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Episode: The Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 1

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:37:28

Episode Shownotes

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.

Summary

In 'The Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 1,' Malcolm Gladwell examines the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, emphasizing the case of U.S. v. Khoury, known as the Georgetown Massacre. The episode explores the absurdities surrounding elite college admissions through Ayman C. Khoury's fraudulent attempt to secure his daughter's admission at Georgetown for $3.5 million. Key perspectives on privilege, corruption, and the legal implications unfold as Gladwell analyzes the actions and motivations behind the participants, including Eamon Currie's defiance against the charges and the broader implications of wealth's influence on college admissions.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Tipping Point Revisited: Georgetown Massacre Part 1) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_14
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00:01:38 Speaker_13
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00:01:59 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:12 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:26 Speaker_13
pled guilty, paid massive fines, served time, reputations were ruined. The media ran story after story.

00:02:35 Speaker_10
50 people facing charges and more arrests are likely in the weeks and months ahead.

00:02:40 Speaker_09
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.

00:02:50 Speaker_02
Meantime, the scandal stretches from Hollywood to Boston next week.

00:02:54 Speaker_13
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.

00:03:14 Speaker_13
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 Ayman Khoury case from a few years ago.

00:03:28 Speaker_13
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.

00:03:45 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:05 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:16 Speaker_13
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 U.S. v. Khoury. That's the 57th varsity blues case.

00:04:36 Speaker_13
But in Chapter 5 of Revenge of the Tipping Point, I tell only part of the story of U.S. v. Khoury. 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.

00:04:51 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:08 Speaker_13
It makes elite schools look absolutely ridiculous. And if you are a regular listener to this podcast, you know how happy that makes me.

00:05:16 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:36 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:51 Speaker_13
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 Coury case.

00:06:04 Speaker_13
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. Started reading them over breakfast. Breakfast led to lunch, lunch to dinner, then all day the next day.

00:06:21 Speaker_13
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 Ayman C. Khoury, who is the son of an even richer man, Ayman J. Khoury.

00:06:39 Speaker_16
If you look across industries, I mean, my background is private equity.

00:06:43 Speaker_13
Khoury 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.

00:06:56 Speaker_16
If you look across industries from pacemakers to automobiles to jet airplanes to helicopters to computers, the only industry that hauls materials and men to locations is the home building industry.

00:07:17 Speaker_16
The home building industry is archaic in its approach.

00:07:22 Speaker_13
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.

00:07:39 Speaker_13
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.

00:07:51 Speaker_13
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,

00:08:02 Speaker_13
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, aka Gordy, who was then the tennis coach at Georgetown University.

00:08:20 Speaker_13
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.

00:08:38 Speaker_13
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.

00:08:55 Speaker_13
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 Ayman Khoury on behalf of his daughter, Catherine.

00:09:09 Speaker_13
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 Khoury's lawyers were based just down the road. So I called them up. I said, I'm in Boca.

00:09:29 Speaker_13
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 Schrebnik, and their two longtime partners. Big shiny office tower, conference room, stacks of documents on the table.

00:09:49 Speaker_13
Roy Black is tall, slender, austere, almost 80 years old, an apex legal predator, completely and utterly intimidating. His nickname is The Professor. Howard Schrebnik is much younger. He looks like he's in a 1980s hair metal band.

00:10:06 Speaker_13
He races motorcycles around Miami in the early morning hours. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention.

00:10:12 Speaker_07
We'll hear argument next in Case 14-419, Luis v. United States. Mr. Schrebnik? Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court.

00:10:22 Speaker_13
Howard has also argued two cases before the Supreme Court.

00:10:26 Speaker_05
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. And he'll read cases all day and all night.

00:10:40 Speaker_05
And 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.

00:10:50 Speaker_13
And Roy began by telling me what Eamon said when they first talked about the case.

00:10:55 Speaker_05
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 with the way I did it.

00:11:07 Speaker_05
Then, of course, and I did it that stupid way that it makes it look bad and all of that. But I don't feel like 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.

00:11:21 Speaker_05
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.

00:11:34 Speaker_05
He said, are you willing to take the case with an agreement you're gonna go to trial? I said, yes, that's what we do.

00:11:41 Speaker_13
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?

00:11:57 Speaker_13
And she said, oh, My dad has these ex-Masad guys on retainer and if you're ever in trouble, you call them and they come and get you. Masad, Israel's secret intelligence service. It is entirely possible she was pulling my leg. I don't know.

00:12:14 Speaker_13
So why am I telling you this? Because Roy Black and Howard Shrebnick are the legal version of those ex-Masad guys.

00:12:22 Speaker_13
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 & Shrebnick.

00:12:33 Speaker_13
We're going to be spending a lot of time with Roy and Howard over the course of the next two episodes.

00:12:39 Speaker_13
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 Shrevenick? And the answer is, of course I am.

00:12:53 Speaker_13
Wait, where were we? Oh yes, Eamon Currie is charged and indicted. One count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, one count of bribery. He retains Roy Black and Howard Schrebnik, and he decides that he's not going to take a plea.

00:13:10 Speaker_13
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.

00:13:28 Speaker_13
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.

00:13:44 Speaker_13
That's illegal, right?

00:13:47 Speaker_17
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

00:14:07 Speaker_17
and indisputably immoral. That's why it became immediately part of every criminal code going back, I don't know, probably Hammurabi's days.

00:14:14 Speaker_13
This is Leo Katz, professor of law, University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of my infatuation with U.S. v. 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.

00:14:28 Speaker_17
And then, of course, there are crimes that are 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.

00:14:42 Speaker_13
Katz's point is that we expect to have arguments and complications and grey areas about malum prohibitum. the made-up crimes, but not, Malamud say, the indisputably immoral acts. Those are supposed to be open and shut.

00:14:57 Speaker_13
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 audacity, bordering on just plain foolishness. He decided to be Don Quixote and tilt at the windmill that was the U.S.

00:15:13 Speaker_13
Attorney's Office of the District of Massachusetts. So he came to the same conference room I was sitting in to ask for help.

00:15:22 Speaker_05
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.

00:15:31 Speaker_13
So when you have a case like this, Um, 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.

00:15:44 Speaker_05
I don't, I don't, we did not, at least I didn't have that. I thought that we were behind the eight ball from the beginning that everybody else that either lost or pled guilty. And I didn't have great optimism about the case.

00:15:59 Speaker_05
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.

00:16:10 Speaker_13
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.

00:16:20 Speaker_08
He wanted to testify.

00:16:22 Speaker_08
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.

00:16:36 Speaker_13
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.

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There are so many styles, so many sizes, so many companies selling them, and so many seemingly good deals this time of year. It's enough to make your brain hurt.

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00:19:22 Speaker_13
Picture this, you're in the garage, your favorite room in the house, and you're tuning up your engine with parts you found on eBay. Every piece is locking perfectly into place.

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You step back to admire your work, hands covered in grease, and because you're committed to driving that thing further than the odometer can even handle, you start thinking to yourself, you know what? I could probably also use some new brakes.

00:19:47 Speaker_13
Some shocks and struts. This baby deserves a new air filter. So you head right back to eBay. You can find any part you need there. It's unreal. From wipers and headlights to cold air intakes, exhaust systems, and even that turbo you've had on your mind.

00:20:05 Speaker_13
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00:21:27 Speaker_13
eBay. Things. People. Love. 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.

00:21:47 Speaker_13
There's no tape of the trial proceedings, but we've recreated testimonies for you using two loyal members of the greater Pushkin community, Dax Shepard and Britt Marling.

00:21:57 Speaker_13
Here's Britt as one of the prosecutors examining Donovan as played by Dax Shepard.

00:22:03 Speaker_02
Are you familiar with the defendant, Eamon Corey?

00:22:06 Speaker_03
I am.

00:22:07 Speaker_02
How do you know him?

00:22:09 Speaker_03
We were teammates on the tennis team at Brown University in the late 80s.

00:22:16 Speaker_02
Did there come a time when you entered into an arrangement with the defendant concerning his daughter?

00:22:21 Speaker_03
Yes.

00:22:23 Speaker_02
What was the nature of that arrangement?

00:22:26 Speaker_03
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.

00:22:38 Speaker_02
And who was he going to pay $200,000 in cash to as a part of this deal?

00:22:43 Speaker_03
Gordon Ernst, the coach at the time at Georgetown.

00:22:48 Speaker_02
And what was the payment for?

00:22:50 Speaker_03
An admission slot on the team.

00:22:54 Speaker_02
And what was your role in the deal?

00:22:57 Speaker_03
I was essentially the middle person to help with communication back and forth between Gordy, Ernst, and Amon Currie.

00:23:05 Speaker_02
Was that payment made?

00:23:08 Speaker_03
It was.

00:23:09 Speaker_02
By whom?

00:23:11 Speaker_03
By Amon Currie.

00:23:14 Speaker_02
And what was your understanding of whether the defendant's daughter was actually qualified to play tennis?

00:23:21 Speaker_03
She was not qualified to play at that level of college tennis.

00:23:26 Speaker_02
And what was your understanding of whether she was actually going to play tennis at Georgetown?

00:23:31 Speaker_03
The defendant and I talked about how she had no plans to play there.

00:23:35 Speaker_13
To be specific, Donovan went to Corey's house on Cape Cod, picked up a brown paper grocery bag with one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in cash, got 20K for himself and delivered the package to Gordy Ernst's wife, who stashed it in a safe deposit box.

00:23:53 Speaker_02
How did Catherine's scores compare to the average scores of your clients who were admitted to Georgetown as tennis recruits?

00:24:00 Speaker_03
They were quite a bit lower.

00:24:03 Speaker_02
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?

00:24:21 Speaker_03
Significantly lower.

00:24:24 Speaker_13
After Donovan came a parade of other witnesses. Tennis people, people from Kathryn Khoury's high school, her guidance counselor, tennis coach, all saying the same thing. Katie Khoury at a school like Georgetown is a dubious proposition.

00:24:39 Speaker_13
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.

00:24:56 Speaker_13
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 fundraiser for the Georgetown Athletic Department.

00:25:17 Speaker_13
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 gonna be easy. She wasn't on trial. Eamon Currie was.

00:25:33 Speaker_13
The case was black and white, and she was on the winning side. Malum Ensay. So yeah, create, 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.

00:25:50 Speaker_08
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.

00:26:07 Speaker_08
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.

00:26:19 Speaker_13
This was the moral heart of the case. Why does Eamon Currie belong in jail?

00:26:23 Speaker_13
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.

00:26:39 Speaker_13
Once again, our voice actors.

00:26:44 Speaker_03
All right. I wanted to ask you about admissions into the university. The university has an admissions department, correct? Or admissions office?

00:26:52 Speaker_02
Correct.

00:26:54 Speaker_03
And you are not an admissions officer?

00:26:57 Speaker_02
No.

00:26:59 Speaker_03
However, you would communicate with admissions officers, would you not?

00:27:03 Speaker_02
No, I never did.

00:27:06 Speaker_03
Would you ever get involved in attempting to influence the admission of people into the university?

00:27:11 Speaker_02
No, I did not.

00:27:14 Speaker_03
Did you ever lobby the admissions office?

00:27:17 Speaker_02
The admissions office? No, no.

00:27:21 Speaker_03
Did you ever advise the admissions office about the amount of money people had?

00:27:26 Speaker_02
No.

00:27:28 Speaker_03
Did you ever advise the admissions office that an athlete or a potential athlete came from a well-positioned family?

00:27:35 Speaker_02
No.

00:27:37 Speaker_03
Did you ever advise the admissions office about the net worth of parents of potential recruits?

00:27:43 Speaker_02
I did not.

00:27:45 Speaker_03
Did you ever advise the admissions office about the value of parents' homes?

00:27:50 Speaker_02
I did not, no.

00:27:53 Speaker_13
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.

00:28:04 Speaker_13
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.

00:28:20 Speaker_13
And Roy starts putting his favorites up on the screen.

00:28:25 Speaker_03
All right, can we turn to exhibit 285 and if we could highlight the middle paragraph, by the way, who is let's let's go to the top first. I'm sorry. Who is David Nolan?

00:28:37 Speaker_02
He is the women's soccer coach.

00:28:41 Speaker_03
All right. And he's asking you if she is somebody you want to cultivate, correct?

00:28:47 Speaker_02
That's what the email says.

00:28:49 Speaker_03
Good. Tell me what the word cultivate means.

00:28:54 Speaker_02
Develop a relationship with, typically.

00:28:56 Speaker_03
All right. And if we could, oh, you put down there in the second one, you wrote 5.6 million house, right?

00:29:07 Speaker_02
Correct.

00:29:10 Speaker_03
So I guess you do find out how much parents' homes are worth, right?

00:29:15 Speaker_02
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.

00:29:28 Speaker_03
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?

00:29:50 Speaker_02
Nothing.

00:29:52 Speaker_03
Does that have something to do with the ability to get them to donate money to the soccer team?

00:29:58 Speaker_02
No, it's simply the part of the family relationship that I would be interested in.

00:30:07 Speaker_13
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.

00:30:22 Speaker_13
Something would come up in our conversation. They would pick up one of the stacks of transcripts on the table and just start reading.

00:30:29 Speaker_08
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.

00:30:39 Speaker_05
Well, yeah. Rich kids who can play. Yeah, okay.

00:30:44 Speaker_15
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. Block. Boom.

00:31:01 Speaker_08
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.

00:31:21 Speaker_08
And Roy says, anything in there about the splits, the times in the hundred yard dash? Look, on the lacrosse team, of course, our case was about tennis, but it was institutional.

00:31:38 Speaker_08
Quote, I'm checking on this potential recruit, one of my $500,000 donors, and next I'm working on a 500 million plus. 500 million plus? Yeah. And so, Brenda Smith writes back, so if the student is in your ballpark at all, dot dot dot.

00:32:04 Speaker_13
So wait, describe Brenda Smith to me during that testimony. What's she doing?

00:32:09 Speaker_05
How is she dealing with this? She was sort of befuddled as I recall.

00:32:14 Speaker_08
Yeah, 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

00:32:24 Speaker_05
wealth did not affect the admissions process because they didn't want to ever admit that money influenced admissions that they will never admit that even no matter how many wheels we show they would still not admit because they knew they could not admit that they thought that that would have uh... infect the integrity of the school

00:32:45 Speaker_13
Is she defiant or humiliated or defensive?

00:32:48 Speaker_05
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

00:33:04 Speaker_05
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.

00:33:21 Speaker_05
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.

00:33:34 Speaker_14
That's a good Catholic school. It's the parable of the coin.

00:33:38 Speaker_13
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.

00:33:50 Speaker_13
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.

00:34:07 Speaker_13
You can imagine how much our apex predator is enjoying this moment.

00:34:13 Speaker_03
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.

00:34:25 Speaker_03
Now, why in the world would he be asking you or telling you he has no idea if the kid has money?

00:34:33 Speaker_02
I don't know. I don't know what this term is about.

00:34:39 Speaker_03
You responded, he has no money at all, right?

00:34:45 Speaker_02
I do say that.

00:34:47 Speaker_03
Why would you be telling that to the describing a potential recruit like that to the tennis coach?

00:34:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:19 Speaker_02
And and I was trying to get to the heart of the conversation, looks like, which is how he would not be a recruit.

00:35:29 Speaker_03
Hmm. But your actual statement is he has no money at all. Show me the money.

00:35:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:51 Speaker_03
And then you end it by saying he sounds dreadful.

00:35:56 Speaker_02
Yes, I do.

00:35:59 Speaker_03
Why would you say that?

00:36:03 Speaker_02
I don't know.

00:36:08 Speaker_13
Oh dear. Picture this, you're in the garage, your favorite room in the house, and you're tuning up your engine with parts you found on eBay. Every piece is locking perfectly into place.

00:36:23 Speaker_13
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00:36:37 Speaker_13
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00:36:55 Speaker_13
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00:37:14 Speaker_13
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00:37:28 Speaker_13
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00:38:17 Speaker_13
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00:38:19 Speaker_04
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00:38:31 Speaker_13
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00:38:46 Speaker_00
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00:39:02 Speaker_01
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00:39:37 Speaker_13
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00:39:48 Speaker_13
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00:40:01 Speaker_13
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00:40:13 Speaker_13
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00:40:35 Speaker_13
So let us imagine that you are sitting in the jury during the eight long days of U.S. v. Curry. You might begin with a very straightforward thought, that rich people should not be buying their children's way into Georgetown University.

00:40:49 Speaker_13
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.

00:41:05 Speaker_13
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?

00:41:20 Speaker_13
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. Kant suggested a hypothetical scenario to make sense of this.

00:41:34 Speaker_13
Suppose that after that boozy dinner at the Capitol Grill, Khoury and Gordy had gone to a lawyer. And the lawyer said to Gordy, you should start a tennis camp.

00:41:46 Speaker_17
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.

00:41:55 Speaker_13
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.

00:42:06 Speaker_17
And if you do it that way, you know, then 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.

00:42:21 Speaker_17
What's the big deal? It comes to the same thing.

00:42:24 Speaker_13
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.

00:42:32 Speaker_13
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 who have chosen tennis.

00:42:50 Speaker_17
You're much better at this than I am. 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.

00:43:00 Speaker_13
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.

00:43:07 Speaker_17
That's important too. to specify that, know your objectives, that makes it even easier because bypassing people who are maybe better tennis players then becomes particularly unobjectionable.

00:43:17 Speaker_13
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 written by Leo Katz, the patron saint of this particular arrangement. Yes, yes, yes. That would work.

00:43:35 Speaker_13
This is the hypothetical scenario that would have saved Gordy Ernst and Eamon Currie. A tennis camp. But wait, wait, Gordy Ernst actually had a tennis camp. We know he has one. He's running at the Georgetown.

00:43:51 Speaker_13
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 100% of the proceeds from the camp. So, they had signed off on that.

00:44:07 Speaker_17
Wow, the 100% makes it particularly interesting.

00:44:10 Speaker_13
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.

00:44:22 Speaker_13
No one is, the university is not interfering in a substantial way with either 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.

00:44:36 Speaker_13
So say Gordy Ernst made it clear that he wasn't actually trying to recruit great tennis players. Wouldn't the crime of letting someone on the team who wasn't a great tennis player look less and less like a crime?

00:44:50 Speaker_13
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 is a kid who likes to play tennis.

00:45:04 Speaker_13
Roy made a meal out of this one while examining Brenda Smith.

00:45:08 Speaker_03
And then it says, his good friend in a well-positioned family. What does that mean, a well-positioned family?

00:45:17 Speaker_02
I think it means that the family has the potential to be donors should they become involved with the university.

00:45:27 Speaker_03
All right. And what they're saying here is that the person wants to come to the campus and meet with Gordon Ernst, correct?

00:45:34 Speaker_02
That's what it says.

00:45:37 Speaker_03
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?

00:45:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:46:00 Speaker_03
And what he responds to you, another mediocre player, that is my strike zone. What is he telling you there?

00:46:08 Speaker_02
that his team is not a very well-performing team.

00:46:14 Speaker_13
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.

00:46:22 Speaker_13
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?

00:46:36 Speaker_13
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.

00:46:51 Speaker_13
And the mystery witness has a very big surprise for the prosecutors of the District of Massachusetts. That's next week in part two.

00:47:02 Speaker_05
In terms of poise and speaking, she had such authenticity. She came across very well as a witness.

00:47:15 Speaker_13
Revisionist History is produced by Nina Byrd-Lawrence with Ben Dadaf-Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact-checking by Sam Rusick. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Echo Mountain.

00:47:28 Speaker_13
Engineering by Sarah Bruguier and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is the incomparable Jacob Smith.

00:47:39 Speaker_13
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.

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