Former Pimco C.E.O. Gets 9 Months in Prison in College Admissions Case
Most parents were accused of crimes to get one child, maybe two, into an elite college. Douglas Hodge, the former chief of Pimco, paid bribes for at least four children, prosecutors say.

BOSTON — Most of the parents charged in the nation’s largest college admissions scandal were accused of paying to cheat on admissions exams or bribing coaches to get one child into college, or perhaps two.

But prosecutors say that Douglas Hodge, the retired chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, was in a different class, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get no fewer than four of his seven children into elite schools and attempting to do so with a fifth child.

On Friday, a federal judge sentenced Mr. Hodge, who pleaded guilty to two counts — money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and honest services mail and wire fraud — to nine months in prison. It was the heaviest punishment of any parent who has been sentenced in the admissions scandal, though it fell considerably short of the two years that prosecutors had recommended.

“There is no term in the English language that describes your conduct as well as the Yiddish term of chutzpah,” Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton told Mr. Hodge before imposing his sentence. “You need to pay a significant and conspicuous price for unconscionable, egregious criminal conduct in order to deter you and others who can afford it from the blatant misuse of your good fortunes.”

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