Revisionist History - The Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 1

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On March 12th, 2019, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts unsealed indictments against more than 50 people. Indictments that were part of a criminal investigation codenamed 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. 50 people facing charges and more arrests are likely in the weeks and months ahead. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are two of the dozens of wealthy parents accused in the alleged scheme. The biggest college admissions fraud in U.S. 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.

56 cases. A home run. And then came the case at the very, very end. The 57th case. This is me in an email to the U.S. 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 U.S. attorneys who were involved in the Eamon Khoury 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 57 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 25 years ago, The Tipping Point. If you read Revenge, and of course I really hope you do, you'll see that halfway through Chapter 5, the mysterious case of the Harvard women's rugby team, I make reference to a court case called U.S. v. Coorey. That's the 57th Varsity Blues case. But in Chapter 5 of Revenge of the Tipping Point, I tell only part of the story of U.S. v. Coorey.

Did I want to tell the whole story? Of course I did. I lost sleep over trying to shoehorn the whole Khoury case into my book because I regard U.S. v. Khoury as one of the all-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 tipping 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 Raton on vacation with my family when I first heard about the Khoury 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. 1,200 pages. I 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 Eamon C. Coorey, who is the son of an even richer man, Eamon J. Coorey. If you look across industries, I mean, my background is private equity. Coorey 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. If you look across industries from pacemakers to automobiles to jet airplanes to helicopters helicopters, to computers.

The only industry that hauls materials and men to location is the home-building industry. The home-building industry is archaic in its approach. Khoury is in his 50s, 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 Cod. 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, Catherine, to play tennis in college just like he had. So one day, back in 2014, Eamon 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, a.k.a. 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 U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, on the occasion of Gordy's sentencing hearing, said this about him. Mr. Ernst was one of the most prolific participants in cheating the college admissions system.

He put nearly $3.5 million in bribes directly into his pocket and sold close to two dozen slots at Georgetown to the highest bidder. And according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, one of those two dozen slots on the Georgetown tennis team was sold at the Boozy Brown reunion dinner to Eamon Coorey on behalf of his daughter, Catherine. Gordy went down and he brought his old teammate with him. Case number 57. Midway through my long days in Boca devouring the trial transcript, I realized that Coorey's lawyers were based just down the road. So I called them up. I said, I'm in Boca. I'm up to page 1100. They said, come on down.

And I made a beeline for Miami. Met up with Roy Black, his partner Howard Shrebnik, and their two longtime partners. Big shiny office tower, conference room, stacks of documents on the table. That's Maria. Hi. So, well... Roy Black is tall, slender, austere,

almost 80 years old, an apex legal predator, completely and utterly intimidating. His nickname is The Professor. Howard Shrebnik is much younger. He looks like he's in a 1980s hair metal band. He races motorcycles around Miami in the early morning hours. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. We'll hear argument next in case 14419, Luis versus United States. Mr. Shrebnik. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court. Howard has also argued two cases before the Supreme Court. Howard is the intellectual, does all the legal work as well as working on the facts.

But I leave for him all that kind of stuff. That's the great thing about the way that we work. He'll read cases all day and all night. His only dream in life is 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, he 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, and I did it the 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 pled 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, we said, 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. Massad, 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 Shrebnick are the legal version of those ex-Mossad 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 of Black and Shrebnick.

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 there will come a point when you will ask yourself, is Malcolm Gladwell totally in the tank for the law firm of Black and Shrebnick? And the answer is, of course I am. Wait, where were we? Oh yes, Eamon Coorey is charged and indicted. One count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, one count of bribery.

He retains Roy Black and Howard Shrebnnik, and he decides that he's not going to take a plea. Now, understand that everyone else charged in the Varsity Blues investigation, all 56 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 in se, meaning the earliest crimes, the ones conduct that was immoral, and that's indisputably immoral, That's why it became immediately part of every criminal code going back, I don't know, probably Hammurabi's days. This is Leo Katz, professor of law, University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of my infatuation with USV Khoury, I asked one of the

country's 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. Katz's point is that we expect to have arguments and complications and gray areas about malum prohibitum, the made-up crimes, but not malum in se, the indisputably immoral acts. Those are supposed to be open and shut. For Eamon Currie to say, I'm going to fight this bribery charge, I don't think

what I did was wrong, was an act of extraordinary audacityacity bordering on just plain foolishness. He decided to be Don Quixote and tilt at the windmill that was the U.S. 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. 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 your... I don't think so. I don't think we did not, at least I didn't have that. I thought that we were did not, at least I didn't have that. I thought that we were behind the eight ball from the beginning, that 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. Did 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 Shepard and Britt Marling. Here's Britt as one of the prosecutors examining Donovan as played by Dax Shepard. Are you familiar with the defendant, Eamon Corey? I am. How do you know

him? We were teammates on the tennis team at Brown University in the late 80s. 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 $200,000 in cash in exchange for a recruiting slot at Georgetown University. And who was he going to pay $200,000 in cash to as a part of this deal? Gordon Ernst, 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 Eamon Coorey. Was that payment made? It was. By whom? By Eamon Coorey. And 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. And 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 Khoury's house on Cape Cod, picked up a brown paper grocery bag with $180,000 in cash, got $20,000 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 were admitted to Georgetown as 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 78.5. 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 Catherine Corey's high school, her guidance counselor, tennis coach, all saying the same thing. Katie Corey 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 Eamon Currie 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 the, in my reading, was the highlight. On day five, Howard and Roy called a witness who worked as a fundraiser for the Georgetown Athletic Department.

Her name was Brenda Smith. Smith did not come to the courthouse willingly. She was subpoenaed. All she knew going in was what the Georgetown lawyers clearly told her, which was not to worry. This was going to be easy. She wasn't on trial. Eamon Currie was. The case was black and white

and she was on the winning side. Malamense! So, you know, describe that whole moment exchange for me, because like I said, all I'm going to 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 Eamon Khoury 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 a 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 admissions office? No, no.

Did you ever advise the admissions 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. I did not. No. 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. 99% of them were 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 285? And if we could highlight the middle paragraph. By the way, who is, let's go 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. And if we could, oh, you put down there in the second one, you wrote 5.6 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 athletic soccer player's parents own a home worth $5.6 million, 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. 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 Koori defense team, but everyone in the conference room that day, Roy, Howard, and their two partners, Jackie Perchek and Maria Neira, 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. Rich kids who can play yeah i remember that one yeah well yeah rich kids who can play yeah okay the beauty of it is is that before he got to the email roy would say to the witness and did you ever get an email where somebody would tell you that you need to recruit really rich people of course not mr, Mr. Black. Boom. 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 100-yard dash?

Look, 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 dollar donors and next I'm working on a 500 million plus other million yeah and so Brenda Smith writes back, so if the student is in your ballpark at all, dot, dot, dot. So wait, describe Brenda Smith to me during that testimony. What's she doing? How is she dealing with this? She was sort of befuddled, as I recall. Another example of someone just denying what was obvious, losing credibility as she's sitting on the witness stand to try to pretend as if wealth did not affect the admissions process. They didn't want to ever admit that money influenced admissions. They will never admit that.

No matter how many e-wills we show them, they would still not admit it because they knew they could not admit that. They thought that that would infect the integrity of the school. Is she defiant or humiliated? 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 say that development is separate from admissions. That was their whole theme, is that we admit people, but it has nothing to do with money.

Sure, we'll 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 because of their wealth. That'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 Gordy again, Gordon Ernst, Eamon 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 sends you this email in which he says, no idea if he has dough 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 do 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 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. Yeah, 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 U.S. v. Khoury. 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 Eamon Currie and Gordy did and what the Georgetown Development Office did every day? Isn't it just that Gordy and Eamon's arrangement was a bit too obvious? This was the point that my legal expert Leo Katz made. Katz 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 their strengths. And if you do it that way, you know, then it's, it's, I think you ought to be okay. And then the puzzle arises, 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 paper bag, what's the big deal? It comes to the same thing. Leo, 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. I mean, if he does that... You're much better at this than I am.

I mean, 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 add some further. But he just needs to be frank about the fact he's not interested in turning out Roger Federer. That's not what this camp is about.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, that's important to specify that. Know your objectives. That makes it even easier because bypassing people who are maybe better tennis players then becomes particularly unobjectionable. In the evening, after we've hit backhands for two hours, we'll sit and we'll discuss great works of legal philosophy, such as books written by Leo Katz. Yes, yes, yes. The patron saint of this particular arrangement. Yes, yes, yes.

That would work. This is the hypothetical scenario that would have saved Gordy Ernst and Eamon Currie. Of this particular arrangement. Yes, yes, yes. That would work. This is the hypothetical scenario that would have saved Gordy Ernst and Eamon Curry. A tennis camp. But wait, wait. Gordy Ernst actually had a tennis camp. We know he has one. university is that he was running it on university property during the summer, and he was allowed to keep 100% of the proceeds from the camp. So they had signed off on that.

Wow. The 100% makes it particularly interesting. 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 with the idea of, if he wants someone on his tennis team, he gets someone on his tennis team.

And definitely, in his summer camp he gets to admit, absolutely, whoever he wants. So say Gordie 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 has a friend who has 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 Ernst 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 jury 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 2. In terms of poise and speaking, she had such authenticity. She came across very well as a witness.

Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Ben Dadaf-Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact-checking by Sam Rusick. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Echo Mountain. Engineering by Sarah Bruguera and Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke Lamond Our executive producer is The Incomparable Jacob Smith Special thanks to Sarah Nix Voice acting by Dax Shepard and Britt Marling

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 Gladwell