Julie Bosman, Serge F. Kovaleski and Jose A. Del Real

In central Illinois, William Singer made a passionate pitch to local business executives who came by invitation to a hotel meeting room. In Sacramento, he addressed rapt audiences of parents at private schools. He twice spoke to well-heeled employees at Pimco, the giant investment management firm based in Newport Beach, California.

His message was confident and concise: He knew the secret to getting into college.

“He was well dressed, he was well spoken, he had a PowerPoint,” said Eric Webb, a father of two who drove to Champaign, Illinois, from Peoria in 2012 to hear Singer talk about building children’s brands, leveraging their talents and finding the schools of their dreams.

Intrigued, Webb hired Singer to prepare his son and daughter for college, paying him at least $5,000 a year for several years of monthly visits to dole out sage advice.

But even as Webb’s teenage son began counseling sessions with Singer in 2012, federal prosecutors say, Singer was simultaneously bribing a college tennis coach on the East Coast and setting up a foundation on the West Coast to camouflage bribes from rich parents.

Singer, 58, became the mastermind of an enormous, elaborate scheme carried out over years, brazenly paying off coaches and test monitors, faking exam scores and fabricating student biographies, prosecutors say — all to help wealthy parents cheat their children’s way into desirable colleges.

Thirty-three parents have been charged in the case, and more indictments may be on the way. Singer, who pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and other counts last week, has claimed on his website that he had thousands of clients, though it is unclear how many of them he helped to break the rules.

As news of the charges spread, some of Singer’s former clients around the country said they were stunned and shaken. To them, Singer, who was known as Rick, had always been strategic and unabashedly pushy, but they said they had never heard him suggest breaking a law.

“He was a great mentor to me,” said Dylan Klumph, a college football player who said Singer counseled him.

Singer worked in the college counseling business for much of three decades, but he appeared to reach a pivot point around 2011. The earliest in the long list of his deceptions that investigators have traced so far, outlined in more than 200 pages of court documents, date back to that year.

Around the same time, Singer was moving to a new house in a flashier community in Southern California; starting a charitable foundation that prosecutors say was used as a clearinghouse for bribes; and frenetically seeking out clients in cities across the country.

Those who knew Singer described him in interviews as a man constantly on the move, in and out of airports, hotels, boardrooms and living rooms. He was selling himself — a trim former athlete with salt-and-pepper hair who bragged about his connections in college admission offices and his encyclopedic knowledge of the higher-education landscape. He sold copies of his self-published guide to college admissions with a close-up of his face on the cover.

Singer, whose representatives did not respond to interview requests, carefully cultivated networks of parents around the country — typical middle-class families in Illinois, business moguls and celebrities in Los Angeles, and even professional athletes — who used his college counseling services and invited him into their homes and inside their deepest worries.

They all wanted the same thing: An answer to the vexing question of how to beat the odds at selective schools that turn away as many as 20 applicants for every one they accept.

“He was like the Pied Piper,” said Dorothy Missler, a former administrator at a Jesuit school in Sacramento who had an encounter with Singer about 20 years ago. “He played the music, and they followed him down the lane.”

— ‘A Master Salesman’ in a Young Field

In the Sacramento of the 1990s, Singer was not just an ambitious up-and-comer, but a pioneer.

Margie Amott, a certified educational planner in Sacramento, said she was a volunteer at a public school in the mid-1990s when Singer spoke at a college-night event. He was discussing his services as an admissions consultant, a relatively unusual occupation in those days, when college competition was fierce but had not yet exploded out of control.

“He was the first consultant of this type in Sacramento,” she recalled. “He was persuasive, articulate and implied he knew the tricks, and that he could really help kids get an edge to get into college. I refer to him as a master salesman. He was a great pitcher. He was believable.”

Singer was a somewhat unlikely messenger. In his own youth, he appeared to display neither wealth nor connections as he bounced from a Catholic university to a community college, before eventually graduating from Trinity University in San Antonio, a respected private institution but not one of the Ivy League-level names he was in the habit of mentioning to his top clients.

As a college student and competitive baseball and basketball player in 1985, he mused to the university’s student newspaper, The Trinitonian, that he might like to work with young people someday. “I like to communicate with people, and I’m definitely a person who works hard on my own skills,” he said.

In the article, he was pictured in his basketball jersey, the Trinity Tigers’ No. 25. “I don’t like to lose,” he told the paper.

In the years that followed, Singer dabbled in a series of jobs and companies that he created, but always returned to counseling people for college.

The parents who hired him early on, in Sacramento, said they were thrilled by his confident, exacting approach. He swept into presentations, polished, authoritative and willing to drop names of renowned schools and clients from the top rungs of industry. He conveyed a calm certainty about the mysteries of the stress-inducing admissions system.

Janis Heaphy Durham, a former publisher of The Sacramento Bee, said that she enlisted Singer in late 2006 or early 2007, when he was well known among parents around town.

“We hired him to keep Tanner on track,” she said of her son.

Although her son’s grades in high school were “in order” and he was being scouted by at least two universities as a rugby recruit, Durham recalled that Singer “helped us navigate the application process, which can be daunting, and he had a good understanding of the personalities of the various schools.” She would sometimes come home and find Singer sitting at her dining room table, working with her son on his homework.

But other people who encountered Singer at the time — particularly professional peers and counseling competitors — viewed him with suspicion. Some said he seemed to be promising things he couldn’t necessarily deliver. Others chafed at his aggressive approach.

Jill Newman, a longtime counselor at schools in Sacramento, said that in meetings at Rio Americano High School, where she was working, Singer would forcefully advocate for students whose parents had retained him.

“He would just come in and be very demanding, and say, ‘We want this kid transferred to this teacher, and how do we make this happen,'” she recalled. “He clearly schooled the families on how to behave. Parents would say things like, ‘Rick told us to do this.'”

Amott eventually got into the business herself. She concluded that Singer didn’t know much about what he was doing. She also questioned his ethics.

“It drove me nuts that he would say that he could get you into X college, because an ethical consultant cannot make promises like that, since there are no guarantees,” she said.

— ‘I Can Do Anything and Everything’

Around 2011, Singer’s life had reached a turning point.

His marriage had officially ended that year, according to court records. But his business was flourishing, as he continued to travel frequently and search out more clients. He appeared to be moving on from Sacramento and establishing a new home base in glitzier Southern California: In May 2012, Singer bought a house in Newport Beach for $1.55 million, according to property records, getting a mortgage for most of it.

Bill Townsend, an entrepreneur, met Singer around 2010 through a mutual friend, and was enlisted to build a new website for Singer, one that would more effectively tell the story of his growing business.

Singer spoke of his increasingly high-profile clientele, Townsend said. “As I recall, a lot of tech contacts, media contacts, politicians,” he said. “It was an expensive service. Back then, it was about $12,000 or $15,000 a year.”

It was around 2011, prosecutors said, that Singer began committing the crimes that were detailed in documents last week, soliciting bribes from parents to facilitate their children’s admissions to college — something he called a “side door” entrance to the entire college competition. Under his theory, the “front door” was for ordinary, law-abiding students applying the normal way and hoping for the best, and the back door was for families who made large donations to schools in the hope of boosting a student’s chances for admission there, a practice that is legal but not certain to succeed.

Until the operation was interrupted by the FBI eight years later, Singer promoted his side-door method, including faked athletic credentials and cheating on tests, as something the other methods were not: a sure thing.

He recruited coaches to his plan by telling them that plenty of other coaches were already involved, and that he had handled plenty of student applications this way. “You can tell them I did 760 of these this year,” he told a coach last year.

And to parents, he conveyed the same sort of certainty and swagger about his side-door method that he had shown for decades about standard college admissions coaching. Could cheating on a standardized test get a family in trouble? “I have never seen it happen,” Singer assured the father who asked.

Explaining the heart of his plans in a call last year that was secretly recorded by investigators, Singer told one parent: “There’s lots of ways to do this. I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it.”

Even as he talked to families in Southern California, Massachusetts and Illinois, Singer was aiming to expand his reputation nationally.

In YouTube videos, Singer gave tips on college admissions aimed at students and parents — and promoted his company, the Edge College &amp; Career Network, called The Key. At least once, he made passing mention of his son, Bradley, saying that as a father, he understood how stressful the college-admissions process could be.

In 2012, Singer stepped more deeply into criminal activity, prosecutors said, by setting up the Key Worldwide Foundation, the charity that was used to disguise the true nature of payments from parents.

It was ostensibly established to provide a gateway to higher education for disadvantaged students, but it made financial donations to colleges and universities that were the top choices of Singer’s more affluent clients.

The foundation’s tax returns show that it received more than $7 million in contributions from 2013 through 2016, and that it listed around $2.7 million in donations that it distributed in the same period, mostly to universities. It is unclear whether the donation figures listed in the tax returns are accurate, since the foundation has been implicated as a major tool in the scheme.

Through his foundation, Singer donated $150,000 to DePaul University in Chicago while his son was an undergraduate there, said Carol Hughes, a spokeswoman for the college, noting that the younger Singer graduated in 2017. The donations, she said, were intended to support students as they studied abroad.

Between 2011 and 2018, parents paid Singer some $25 million to get their children into the right schools, prosecutors said.

By the end, as investigators were learning of the scheme, Singer seemed to have his illegal methods well established. He had grown bold about his side door, even cocky.

When he sought out photos of a student that he planned to insert digitally into a real image of an athlete, he breezily told one parent not to worry, he had done this “a million times.” In communications with colleges, he laid out false athletic credentials for students that might easily have been checked and revealed as lies; he listed one high school student as a “3-year Varsity Letter winner” in water polo and “Team MVP 2017,” even though the girl did not know how to play the sport.

Last summer, when an adviser at the University of Southern California asked an incoming freshman about his plans for the track team, the student — unaware that his parents and Singer had sold him as a track standout, complete with a pole-vaulting photo — phoned home, clearly confused. The student’s worried mother then called Singer, who brushed it all off. “I would just go about your business and let it be,” he told her.

When investigators stepped in last year, and confronted Singer with his years of questionable dealings, he turned on some of the families who had poured out their deepest parenting fears and trusted him with their complicated family dynamics.

In phone conversations that Singer knew were being recorded by the FBI, he prodded parents to acknowledge their part in shared crimes. If a parent sensed a problem and suggested meeting in person, Singer agreed — and then wore a wire.

Even then, he did not fully commit to cooperating with the government, the records show. Singer had built his business on relationships, recommendations and trust, and he appeared unwilling to tear all of it down again. At one point last year, authorities say, Singer secretly reached out to several people involved in the plot — people he had presumably once sold on his know-how, his power, and himself — and warned them about the criminal investigation.

This article originally appeared in <a id="023e852c-3313-440c-9768-a2abb4667540" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/william-rick-singer-admissions-scandal.html">The New York Times</a>.

College admissions scam was built with swagger and secrets

He was part coach, part therapist, part motivational speaker and part name dropper. Like a traveling salesman, he sought out clients near and far, selling dreams of prosperous futures.

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Julie Bosman, Serge F. Kovaleski and Jose A. Del Real

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College admissions scam was built with swagger and secrets