Former U.S.C. Coach in Varsity Blues Scandal Is Found Guilty

A federal jury discovered a former water polo coach on the College of Southern California responsible on Friday of taking 1000’s of {dollars} in bribes in change for designating highschool candidates as recruits in order that they might be favored within the faculty admissions course of.

The defendant, Jovan Vavic, has been the one coach to face trial slightly than take a responsible plea within the federal investigation referred to as Operation Varsity Blues, wherein rich dad and mom paid bribes to have their youngsters admitted to elite faculties.

Mr. Vavic was a star at U.S.C. who had stewarded the boys’s and girls’s water polo groups to 16 nationwide championships. His attorneys argued through the trial that he had been pressured by the fund-raising tradition of the college to recruit athletes whose households might afford to make giant donations, however that he needed them to be actual athletes.

After a half-day of deliberations, the jury in Boston rejected these arguments, siding with prosecutors who stated that Mr. Vavic acquired greater than $200,000 in bribes from William Singer, referred to as Rick, a school admissions guide to the wealthy, in change for facilitating the recruitment of athletes with trumped up credentials.

Mr. Vavic was discovered responsible on all counts, together with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit federal packages bribery.

Mr. Singer, who’s cooperating with the federal government, has described himself as a “concierge” guide for rich households, boasting that he might get their youngsters into the schools with the very best model names within the nation.

Through the trial, Mr. Vavic’s attorneys stated that he by no means misappropriated any cash or dedicated any fraud. They stated that about $100,000 of the money was deposited right into a U.S.C. account for the water polo group. One other $120,000 went to pay personal college tuition for his sons, cash that they stated got here within the type of scholarships from Mr. Singer’s basis. Prosecutors stated the inspiration was a conduit for bribery.

The sweeping federal investigation uncovered the soiled underbelly of faculty admissions. Federal prosecutors stated {that a} canny faculty guide — Mr. Singer — was in a position to manipulate the desire given to recruited athletes for college students who would in any other case not qualify. Prosecutors had been cautious to say, nonetheless, that the schools concerned weren’t on trial and that they had been the unknowing victims of the fraud.

The jury in Mr. Vavic’s trial appeared to simply accept the prosecution’s argument that the case was not about donating a constructing and even a big sum of money to a college, however about mendacity and dishonest on a school utility.

In a separate a part of the probe, investigators charged that folks had been bribing Mr. Singer to physician the standardized check scores of their youngsters in some instances by exploiting the system that permits studying disabled college students to go to particular testing areas, the place Mr. Singer might set up his personal brokers.

U.S.C., which has labored to beat its status because the “College of Spoiled Youngsters,” was a spotlight of the investigation, and it fired Mr. Vavic after his arrest in March 2019.

However the investigation snared dozens of fogeys, coaches, examination directors and others in a scheme that implicated faculty athletic packages at not solely U.S.C. however Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest and Georgetown. Most athletic officers and oldsters implicated within the scheme have pleaded responsible slightly than take their possibilities at trial.

Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, the actresses, have already accomplished their jail sentences. John Wilson, a former government at Staples and at Hole and the founding father of an actual property and personal fairness agency, was sentenced to fifteen months, the longest sentence up to now. Mr. Vavic helped recruit Mr. Wilson’s son to the water polo group.

Susan C. Beachy contributed analysis.