being a part of this world, she is able to provide a lot of insight into a world that I didn’t even know existed. Take, for example, the “budding industry of kindergarten-prep tutors and companies,” with one the most popular services offering “one-on-one tutoring, for $350 an hour, to help children master the skills they will need for kindergarten.” This is a thing.

LaPorte has sympathy for the parents (as noted, she is one herself), and her account of the environment of “competitive parenting” that Singer exploited is valuable. But at one point in the story this fellow-feeling does lead to an unintentionally hilarious, and revealing, use of language:

At times, the parents’ spiritual wrestling was painfully palpable, as when Caplan said on a call to Singer. “It’s just, to be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here. I’m worried about the, if [his daughter’s] caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”

Did you get that? The parent isn’t worried about moral issues but only at how his daughter might lose status if she’s caught. This is what counts as “painfully palpable” “spiritual wrestling” in this world!

If status anxiety among the uber-wealthy is one part, the demand part, of the criminal equation, the supply side was provided by Rick Singer. It’s become easy to track everything in the Age of Trump back to the example of the president during the time when Singer’s enterprise was in its fullest swing, but given that the shoe fits so well I have no problem with putting it on again. Singer was an inveterate and indefatigable hustler and con man who took personal-branding and “truthful hyperbole” (Trump’s preferred euphemism for lying) to new levels. And if he was lying all the time then he just assumed that’s what everyone else was doing, or would want to be doing, too. Anything that would help grow not the individual but the brand. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not winning,” was the age’s mantra. And if you weren’t winning you were a loser. The rich would get richer and everyone else would go extinct, which is an observation not limited to individuals. Many colleges and universities would find themselves going under at this time, while the “elite” schools with brand recognition and huge endowments would keep getting richer.

But even the richest most well-endowed universities were grubbing for cash. Like everyone else, they could never get enough. “The culture [at USC] was one of enrichment at all costs, and multiple scandals would come to light down the road as a result.” But wasn’t all the scandal just the price of winning? Everything about the Varsity Blues case comes back to this point: was what Singer was doing really that out of the ordinary? Was it even that bad? The great thing about Guilty Admissions is that it demands we answer these questions for ourselves, forcing us to think hard about how the modern class structure affects all of us today.

Noted in passing:

Those twin demons of entitlement and privilege can reveal themselves in truly shocking ways. All the more shocking for being expressed so matter-of-factly. I already mentioned the demented sense of grievance and of being somehow cheated that pervades all levels of society today, and that the wealthy families who sought to rig the game by Singer’s side-door methods were representative of this. What’s amazing is the way they justified what they were doing by seeing the game as being rigged against them. Why, they were just fighting back against an unjust system! When Singer explained how he proposed to raise the SAT score of one client’s daughter he referred to it as a way to “level the playing field.” Later, that same client would write a letter to the judge sentencing her that she had only wanted to give her daughter “a fair shot.” It tells you something when even the most fortunate among us, and we’re talking about the 0.01% here, feel so hard done by.

Takeaways:

It’s not being cynical to feel that life isn’t fair and that we don’t live in a meritocracy. The game really is rigged. There was a time, however, when the winners weren’t quite so arrogant, deluded, and willfully destructive of the social fabric. That was a long time ago though, and I don’t see how there’s any way we’re getting back to health.

True Crime Files

Love Her to Death
By John Glatt

The crime:

Darren Mack was the wealthy owner of a Reno, Nevada pawn shop who stabbed his second wife, Charla, to death. They had been going through an acrimonious divorce, the terms of which were just being finalized. Angry at the settlement, Mack also shot the judge, Chuck Weller, who had presided over it. Weller was injured but recovered. Mack then fled to Mexico, but soon gave himself up. At trial, after much legal dancing around, he pled guilty and was sentenced to life.

The book:

This is a St. Martin’s Crime title, and I don’t want to knock them because I find them to be in general both highly readable and trustworthy, but they can also be pulpy and scattershot. We could start with the title here, which is just a catchy headline that doesn’t capture anything of the nature of the relationship between Darren and Charla. Darren was a full-blown narcissist who only loved himself, and he killed Charla out of rage at having to pay her a million-dollar divorce settlement. And even cornier is the broken string of pearls on the cover. What does that have to do with anything? Chandra wasn’t wearing pearls when she was killed; it was 9 in the morning and she was dropping her daughter off. And of course there’s a bubble promising “8 pages of chilling photos.” None of the photos are chilling, and they are mostly just tiny screen grabs from television coverage of the trial, poorly reproduced.

There are also quite a few typos, some of which led to real confusion. Like saying “employers” where “employees” is clearly meant, or an incidental victim describing herself as being “in the wrong place at the right time.” I suppose that might have been what she really said, but if so then she was confused.

That said, the writing is lively and the chapters short, which helps when dealing with what was a pretty standard, however tragic, case of domestic violence that only came to national attention because of Mack’s attempt at killing the judge and his subsequent run into Mexico. But it was never much of an “international manhunt,” and the media attention at Mack’s trial (Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, etc.) was wasted on what was an open-and-shut case that ended up with a plea deal. Nevertheless, the trial takes over the latter part of Love Her to Death, filling over 100 pages at the end of a 400-page book. There’s too much detail and quoting of transcripts here, especially with regard to arcane procedural matters that were of no consequence. But this is a trap many true crime authors have trouble avoiding.

A final point I’ll mention, and one that is of more substance, has to do with the difficulty I had in figuring out the actual timeline of the murder, and how it fit with the evidence. Breaking the fatal events down: Mack killed Charla in his garage, then shut the garage door, went into his house, and showered and changed his clothes, as it had been a very bloody business. He also dressed a wound he’d received on his hand. He then went back out and drove Charla’s car into the garage (she’d left it parked on the street in front of the house), while somehow leaving the inside of her car splattered in blood, both Charla’s and his own. Where did this blood come from? Also, there was a man in the house taking care of Mack’s daughter who left in a hurry when he saw Mack first come back inside after he’d killed Charla. But this same man says that when he left the house Charla’s car was already in the garage and the garage door closed. I’m sure somehow this all makes sense but I couldn’t get it straight.

I’ve said this was in many ways an unexceptional crime story but for Mack’s sniping at the judge. But if you wanted to find some deeper meaning in it I’d focus on his adopting the banner of the men’s rights movement. There are some legitimate concerns that this addresses, but Mack made a very poor poster boy for the cause, being the sort of whiny victim that fit into the predominant grievance culture of the time. Just listen to him inveighing against the injustice of the court system on a Web TV show (what we’d call a podcast now) just before killing Charla:

“For me, this is probably what people felt in Nazi Germany, where things started to slide very subtly, and then all of a sudden you find yourself being whisked away to concentration camps. That is the family court system, [and] my experience of it under Judge Weller reminds me much more about what I studied in school about Nazi Germany.”

In the years to come we’d hear a lot more of such nonsense, as every time things didn’t go our way we would blame fascists or Nazis, with every exercise of the rule of law bringing us one step closer to the gulag. The shamelessness of this posturing would be underlined by Mack in the three-hour (!) personal statement he made at his sentencing hearing. “The thing a lot of people don’t recognize,” he would tell the court, is that “I lost a wife too.”

The lack of self-awareness here is next level. His original defence was going to be something along the lines of temporary insanity, which was such a longshot even his attorneys had little confidence in it. The only diagnosis I came away with was that he was a narcissistic sex addict, but that doesn’t let you beat a murder charge. The only thing it leads you to is more of the same sort of behaviour that got Mack into all his troubles in the first place: blaming everyone else for mistakes that he made. We see this thinking everywhere today, and even the legal system can’t always effect a cure.

Noted in passing:

Mack was a narcissist of truly impressive proportions. I mean, he had both a personal assistant and a life coach, though I can’t see where any of them had much to do. He was also an amateur bodybuilder and at one point came in fifth place in a Mr. Reno competition. I wouldn’t have thought this too impressive a finish, but I guess it was Mack’s Mr. Olympia because he celebrated by commissioning “a life-size photo portrait of himself flexing his muscles, which he placed on the wall directly above the urinal of his master bedroom.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s weird. I mean, a life-size photo? Mack was 5’11”. The photo must have taken up the whole wall. When the police came to search his house they found it notable.

“It was right above his toilet,” Detective Chalmers said, “so literally as he’s peeing in the morning he can look at himself in his Speedos, flexing. That was one of the first indications to me that this person is obviously very egotistical.”

What took me aback almost as much though was that he had a urinal in his master bedroom. I’ve only seen urinals, which are a fixture for standing urination only, in public restrooms. I’ve never seen or heard of one in a private home. But then the detective later calls it a toilet so maybe this was just another case of sloppy editing and Glatt meant to say toilet the first time. The Mr. Reno competition is also later referred to as Mr. Nevada so it’s hard to tell which is right.

In any event, it’s very strange but fits with my own observation that the homes of rich people are almost always decorated in tacky and tasteless ways. And on the subject of the homes of rich people, the McMansion Darren and Charla lived in together was valued at around $1.5 million and had monthly mortgage payments of $8,300! Whew!

Takeaways:

Mack did do some rudimentary planning, even making up a rather damning “to do” list before killing Charla that euphemised her murder as “END PROBLEM.” In a moment of curious detachment he even initialed a change made to the list, as though altering a legal document. He also staked out the judge’s office and pre-selected the best place to set up his sniper station, while buying a plane ticket to Mexico in advance (he’d end up driving) and filling a suitcase with $40,000 in cash to effect his escape.

But after that his planning hit a wall. A pro would have known how to disappear. Mack just ran to one of his favourite swinger resorts and tried to get laid. And how long was that $40,000 going to last anyway? He didn’t even know how to speak Spanish. At least the gormless teens in Let’s Kill Mom tried to escape to Canada.

You often hear it said of such people that they “wanted to get caught.” I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that not everyone capable of planning a murder can really imagine being a killer, and all the work that it involves.

True Crime Files

Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias
By Jane Velez-Mitchell

The crime:

After a brief and torrid relationship, Travis Alexander broke up with his crazy girlfriend Jodi Arias. On June 4, 2008 she killed him, stabbing him 27 times and then shooting him in the head. After a highly publicized trial she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The book:

I’ve talked before about how hard it is to predict what true-crime stories are going to grab hold of the public imagination and become media sensations. Though I think it’s largely forgotten now, the Jodi Arias case was huge at the time. Not a crime of the century, not by a long shot, but a crime of the month, roughly on the same level as the trials of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony. But what was special about Jodi Arias? A spurned lover goes full Fatal Attraction and kills the guy who dumped her. Jane Velez-Mitchell, who covered the Arias trial for HLN, addresses this question midway through Exposed:

The public was intrigued with the murder, and the coverage in the media began to balloon. It had all the makings of a media sensation. According to the “National Data on Intimate Partner Violence” for the complete year 2007, there were more than two thousand “intimate homicides,” or homicides involving people who were either in or had been in an intimate relationship. In 25 percent of intimate murders in 2007 – more than five hundred in all – the victim was the male partner or ex-partner. What propelled the Jodi and Travis doomed relationship into such a disproportionate headline grabber, beyond the “ex-girlfriend murders ex-boyfriend” scenario? Travis and Jodie were a couple that appeared to be ideal – good-looking, smart, savvy, personable, sensible, religious – appealing in every way. Added to that was a relationship undercurrent that most of us can relate to on some level – insecurity, jealousy, flirting, and desire. Then add the forbidden love, the raunchy sex, the stalking, and the web of lies, with a twist of Mormonism, and the press could not resist. The fact that the murder was brutal, bloody, and partially documented in accidental photos added to the fascination of the red-hot story, and crime junkies could not get enough.

This all checks out but my guess is that it was the sexual angle (with a “twist of Mormonism”?) that drove most of the hype. Though I had to wonder just how “kinky” Travis and Jodi’s relationship really was. Velez-Mitchell plays up how “shocking” and “explicit” the details revealed at trial were, “while the audience blushed and the jurors squirmed,” but what was the reality? To me it all seemed pretty vanilla. Travis was an ass man, but while anal sex isn’t everyone’s thing, it’s pretty common. In the phone-sex recording he talks about tossing Jodi’s salad – an euphemism for anilingus popularized by the comedian Chris Rock, which Velez-Mitchell somehow tortures into “a slang reference that denotes anal sex delivered orally” – but I wasn’t sure if this was something he actually did. Nor is it clear if they ever engaged in even very light forms of bondage. There’s no limit to the public’s prurience, but is the average American so prudish that the mention of things like this makes them blush?

But the kinkiness, if that is what it was, was given a boost by Arias herself, who had an undeniable star power, at least as far as murderers go. Young and good-looking, she also liked playing to the spotlight, a desire for attention flagged by the prosecutor in his summation and which ended up doing her more harm than good. Given the case against her, she probably should not have taken the stand, and I wasn’t sure from the reporting presented here if this was something her lawyers tried to talk her out of. Was she a little bit proud of being declared, in Alexander’s words, a “prototype of sluttiness,” “the ultimate slut in bed,” and a “three-hole wonder”?

(I can’t resist an aside here on the history of the word “slut.” Today this has the meaning of a sexually voracious or promiscuous woman, but a hundred years ago it was commonly used to mean something quite different. In one of Agatha Christie’s novels a woman is referred to as being a total slut and it has no sexual connotations at all. It just means she doesn’t keep a clean house.)

But perhaps her decision to testify in her own defence was just another case of her not being very bright. This was an open-and-shut case, mainly due to Arias’s stupidity. Her (third) account of what happened was preposterous, and there were other times when she seems to have almost wanted to get caught. How did she even manage to take a picture of herself moving Alexander’s body? Velez-Mitchell says it was “probably by accident.” But even if it wasn’t by accident, how did she do it? Why was she still holding on to the camera as she was trying to lug Alexander’s body around? And why didn’t she just take the camera with her and dispose of it the same way she (successfully) did with the murder weapons? Why throw it in the laundry? Indeed, why even do a laundry?

Even her few attempts at thinking ahead backfired. The idea of filling up gas cans before she set out to drive from her place to Alexander’s so as not to leave a paper-trail of stations she’d filled up at along the way was a good one in principle. But the evidence of her taking the gas cans with her only went to proving premeditation, thus nailing her with murder in the first.

This was a timely book, so Arias hadn’t even been sentenced at the time of publication. All the same, I didn’t want it to be any longer. I think I’d had my fill of Arias by the end. But I thought Velez-Mitchell handled the material well. Author of a couple of previous books on addiction, I thought she was particularly insightful in accounting for Alexander’s fatal appetite for Arias.

Jodi elicited Travis’s reckless forbidden passion, which was what he craved about her. Unfortunately for her it was also what he loathed, as it came with more and more guilt each time. She was the vehicle of his moral corruption, and over time, the sexual fire sale that she offered him didn’t increase her value in his eyes – if anything, it brought her worth to an all-time low.

I don’t know if this is what was going on, but as psychological analysis I think it’s better than what we get in the epilogue, which offers a selection of hot takes from observers on what Arias’s problem was. I thought this only underlined how limited in usefulness such exercises are, as various labels like Borderline Personality Disorder (a really vague sort of catch-all), narcissism, psychopathy, or sociopathy, all get tried on. I thought the addiction model was probably a better fit. I mean, after breaking up Alexander apparently offered to hire Arias to clean his house, paying her $12.50 an hour for sixteen hours a week of work. That struck me as really strange, not to mention a bit cold. But maybe, as others indicated, she offered to clean the house for free, just as a way of staying close to Travis. Either way, it’s weird. When couples split up, they don’t stay together in this kind of relationship, and for good reason. It’s always best to make as clean a break as possible.

Noted in passing:

I wouldn’t call Dungeons & Dragons, at least in its classic form, a board game, but a tabletop role-playing game. There’s a difference.

It can be hard keeping slang straight. At one point Velez-Mitchell talks about how

Travis grew determined to get healthy and into great physical shape. He began an exercise regimen that consisted of long workout sessions and strenuous hikes and bicycle rides, while also eating more fruits and vegetables. He was even juicing and – after viewing a documentary on the horrors of factory farming – had cut back on meat.

What confused me here was the word “juicing.” I think it means that Alexander was using a juicing machine to whip up protein smoothies or some other supplement. However, “juicing” is also a term used to describe someone who is taking steroids for bodybuilding. They are said to be “on the juice.” This isn’t just something professional bodybuilders do, as I’ve known people as long ago as when I was in high school who were juicing in this sense. So a bit more information was needed here.

Takeaways:

Crazy in bed, crazy in the head.

True Crime Files