A Supposed Stickler for the Rules, Now at the Center of a U.S.C. Scandal

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LOS ANGELES — Ron Allice, the track and field coach at the University of Southern California, assumed bad news was on the way when Donna Heinel summoned him to her office back in 2011.

He was right.

Heinel, the athletic department administrator who functioned as a gatekeeper over whether recruited athletes could find a spot at the increasingly competitive private university, had found a problem with the track athlete Allice was pushing. He had taken a sign language class to fulfill a foreign language requirement and, though that was the standard in the state university systems, Heinel dug in against him.

Now, Allice wonders if there was another reason Heinel was so resolute. And he is not alone.

Heinel, 57, who as an unyielding, by-the-book administrator rose to a position of unchecked authority during her 16 years in the U.S.C. athletic department, has emerged as a central figure in the academic admissions scandal that has ensnared members of rich — and in some cases famous — families. They are among 50 people charged with carrying out a series of bribes and rigged admissions qualifications, including making up athletic accomplishments, in order to get affluent children into prestigious universities across the country.

Nowhere was the scheme more widespread than at U.S.C., where four others who have coached there — one of them until earlier this month — are under indictment. Heinel stands accused of being at the fulcrum of the scheme, conspiring with Rick Singer, a private admissions consultant, to obtain millions in bribes and then easing more than two dozen students into the school through the so-called side door of athletic admissions, using fraudulent athletic profiles.

Through a lawyer, Heinel, who was fired the day she was indicted, declined to comment.

Heinel is the only administrator who has been charged, and her university is the only one of eight involved at which more than one coach has been implicated.

U.S.C.’s interim president, Wanda Austin, has pledged to revamp its athletic admissions process.

According to the indictment, Heinel and Singer, the private counselor who hatched the plan, collaborated with the water polo coach, Jovan Vavic, and the former soccer coach, Ali Khosroshahin, who was fired in 2013, and his former assistant Laura Janke, who created phony athletic profiles. Like Heinel, Vavic was fired by U.S.C. on March 12, the day the indictments were unsealed.

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A college admissions scheme has roiled U.S.C., where several coaches are under indictment.CreditRozette Rago for The New York Times

It was a stunning revelation. Heinel ran an independent business counseling parents and high school administrators on how to comply with N.C.A.A. regulations. Colleagues described her as a stickler for the rules.

Tom Walsh, the former cross country coach who left U.S.C. in 2013 after 19 years, said coaches sweated the days when they had to attest to the worthiness of their recruits to Heinel. “It didn’t matter how good people were,” Walsh recalled in an interview last week. “Coaches in different sports would commiserate: damn, this is tough.” In fact, Walsh said, if you had asked him before the indictment about Heinel’s standards, “I’d have said she was as hard as it gets.”

Walsh and his former colleagues are now wondering how far back the alleged scam might have gone. Heinel required coaches who recruited athletes from Europe to have their transcripts translated in the United States to limit the chances of fraud, Walsh said. One runner he recruited was an artist. Heinel demanded to see a portfolio, and copies or photos of the works were not sufficient. The originals had to be shipped.

“She was basically the gatekeeper,” said a former U.S.C. coach who requested anonymity because he was concerned that being identified could hurt his career. “If you wanted to get someone in, she was the person that really made that decision. Or not.”

Regardless of that power, Heinel largely kept a low profile both on campus and off. She has two children in elementary school and lives with her partner, a school-district special-education administrator, on Naples Island, an exclusive neighborhood in Long Beach, Calif., known for multimillion-dollar homes on winding canals.

Neighbors were shocked when F.B.I. agents surrounded Heinel’s house on a narrow, quiet side street just before dawn 10 days ago to arrest her, instructing an inquisitive neighbor to go back in his house. Heinel was described by neighbors as quiet and unassuming, driving a red sedan reminiscent of the official color of U.S.C., walking the dog, jogging or riding a bike frequently, and flying drones or playing sports with her son and daughter.

Neighbors said Heinel generally kept to herself, even when they mentioned their children had gone to U.S.C.

Court documents allege that Rick Singer conspired with Donna Heinel to get unqualified students into U.S.C.CreditBrian Snyder/Reuters

“It’s usually, ‘Hi, how you doing?’” said Keith Muirhead, a real estate broker who has lived in the house one door down for 36 years. Muirhead described Heinel as friendly, but said that they had “never socialized, never had a glass of wine, which is unusual because in Naples it’s almost a rule.”

It’s not clear when exactly Heinel developed a relationship with Singer. But since 2014, Heinel had presented to admissions more than two dozen students with bogus athletic credentials, including a football player whose high school had no football team, as well as a 5-foot-5 men’s basketball player and a high school cheerleader made to look like a lacrosse star. In fact, emails and recorded phone conversations in the indictment paint a portrait of Heinel not merely as a conduit, but also as a fixer who could spot potential brush fires and swept aside skeptical questions.

When counselors at two high schools reviewing applications to U.S.C. last April raised questions with parents about the listed athletic qualifications of their children, Heinel called Singer. In a voice mail message captured by investigators, she warned that the indignant parents must be stopped from going to the high school “yelling at counselors.”

“That’ll shut everything — that’ll shut everything down,” she said.

Around the same time, Heinel wrote a lengthy email to the U.S.C. director of admissions to set aside concerns about the athletic credentials of Matteo Sloane, the son of a drinking and wastewater systems entrepreneur who was admitted as a water polo player despite not playing the sport.

Heinel said that because Sloane’s high school did not have a water polo team, he played at L.A. Water Polo Club during the school year and traveled internationally with a youth junior team in the summer, playing in Greece, Serbia and Portugal. None of this was true.

“He is small,” Heinel continued in the email. “But he has a long torso but short strong legs, plus he is fast which helps him win the draws to start play after goals are scored. He is an attack perimeter player.” She then thanked the admissions director for raising the discrepancy. Sloane did not play for U.S.C.

The admissions director replied to Heinel, thanking her and saying that a paraphrased version of her email would be passed along to assure the high school officials that U.S.C. had looked into the matter. “They seemed unusually skeptical,” the director wrote.

Pat Haden increased Heinel’s power during his tenure as athletic director at U.S.C.CreditVictor Decolongon/Getty Images

There seemed to be no such skepticism of Heinel at U.S.C.

Through her 16 years at the school, she grew increasingly powerful, controlling two areas that were crucial to coaches: admissions and budgets. That reputation helped lead to her ascent, colleagues said.

Pat Haden, a former U.S.C. football star lured from his post at a private equity firm to become athletic director after the football and basketball programs were penalized in 2010 for improper benefits to players, tripled the department’s compliance staff. He also promoted Heinel to senior women’s administrator and the director of admissions and eligibility, jobs that had previously been handled by two associate athletic directors. Haden could not be reached for comment.

Heinel managed to cash in on her experience navigating admissions for prospective student athletes. In 2008, she established a side business, Clear the Clearinghouse, which advised high school coaches, counselors and administrators on N.C.A.A. rules for athletes. She offered subscriptions services, for up to $700 annually, and hosted workshops that cost $100, along with offering to do consulting work.

Heinel’s business held two-hour workshops at U.S.C.’s Galen Center. The notices advertising the clinics were sent to about 150 high school and private counselors, either from Heinel’s work email account or from that of Katie Fuller, an assistant director of admissions and eligibility at the school.

Typically, about 50 people attended the workshops, according to one private counselor who said she attended two of them, several years apart.

The workshops were unusual in that most schools, including U.S.C., put them on at no cost or for a nominal fee as a sort of public service for counselors.

One of the few documented interviews with Heinel is from a panel discussion for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people she participated in at U.S.C. in 2013, at which she described herself “as a loner for mostly all of my life.” Growing up in Philadelphia, she recalled, she was estranged from her parents for more than two years when she came out to them as gay while she was a student at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where she was a member of the swim team. But she reconciled with them somewhat a couple of years later when a sister became ill with cancer.

Heinel conducted workshops in N.C.A.A. compliance at the Galen Center.CreditRozette Rago for The New York Times

The experience of coming out to her parents stayed with her. “I’ve just kind of been, ‘Do what I want to do, when I want to do it,” she said.

Years later, established in her career as an athletic administrator, Heinel quickly developed a rapport with Haden, who has a gay son. Haden, and his successor, Lynn Swann, instituted few checks on Heinel’s powers.

From October until April, Heinel would meet every other Thursday with a subcommittee from the admissions office that included the dean of admissions and two assistants. At each meeting, Heinel would go through a list of recruits, including their test scores, transcripts and athletic profile, and within a few days would get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on whether they would be admitted, according to both colleagues and the indictment.

Sprinkled among those hundreds of recruits in 19 sports were the fraudulent athletic résumés that Heinel is accused of shepherding.

Often those profiles were created by Janke, who was paid by Singer, but according to the affidavit, on at least one occasion, Heinel created a profile on a U.S.C. letterhead that made it appear as if the U.S.C. lacrosse coach were lavishing praise on a recruit who in reality had never played the sport.

Almost always, within days of one of Singer’s clients being conditionally admitted to U.S.C., a check for $50,000 or more made out to “U.S.C. women’s athletics” or “U.S.C. athletics” would arrive in an envelope addressed to Heinel. In all, those checks added up to $1.3 million, which were deposited into accounts that Heinel largely controlled and could distribute to various teams. (Heinel also received $20,000 per month dating to last July from Singer in what court documents referred to as a “sham” consulting agreement.)

In explaining to Todd Blake why he had received a solicitation call asking for another donation to women’s basketball when his daughter was admitted fraudulently as a volleyball player, Singer said: “the money went toward her,” referring to Heinel, “and she gets to decide where it goes within the department.”

Eight years later, Allice, the retired track and field coach, remains annoyed. Memories of that hurdler were dredged up by the allegations against a woman who now stands accused of fraud. The athlete Heinel said did not measure up to the school’s standards was hardly a borderline athlete, much less one of the fakes she and Singer created.

The hurdler, Johnathan Cabral, ended up at U.S.C.’s Pac-12 rival, Oregon, where he would finish second in the N.C.A.A. finals in the 110-meter hurdles as a senior. A year later he finished sixth during the 2016 Olympics while representing Canada.

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