Parents changing pleas as prosecutors threaten more charges in college admissions case

Federal prosecutors are ratcheting up pressure on parents who have maintained their innocence in the college admissions scandal with a warning they intend to file additional criminal charges as early as next week, according to sources familiar with the discussions. The stable of defendants includes nearly three dozen parents, as well as college athletic coaches and others accused of working with William “Rick” Singer, a Newport Beach consultant who has admitted to running a wide-ranging scheme in which he paid off accomplices to rig test scores for the children of his wealthy clients or outright bought them spots at elite schools. Beginning in fall 2015 and continuing through summer 2016, the Henriquezes paid Singer a total of $450,000, and Manuel Henriquez used his influence at his alma mater, Northeastern University, to ensure the child of another of Singer’s clients was admitted to the school, prosecutors alleged in the indictment to which Manuel Henriquez will plead guilty. Singer also arranged with Gordon Ernst, Georgetown’s former head tennis coach, to misrepresent the couple’s older daughter to the school as a promising tennis recruit, according to the indictment. For years I have spent three – four hours a day grinding out on and off court workouts with the hopes of becoming successful enough to play college tennis especially at Georgetown.” While she told the school she was ranked among the top 50 players in her class by the United States Tennis Assn., prosecutors said in court papers that “at her best, she appears to have ranked 207th in Northern California in the under-12 girls division, with an overall win/loss record of 2-8.” After she was admitted to Georgetown in 2016, her parents wired from the Henriquez Family Trust a purported charitable gift of $400,000 to Singer’s foundation, which prosecutors say had little, if any, charitable purpose and was used instead to funnel money from his clients to corrupt coaches, test administrators and proctors.