Gordon Caplan, co-chairman of law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, wanted his teenage daughter to attend a selective college, perhaps Cornell University. But he wasn't sure her SAT or ACT test score was high enough for admission. So he allegedly did what a lot of wealthy parents across the country on Tuesday were accused of doing: He cheated.
According to a criminal complaint, Caplan hired a California test-prep firm that in turn had bribed exam monitors to correct his daughter's exam after she completed it. Caplan made a $75,000 contribution to a charity affiliated with the test-prep firm, the Edge College & Career Network.
Caplan was one of dozens of people charged by federal prosecutors with finding ways to get students admitted to college under false pretenses. Defendants include former Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman.
"[Let me] ask you straight up: You've never had an issue with this?" Caplan said in a wiretapped phone call with a cooperating witness in November. "No one has ever gotten in trouble with this?"
"I've never … had an issue with anybody," said the witness, who is identified as Edge founder William Singer.
"The score we're hoping for here is—we're really hoping for is—a 32," Caplan later told Singer. (The highest possible ACT score is 36.)
"You tell me," Singer replied. "Whatever you think we want to have, and we will get within one point. So if you say 32, it'll be either 31, 32, 33. If you say you want 31, it'll be 30, 31, 32."
Neither Willkie Farr nor Caplan replied to requests for comment.
Another New York couple caught in the dragnet are Gregory and Marcia Abbott. He is founder of a packaging company in the food and beverage business, according to the criminal complaint, and the former CEO of a clothing manufacturer. They allegedly paid $75,000 to the same charity as Caplan so that someone from Edge would take the SAT for their daughter.
"She's convinced that she bombed the [literature test] because she was too tired," Marcia Abbott said on a wiretapped phone call last fall. "And [Duke University] told us they didn't want anything below a 750."
"We'll get 750 and above," the witness promised.
"That's fabulous," Abbott said.
Abbott's daughter received a highest-possible score of 800 on the SAT math test and 710 on the literature test. She would have scored in the mid-600s without someone cheating on her behalf, according to an affidavit in support of the criminal complaint. (Click here for official transcripts.)
The Abbotts couldn't be reached.
CORRECTION: George Abbott’s former job as CEO of a clothing company was mistakenly conferred on his wife, Marcia Abbott, in an earlier version of this story posted March 12.