Bay Area financier gets 6 months for college fraud

Manuel Henriquez, who led a venture capital firm before being charged with paying $450,000 to rig his daughters’ college entrance exams and bribe a coach at Georgetown University, was sentenced Wednesday to six months in prison.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, ruling from Boston in a video conference, went beyond the five-month sentence requested by prosecutors, saying Henriquez’s “despicable” crimes made the financier, whose lawyers had lauded his support of children’s charities, “not only a felon, but a hypocrite.”

Gorton also ordered Henriquez, 57, to pay a $200,000 fine and perform 200 hours of community service.

Gorton noted that Henriquez, who founded a publicly traded finance company and chaired it until his arrest, was “by all accounts, an intelligent, hardworking, very successful and very rich entrepreneur who has overcome many hardships.”

“How in God’s name can you have come to this day?” he asked.

Gorton had previously sentenced Henriquez’s wife, Elizabeth, to seven months in prison. In court papers filed before Manuel Henriquez was sentenced, prosecutors said he was a “less active participant in the mechanics of the fraud” than his wife, who “gloated” after a Harvard-educated conspirator supplied her daughter with the answers to her SAT exam.

Elizabeth Henriquez is now serving her sentence at a federal prison in Dublin, Calif.

In a lengthy, tearful and stumbling address, Manuel Henriquez apologized to the judge, his daughters, wife, colleagues, friends and the college students whose parents, unlike himself, hadn’t spent a small fortune to fix their children’s chances of admission. He declared himself “humiliated, a broken man, a criminal and, as you rightfully said, a common thief.”

“I will take these words to my grave — a common thief,” he sputtered.

The Henriquezes, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit fraud and money laundering, acknowledged paying William “Rick” Singer, a Newport Beach, California, college admissions consultant, roughly $50,000 to fix their two daughters’ SAT, ACT and SAT subject tests on five occasions.

The couple paid Singer another $400,000 to secure the fraudulent endorsement of Gordon Ernst, a tennis coach at Georgetown, prosecutors alleged.