by Paul Levine
He shrugged. “No way, dude. It’s a photoshopped world.”
A couple jurors shook their heads in apparent wonderment. Good. It’s the reaction I wanted.
Just who are these kids? What planet are they from?
“What are you doing now, Mr. Kwalick?” I asked.
“I design and manufacture clothing.”
“Just like your father?”
“My stuff’s more hip, but yeah, I use his factories in China.”
“What’s the name of your company?”
“‘None of the Above.’”
“Like an answer on a standardized test?”
“That’s our hook. That’s how we branded it.”
“Would you take off your jacket and turn to face the jury?”
“Sure. Always up for free publicity.”
Margaret Bolden moved from the prosecution table to get a better angle.
The witness removed his jacket, stood, and revealed a T-shirt in a rich blue with white lettering.
“For the record,” I said, “the shirt has an image of a diploma and the words, ‘Summa cum Fraud.’ What’s that mean, Mr. Kwalick?”
“Seriously, dude? It’s a play on summa cum laude. But now, instead of highest distinction, it’s, you know, the biggest fraud. See, I’m kind of framous for getting kicked out.”
“Framous?”
“That’s ‘famous’ in a bad but cool way, so we’re playing off that.”
“When you walked into the courthouse today, were you wearing that T-shirt?”
“Yeah, without the jacket. There were like a zillion photographers out there and the T-shirt was in every shot. One of my assistants was wearing ‘Ivy Be-Leaguer.’ I write the logos myself.”
“You’re good at this, aren’t you, Mr. Kwalick?”
“Marketing 101 is my deal, which, by the way, I never took at Yale.”
“You’re making money at this?”
“It costs me about four bucks each to make a shirt, and they retail for $99. ’Course I got expenses for distribution and advertising, but yeah, I’m dreaming on capitalism, gonna be stanky rich.”
After a short recess, the government called the dullard twins, Teague and Niles Hallinan, who testified, as expected, that their families paid Kip to take their tests. Niles had gotten over his anger about Kip double-crossing him with the sky-high score that got flagged by the testing service and kept him out of U.S.C. He didn’t end up at Lackawanna Junior College in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as he had feared. Instead, he and Teague, expelled from Wake Forest, seemed to be enjoying their career as hip-hop artists. The twins had a crew of young people on the courthouse steps promoting Teague’s latest hip-hop downloads, “Pimpin’ the Quad” and “Outta Class, Mah Ass.”
Like the Kwalick kid, they, too, bragged about their success. Niles, the Oscar Hammerstein to Teague’s Richard Rodgers, said he had just finished writing the lyrics for “Love Me Mah Benjamins,” which celebrated the glory of hundred-dollar bills.
Teague had gotten into Wake Forest, thanks to Kip nailing a 1475 on the SAT exam. I had a few questions for the lad.
“Are you telling the truth here today, Mr. Hallinan?” I began.
“Yeah.”
“Do you always tell the truth?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your résumé says you were the long snapper on your high school football team.”
“Oh, that. Yeah.”
“Max Ringle didn’t have an accomplice in the Wake Forest football program, so why lie about that?”
“My high school grades were so sorry, my dad was afraid a good SAT score wouldn’t be enough. He talked to Ringle, who told him to say I wanted to walk on the football team. Like maybe if it was a close call, that could put me over the top.”
“So, you went along with Max Ringle’s advice and fabricated your résumé?”
“It wasn’t a total lie. My freshman year in high school, I went out for the team.”
“Then you must have experience as a long snapper, correct?”
“Some. I mean, I could have walked on the Demon Deacons if I hadn’t been expelled.”
“What’s a long snapper do?”
“Hikes the ball to the kicker.”
“You mean snaps the ball to the holder for the kicker?”
“Right. But directly to the other kicker. The . . . you know . . .”
“The punter?”
“Yeah, him.”
I pulled an old football out of my bulky trial bag. Painted on the pigskin was “Penn State 14, University of Miami 10,” from the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. Fond memories.
“Mr. Hallinan, catch.” I tossed the ball with the underhand spiral favored by game officials. Teague’s hands came up late and the ball bounced off his rib cage, but he managed to snag the rebound and clutch the ball to his chest, as you might a crying baby. “Now please come down and stand over there by the government table.”
Margaret Bolden got to her feet, eyed me with a bit of amusement, and stayed quiet. I paced off precisely 7.5 yards, which put me at the far corner of the jury box. I got down into the holder’s position on one knee.
“Now, get into your stance over the ball.”
He spread his legs and held the ball on the floor with both hands in front of him. He teetered unsteadily as he looked at me, upside down.
“Keep your back straight, Mr. Hallinan. Be balanced. You look like a teapot that’s going to topple onto your spout.”
He adjusted his position, and I said, “Now, a good long snapper can get the ball to the holder in less than seven-tenths of a second. You gotta really whip it and follow through. That’s the key. I’m not calling any signals. Just snap it when ready.”
“No problem.”
He breathed hard and tilted forward, then snapped the ball. As I’d advised, he whipped it with a strong follow-through. Unfortunately, he never let go of the ball and it slammed into his testicles so hard you could almost hear the squish.
He emitted a shriek, crumpled onto the floor, and curled into the fetal position, both hands on his groin, whimpering.
“Perhaps this would be a propitious time for a brief recess,” I suggested amiably.
***
Following the recess, the last witness of the day was Shari Ringle. She wore a silk gray and black wrap dress, cinched at the waist, with knee-high burgundy boots of a soft leather. Her chestnut hair fell to her shoulders. Shari took the oath, sat down, looked straight at Kip, and pursed her lips, as if kissing him. Kip looked back and nodded. A calm, neutral nod that he’d been practicing.
Shari was important to the government because she was “student zero,” the first client of the scheme. As Max Ringle’s daughter, there was no charge, but Max still paid Kip for proctoring her test and changing her answers.
“Daddy hired Kip to tutor me,” Shari said on direct exam. “At first, just plain old tutoring. To make it more fun, Kip would take the practice tests with me, challenging me to beat him, which I never did. Then I noticed he missed the last two questions of every section. Otherwise, he got everything right. I grilled him and he admitted he got those wrong on purpose, so I wouldn’t be bummed about my own scores. I told Daddy that Kip’s a friggin’ genius. He could get a 1600 on the SAT or a 36 on the ACT every time. Then I said, ‘I wish Kip could take the test for me.’”
“What did your father say?”
“Daddy was quiet a minute. Then he said, ‘Maybe he can.’ Which I thought was totally obidiculous.”
“Obi . . .?”
“Obidiculous. Overboard and ridiculous. But Daddy bribed a proctor in West Hollywood to get Kip into the extra-time room as a proctor, and he corrected enough of my wrong answers to get me into U.S.C.”
On cross-examination, I started nice and easy.
“Have you been busy since getting expelled from U.S.C.?”
“Duh,” she answered. “Maybe you heard of my podcast, ‘Alt-Skool.’”
“I never miss it. Does it have spo
nsors?”
“Aroma-dot-com, high six figures and going up. They cancelled me when the scandal broke, then begged to come back when I started making bank on my other projects.”
“What else is keeping you busy these days?”
“My cosmetics line. My biggest seller is ‘Eraze,’ a blemish remover.”
“And you have a line of feminine hygiene products, correct?”
“‘Change your tampon, not your grade.’ I wrote that slogan myself.”
“Then there’s your nutrition book,” I continued.
“It’s really a nutrition-lifestyle book. Count Money, Not Calories. I didn’t actually write it, but I read some of it when the ghostwriter gave me galleys. And my vlog, “Sexting and Blinging,” has taken off. So has my reality show, ‘Gen Z Nation.’”
“How about your Instagram? Nine million followers, right?”
“Old news. Ten million and powering up from there.”
“So, you’re really more than just a social media influencer?” I asked.
“I’m a media empire,” Shari declared, without a hint of boastfulness.
“How much money did your empire make in the last year?”
“You’d have to ask my accountant, but it’s north of eleven million.”
I let out an appreciative whistle for the jury’s benefit. The judge scowled at me but said nothing.
Then, out of the blue, Shari said, “I met Kim Kardashian at Nightshade.”
My look showed my puzzlement.
“Nightshade! Mei Lin’s restaurant in L.A. Kusshi oysters with passionfruit leche de tigre.”
Oh, that Nightshade.
“I met Kim Kardashian there,” Shari repeated. “She knew who I was!”
Shari said it with the enthusiasm Albert Einstein might have displayed when discovering that massive objects distort space-time.
As was my custom, I decided to ask a question without knowing the answer. It’s like wandering off a marked jungle trail into an area known for quicksand. But you also should use your instincts. Shari Ringle was all glitz, glamour, and Kushii oysters with passionfruit leche de tigre. But she was not deceptive or malicious. I took the leap.
“Ms. Ringle, when the indictments came down and you were expelled from U.S.C., you were pretty upset with my client, weren’t you?”
“Totally. Really aguitado.”
“Agitated?”
“Yeah. Bummed.”
“And now?”
“Now, I thank Kip for making me what I am today.”
Unless the heavens were going to open and rain down milk and honey, this seemed to be the high point of my day.
“No further questions.” I felt a measure of joy. I was a poker player who, against the odds, had just filled an inside straight and had won a small pot. But looking toward Margaret Bolden at the prosecution table, I knew that my opponent had a pile of chips that dwarfed my own.
CHAPTER FIFTY
A Bribe is a Bribe
The next morning, I expected the government to call Max Ringle, its star witness. So I was surprised when Bolden asked a woman named Georgina Suarez to take the stand. She was director of Ethical Admissions Compliance at Stanford. It was a nifty new department created in the wake of the scandal, the university building a moat around its castle to keep out the barbarians. Or, rather, “to assure fair and ethical administration of the admissions process henceforth,” in Ms. Suarez’s words.
Yeah, she said “henceforth.”
She was a smart and articulate woman, conservatively dressed in a charcoal skirt and jacket and a gray silk blouse. She had recently moved into the Admissions Department from the faculty, where she taught a course called “Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.”
Margaret Bolden went straightaway to the heart of the government’s case. “Did Stanford admit any students whose standardized tests were compromised by the defendant?”
“There was a young woman, a Chinese national, who purported to be a competitive sailor. That was false. Her family gave five million dollars to the university through Max Ringle’s company. Because of her difficulties with English, she fared poorly on the English portion of the SAT, so that even had she been a competitive sailor, she would not have been admitted. The young woman then came to Los Angeles where the defendant proctored her exam, or I should say, doctored her exam, and her score increased sufficiently to gain admission, albeit fraudulently.”
I pulled a file from under the table and found the information regarding the Chinese woman, her family, and the sailing team.
“What is the effect of such a fraudulent admission on Stanford, now that this case and others have been discovered and publicized?” Bolden asked.
“Whoa! Whoa! Objection.” I was on my feet, not sure exactly why I seemed to be yelling at runaway horses. “Irrelevant and calls for an opinion.”
“To the contrary,” Bolden replied. “This goes to the element of the crime requiring that property be taken by fraud.”
“Then I object on the ground that the question calls for a legal conclusion.”
“No, it calls for facts, which the witness is uniquely positioned to explain.”
“Then I object because the government is using the witness as an expert, and under the rules . . .” I shot a look at the judge to see if he detected any irony in my citing one of his heavenly rules, but he wasn’t even looking at me, “the government is required to give me advance notice of all expert witnesses.”
“Overruled,” proclaimed the judge without favoring us with his reasoning.
“The defendant harmed our university in many respects,” Georgina Suarez said. “Securing the fraudulent admission of less qualified students damaged the more qualified applicants who were not accepted. The fraud also hijacked the university’s admissions process. Finally, it validated a national cynicism about the process by giving credence to the notion that wealthy families enjoy an unjust advantage.”
Wow. My Kip did all of that?
“What property was Stanford deprived of due to the defendant’s scheme?”
“The admissions slot was basically stolen by the defendant’s actions. We were deprived of filling it in the best interests of the university. We also suffered a reputational loss. The news coverage has portrayed the admissions process at elite universities as corrupt. We strive for fairness, a level playing field, and the defendant deprived us of that ability.”
This went on for a while, Margaret Bolden feeding lobs to Georgina Suarez, who smacked overheads into my court like a champion Stanford tennis player. When Bolden turned the witness over to me, I bounded out of my chair—and I don’t do much bounding these days. I had no notes; I didn’t need them. I stood in front of, not behind, the podium, to create a more imposing presence.
“When you answered the question about the property Stanford supposedly lost,” I began, “you didn’t say anything about money, did you?”
“No, I did not.”
“Because this didn’t cost the university a dime, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Isn’t it true that Stanford actually made money? Millions of dollars funneled to the athletic department through Max Ringle’s company, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So, there’s no real difference in gaining admission through Ringle’s bribery and the university selling admissions slots to the children of high-rolling donors?”
“We don’t sell slots.”
“Fine, we’ll get back to that. First, let’s talk about that level playing field and fairness in admissions. Not all applications go into the same pile, do they?”
“It’s all electronic these days, so technically, there are no piles.”
“Whether on paper or on hard drives, legacies have a leg up, don’t they? Children of alumni.”
“Yes, at all major institutions, some weight is given to that.”
“Children of major donors get preferential admissions, too. Isn’t that right?”
&n
bsp; “Again, that’s quite standard.”
“And athletes get preferential admissions, whether they be football players or women lacrosse players?”
“Yes.”
“So athletes, legacies, and children of major donors are routinely admitted with lower grades and test scores than other applicants, correct?”
“As they are at the Ivies and other institutions.”
“What’s the overall acceptance rate for your applicants?”
“This year, 4.4 percent.”
“Harvard, which has a similarly low acceptance rate, reports that eighty-six percent of recruited athletes gain admission. Would Stanford’s number be similar?”
“I don’t have an exact figure, but that sounds like the ballpark, no pun intended.”
“Let’s go back to that applicant who claimed to be a competitive sailor. She lived in a landlocked Chinese city about a thousand miles from any body of water, correct?”
“I’ve since learned that, yes.”
“And the young woman wouldn’t know a mast from a boom if one hit her on the head, would she?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“What I’m getting at, Ms. Suarez, is this. Wasn’t Stanford negligent in not researching the bona fides of her application?”
“Our process fell short, and my office is taking remedial steps.”
“Stanford is very proud of its athletic program, is it not?”
“Indeed.”
“Again this year, Stanford won the Directors’ Cup, signifying the best overall athletic program, correct?”
She loosened up and smiled. “Year in and year out.”
“How many varsity teams does Stanford have?”
“Thirty-six,” she reported, proudly. “Second only to Harvard.”
“Ah, just as in academics?”
She gave me her first smile. “We can debate that another time.”
“How many athletes on those thirty-six teams?”
“Approximately nine hundred.”
“The key word is ‘approximately,’ isn’t it? You might have a few more or a few less. It’s not a set number, is it?”
“That would be correct.”
