The 35th parent, a Canadian woman arrested in Spain last month, hasn’t entered a plea yet.
Wilson, whom prosecutors have identified as the founder and chief executive of a private equity and real estate development firm, was previously accused of making illegal payments to get his son into USC as a purported water polo recruit. He is now charged with two counts of federal-programs bribery for paying to win his two daughters’ admission to Harvard and Stanford as recruited athletes.
Prosecutors told the scheme’s admitted mastermind, Rick Singer, who pleaded guilty and has cooperated with them, to tell Wilson he had a “senior women’s administrator” at Harvard who’d get one of his daughters in as an athletic recruit for a $500,000 bribe, according to court filings. The sting has been dubbed Operation Varsity Blues.
“Aside from reminding media that this was a ruse, and that Harvard is not implicated in Varsity Blues, we have no additional comment,” Rachael Dane, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in an email.
Lawyers for Loughlin, Giannulli, McGlashan and Wilson didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment on the new charges.
Prosecutors announced Tuesday that, in addition to the new bribery charge, further counts of the initial fraud charge were brought against McGlashan, Wilson, Robert Zangrillo, the founder of private investment firm Dragon Global Management, and I-Hsin “Joey” Chen, who runs a provider of warehousing for the shipping industry.
Lawyers for Zangrillo and Chen didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment on the new charges.
Seven coaches and college administrators the government says were part of the scam were also hit with further conspiracy charges, on top of the racketeering conspiracy charges they’d already faced. In addition, three former college athletic officials were charged with new counts of conspiracy for allegedly soliciting bribes to usher students into the schools where they worked, including USC, Georgetown and UCLA.
On Monday, the day the four parents changed their pleas to guilty, a Houston man accused of helping Singer sneak a student into the University of Texas as a bogus tennis recruit decided to change his own plea and to cooperate with prosecutors.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.