Another slap on the wrist.. If they were black they would go in for life....

Greenwich lawyer Gordon Caplan sentenced to 1 month in prison for rigging daughter’s ACT score in college admissions scandal

By AMANDA BLANCO

A high-powered Greenwich lawyer was sentenced to a month in prison Thursday for paying $75,000 to rig his daughter’s ACT exam, the latest parent who will go behind bars as part of the sweeping college admissions scandal.

Gordon Caplan, the fourth parent sentenced in the case, must also pay a $50,000 fine and complete 250 hours of community service. He’ll be on probation for one year after he’s released.

Lawyers for Caplan, 53, had argued he should face a fine and community service and at most 14 days in prison, the same sentence handed down to actress Felicity Huffman, who was also implicated in the scandal. He pleaded guilty in May to a single count of fraud and conspiracy.

Caplan and Huffman were among the wealthy parents snared in the FBI’s Varsity Blues investigation, which reached from Boston to Los Angeles and back to Tampa. At its center was so-called college counselor William “Rick” Singer, who Caplan says dragged him into what became an enormous, higher education scandal. Caplan would learn later that Singer was cooperating with the FBI and recording their conversations while he was making payoffs.

Through Singer, parents were bribing college coaches and administrators to get their children into top schools. In some cases, kids who hadn’t competed in sports were admitted as athletic prospects. In others, parents paid so their children could cheat on standardized admissions tests. Still others did both.

Caplan, named 2018 “Dealmaker of the Year” by American Lawyer magazine, has admitted paying Singer to allow his daughter to cheat on an ACT test. It appears that the child didn’t know the test was rigged until her father was arrested in March. Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher, the New York law firm where he served as co-chairman, severed ties with Caplan after his arrested.

Singer first arranged through associates to have Caplan’s daughter falsely diagnosed with a learning disability. That allowed her to take the test at a special site in Los Angeles with a greater than normal time allowance.

It turned out that a time limit was meaningless. Among those on Singer’s payroll were the man who ran the Los Angeles test site and a proctor, described by authorities as a Harvard grad with such prodigious test-taking ability that could secure whatever ACT score a parent ordered. Caplan wanted a 32 on the ACT scale of 1 to 36, which would have put his daughter in the 97th percentile of test-takers.

The proctor, 36-year old Mark Riddell of Tampa, delivered on Singer’s promise, intercepting the daughter’s test and changing the answers.