Rigged Justice: How The College Admissions Scandal Ruined An Innocent Man’s Life, by John Vandemoer

In many ways, this book is a nightmare. One day, John Vandemoer was a talented and able coach of Stanford’s sailing program, seeking to encourage the student-athletes he worked with on how they might compete with and surpass far more privileged programs on the east coast, and the next minute he found himself being hounded by a corrupt federal justice system to confess to crimes relating to a RICO investigation into scandalous elite-driven college recruiting fraud with his life and career forever tarnished, despite him not taking any bribes or himself being directly involved in anything corrupt. This is not to say that the author did not make any mistakes, but they are the sort of mistakes that many people would have made in his place–being a polite listener to a recruiter’s fraudulent efforts to make money for himself by steering wealthy scions of elite families into universities as student-athletes who were woefully unprepared to be athletes and letting the feds into his house without a lawyer present. One might not think of those mistakes as being worthy of prison time, but together they tarnished the author’s reputation, enough to make him an unwanted celebrity in the world of sports scandals, and led to him serving some thirteen months in prison along with having his life turned upside-down.

One wonders what the takeaway from this book is. While the story of the author is a compelling one, and one certainly feels a great deal of sympathy for the naive but decent man who found himself an unwanted subject of a tainted and corrupt federal investigation into corruption. One might think that a conscientious coach of a small program at an elite university would be the sort of person that the federal government (to say nothing of the university itself) would want to protect from trouble, but no, the first targeted him and engaged in entrapment which should have gotten the federal investigators themselves thrown in prison and the second threw him to the wolves to save their own sorry and incompetent selves. How can the justice system be reformed in such a way where it could serve the interests of the innocent and not merely provide bullies with a chance to harm others with the power of the government behind them. It is easy enough to see as a root cause for the whole mess a sense of insecurity on the part of elites that their sons and daughters may not be able to get a guaranteed place in elite universities like Stanford, USC (my own alma mater, and a university that got caught up in the scandal thanks to a Full House alum and her nepo baby), but knowing the root cause does not make figuring out how to properly separate the innocent from the guilty and to protect everyone, as much as power, from the overly intrusive power of a corrupt state, is by no means an easy task.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit less than 250 pages and is divided into 25 numbered chapters. The book begins, as it should, with the entrance of the federal agents into the author’s house, from which everything goes downhill. After that, having begun his book in media res, the author steps back to look at how he became interested in sailing himself as a youth, and how those experiences led him to become a coach, and how as a coach he became familiar with a shady but charismatic recruiter who funneled money to his program–none of it to the author personally–while the university happily took the money and gave him no preparation on how to handle the corrupt world of contemporary college recruiting. We get a vivid and painful look at how an innocent but not particularly wise person in the wrong place at the wrong time finds himself involved in the crushing machine of the federal justice system, and see how he deals with the stress of unwanted press, casual character assassination, and the varied moods that are involved in dealing with lawyers, pretrial negotiations, and the revelation of improprieties in how the case was run, with plenty of false hope and crushing despair along the way. We end with the author free, but forever changed by the experience, hoping to give some wisdom to others who might easily be caught up as he was in a corrupt legal system that largely serves to give the government good press in defending law and order.