Man to appeal admissions scandal sentence

LOS ANGELES — Already ordered to spend nine months in prison for bribing his children’s way into USC and Georgetown, Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pimco, plans to appeal his sentence in light of newly disclosed notes taken by the scam’s ringleader, William “Rick” Singer.

In an early sign those notes could roil the government’s case, Hodge’s attorney, Brien O’Connor, asked on Thursday to extend the 30-day window Hodge has to challenge his prison sentence, citing the government’s “inappropriate withholding” of notes Singer wrote in his iPhone while cooperating with federal agents.

Singer was calling dozens of his former clients on a recorded line, retreading deals they’d brokered to get their children into such elite schools as Georgetown, USC and UCLA. But Singer’s handlers, he wrote, were insisting he “tell a fib” and portray the payments that clinched their children’s admission as bribes, not donations, to university programs.

Hodge was sentenced Feb. 7. Nineteen days later, prosecutors disclosed Singer’s notes to attorneys for other parents charged in the case.

Eric S. Rosen, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the lawyers in a letter that a prosecutor first glimpsed one of the notes in October 2018. Because Singer had written the notes to his own lawyer, Rosen and his colleagues believed the writings were protected by attorney-client privilege, Rosen wrote. Singer’s lawyer waived that privilege last week and the notes were turned over.

O’Connor said without those messages, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton had not viewed a “full and accurate record” of Hodge’s conduct before sentencing him to nine months in prison, the longest term handed down in the case to date. O’Connor declined to comment Thursday.

While he didn’t dispute his guilt and acknowledged committing fraud and money laundering, Hodge had argued he thought the money he paid to get four children into USC and Georgetown as bogus athletic recruits — $850,000 in all — was bound for school coffers, not the personal bank accounts of corrupt university employees. Singer, according to his own notes, appears to have imparted this impression on his clients, O’Connor wrote.