Thieves are everywhere. If you have something everybody wants, someone will try to steal it from you. Usually thieves steal objects – jewelry, money, etc. But every now and then, an exceptional crook finds a way to steal something that can’t be seen, felt, or heard: a sterling reputation.
These are crooks like Adam Wheeler who was ordered held on $5,000 bail Tuesday after he tried to steal an Ivy League education as a fraudulent Harvard student. He almost got away with it, too. Only his greed or, as he would say, his “sententious, crypto-tendentious, slightly pedantic” nature, kept him from the perfect crime (in case you don’t share Wheeler’s love of the Thesaurus, he called himself a smug, pretentious ass). Stories like this grip the public’s attention for their sheer audacity and devious brilliance of their protagonists. Stories like Wheeler’s are exotic.
Or are they?
Harvard is not the only prestigious university to overlook a fraudulent application. Princeton, Stanford, and Yale have all had their own Adam Wheelers.
First, there’s Azia Kim, the Stanford “freshman” who was evicted from her dorm room at 2 am in 2007. Kim’s crime? She wasn’t even a Stanford student. While she went to classes, ate meals in the cafeteria, and lived in the Stanford dorms for eight months, she had never even been admitted to the university. She tricked other Stanford students into taking her on as a roommate and snuck into classes and cafeterias. To get around the inconvenience of not having a key, she entered her bedroom through the window.
Then there’s Princeton’s most famous impostor, Alexi Indris Santana. He was admitted to Princeton in 1988, claiming to be a self-taught orphan from Utah who had worked on a ranch and slept outdoors with his horse, Good Enough. At Princeton, he excelled on the track team and pulled down mostly A’s. His life seemed to be a picture-perfect story, destined for the movies. Sadly for Santana, his story was destined for a movie, just not the kind he would have preferred.
Alexi Santana was actually James Hogue, a wanted ex-con from Kansas City, Kansas. Before coming to Princeton, he had pretended to be an orphan from Nevada and masqueraded as a student at a Palo Alto high school despite being 26 years old. For his time at Princeton, Hogue spent nine months in jail and repaid $22,000 in fraudulent financial aid. Still, he couldn’t resist the allure of the Ivy League. In 1992, he was arrested for stealing $50,000 in gemstones one of Harvard’s museum. In 2003, his life story was portrayed in the Jesse Moss film Conman.
But perhaps the greatest impostor story of all time belongs to Yale, circa 1997. That year, Tonica Jenkins was accepted as a graduate student in Yale’s biological and biomedical science program. She claimed to be a student from Central State University and Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio but, like other college fraudsters, Jenkins had faked her transcripts and recommendations. By December, Yale had detected the fraud and police were summoned to arrest Jenkins. Then Jenkins’ story took an unexpected turn.
Tonica attempted to escape arrest by fleeing from the police car. She failed and was charged with fraud and larceny, but Jenkins’ determination would prove to know no bounds. First, she tried to ignore her problems. She ignored her court date and returned to her home in East Cleveland. When law enforcement found her there, Jenkins claimed she missed her court date because she had been raped, abducted, and driven to Philadelphia in the trunk of a car. Only once her abductor had fled could she escape from the trunk and drive back to Cleveland. The judge didn’t buy her excuse, and she ultimately served three years in prison.
Jenkins’ apparent belief in her own criminal brilliance assured she would soon be back in the news. In 2000, she and her mother were arrested for drug trafficking. Again, Jenkins tried to beat the rap. Her solution? Murder. She and her cousin kidnapped a woman who resembled Jenkins. Then they planned to replace Jenkins’ dental records with the stranger’s. Finally, they would fake Jenkins’ death by killing the stranger and burning her body. Unfortunately for Jenkins, the woman escaped from the Jenkins family’s basement and contacted the police. In 2003, Jenkins was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Obviously, Harvard grads shouldn’t be too worried about Wheeler’s effect on their alma mater’s reputation. After all, all of Harvard’s competitors have had their own fraudsters running the gamut from funny to insane, and those scandals have all faded from public memory.
It is true, however, that Harvard’s administration probably wouldn’t have caught Wheeler if he hadn’t applied for the world’s most prestigious scholarships. Perhaps the takeaway lesson is that, no matter what your academic background, you can blend in at Harvard if you’re “sententious, crypto-tendentious,” and “slightly pedantic.”