This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

On a Monday morning in April, 2017, students at Sage Hill School gathered in its artificial-turf quadrangle, known as the Town Square, to celebrate seniors who were heading to college as recruited athletes. The ten honorees lined up behind an archway adorned with balloons. One by one, they stepped forward as their sports and destinations were announced. Patricia Merz, the head of the private high school in Newport Coast, California, placed a lei in the appropriate college’s colors around each student’s neck.

Most of the students were recruits to low-profile Division III programs. Only three had committed to play Division I college sports. Two were the captains of Sage Hill’s girls’ volleyball and girls’ soccer teams, bound for Columbia University and the University of Denver, respectively. The other, Grant Janavs, played tennis. As his shirt and blue-and-gray lei both showed, he would attend Georgetown, the élite Catholic university in Washington, D.C.

The Town Square is framed on three sides by Sage Hill’s gym, library, and administration building. As Adam Langevin watched the ceremony with other seniors, sitting on four rows of steps at the quadrangle’s open end, across from the archway, he was stunned. Adam had been Sage Hill’s top tennis player for four years, and he had lost only three singles matches as a senior. He had trained long hours with renowned coaches, hit with college stars and budding pros, and acquitted himself well in regional and national tournaments. Although his two-handed backhand needed work, Adam had developed a solid serve and a forehand that one of his coaches, the former college and professional player Ross Duncan, described as “pro potential, tour level.” Between tennis and classes, he’d had little time left for other extracurricular activities or a social life. In four years, he’d attended only two school dances and had no romantic relationships or even casual lunches with friends. He’d sacrificed it all for his goal of playing for the best Division I college-tennis team he could.

And yet his dream had narrowly eluded him. Although he would likely have played for a weaker Division I program, such as Georgetown, he had his heart set on California Polytechnic State University, which matched his academic interests and is a perennial contender in the Big West Conference. Unlike Georgetown, California Poly typically ranks among the top seventy-five of the more than two hundred and fifty Division I men’s college-tennis teams in the country. Earlier that month, Adam held back tears when a coach at Cal Poly phoned him in calculus class and said that there was no spot left on its team for him. He had been beaten out by players of similar ability whom the coaches had identified as prospects earlier. Desperate to hide his shame and embarrassment from classmates, he immediately fled school. That afternoon, when his father, Rick Langevin, came home, he found Adam sitting on the hood of his car in the driveway, disconsolate.

Now Grant was being celebrated as a future Division I Georgetown tennis player. When Grant had mentioned that he would be playing for Georgetown, Adam had privately thought that Grant was deluding himself. In their freshman year, Grant had played doubles regularly for Sage Hill, but, as the team improved, he lost his starting position. As a senior, Grant wasn’t even on the team. He hit the ball hard but sprayed his shots outside the lines; he couldn’t stay in a rally for more than three or four strokes. Grant had a private coach who went to his matches and practices, but he still didn’t get better. Adam sometimes wondered if Grant would prefer playing for fun rather than competing.

“I must admit it. I was jealous,” Adam recalled in June, as he sprawled on a couch in the living room of his family’s home, part of a residential development on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Five feet ten and a sturdy hundred and fifty-five pounds, Adam wore white socks without sneakers because he was recovering from surgery for an ingrown toenail, a common tennis malady. “He was living my dream after I worked for so many years,” Adam told me. “I was known as the tennis kid. That’s what I did. Grant gets up there, and I felt people looking over. ‘Why aren’t you up there?’ The whole team was, like, ‘What?’ It was really, really frustrating.”

A. G. Longoria, who served as Sage Hill’s tennis coach from the school’s founding, in 2000, to his retirement, in 2015, coached both players. Adam “was the better athlete and devoted much more time to tennis as this was his number one passion—he was in an elite tennis academy, had high performance coaches and played USTA tournaments almost every week,” Longoria told me in an e-mail. “He got good in a hurry” and “could have played at Georgetown.” By contrast, “Grant was limited by his form (strokes) which all his coaches tried to correct but either he could not or would not change them. I am guessing that Adam was surprised, as many were, that Grant was going to play for Georgetown.”

When Adam told his parents that Grant was a Georgetown tennis recruit, his father speculated that Grant’s billionaire family had endowed a building at the university. Grant’s mother, Michelle Janavs, is the daughter of Paul Merage, who, with his brother, co-founded Chef America Inc., which created the Hot Pockets microwavable snack. Universities frequently reward donors by giving their children or grandchildren an edge in admissions.

Nearly two years later, in March, 2019, the actual explanation emerged. An independent college-admissions counsellor named William (Rick) Singer pleaded guilty in a federal court in Boston to fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice in a case known as Operation Varsity Blues. Singer’s clients had paid him more than twenty-five million dollars to help their children enter an array of selective colleges with bogus credentials. He bribed college coaches and athletic officials to misrepresent students as recruited athletes, and he paid proctors at testing sites to improve their scores on the SAT or ACT by secretly correcting wrong answers.

One billionaire family paid Singer $6.5 million for their daughter’s admission to Stanford. Her application to Stanford was embellished with false credentials for the sailing team, according to a court filing by prosecutors. The university expelled the student, according to news reports, but she and her parents have not been charged in the case. Stanford’s sailing coach, who pleaded guilty, admitted to taking bribes to help some of Singer’s clients, but he spent the money on the sailing program rather than himself. The thirty-three parents who were charged included the television actresses Lori Loughlin, who pleaded not guilty, and Felicity Huffman, who apologized and was sentenced to fourteen days in prison.There were also two Sage Hill trustees: Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pacific Investment Management Company, or PIMCO, one of the world’s largest bond managers, and Grant’s mother, Michelle Janavs.

In May, 2017, after Georgetown admitted Grant, a foundation controlled by his grandfather had wired four hundred thousand dollars to a California nonprofit that Singer had set up—the Key Worldwide Foundation, according to court documents. Prosecutors said that Singer, through that foundation, paid Georgetown tennis coach Gordon Ernst more than $2.7 million in “consulting” fees to designate at least a dozen applicants, including Grant, as tennis recruits. Ernst, who declined to comment through his lawyer, pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy. Grant was not charged in the case, and no evidence has emerged that he knew or suspected anything inappropriate regarding his recruitment. His mother and Singer appear to have engineered his acceptance to Georgetown without him being aware of their alleged scheme.