SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 127
Adam Bass, a wealthy board member, with
a B.A. and law degree from USD. Taylor-Vaz
shared the information with her superiors.
Puzzled, Buckley made calls to Georgetown
and Loyola Marymount. They too wanted
to accept Eliza, the African American ten-
nis wonder. Buckley set the colleges straight
and promptly got to work trying to determine
what on earth was going on.
School brass spoke with Adam Bass, hop-
ing to find answers. After initially failing to
acknowledge that he’d hired an outside
consultant for Eliza, Bass now admit-
ted that Eliza was, in fact, using one: Rick
Singer. Singer, Bass explained, according to
a Buckley source, had asked for her name
and password to her applications file. One
of Singer’s employees must have gotten
in there, changed the application without
Eliza’s knowledge, and submitted it for
her, Bass claimed. Eliza wrote an email to
Georgetown and Tulane explaining the
same. When pressed further by George-
town, Eliza explained that her father had
worked with Singer on charitable endeav-
ors that helped disadvantaged inner-city
youths. The colleges were unmoved, for a
fairly obvious reason: No applicant should
be in the position of having someone else in
control of his or her application in the first
place. The same falsehoods were on her
applications to the University of California
schools where Eliza had applied. She was
allowed to retract those applications and
reapply. (Adam Bass did not respond to
multiple requests for comment.)
As Eliza waited to hear back from Berke-
ley—her new first choice—life was about to
get even more uncomfortable. Although the
fact of her fraudulent application remained
successfully hidden from the high school
community, in February 2018 word began
spreading about Eliza’s grade change from
the previous June. Students were angry and
launched a protest against the board and
headmaster, demanding an investigation.
It became a local news story—with news
trucks showing up on campus. The school’s
investigation cleared Busby of violating any
guidelines, but he was later pushed to resign.
Elliot Choi, then a co–editor in chief of the
school newspaper, recalls Eliza coming to
him in a distraught state, worrying what this
would mean for her chances at Berkeley.
Choi, one of the few kids who didn’t come
from a privileged background, gave her the
only advice he could think of: Keep working
hard and wait and see.
As soon as Georgetown learned the
truth about Eliza’s phony application as an
African American tennis ace, it put tennis
coach Gordon Ernst on leave and began an
investigation into his recruiting practices.
The investigation concluded that there
were “irregularities in the athletic and other
credentials” of two of Ernst’s past recruits,
but found no evidence of bribes and no
trail that led to Singer. Ernst (who has plead-
ed not guilty to racketeering conspiracy)
ended up getting a job at the University of
Rhode Island. The matter stopped there.
But in L.A., Morrie Tobin was about to blow
the whole thing.
From around 2013 to the present—the
same period during which three of his
daughters came streaming into Yale—Tobin
was engaged in a classic pump-and-dump
stock scheme. Starting in 2017, investiga-
tors in Massachusetts began looking into
the transactions, as some of the investors
lived in the state. In March 2018, the FBI
raided Tobin’s house looking for materials
and arrested him. According to prosecutors,
Tobin was given a “multi-day proffer,” in
which he could offer whatever he knew about
the stock scam in hopes of getting a lighter
sentence. Tobin had something that turned
out to be more explosive—a coach who was
selling recruitment spots at Yale.
Cooperating now with the FBI, in an
investigation the bureau dubbed Operation
Varsity Blues, Tobin asked Meredith to meet
him in a Boston hotel room, which the FBI
had wired. Tobin paid Meredith $2,000 in
the room, and they discussed where the
final payment for the bribe would be wired.
Over the course of their conversation, Mer-
edith brought up a name, Rick Singer, as
someone he was working with. It was the
first time the FBI had heard his name, and
they began following the trail. Over the
summer of 2018, the FBI started wiretap-
ping Singer’s phone, gathering evidence on
him and collecting dirt on parents along the
way. By late September, the FBI had what it
needed to arrest him. Singer flipped on his
clients and coaches. He cooperated with the
FBI, which led to dozens more wiretapped
phone calls with parents and emails with
coaches—and the eventual mass arrest of
50 people on March 12, 2019.VALEDICTIONThe Wall Street Journal broke the news
about the identity of the tipster in the case—
Morrie Tobin—and revealed that he was also
a participant in the bribery. Kate, according
to a source, learned the news along with the
rest of the world, and was in for the most
traumatic day of her life as long-standing
grudges against her exploded into a fren-
zy of schadenfreude. “When the article
came out, [Kate] was literally sprinting
down Rossmore, away from Marlborough.
[Other girls] were laughing and being glee-
ful,” says the source close to her. Later,
when the college acceptances came out,
and it was revealed that Kate had not been
accepted to Yale, “they were all in the senior
lounge, cheering and celebrating.” This
group had made up its mind about Kate’scharacter—they believed that she must have
been aware of her father’s actions. Kate had
her defenders, who insisted she knew noth-
ing about what he had been doing. This only
got the doubters wondering if some of the
defenders hadn’t also been paying bribes to
get into college themselves. After all, they
were from the wealthiest families in the
class, and studying didn’t seem to be their
top priority. The atmosphere devolved into
what one parent compared to Lord of the
Flies. Everything was thrown into chaos and
question. Even Lagnado, the retired science
teacher, began to wonder. He remembers
thinking, Now I understand why X was
admitted and Y wasn’t.
Over in Brentwood, Jack Buckingham
was surely having one of the most hor-
rific days of his life too. That morning, FBI
agents had shown up at his house and taken
his mother away. According to a Brent-
wood source, he lasted only a few periods
before returning home. For his classmates,
the reaction was complicated. On the one
hand, they felt bad for him. Jack denied
knowing anything about it, and his friends
believed him. But it wasn’t that simple. They
remembered how weird it was that he’d
taken the ACT at home. Now that mystery
was solved, and many people were angry.
For the kids who’d applied to USC and
hadn’t yet gotten in, they and their parents
wondered if they had been cheated out of a
spot. The families fretted that the scandal
would tar Brentwood at large, and crush
everyone’s hard-fought efforts to get into
any decent college. “We all thought our
kids were going to be collateral damage,”
says one parent, pointing particularly to
those who were white and privileged but
not wealthy enough to donate a building.
“We are the category that’s going to get
completely fucked.” It didn’t help Brent-
wood’s image that in an unrelated inci-
dent, a kid who’d recently been rejected by
Georgetown—and then accepted to Har-
vard—chose to email the following mes-
sage to Georgetown: “Fuck you. I’m going
to Harvard.” Harvard learned of this; the kid
is now taking a gap year.
A meeting for the parents of juniors
and seniors led by the head of the school
and top administrators devolved into “an
absolute shit show,” says one attendee.
Brentwood officials tried their best to mol-
lify the parents, assuring them that they’d
been in touch with the colleges, and that
the colleges were not putting the blame
on the high schools, or any honest appli-
cants from Brentwood. Still, the parents of
Jack’s friends weren’t taking any chances.
Some forbade their kid from hanging out
at his house. God forbid a photographer
on stake-out would snap a picture of them,
drawing them into the mess. As for Jane
Buckingham, puzzled, disillusioned friends