Revisionist HistoryThe Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 1
In the ‘Varsity Blues’ college admissions scandal, the government indicted more than 50 people. Business leaders. Celebrities. Actors. Rich people accused of paying millions of dollars to get their children into elite universities. The Department of Justice was successful in all but one case: U.S. v. Khoury. What we’re calling: The Georgetown Massacre.
Bushkin.
On March twelfth, twenty nineteen, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts unsealed indictments against more than fifty people, indictments that were part of a criminal investigation code named Varsity Blues. Business leaders, celebrities, actors, rich people accused of paying millions of dollars to get their children into elite universities millions of dollars in bribes. One by one, the parents were arrested, pled guilty, paid massive fines, served time, reputations were ruined. The media ran story after story.
Fifty people facing charges, and more arrests are likely in the weeks and months ahead.
Actresses Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman are two of the dozens of wealthy parents accused in the alleged scheme, the biggest college admissions fraud in US history. Meantime, the scandal stretches from Hollywood to Boston next week.
It was the largest investigation of its kind in the history of the Justice Department. Fifty six cases a home run, and then came the case at the very very end, the fifty seventh case. This is me in an email to the US Attorney's Office, of the District of Massachusetts asking about the final case in the Varsity Blues Investigation. Hello, there, I'm looking to interview any of the US attorneys who were involved in the Amen Couri case from a few years ago. Do you think that might be possible? Thanks m. A day later I get an answer three lines received. Thank you. While we greatly appreciate the invitation, we must respectfully decline at this time. At the Department of Justice, they do not want to talk about case fifty seven of the Varsity Blues Investigation. Oh but I do. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is part of a little mini series I'm doing to introduce my new book called Revenge of the Tipping Point, the sequel to my very first book from twenty five years ago, The Tipping Point. If you read Revenge, and of course I really hope you do, you'll see that halfway through chapter five, the Mysterious Case of the Harvard Women's Rugby Team, I make reference to a court case called US v. Coory that's the fifty seventh Varsity Blues case. But in chapter five of Revenge of the Tipping Point, I tell only part of the story of US v.
Cooory.
Did I want to tell the whole story? Of course I did. I lost sleep over trying to shoehorn the whole coury case into my book because I regard usv. Coory as one of the old time most riveting, most unintentionally hilarious, most heartbreaking legal battles ever. I mean, it ticks every single one of my boxes. It involves a tantalizing philosophical puzzle, It has twists and turns, It makes elite schools look absolutely ridiculous, And if you are a regular listener to this podcast, you know how happy that makes me. Not to mention, it features a cross examination so brutal that fair warning. If you are triggered by a defense attorney disemboweling a witness in open court, you should probably turn this off right now and switch to something safe like Joe Rogan. But in the end, I could only figure out how to put half of my favorite case ever in Revenge of the Tip Point, So I thought, just to whet your appetite, I'd use this episode to tell you about the other half. What I've come to think of as the Georgetown massacre. I was actually in Boca Ratone on vacation with my family when I first heard about the Kouri case. My cousin Kyle mentioned it to me in passing, and I was a bit bored. Needed something to read, so I ordered the trial transcripts, twelve hundred pages, started reading them over breakfast. Breakfast led to lunch, lunch to dinner, then all day. The next day, the lazy River was put on hold. I sat poolside, oblivious to the children squealing happily around me. The case centered on a very rich man named amon C. Koori, who is the son of an even richer man, Aman J.
Koory.
So if you look across industries, I mean my background is probably equity.
Corey Jr. Didn't want to talk to me, but I wanted you to get a sense of his voice. So here he is speaking on a podcast called Michigan Reimagined. One of his current projects is disrupting the trailer park business.
You look across industries, from pagemakers to automobiles, to jet airplanes, to helicopters to computers. The only industry that hauls materials and men to location. Think the homebuilding industry. The home building industry is archaic and it's approach.
Corey is in his fifties, graying nicely at the temples, a long, narrow face framed by a pair of exuberant ears. A man who takes care of himself, and his great passion is tennis. He played varsity tennis at Brown University. He played at the country clubs of Palm Beach and Cape Cof. He played with his kids. Something about hitting a round, fuzzy ball over a net clearly made him very, very happy, And what he really wanted was his oldest daughter, Katherine, to play tennis in college, just like he had. So one day back in twenty fourteen, Amon Curry goes to his college reunion and has a boozy dinner at the Capitol Grill in Providence with his old teammates from the Brown tennis squad, one of whom is Gordon Ernst aka Gordy, who was then the tennis coach at Georgetown University. Gordy Ernst was not yet notorious, but after the launch of the Varsity Blues investigation, he would be the US Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts. On the occasion of Gordie's sentencing hearing said this about him, Mister Ernst was one of the most prolific participants in cheating the college admissions system. He put nearly three point five million dollars in bribes directly into his pocket and sold close to two dozen slots at Georgetown to the highest bidder. And according to the US Attorney's Office, one of those two dozen slots on the Georgetown tennis team was sold at the Boozy Brown reunion dinner to Amon Coury on behalf of his daughter, Catherine. Gordy went down and he brought his old teammate with him, case number fifty seven. Midway through my long days in Bocha, devouring the trial transcript, I realized that Koory's lawyers were based just down the road. So I called them up. I said, I'm in Boca. I'm up to page eleven hundred. They said, come on down, and I made a bee line from Miami. Met up with Roy Black, his partner Howard Shrebnick, and their two longtime partners, Big shiny office tower, conference room, stacks of documents on the table.
That's free.
Yeah.
So Roy Black is tall, slender, usteer, almost eighty years old, an apex legal predator, completely and utterly intimidating. His nickname is the Professor. Howard Shrebnick is much younger. He looks like he's in the nineteen eighties hair metal band. He races motorcycles around Miami in the early morning hours. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention, well.
Your argument next in case fourteen four nineteen Luis versus United States.
Mister Shrebnick, thank you, mister Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
Howard has also argued two cases before the Supreme Court.
Alward is the intellectual does all the legal work as well as working on the fact. But I leave for him all that kind of stuff. That's the great thing about the way that we work. And I'll read cases all day and all night. And his only dream in life as if the case can go to the Supreme Court. But I'm trying to make sure it doesn't go into appeals by winning the trial.
And Roy began by telling me what Amon said when they first talked about the case.
He said, when he came here, said I want to go to trial. I don't want to take a plea. I don't feel that I did was a crime. Now, maybe people will disagree with the way I did it, and of course that I did it in a stupid way, that it makes it look bad and all of that, but I don't feel I committed a crime, and I think it would be against my own integrity if I went in there and played guilty just to get a shorter sentence, and if they give me a longer sentence, so be it. I would rather have my day in court, let a jury make the decision and what I want to do. And this is about six to seven months before his trial. He said, I will Are you willing to take the case with an agreement? You're going to go to trial? I said, yes, that's what we do.
A little digression. Many years ago, I went hiking in Portugal with a good friend of mine whose dad was very wealthy, and we got lost and I said to her, are you worried? And she said no, because I have the number. And I said what's the number? And she said, oh, my dad has these ex Massad guys on retainer, and if you're ever in trouble, you call them and they come and get you. Masaud Israel's secret intelligence service. It is entirely possible she was pulling my leg. I don't know. So why am I telling you this? Because Roy Black and Howard Shrebnik are the legal version of those ex masad Guys, if you are a very rich person in America and you find yourself in a great deal of legal peril, your best bet is to call on the offices a Black and Shrebnik. We're going to be spending a lot of time with Roy and Howard over the course of the next two episodes. Oh yeah, I'm doing two episodes on the Georgetown massacre, and they will come a point when you will ask yourself, is Malcolm Glawel totally in the tank for the law firm of Black and Shrebnik, And the answer is, of course, I am. Wait where were we?
Oh? Yes?
Amon Koury is charged and indicted one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, one count of bribery. He retains Roy Black and Howard Shrebnick, and he decides that he's not going to take a plea. Now understand that everyone else charged in the Varsity Blues investigation, all fifty six of them pled guilty. The famous actresses Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, folded their cards, paid a fine. Some of them did short stints in prison. How could they not. They were caught paying money under the table to college coaches to pretend that their kids could play sports when they actually couldn't, and why so their kids could get into a school that they otherwise could not. That's illegal, right.
You know.
Bribe is one of those basic crimes kind of like murder, theft, rape, by which I mean not that it's as grave as that, but it's one of those crimes that are in criminal law scholars called malum incee, meaning the earliest crimes, the ones conduct that was immoral, and that's indisputably immoral. That's why became immediately part of every criminal code going back I don't know, probably Hamlabi's days.
This is Leo Katz, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of my infatuation with US v. Korry, I asked one of the countries leading legal experts to read up on the case so I could ask him questions about it.
And then, of course there are crimes that are they're called malum prohibitum, like you know, not registering for the draft or selling illegal drugs or even not paying taxes, which only became crimes because we decided to make them.
That point is that we expect to have arguments and complications and gray areas about malum prohibitum, the made up crimes, but not malaman say, the indisputably immoral acts. Those are supposed to be open and shut for Aim and Curry to say, I'm going to fight this bribery charge. I don't think what I did was wrong. Was an act of extraordinary audacity, bordering on just plain foolishness. He decided to be done Quixote and tilt at the windmill that was the US Attorney's office of the District of Massachusetts. So he came to the same conference room I was sitting in to ask for help.
So that's really what happened.
He wanted to have a trial, and we said, yes, we will do it and dedicate ourselves to get ready for this case.
No, and that's how it started.
So when you have a case like this, you must have a kind of gut instinct about whether it's winnable at the outset.
So I'm curious about what you're.
Well, I don't know.
We did not at least. I didn't have that.
I thought that we were behind the eight ball from the beginning, and everybody else had either lost or pled guilty, and I didn't have great optimism about the case, you know, when the client came in. But I said, listen, that's been my whole career is taking cases where things look bleak. I mean, that's what we specialize in.
Black shook his head. The lawyer's nightmare is a client who will not take the easy way out. On the other side of the conference room table, Howard was shaking his head as well.
He wanted to testify.
In fact, it was a battle to convince him he should not testify, because he wanted the jury to know the truth that he did not bribe the coach, and that what he did was an act of generosity after the fact, not a crime.
Before the fact.
A man attacking a windmill, armed only with a tennis racket a lost cause. I tell you that this was my favorite legal case ever, I think I did. The first witness for the government was a man named Timothy Donovan. He was one of the former Brown tennis players who attended the Fateful Dinner at the Capitol Grill. He now runs a tennis academy in Milton, Massachusetts. There's no tape of the trial proceedings, but we've recreated testimonies for you using two loyal members of the Greater Pushkin community, Dak Shepherd and Britt Marlin. Here's Britt as one of the prosecutors examining Donovan, as played by Dak Shepherd.
Are you familiar with the defendant Amon Corey?
I am.
How do you know him?
We were teammates on the tennis team at Brown University in the late eighties.
Did there come a time when you entered into an arrangement with the defendant concerning his daughter?
Yes?
What was the nature of that arrangement.
The nature of it was, I was going to help facilitate a deal where the defendant would pay two hundred thousand in cash in exchange for a recruiting slot at Georgetown University.
And who was he going to pay two hundred thousand dollars in cash to as a part of this deal.
Gordon Arnst, the coach at the time at Georgetown.
And what was the payment for.
An admission slot on the team.
And what was your role in the deal?
I was essentially the middle person to help with communication back and forth between Gordy Ernst and Aim and Coury.
Was that payment made it was by whom?
By Aim and Coury.
What was your understanding of whether the defendant's daughter was actually qualified to play tennis?
She was not qualified to play at that level of college tennis.
What was your understanding of whether she was actually going to play tennis at Georgetown?
The defendant and I talked about how she had no plans to play there.
To be specific, Donovan went to Kury's house on Cape cod picked up a brown paper grocery bag with one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in cash, got twenty k for himself, and delivered the package to Gordie Ernst's wife, who stashed it in a safe deposit box.
How did Catherine's scores compare to the average scores of your clients who are admitted to Georgetown's tennis recruits.
They were quite a bit lower.
If we can look at page four, please we see a copy of Catherine's transcript, and in particular, her junior year average was seventy eight point five. How did Catherine's GPA compare to the average gpa of your clients who were admitted to Georgetown as tennis recruits significantly lower.
After Donovan came a parade of other witnesses, tennis people, people from Katherine Courry's high school, her guidance counselor tennis coach, all saying the same thing, Katie Coury at a school like Georgetown is a dubious proposition. Day two of the trial was not good for the defense. Day three not good. Day four comes and goes. If you are Aman Curry sitting in the defendant's chair, you're thinking, I should have taken a plea. I'm going away for years. But then came day five, the Georgetown massacre. Let's talk about Brenda Smith, which I thought was in my reading, was the highlight. On day five, Howard and Roy called a witness who worked as a fun for the Georgetown Athletic department. Her name was Brenda Smith. Smith did not come to the courthouse willingly. She was peened. All she knew going in was what the Georgetown lawyers clearly told her, which was not to worry. This is going to be easy. She wasn't on trial, Amon Courry was. The case was black and white, and she was on the winning side. Malamense. So you describe that whole moment exchange for me, because, like I said, all I can do is read it.
So bring it to life.
Howard sets the scene.
So now Brenda.
Smith, whose sole job as the quote senior director of development for athletics close quote, and development doesn't mean bodybuilding, conditioning.
Fitness development is a euphemism for money raising money. She's now on the witness stand, and she's going to suggest that money doesn't matter with regard to admissions, that her job is entirely independent of the admissions process.
This was the moral heart of the case. Why does am and Curry belong in jail because he used a grocery bag full of cash to corrupt the admissions process at a selective institution where the admissions process is supposed to be about merit and achievement. So Smith takes the stand. Roy's asking the questions once again, our voice actors.
All right, I wanted to ask you about admissions into the university. The university has an admissions department correct or admissions office correct? And you are not an admissions officer. No, However, you would communicate with admissions officers, would you not?
No?
I never did would you ever get involved in attempting to influence the admission of people into the university?
No?
I did not.
Did you ever lobby the admissions office the admission's office, No?
No.
Did you ever advise the admission's office about the amount of money people had?
No?
Did you ever advise the admissions office that an athlete or a potential athlete came from a well positioned family.
No?
Did you ever advise the admission office about the net worth of parents of potential recruits?
I did not.
Did you ever advise the Admission's office about the value of parents' homes?
I did not know.
Brenda Smith does not seem to have realized at this point that Howard and Roy have in their possession every email, every email she wrote in the time of her employment at Georgetown. Or maybe she does, but the implications of that fact haven't sunk in. I mean, maybe she thought, I wrote thousands and thousands of emails, ninety nine percent of them. We're harmless. There's no way they read all of them, is there? Well, yes there is, and Roy starts putting his favorites up on the screen.
All right, Can we turn to Exhibit two eighty five and if we could highlight the middle paragraph. By the way, who is Let's go to the top first. I'm sorry, who is David Nolan?
He is the women's soccer coach.
All right, and he's asking you if she is somebody you want to cultivate.
Correct, that's what the email says.
Good, tell me what the word cultivate.
Means, develop a relationship with typically?
All right? If we could, Oh, you put down there in the second one, you wrote five point six million house, right, correct? So I guess you do find out how much parents' homes are worth.
Right?
Well, you asked me earlier. If I share that information with admissions, I do not. This is an email with a coach.
This is different, so as I understand it. Then you're telling the soccer coach that a prospective athletics soccer players parents own a home worth five point six million dollars right?
Yes?
Now, can I ask you this, What does that have to do with their ability to play soccer?
Nothing?
Does that have something to do with the ability to get them to donate money to the soccer team.
No, it's simply the part of the family relationship that I would be interested in.
The trial had ended well over a year before I met with the Coury defense team. But everyone in the conference room that day, Roy Howard and the two partners Jackie Purchek and Maria Naira, remembered the key moments perfectly. Something would come up in our conversation. They would pick up one of the stacks of transcripts on the table and just start reading.
One of my favorite one of the coaches writing to Brenda Smith, the coaches will have to recruit really rich kids who can play.
Yeah, I remember that one.
Yeah, well yeah, rich kids who can plain?
Yeah, Okay.
The beauty of it is that before he got to the emil, Roy.
Would say to the weirdness and did you ever get an email where somebody would tell you that you need to recruit.
Really rich people?
Oh?
Of course not, mister blah.
Brenda Smith writing to the swimming coach, in an effort by Brenda Smith to get the swimming coach to recruit the student quote, this is a family who may not have seven figures, but definitely six figures. And Roy says anything in there about the splits, the times in the one hundred yard dash on the lacrosse team. Of course, our case was about tennis but it was institutional. Quote, I'm checking on this potential recruit one of my five hundred thousand dollars donors, and next I'm working on a five hundred million plus.
Million. Yeah.
And so Brenda Smith writes back, So if the student is in your ballpark at all?
Dot dot?
So wait, did you describe Brenda Smith to be during that destiny?
What's she doing?
I wish she dealing with this. She was sort of befuddled, as I recalled.
Another example of someone just denying what was obvious, losing credibility as she's sitting on the witness stand to try to pretend is if wealth did not affect the emissions process.
They didn't want to ever admit that money influenced admissions. They will never admit that, even no matter how many emails we show them, they would still not admit it because they knew they could not admit that it just they thought that that would affect the integrity of the school.
Is she is she defiant or humiliated or no?
No, she wasn't defiant, as I said, She was more befuddled, like why am I here? And I don't really want to be here? But it's like they told me to show up. So here I am what Georgetown's mission was at the trial to look to say that development is separate from admissions. That was that was their whole theme, is that we admit people, but it has nothing to do with money. Sure will ask for money later, but there's no connection between the two. That was what everybody on direct examination testified to because they thought as a matter of integrity, they didn't want to admit that people got admitted.
And he's because of their will.
It's a good Catholic school.
It's the parable of the coin.
And Jesus answering said, unto them, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. And they marveled at him. Render to development the things that are development, and to admissions the things that are admissions. And finally we come to my favorite email. It's from Gordie again, Gordon Ernst, Aiman Curry's old tennis teammate to Brenda Smith. You can imagine how much our apex predator is enjoying this moment.
Now let me show you, he said, end you this email in which he says no idea if he has do or not. He struck me as a bit of a tire kicker, but who knows. Sometimes those are big hitters. Now, why in the world would he be asking you or telling you he has no idea if the kid has money.
I don't know. I don't know what this term is about.
You responded, he has no money at all, Right.
I do say that.
Why would you be telling that to the describing a potential recruit like that to the tennis coach.
Well, I believe because I was trying to get him back on track. If you see his previous comment, it was about money, and I was trying to talk to him about whether or not this kid was a recruit. The previous emails are about this parent wanting to hold his kid out of college for a year to you, a gap year, but with the hopes that the kid would be able to play for Gordy, And I was trying to get to the heart of the conversation. Looks like which is how he would not be a recruit.
But your actual statement is he has no money at all. Show me the money.
That's a joke, like that was a joke in our office. Show me the money, Show me the money, like it was just a joke in.
The office, and then you end it by saying he sounds dreadful.
Yes I do.
Why would you say that?
I don't know, Oh dear, So let us imagine that you are sitting in the jury during the eight long days of usv.
Kurry.
You might begin with a very straightforward thought that rich people should not be buying their children's way into Georgetown University. But then by day five, after the Georgetown massacre, you begin to think, oh, wait a minute. In a kind of roundabout way, Georgetown allows rich people to buy their way into Georgetown University, only they are a little more circumspect about it. I mean, no one is making donations to Georgetown in a brown paper bag. But what exactly is the difference between what Amon Kurry and Gordy did and what the Georgetown Development Office did every day? Isn't it just that Gordy and Amen's arrangement was a bit too obvious. This was the point that my legal expert Leo Katz made that suggested a hypothetical scenario to make sense of this. Suppose that after that boozy dinner at the Capitol Grill, Corey and Gordy had gone to a lawyer and the lawyer said to Gordy, you should start a tennis camp.
And the lawyer says, you know, you could just you know, charge an arm and a leg or maybe sort of a sliding scale for getting admitted to the tennis camp, and then you predominantly choose people from your tennis camp to be admitted, which you could justify. Right, You've seen them play, you know the strengths, and if you do it that way, you know, then it's it's I think you ought to be okay. And then then the puzzle right as well. Gee, if it could have been done that way but just happened not to be done that way, they did it in a more direct way with the paperbag. What's the big deal? It comes to the same thing.
You're missing one component though, which I'm curious what you make of this. I would add a third if I was him, I would say, and the goal of my tennis camp is not to produce elite tennis players, but to instill in the campers a love of the game and to build character among those you know who have chosen tennis's. I mean, if he.
Does much better at this than I am, I just that's right. I think he'd want to get a lawyer, and the lawyer would probably want to bring in a PR person who can then answer.
But he just needs to be frank about the fact he's not interested in turning out Roger Federer. That's not that's.
Important to specify that, know your objectives. That that makes it even easier because they bypassing people who are maybe better tennis players. Then becomes particularly unobjection.
In the evening, after we've hit backhands for two hours, we'll sit and we'll discuss great works of legal philosophies, such as books books written by Leo Katz. Yes, patron sate of this particular arrangement. Yes, yes, yes, that would work. This is the hypothetical scenario that would have saved Gordy Ernst and Aim and Curry a tennis camp. But wait, wait, Gody Ernst actually had a tennis camp. You know, he has one he's running at the Georgetown and the arrangement he has with the university is that he was running it on university property during the summer and he was allowed to keep one hundred percent of the proceeds from the camp. That was so they had signed off on that. Wow, makes it particularly interesting and The other thing that's fascinating is that in all aspects of the decisions about who to admit both to his tennis squad but also his camp, he has discretion. No one is the university is not interfering in a substantial way without of If he wants someone on his tennis team and gets them on his senness team, and he definitely in his summer camp, he gets to admit absolutely whoever he wants, so, say, Gordy Ernst made it clear that he wasn't actually trying to recruit great tennis players. Then wouldn't the crime of letting someone on the team who wasn't a great tennis player look less and less like a crime. As I was talking to Leo Katz, I suddenly remembered, Oh, there was an email on this right in the middle of the Georgetown massacre. It's about a big time Georgetown donor who was a friend who is a kid who likes to play tennis. Roy made a meal out of this one while examining Brenda.
Smith, and then it says, his good friend in a well positioned family. What does that mean? A well positioned family?
I think it means that the family has the potential to be donors should they become involved with the university.
All right, And what they're saying here is that the person wants to come to the campus and meet with Gordon Ernst.
Correct, that's what it says.
You tell Gordy Earnst that, But if she he is in the ballpark, it wouldn't hurt us. Now does that mean that it wouldn't hurt us to recruit the person?
No, Gordy is asking me if I want him to meet with the kid, and so I'm saying it wouldn't hurt us if he met with him.
And what he responds to you another mediocre player. That is my strike zone. What is he telling you there?
That his team is not a very well performing team.
Gordy, you idiot. You could have made all this go away so easily. And that's what I have to imagine. The Jerry is thinking, why are we going through all this trouble, sitting here for the better part of two weeks to stand in judgment of two people who are just too stupid to conduct their business with the right number of nudges and winks. The Georgetown massacre was when the first cracks appeared in the government's case, and then the whole thing goes south because right after Brenda Smith is disemboweled on the stand, Howard and Roy call a mystery witness, and the mystery witness has a very big surprise for the prosecutors of the District of Massachusetts.
That's next week in Part two.
In terms of poise and speaking, she had such authenticity. She came across very well as a witness.
Vision's History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Ben ded Af Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Schakerji fact checking by Sam Russick, Original scoring by Luis Gerra, mastering by Echo Mountain, Engineering by Sarah Bruger and Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer is the incomparable Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix. Voice acting by Dak Sheppard and Britt Marlin, who had so much fun working together on our Little Mermaid episodes a few seasons ago that they re upped for another tour of duty. I'm Malcolm Blodwell.
