Revisionist History - The Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 2

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

What exactly constitutes a bribe? The Georgetown Massacre continues, and the defense calls a surprise witness. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the fifth day in the trial of U.S. v. Coorey, right after the defense left the fundraiser for the Georgetown University Athletic Department in small pieces on the floor of the courtroom, the attorneys for Eamon Coorey asked the judge for a sidebar. They wanted to call a witness, a surprise witness, who the defense team had somehow persuaded to make an appearance. She's in the bathroom, Howard Shrebnik told the judge. I just wanted to let you know. They just whispered to me that she's coming. I didn't want you to. His voice trailed off. The prosecutors in the case from the U.S. Attorney's Office were there in the sidebar too, standing right beside Shrebnik. And it is safe to say this sudden revelation came as a shock to them.

They weren't expecting this particular witness to show up. They were counting on her not showing up. And now she was here? In the bathroom? Fuck! Then Howard says, and we're going to propose to introduce text messages that she wrote back in May of 2015. Text messages? Fuck! of 2015. Text messages? Fuuuuuuck!

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of the story of my favorite court case of all time, U.S. v. Khoury. In part one, which you should listen to first, if you have not already,

we talked about how Roy Black and Howard Shrebnik were presented with an impossible case. A client who openly admitted to giving $180,000 in cash in a brown paper bag to the Georgetown University tennis coach in order to get his daughter admitted to the school. Days one, two, three, and four of the trial had been a disaster for the defense. Eamon Curry seemed destined for prison. But by the end of the Georgetown massacre on day five, Howard and Roy had managed to introduce an element of doubt into the minds of the jury. What exactly is or isn't a bribe? And are the dubious actions of

a wealthy man worse than the dubious actions of a wealthy university? This episode is about what happened in the afternoon on day five, the aftermath of the Georgetown Massacre. The mystery witness entered text messages. What were the, so talk about the, during the trial, what you feel were the most significant turning points. Most trials don't have one thing like that, but things just develop. You know, the more you worked on it, the more we got into the case,

the more facts we learned, the more details, the better it looked. I talked with Roy Black when we met at his offices in downtown Miami. Roy is a trial lawyer. He and his partner Howard are maybe the greatest defense team of their generation. They construct elaborate narratives out of mountains of complicated facts. They are not mystery novelists who tell stories with a clever twist on the last page. Things just develop. But then Roy Black thought about it a little bit, and he said, well, actually, I take it back. There was a knockout bunch.

It was the mystery witness. I mean, to me, that was like an extraordinary event at the trial. From the very beginning, Roy and Howard had a problem. They could show that Georgetown was a corrupt institution, where the lines between admissions and fundraising had been all but obliterated. That was the point of the Georgetown Massacre. But that didn't

resolve their problem. If we say, okay, the whole system's corrupt and our client took advantage of the corrupt system by paying money, what are we doing? We're admitting that our own client's corrupt. The Georgetown massacre, in other words, didn't win them the case. It simply leveled the playing field.

They needed something more. Another layer to their argument, proof that Georgetown was worse than Eamon Curry. And in the first few difficult days of the trial, when the government was running roughshod over Eamon Currie. And in the first few difficult days of the trial, when the government was running roughshod over Eamon Currie, Howard and Roy began to drop little breadcrumbs. They were cryptic. Chances are the jury missed them. But if you read through the trial transcripts, all 1,200 pages of them, and you pay attention, it's obvious something is afoot. The first inkling came during an offhand moment in Roy's cross-examination of a Georgetown admissions officer

named Meg Lisey. Once again, we have our wonderful voice actors, Dax Shepard and Britt Marling. Listen. Isn't it a fact that at Georgetown you have a software called Salesforce, don't you? Not that I remember. Isn't it a fact that you have an investigation into the net worth of the parents of potential students? The prosecution jumps up immediately.

Objection! Which, in retrospect, was weird. What was it about the mention of that word sales force that led the government to stand up abruptly and say, stop! No! But the judge won't have it. Overruled.

I don't know about that. Lacey denies any knowledge. Roy moves on. Then at the end of the Georgetown massacre with Brenda Smith he tries again. He leads Brenda through a long series of questions about fundraising. She's evasive in her answers. Then Roy asks, out of the blue,

Does Georgetown use a program, Salesforce? It is my understanding that they do. And what is Salesforce? It's a customer relations management tool. Roy follows with a few more questions. Then he says. All right. Well, let me then show you a document marked NU.

Roy is just about to put a document on the screen, a document that he is desperate to show the jury. His finger is literally on the clicker. But just as he does, the prosecutor jumps up again. Objection! The judge agrees. Sustained. Under the rules of a trial, if you have evidence you want to show to the jury, you have to find a witness to authenticate it.

Someone who will say, it's real. That's what Roy is trying to do with Brenda Smith. Get her to say, yes, I know all about that. But he shut down. Your Honor, objection. Sustained. You have what you think is a knockout punch, and you can't show it to the jury. Plan A foiled. So what do you do? You go to Plan B. The mystery witness. And the text messages. A little bombshell

dropped in the middle of the sidebar. Your Honor, we call Catherine Currie. There had never been any indication during the first few days of U.S. v. Currie that the person at the heart of the case, the person on whose behalf Eamon Currie had paid $180,000 in cash to the coach of the Georgetown tennis team, would show up. The government's lead prosecutor made this clear in his opening statement. He told the jury,

we're not here because of the defendant's daughter. You're going to hear about her grades and her test scores, the fact that she wasn't very good at tennis, but to be clear, we're not here because of Catherine. We are here talking about Catherine because of the crimes the defendant committed outside of her formal application process. So during the trial, we're going to ask you to focus on the defendant's actions and his words and those of his co-conspirators. In other words, the prosecution wanted to make a case about Catherine Currie's shortcomings as a tennis player and student without the awkwardness of actually having Catherine speak for herself.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we would prefer if Catherine Currie remains an abstraction. But of course, if you are the legal team of Black and Shrebnick, and you sense a certain reluctance on the part of your adversaries to confront the person at the heart of the case, what do you do? You convince the person at the heart of the case to make an appearance. I would say the one thing that stands out that really made a huge difference was the daughter testifying, introducing the text messages with her father.

I mean, to me, that was like an extraordinary event at the trial. And I thought it was really a great part of the case. Why is that? Explain to me why you think that testimony would have been so powerful for the jury. A couple of reasons. Number one, she, in terms of poise and speaking, She had such authenticity about her. I know that authenticity is like a cliche these days, but she came across very well as a witness, number one. Number two, the government, amazingly, after her testimony,

never changed their theory of the case. Ah, yes. The theory of the case. The explanation given for the nature of the crime. The government laid out their plan of attack with their very first witness, Timothy Donovan. Remember him from the boozy dinner at the Capitol Grill? He played on the Brown tennis team way back when with Eamon Curry and Gordie Ernst. He ran, and still runs, by the way, an outfit called Donovan Tennis Strategies, whose goal, according to its website, is to help parents with, quote, successfully navigating the college recruiting process, end quote. Donovan helps tennis players avail themselves of the backdoor that elite colleges reserve for tennis players.

In the Coorie case, that meant he was the bag man who picked up the money from Eamon Coorie, got 20K for himself, and delivered the brown paper bag to Gordie Ernst's wife. The government gave immunity to Timothy Donovan, and Donovan in return provided them with their theory of the case. Listen to this excerpt from Donovan's testimony on day two of the trial. He's being questioned by one of the prosecutors.

Did there come a time when you discussed with the defendant whether Catherine would in fact play on the Georgetown tennis team? Yes. What did you discuss about that? He said that she didn't have any plans to play and that, as a matter of fact, that her old shoulder injury would kick in and she'd be unable to play for that reason. And based on how the defendant described

Catherine's old shoulder injury, what was your understanding as to the nature of that injury? That it was not legitimate, that it was a story that would allow her to not play. The prosecution painted a picture of a conspiracy. Gordy Ernst, Timothy Donovan, and Eamon Curry conspiring to deceive Georgetown into thinking they were getting a real tennis player. And what's more, Eamon Currie and his daughter Catherine conspiring to fake an injury so she would never have to reveal how unworthy she actually was of playing tennis at Georgetown University.

So when the daughter gets to the school as a tennis admission, she then doesn't play tennis. This is Jackie Perchek, one of the black Shrebnick partners who worked on the case. She doesn't go to practice and never practices with the team and never play tennis. And so the government fed off of that to come up with this theory that she knew all along that this was a paid-for admission, because otherwise she would have shown up to play tennis. This was the theory on which the prosecution based its case, and it came gift-wrapped and tied with a bow from Timothy Donovan. Why would they advance a theory about the daughter having never spoken to the daughter? Because they had the fact that she never, as Jackie just said, she never went to play tennis so they just assumed see what i think would happen

with the case is that remember they have a slam dunk all along you know 55 or 56 cases how many they didn't think this was going to be a problem at all they thought the client was going to plead guilty to begin with and and then he didn't. Then I guess they got ready for trial. I don't think they took it that serious. I don't think they took it that serious. On some unconscious level, I think Howard and Roy were offended by this.

It was a slight. People from Miami take particular umbrage at the condescension of fancy lawyers from Boston with their highfalutin manner and ivy-league pedigrees. Thus, the dramatic sidebar, when the stiletto that they had brandished during the Georgetown Massacre was inserted a little deeper. We have Catherine Coore, the person you didn't think belonged here,

and we have her text messages, which you somehow didn't think were going to be an issue. Then, a long pause when the news registers with the prosecution. A sharp intake of breath and a silent scream that echoes across the courtroom.

Fuuuuuuck! that echoes across the courtroom. Fuck! The direct examination of Katie Coury was conducted by Howard, not by Roy, which makes sense. Roy is, as I've said, an apex legal predator. You don't let the grizzly bear play with your grandkids. This one was Howard's responsibility. Howard is not just the intellectual half of Black Shrebnick. He is the warm and fuzzy half. Howard is the one most likely to dress as Santa at the Black Shrebnick Christmas party. Howard has a daughter

of his own, whom I'm quite sure has Howard wrapped around her little finger. Katie Currie was 25 at the time. Tall, long brown hair, generous smile when she's smiling, but she's nervous when she emerges from the bathroom. She clearly does not want to be there. The adults in her life have made a dreadful mess of things. The momentum continued to build when the daughter gets on the witness stand. The government having married itself to a theory that the daughter was a fraud, essentially, that her application was a fraud.

Howard starts quietly and calmly. Tell us how old you are. Easy questions to answer. Where do you work? You went to graduate school. Where? Only when she seems comfortable does he get to the heart of the matter. Once again, we've asked our voice actors to read from the transcript.

Okay. Catherine, growing up, did you play tennis? I did, yes. Okay. And who taught you how to play tennis? My dad. And how old were you when you learned to play tennis? Oh, I want to say I was maybe about five, six years old. Her voice is soft. At one point, the judge tells her to speak up. Okay. And your dad, when you said you would play tennis with your dad, was it just hitting the balls or was there anything more instructive about the relationship, the tennis relationship with your dad?

Well, so yeah, my dad is an amazing tennis player. He did play at Brown, and so I guess in a way we had not only a father-daughter relationship, but in a lot of ways he was my primary coach. I mean, he would help me with drills, techniques, my serve, which was the weakest part of my game, set up cones around the tennis court and try to, you know, boost my tennis skills. So it was something he enjoyed and also something he encouraged me to work hard on. How passionate was he about playing tennis with you? Oh, I think it was one of our favorite things we did together.

Howard pauses and has one of his paralegals put up a photo on the screen. It's Catherine and her father, side by side at the tennis court at their country club. Okay. Of all the people on the planet Earth, who is the person with whom you played most hours of tennis in your lifetime? My dad. They talked about high school. She went to a very small private school in Massachusetts. Eight players on the tennis team.

She was number six. Mostly played doubles. Her grades were good, not great. Then they get to the subject of college. Where did she want to go? Boston College? Or Northeastern? Did she think she would play tennis at those schools?

No. What about Georgetown? Well, she'd never thought about Georgetown until she ran into Gordie Ernst at a July 4th party. I mean, he basically said, you know, I'm Gordie Ernst, a friend of your dad's, and I'm a tennis coach at Georgetown, and, you know, you should, like,

have you ever thought about playing tennis at Georgetown? It could be fun. And what did you tell him? I said, wow, that sounds amazing. I would love that, but I don't think I'm good enough. And what did he say? He said, well, you know, train hard and maybe you could. She began playing more tennis. She began to take her tennis more seriously.

She got excited. The idea was that she would practice with the team, but redshirt for a year. She got an acceptance letter from Georgetown. Howard put it on the screen for all the court to see. She was in. She thought it was all her doing, her talent and hard work. The back and forth between Howard and Catherine is building slowly. Everyone on the jury must know something is about to happen, but they don't know what it is.

And Howard is in no hurry to tell them. He's just content to let her talk and let her credibility, her authenticity sink in. And then, finally. Catherine, I want to talk to you now about some of your family circumstances that arose in May of 2015, after you've been accepted at Georgetown. Do you know what time period I'm talking about? Mm-hmm. During the months of April and the first week of May, your parents, Melanie and Eamon, did you understand them to be still married and living as a family? I did until like the second week of May.

Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what you learned in the second week of May. So in the second week of May, I was actually in a tennis match. I believe it was a match, not a practice. My mom had flown from Florida to Middlesex, which wasn't uncommon. She liked to visit us a lot. But, you know, I could tell that something was wrong. Up until that moment in time, did you have any idea that your parents were divorcing? No. How did it affect your feelings towards your father?

I was really very angry with him for that decision to leave the marriage. And how did you express yourself to your dad? With tears and anger and some mean words. I had lost respect for him at that moment in time and was, yeah, I felt, I felt betrayed. How was your mom handling it? She was not handling it well at all. I mean, she was, you know, it broke her, for lack of a better word. And then Howard puts the text messages Catherine sent to her dad up on a big screen for the whole court to see.

On May 10th, you described your dad directly to him that he's pathetic? Yes. And hoping there will be a day when he'll be strong again? Yeah. Next page, Keith. This is two days later on May 12th. You write to him, I wasn't the one who traded our family for the feelings of being young again.

You're a grown man. Don't equate my actions with yours. Just from that statement, it's apparent how selfish you are. Yes. Is that how you felt at the time? Yes. Had you ever felt that way about your father before? No.

Keith, go to the next page. Do you recall your dad trying to explain himself and you telling him, you have not done anything wrong, LOL? Laugh out loud? Yeah. Next page. You tell your dad he's clueless and you have no interest in associating with him. Is that right?

That's correct. Keith, if we could go to the next page. At which point the judge interjects, How many pages is this? And Howard says, Fifteen more. The judge says, Fifteen more?

Yes, Your Honor. Fifteen pages. And when it ends, Catherine Currie explains where her anger left her. Well, you know, tennis was something that my dad and I shared. When I thought of tennis, I thought of my dad. And I wanted nothing to do with him at that point. I was disgusted and hurt.

And I was basically like, you know, screw it. I feel like you've ruined the sport for me. I think of you when I'm out there. And I'm not going to follow, you know, keep on following your leads and everything when you don't set good examples. And to be honest, it was just too painful to be out there with those reminders. So when she got to Georgetown, she didn't join the tennis team. She didn't play the sport she loved. And it had nothing to do with her shoulder. It had to do with her heart.

When was the last time you played competitive tennis? May, like like right before. And did you, have you ever since played tennis? Not really. Maybe one day. I want to love the sport again. You know, like I don't want to just, I used to love it. And, you know, one day when hopefully we've found peace and a stable, you know, familial unit, I will be able to be at

peace with, you know, playing the sport that reminds me of my dad that does hold so many good memories again. The lawyers for the U.S. Attorney's Office called Katie Coury a mediocre tennis player when Georgetown's specialty was mediocre tennis players. They said she got into Georgetown because her dad was rich, but recruiting rich kids for the Georgetown tennis team was what Georgetown did as a matter of course. And then they threw her under the bus a third time. They said that she had been involved in a conspiracy with her father to fake an injury, and that just wasn't true. Back at the top of episode one, I said that I asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to talk to me

about the Khoury case, and they refused. Now I know why. Because they went home and tried to wash their hands, and the stink wouldn't come off. Closing arguments in the case of U.S. v. Khoury came the next day. Roy did the honors for the defense. I came up with this walking over to the courthouse because I was trying to figure out how to make these text messages as dramatic as possible. And it doesn't come across in the transcript. But what I did is I picked up the exhibits, and I walked over to the defense table and stood in front of Corey and read every one of those text messages, looking him in the eye. You mean the text messages from his daughter?

Yeah, where she's calling him every name in the book and how I hate you and all this stuff. I'm curious, as you did that, was it in tears? Yes. All of us. Everybody. So there all this stuff. Cheers. Amon Kori as you did that was in tears. Yes. All of us. Everybody. So there's the jury. Yeah.

There. This is Roy Black. There's the jury. There's the judge. Kori is standing, sitting right where you are. By the way, my daughter was sitting right behind Amon Kori. Sophie was watching the trial. And my son.

Okay. And your son. Yeah. And Roy, who's talking to the jury, and it's right there. We have the transcript. And Stan's literally the distance four feet from Amon Corey. And he's reading to Amon Corey, and they're right here. You can read them out loud into the tape.

Each one of those texts. Roy, Stan, though. Well, why don't you read it, Roy? This is the actual closing argument. Quote, the night of my graduation is supposed to be a fun celebration. I don't think it will be if you come. Lexi and I are not doing that well. I hope that you know that your family won't be able to exist peacefully together and don't spend another holiday together.

I will forever blame and resent you and have zero interest in sharing vital parts of my life with you. That's what Katie Corey was saying in the summer of 2015, not making up some story about her shoulder injury. The courtroom is absolutely still, and Roy just keeps going, right in front of his client, face to face. And so what's happening? Well, the jurors were crying. The jurors were crying. You didn't see that, but we did.

There's a juror crying. So explain to me psychologically what's happening with the jurors. They're crying. It's sort of obvious, but sort of not. What conclusion are they drawing from the emotion in that moment? Well, I think that they're all parents. Can you imagine getting messages like that from one of your children about how catastrophic, how tragic, how emotional that would be? And the reason why I wanted to do that

is to show that there was simply no way that this girl was being controlled by her father and would go and say, okay, we're now getting into Georgetown on this fake admission and I'm going to fake a shoulder injury. It's just that it was just such a powerful, tragic thing to get from a child.

What I thought happened was it now became a contest between this prosecutor and Katie Coury. Who was the jury going to rule for? Roy's closing argument didn't last very long. It didn't have to. He just said, you know why the prosecution's case makes no sense? Because they didn't know about the text messages. The jury acquitted Eamon Currie on all counts. They couldn't distinguish between what Eamon Currie did and what Georgetown did.

I think they must have wondered what they had been dragged into, a full-on trial in a federal courthouse that ended up being about a daughter's broken heart and a father's tears. Oh, and all taking place on a tennis court, which is the question that got me interested in U.S. v. Khoury in the first place, the other half of the case, the half I write about in Revenge of the Tipping Point. Since when do we care so much about games like tennis that prosecutors and elite universities and rich men and their daughters make it the staging ground for their ambitions? By the way, one more moment that no one knows about because we were there and it didn't happen in the courtroom. We walk out of the courtroom with a not guilty verdict. We encounter some of the jurors right outside the courtroom. Eamon Curry is standing next to me. The juror is standing five feet away. She looks over to Mr. Curry

and she says, take care of your daughter. Revisionist History is producing... Wait, we're not done. What about the mysterious Salesforce document? The document Roy kept trying to get Georgetown witnesses to say, yes, it exists, or yes, it's real. What was it?

Yeah, Salesforce. They kept a database of what people are worth. And they had like targets. So if this person is worth this amount of money, my target is to get them to donate this amount. And they would keep track of contact with the family and what they're going to ask for. And they kept this in a database internally,

in a Salesforce database at the school for each parent. It uses a sophisticated set of software to analyze thousands of people and figure out who among them is the best target for a fundraising call and what that person's, and this is the term that is used, capacity might be. It looks at patterns. Families that have given a lot tend to be those who will continue to give a lot. Then there's a question of the individual's ties to the institution.

Do they have a child at school there? That helps a lot. Or if they are an alum, what do they do while on campus? Turns out a connection to athletics is a top indicator for future giving. Needless to say, this kind of algorithm would really, really like Eamon Currie. After Catherine was admitted, before she had even set foot on campus, the admissions officer who handled her application sent an email to someone in the development office. Are you able to give me giving for Eamon Currie?

Meaning, can we run him through the algorithm? And they do. And put it all in an internal document. Why was Georgetown so reluctant to admit to the existence of the mysterious Salesforce capacity report? Because their capacity estimate for the Khoury family was, shall we say, awkward. One to five million dollars.

When the so-called victim, Georgetown, is lining up the so-called perpetrator for one to five million, the victim doesn't really look like a victim anymore, do they? It looks more like they're in on the grift. So yeah, nobody would agree to it. So we mentioned it to the jury. The jury knew it existed, but never got to see it yeah but wait so for you you you saw you did you have the document yes we have the document then

after the trial there's the not guilty verdict and that night or the next day the new york times or somebody calls roy for a comment and Roy comments on the trial and in part the comment was there was this Salesforce document and the target for the quarries was one to five million and now Georgetown who during the trial is saying I don't know what document you're talking about and no witness will own up to the document and that no witness is prepared to testify about it after Roy makes the comment the lawyers for georgetown send an email saying hey why are you talking about our salesforce

document there's a confidentiality order in the case and you're not supposed to be talking about our documents and roy writes of course he would never admit it right so at the trial nobody's owning the document after the trial they're all upset that Roy's talking about their document Roy writes back I mentioned it in opening and can I and he writes back to the group in capital letters sore loser lawyer. Oh my god, when we all got that email, I was like banging the desk. That's how it was awesome. USV Curry. Best trial ever.

Or maybe second best trial ever. Because there was another federal case that I fell in love with while writing my book, Revenge at Sipping Point. It's the basis for the chapter entitled, The Trouble with Miami. USVS forms, involving a shadowy nursing home operator from Miami Beach who looked like Paul Newman, drove around town in a $1.6 million Ferrari, dated supermodels, and, in a weird coincidence,

was so obsessed with getting his diminutive son onto the University of Penn basketball team that he gave large amounts of cash in a gym bag to the Penn basketball coach. Who represented that shadowy Paul Newman lookalike in a Ferrari handing out bags of cash to Ivy League coaches? Ten guesses. Originalist 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. Voice acting by Dax Shepard and Britt Marling. Thank you, guys.

Our executive producer is the incomparable Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.