Menlo Park dad avoids prison in bribery case
Peter Jan Sartorio sentenced to probation
A Menlo Park father became the first parent in the national college admissions scandal to avoid prison on Friday, after pleading guilty to fraud charges for paying $15,000 to have his daughter’s ACT exam score inflated.
Peter Jan Sartorio, 54, was sentenced to a year of probation plus 250 hours of community service and a $9,500 fine, the sentence his lawyers had requested, even as other parents were handed sentences of two weeks, a month, even five months.
His lawyers noted that Sartorio was the first of dozens of accused parents, many of whom are fighting the charges, to agree to plead guilty.
“Mr. Sartorio was first because he accepted from the very outset that he was guilty, that there were no excuses, and that he alone was to blame,” his lawyer, Peter K. Levitt, wrote in a memorandum to the court. He also noted that Sartorio paid among the lowest amounts in the scandal and didn’t involve his daughter.
Prosecutors had recommended that Sartorio, an entrepreneur in
the natural and specialty food business, serve a month in prison, plus a year of supervised release. They noted that he knew what he was doing was wrong and took steps to hide it by paying in small-cash installments.
“Though he didn’t buy his daughter an admissions spot directly, Sartorio — like other participants in the exam cheating scheme — bought her a test score that he knew would give her an illicit edge over other applicants,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “The whole point of the scheme was to use the fraudulent score to steal a spot from someone else.”
According to prosecutors, Sartorio in 2017 conspired with the scam’s admitted mastermind, Newport Beach college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer, to boost the ACT exam score for his older daughter.
As part of the scheme, prosecutors said, Sartorio took steps to secure extended time for his daughter to take the ACT, which allowed her to take the exam at a test center in West Hollywood that Singer controlled through an administrator, Igor Dvorskiy, who worked with him.
After Sartorio’s daughter completed the exam on June 10, 2017, without using the extra time she had been allotted, another co-conspirator, Mark Riddell, corrected her answers, prosecutors said.
Sartorio’s daughter received a score of 27 out of 36 on the exam, putting her in the 86th percentile of those taking the test.
Sartorio structured his $15,000 cash payments to Singer in three smaller increments over several days to avoid bank reporting requirements.
In a recorded call with Singer, who had agreed to cooperate with investigators, Sartorio told him that “there is nothing on my end that shows that your company, Rick, or anybody, received any cash payments,” prosecutors said.
The case announced in March has since grown to 52 defendants, including 13 coaches at elite colleges, including Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, USC and UCLA, two entrance exam administrators and 35 wealthy parents. Prosecutors said the parents’ payments to Singer’s sham charities were used to bribe test proctors and university athletic officials.
Singer, Riddell and Dvorskiy have all pleaded guilty, along with 20 others, including coaches and parents. A Stanford University sailing coach received a sentence of six months’ home confinement and was credited with a day served in prison.
Of the other parents who pleaded guilty, sentences so far have ranged from two weeks in prison for actress Felicity Huffman to five months in prison for Napa Valley winemaker Agustin F. Huneeus.