But race sets T.M. Landry apart from more recent cases of education fraud, as was evident in the school’s appeal to prospective students and in how it got them into college.

T.M. Landry’s founders, Mike and Tracey Landry, put the very real obstacles that exist for some minorities — a higher proportion of first-generation college applicants, limited access to wealthier school districts, and a scarcity of affordable college application coaches and tutors, to name a few — at the very heart of their pitch.

The Landrys explicitly vowed to get black students into top universities; to level a vastly uneven playing field; to put into reach a college education that many teenagers and their parents worried was outside their grasp.

Their magnetic pitch had students staying at T.M. Landry despite enduring what they described as severe emotional and physical abuse. “He seemed to see in us what we didn’t see in ourselves,” Raymond Smith, a T.M. Landry alumnus, said of Mr. Landry.

In addition, dozens of parents have continued to stand by the Landrys. “The reason I’m here is return on investment,” one woman said in an audio recording of a parents’ meeting convened after our initial investigation was published in November. The Landrys “give us hope that I never would have imagined going after,” she said.