on being an expert in millennial and
Generation Z trends, she wrote articles
on parenting, gave talks on the subject,
was featured on shows like Good Morning
America and To d a y. We parents need to be
more chill, she told people in her girlish,
approachable way. Let our kids make mis-
takes. Don’t bulldoze a path for them. And
yet here she was, committing a crime in
order to give her son a leg up.
Summer of 2018, and the time had
come for Jack, a rising senior at Los Ange-
les’s tony Brentwood School, to take the
ACT. Buckingham had hired Rick Singer
to shepherd them through the college
application process. And Singer knew
how to make the test easy for Jack—so
easy that he wouldn’t even have to take
it himself. Thanks to a provision for stu-
dents with learning disabilities, and two
alleged Singer coconspirators in Hous-
ton—master test taker Mark Riddell and
test administrator Niki Williams—Jack
would be able to “take” the ACT from the
comfort of his own home while awaiting
a tonsillectomy. Riddell, as Jane knew,
would take the actual test—and score
brilliantly. Later, Williams would submit
that fabulous test to the ACT. Singer just
needed one more thing: a handwriting
sample from Jack so that Riddell could
fake the essay portion convincingly. Jane
asked Jack to provide one. “To whom it
may concern,” Jack wrote in distinct,
uneven lettering, “this provides an exam-
ple of my current writing style. Thank
you for your attention.” Jane snapped
a picture of it and emailed it along. She
knew she was acting bananas and tried
to laugh it off. “I know this is craziness,”
she said to Singer. “I know it is. And then
I need you to get him into USC, and then
I need you to cure cancer and make peace
in the Middle East.” Then she forked
over $35,000 of a promised $50,000 to
Singer’s Key Worldwide Foundation and
waited for her son to get into the Univer-
si ty of Southern California.Eight months later, the news hit the
L.A. private schools as most things did:
over the smartphones. Fifty people,
including 33 parents—most from L.A.
and the Bay Area—had been swept up
in Singer’s jaw-dropping college admis-
sions bribery scheme. Out on the Brent-
wood quad, there was Jane Buckingham’s
name. A few miles north, at the Buckley
School in Sherman Oaks, there was the
name of the respected entrepreneur
father, Devin Sloane, who paid a bribe
for his son Matteo to be designated
as a water polo recruit for USC. Over
in Hancock Park, at the Marlborough
school, Jack Buckingham’s friend saw
her father, Morrie Tobin, exposed as both
a participant in the scheme and the guy
who ratted it out to the FBI. All that time
she spent blabbing about the Ivy League
school she’d committed to—now the
truth was out. As other families learned
more about the identities of the parents,
they began seething—not just because
these wealthy parents had cheated the
system, but because some of them had
done so while presenting themselves to
the world as exemplary human beings.
For Singer, they were the perfect tar-
gets. Any parent obsessed with curat-
ing an image of affluence, good taste,
and beneficence was exactly the sort to
fixate unreasonably on a degree from
Georgetown or USC. In a world dictated
by status symbols, having “a kid at Yale”
was the Holy Grail, the ultimate proof of
a life worth envying—even if their kid wasonly interested in plugging products on
Instagram. L.A. was teeming with such
showboats. Five families, presented here,
each interconnected to the others, lived
behind that glossy façade. They were pil-
lars of the community at their children’s
private schools. They talked about “doing
good” and “giving back.” Their kids were
friends with one another on social media,
a tribute to their own social significance.
(Those children’s first names that have
not appeared elsewhere have been
changed.) But their fates diverge: Two got
caught; two have come away unscathed—
so far—despite dubious entanglements;
and one exposed it all, for a reason no
more noble than to save his own skin.THE BROS OF BUCKLEY
Singer had been in the college coun-
seling business in some fashion for
two decades. His illicit turn appears to
have started 11 years ago in Newport
Beach, just south of L.A., where he lived
after years spent in Sacramento. He
offered legitimate college counseling and
eventually, if a parent seemed desperate
enough, two options off the cheating
menu: the fraudulent testing, or the
engagement of one of his dirty college
coaches to falsely designate the applicant
as an athletic recruit. A year after hitting
Newport Beach, Singer, with his ener-
getic, athletic frame, was storming L.A.
He sold his know-how at financial institu-
tions, where he spoke to rooms full of rich