The University of Southern California has fired 15-time national water polo coach of the year Jovan Vavic and senior associate athletic director Donna Heinel after the two were indicted in federal court today for their roles in a scheme prosecutors say helped students cheat college entrance exams and admissions processes.
We covered the whole scandal in more depth earlier today, and you can read that story here. Essentially, a college counseling service connected to a non-profit foundation would take large payments from wealthy parents, using them to bribe various officials to get the parents children into prestigious colleges, prosecutors say. The foundation is accused of arranging for stand-ins to take the ACT or SAT exams for students, and also of getting students falsely classified as recruited athletes in order to benefit from lowered academic standards for admission.
The federal complaint says that Vavic would take payouts from the foundation in exchange for listing students as recruited athletes for the USC water polo team. The students wouldn’t ever actually join the water polo team (some may not have even played the sport at all), but would be subjected to less-strict academic admissions standards when applying to the school. The indictment says that the founder of the foundation paid Vavic at least $250,000 through various channels, and paid for Vavic’s children to attend private school, disguising the payments as a scholarship.
Heinel is accused of helping that process, receiving payments to help students get admitted to the university even if their athletic credentials were falsified. The legal complaint includes transcripts of conversations suggesting that the scam would photoshop false photos of the students playing the sports they didn’t play, to help sell the falsified athletic resumes better.
The OC Register reports that USC has fired both Vavic and Heinel today after the indictment.
If you don’t believe the kids (adults) should be punished because it was the actions of their parents, then why are child immigrants detained at the border when their parents are the ones that took that action? There needs to be fair consequences to all.
I wonder how Coach Vavic explained this to his wife and kids if they did not know about it. I bet he’s kicking himself, losing a plum job like that. Ouch!
The entire story is completely nuts. Parents paying tons of money to get their kid(s) into the college of their (parents) choice. Ya know, the kids always could have done a year or two at another school and then transfer in, but I imagine the parents wanted to brag about the kids at cocktail parties or at the country club.
A very funny dark movie could be made about it.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed the sign about DIARRHEA in the picture with Vavic. Credit to the swimswam staff for picking this picture.
I am so happy that the US Attorney has the guts to go after these people. It doesn’t surprise me AT ALL that the master mind of the scandal is from Southern California. No surprise that multiple USC employees were caught up in it. California Attorney’s office and Los Angeles area law enforcement don’t seem to care about cheating, fraud, misuse of non-profits, threats, retaliation, corruption, etc. I applaud the US Attorney for the work they are doing!
My mind keeps going back to
‘I’m not surprised’ and
‘why in the world is the FBI spending resources on this?’ I get that it’s a crime and involves a couple of million dollars and hurt innocent students that didn’t get in but to me if u get a sniff of the problem u tell the NCAA or an investigative reporter and move on to something more important.
Apparently it came about from another investigation they were working on and they fell into it.
Thats what the FBI does. It investigates federal crimes. Wite fraud. Mail fraud. Tax law violations. And corruption. If this aint it, what is?
Amen. If “white collar” crime was investigated as much as other crimes, drugs, etc. then there would be less disparity in our crime numbers and certain people who have recently been convicted, (cough cough Manafort et. al.) would not still be out there.
Are you serious? First of all, it’s not only a couple of million dollars and even if it was it shouldn’t matter. Singer set up a charitable not-for profit 501(c) corporation for illegal, unethical practice. The parents send payment to this charity and it becomes a tax write off for them. Example, if someone made 1 million dollars and donated $500,000. to charity, they would only pay income tax on $500,000.00. Not for profit organizations DO not pay income taxes. I’m laughing at the fact that it takes someone from Massachusetts to address the corruption in California, especially Southern California! There are many hard working students in California who will never get into their dream schools in California regardless of… Read more »
From the NYT read of the court filings: “Prosecutors included in court filings a transcript of a somewhat bizarre taped exchange between Singer and Augustin Huneeus Jr., a vineyard owner in Northern California who would provide $250,000 to coaches and other sources that support water polo at U.S.C. in exchange for Coach Vavic securing his daughter’s admission.
“You understand that [my daughter] is not worthy to be on that team,” Huneeus said of U.S.C.’s powerhouse water polo team.
“He knows [s]he’s not coming to play, he knows all that,” Singer responded, referring to Vavic.
Later, he reassured Huneeus that the arrangement would work out “because she’s a water polo player.”
“But she’s not,” Huneeus said.
What is most stunning is it appears the prosecutors nailed Singer a year ago & convinced him to accept a cooperation agreement wherein he’d spend the next several months talking on recorded lines with these parents. That’s something straight out of a Scorsese movie. The foundational arch of proving conspiracy & the other related crimes is that the actions & state-of-mind of the participants was willful. It isn’t enough that they did it; the government would have to prove the players knew it was unlawful & acted out with bad intent anyways. This whole case would be a small fraction of this volume if Singer had not flipped.
Indeed. It sounds like Meredith (the tennis coach) was cooperating for quite some time, too.
This isn’t the whole case, but just the beginning. According to phone conversations, Singer states “it’s worked for 21 years”. The U.S. Attorney said that there may be more arrests.
This shows that… coaches(aquatic) need to be paid more or he would’ve said no
As a college coach, I’d love to see aquatics coaches get paid more. That being said, more money has never solved a character problem.
One of the coaches charged was being paid nearly $250k. I agree with Coach Josh…if you’re ethically challenged you’ll rationalize whatever you want regardless of what you’re paid.
While I agree aquatic coaches should be paid more, a smaller than wished for salary is no excuse to be corrupt – get a different job if what you want is more money. These coaches hurt so many with their actions, and the college admission process is now a big joke thanks to this scandal.
This is a national sting/story that spans many schools and sports. It’s bizarre. Some parents paid as much as $700k to administrators to get their kids admitted as fake athletes. It’s amazing what some parents will do. It spans some pretty senior people in corporations and two actresses.
-Gregory Abbott & Marcia Abbott-Founder/chairman of International Dispensing Corp.… Read more »
-Gamal “Aziz” Abdelaziz-Former president Wynn Macau resort
-Diane Blake-Retail merchandising executive
-Todd Blake-Entrepreneur and investor
-Jane Buckingham-CEO of Trendera
-Gordon Caplan-Co-chairman of an international law firm Willkie Farr
-I-Hin “Joey” Chen-Provider of warehousing services for the shipping industry
-Amy Colburn
-Gregory Colburn
-Robert Flaxman-CEO of Crown Realty & Development
-Mossimo Giannulli-Fashion designer
Re: those paying 100K+… every.single.school has a ‘VIP’ or ‘legacy’ designation in their admissions process that almost guarantees acceptance which heretofore has been completely legal. Why these folks didn’t donate to establish VIP status then simply apply is a little curious.
Good question, I think the major problem is that it might take seven or even eight figures to get a guaranteed developmental admission these days. Given the size of the endowments at these type of institutions, gone are the days when a six figure check would get you in the back door. These people were likely looking for a less expensive alternative and found CW-1’s “side door”.
I think it was who got to them first… the “recruiter” or the school asking for money.
Maybe, but there is a big difference between writing check for $250,000 and one for $2,000,000. All these schools have endowments over $1 billion. USC is probably over $5 billion, and Stanford and Yale are in the tens of billions category. Generally they would like to use developmental admits to fund need based scholarships for the admitted kids who cannot afford to pay, so seven figures is what it might take to move the needle for a donors kid.
That isn’t a guarantee. I know a wealthy alum of a big state school who donated half a million dollars, was a major bundled of other wealthy donors, sat in the president’s box at football games, and his nephew did not get in.
He must have been pretty dumb and possessed zero athletic skills… just saying…