lobbied him to change his daughter’s
grade in math class—from a C-plus to
a B-minus. Such grade changes can be
warranted under certain circumstances,
if a headmaster feels that a teacher has
been unfair, for example. A source close
to Busby says that he agreed with Bass’s
reasoning at the time—that the teacher
had been unfair. The change was made.
Crisis averted. The following fall, Eliza
applied to three colleges’ early action:
Georgetown, Tulane, and Loyola Mary-
mount. The triple early-action play might
have been overkill, but no matter. As
Singer wrote: “Your chance of acceptance
goes up 50% if you apply early, and you
can apply to multiple schools with early
action.” The Bass family wasn’t going to
screw this up now.
But Singer wasn’t done with the
dudes on the Buckley board. Next was
Devin Sloane, whose son, Matteo, was
friends and classmates with Eliza Bass,
and whose whole package looked very
impressive to outsiders. The son of an
oil executive father and Olympic athlete
mother, Sloane met his future wife,
Cristina, an Italian, through a spiritual
guru in L.A, according to a source. They
moved to Italy, where they spent several
years and had three sons and a daugh-
ter, before returning to L.A. He became
a successful entrepreneur in wastewater
solutions, something residents of the
drought-prone city took a major interest
in. He and Cristina funded orphanages in
India. In 2015, Sloane sponsored the Ital-
ian Special Olympics team when it came
to L.A. At the closing event, his oldest
son, Matteo, whose first language was
Italian, translated for the Italian athletes.
“It’s a family you want to love,” a family
acquaintance puts it.
And yet, Sloane was willing to go to
grotesque lengths to get Matteo into a
good college. Together, Singer and Sloane
selected USC and agreed to pass him off
as a water polo athlete who played for the
“Italian Junior National Team” and the
“L.A. Water Polo” team, even though he
did not play competitively. In June 2017,
while fellow board member Bass was
asking for his daughter’s grade change,
Sloane bought the necessary gear on
Amazon—a ball and a bathing cap—then
tasked a graphic designer to photoshop
an image of his son wearing the cap, hit-
ting the ball, in an outdoor pool. It took
a while for the graphic designer to get
it right. When Sloane sent Singer the
photoshopped image of his son rising out
of the water to hit the ball, Singer replied
that the boy was “a little high out of the
water—no one gets that high.” Adjust-
ments were made, and presto: Matteo got
his conditional acceptance letter to USC.
Sloane paid Singer $200,000 through the
foundation and paid $50,000 to USC’s
Women’s Athletics, an account controlled
by Donna Heinel, the senior women’s ath-
letic director and one of Singer’s alleged
coconspirators. (She has been fired and
has pleaded not guilty.) It was practically
time to buy the USC car decal.BRENTWOOD BLUES
But Buckley wasn’t enough for
Singer. He trolled the other private
schools, snagging two high-profile
names at Marymount and L.A. County
High School for the Arts—actors Lori
Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, respec-
tively. And then there was Huffman’s pal
Jane Buckingham. She was a woman who
seemed to have it all: bouncy blonde hair
and a super-fit body; two careers; two
popular kids, Jack and Lilia, a teenage
social media influencer with 1.5 million
Instagram followers; and for 21 years
before they recently split, a handsome,
successful husband, motivational speak-
er Marcus Buckingham. In her work as
founder and CEO of Trendera, a youth-
marketing consulting firm, and author of
the Modern Girl’s Guide series, Bucking-
ham was a bubbly purveyor of savvy
know-how in the quest for success.
“She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s self-
deprecating,” says a fellow Brentwood
mother, who watched her in awe. “She’s
stylish without being too stylish. She’s
wealthy without being showy.”
The parenting-expert thing was a
more recent addition to her résumé.
Millennial entitlement? “It’s not their
fault, it’s their parents’,” Buckingham
told an audience in 2016. “That’s what
happens when you give them a gold star
for going to the potty and a trophy for not
participating and telling them they are
fantastic every day of their life.” Brent-
wood gobbled up her cool mom gospel.
The school hired her as a consultant toclean up its own image as a haven for
entitled rich kids. In spring 2018, at It’s
Our Turn: Young Women’s Conference
at Brentwood School, which drew 1,000
students from across L.A., Buckingham
spoke on a panel called “Wow Them:
Your Best Self, Résumé to Interview.”
Sometime before the scandal broke,
she posted on Instagram a context-free
graphic that said “DONT CHEAT” with a
comment from her below: “Apply it to all
aspects of life and you’ll probably be ok.”
Five months after the Brentwood
conference, in the summer of 2018, the
façade began to crack. Now, a year after
splitting from Marcus, here she was,
apparently working behind his back
to cheat for their son. The details were
proving a bit tricky to sort out. With Jack
awaiting surgery for tonsillitis, he wasn’t
supposed to travel. How was she going to
explain this to Marcus? “My ex-husband
is being incredibly difficult about the
whole surgery,” she told Singer by phone.
“If I take him to Houston and then he
can’t get the surgery, he’s gonna be very
annoyed with me.”
Singer made calls to his cronies, fixing
the details so that Jack could take the test
from home, while Mark Riddell would
complete the test in its entirety in Hous-
ton. Word got around at Brentwood that
Jack was taking the test at home. It struck
people as odd. But, according to a Brent-
wood parent, “Nobody had the sophis-
tication to understand that he was really
actually cheating.” Though Buckingham
tried to laugh it off to Singer as some kind
of nutty act of impulsiveness, she was back
on the phone with Singer four months lat-
er, in October 2018, soberly making plans
for her daughter, Lilia. “[I’d] probably like
to do the same thing with [my daughter]
with her ACTs,” she told Singer, “[because
she’s] not a great test taker.”MARLBOROUGH MAN
Meanwhile, in Hancock Park, one
of Jack’s friends, whom we’ll call
Kate, was becoming ensnared in the
scheme too, thanks to her would-be
superstar parent, Morrie Tobin, who’d
prove to be the final linchpin in the whole