On Friday, Penn alum and petty criminal Edward Anderton was sentenced to four years of prison and ordered to repay $100,000 in restitution for a spree of identity-theft crimes he committed with Jocelyn Kirsch, his former girlfriend and partner-in-crime. Although the duo dabbled in scams in equal measure, Anderton received a lighter sentence than Kirsch - four years to her five - because, as his lawyer successfully argued, he showed greater remorse.

There are many ways to show remorse: a tearful apology, self-flagellation, etc., but, as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Indeed,

Since posting bail, Anderton has worked at a manual labor job and his salary goes toward a bank account specifically for restitution. This salary, in addition to his liquefied 401K and other legally obtained money in a bank account, amounts to about one third of the total restitution he will have to pay.

A manual labor job, really? We know that Wall Street is in the toilet, and that many Whartonites are being terminated from their jobs en masse, but one would think that all Wharton alums - especially those who are criminals - would be far too proud to accept such work. So Anderton's sentence is probably well-deserved.

Whartonites worried that the recent i-bank apocalypse will spoil their plans to bathe nightly in a sea of money, fear not! There's always the lottery, an institution weirdly remniscient of Ivy League admissions, anyway. (Fill out bubbles in #2 pencil, wait anxiously, be disappointed 99.9% of the time.) In an article titled "RICH GET RICHER IN LUCKY $CRATCH," the Post reports that the first-ever winner of the "$1 million a year for life" lotto is a dispassionate i-banking Whartonite:

Keenan Altunis, 33, a banker raised on Long Island and now living in London, accepted his prize with a smug shrug, noting he's already a multimillionaire.

"Is it going to materially change my life? No," he told The Post. "I have been a very blessed and fortunate person."

And if that isn't an argument for spreading the wealth around, how about this: Since he lives in Britain, Altunis, an executive at the European banking firm Unicredit, will have to pay New York but not federal taxes on his winnings, which means he'll net $931,500 a year for the rest of his life.

Irony Gods, are you serious?

"Don't get me wrong, no matter how rich anyone is, a million a year is a lot of money," he said. "But I don't expect this to change my life very much at all."

The family left New York yesterday for a vacation in the Caribbean - one that had already been planned and paid for prior to his winning ticket.

Apparently so.

There is a chance that every single news outlet misspelled Altunis' name (sweet justice?) because the only Keenan Altunis we can find in Penn's records is one Kenan Altunis (Wharton '97), whose sole claim to fame was being in a frat and being quoted in the DP once about beer. IronyGoddammit.

Under the Button spied a sad, prophetic — and, ok, kinda gratifying in a hideously inappropriate and schadenfreude-riddled way — scene outside Lehman Brothers, deposed financial behemoth and quondam employer of upwardly mobile econ majors across the Ivy League.

Wait, did you not catch that? Cut to the relevant portion:

Damn straight, bitch went to Wharton. Now she's so poor, she'll have to trade in that Banana Republic bag for the Gap. Or worse: the sale rack at Old Navy.

Deposed Lehmanites, allow us to bear witness to the diminishing returns on your B-school degrees. What will happen to the storied traditon of Ivy Leaguers summering on Wall Street, now that the Street's hit the wall? Rants, musings, terrifying anecdotes, and backstabbing gossip welcome always at tips@ivygateblog.com. Anonymity guaranteed.

Things were looking up for former Wharton student and recent Columbia temp employee Chris Clemente in September 2005. For one, Clemente, 37, had just been released from prison after serving 15 years for heroin and weapons possession. But even better than his freedom--he allegedly discovered a new and promising illegal scheme! A friend tipped Clemente off to an MTA machine that was malfunctioning and giving out free fares, authorities said. Over the course of the next three years, Clemente and two others, Cary Grant (that's his real name) and Lisa Foster Jordan, allegedly stole more than $800,000 worth of MTA money from this Penn Station machine.

In a New York Post article, an MTA spokesperson explains how this mechnaical error probably happened:

The odds of [the suspects] stumbling on this were astronomical," MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said. The scenario "would only happen if you used an active debit card but had insufficient money in your account and it was from a smaller, nonlocal bank.

In other words, if you were broke and had an account at a nontraditional bank, you too could have taken advantage of the MTA.

What could have possibly brought these three down? According to this Post article, it was a "routine agency audit." Yeah, I guess an audit conducted every three years is kind of routine.

Bloomberg News columnist Amity Shlaes has a monster scoop this morning: Ivy League networking is dead.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Shlaes points out, recently tried to quantify the strength of what the authors call the "connection premium" of attending an elite college or business school. Focusing on Wall Street analysts, the economists looked at whether the financial advice they gave was better when they had the same alma mater as a senior officer at the company they were recommending. It was, obviously -- by 8.16 percent.

This all changed, apparently, with a 2000 Securities and Exchange Commision rule called "Fair Disclosure" that prohibited, it seems, chatting over drinks at the Harvard Club. After that, the "connection premium" disappeared. Fair, indeed, I guess.

No one will suffer more from the new rule than Harvard kids, who once made up 19 percent of all networking, according to the killjoys.

After the jump, what schools used to have the most connections. Read the rest of this entry »

WARNING: The links in this post are NSFW. Some go to a site you are supposed to be 21 years old to view.

The entire concept of irony bursts into flames and ceases to exist today. If the internets are to be believed, a real live Wharton student is whoring herself out. No, this is not another post about douchebags at McKinsey. Not about the shitty job market, or annoying sex columnists, or degrading internships fetching coffee for rich guys in pinstripe suits. We are talking about a literal prostitute, the kind that charges money for admission to her vagina. And if the so-called Eva and her madame Solana Jewel have anything to say about it, the little hussy goes to Penn:

Eva is a new addition to the Philadelphia scene! A hot Italian spinner! She is currently a finance major at a Ivy League university. I can assure you she is 100% GFE!

Rate is $300/hr, $450/1.5 hrs, $600/2hrs. Couples are $450/hr. Inquire for longer hours. She is also available for outcalls.

Miss Eva and Mama Lana were unavailable for comment ("press request" being outside the standard sex-for-money dialogue). But we are pretty sure the above blonde woman exists. Whether she actually attends Wharton, however, is another story. After the jump: We break down the knowns; the unknowns; and the many things that, in the course of investigating this story, we have come to know but really wish we didn't.

Come! Enter the sordid world of Prostitution at Penn...

Read the rest of this entry »

Infected by the unbridled ambition rampant at Penn's Wharton School of Business, senior admissions officer Judith Hodara found a clever way to parlay her dayjob into a sidejob: Admissions counseling! The conflict of interest is so blatant as to boggle the mind. So, one more time: Hodara was simultaneously advising people on how to get into Penn, and choosing who would get into Penn. We assume her counseling consisted of instructing 17-year-olds to mark their applications "Hi Judy! The secret password is MAD MONEY," and then admitting them all.

To be fair, Hodara worked in business school admissions, and her company, IvyStone Admissions Consultants, advised high schoolers. But wait, it gets better! Inside Higher Ed reports that the only reason Judith got caught is because her relationship with another admissions consulting company -- advising Japanese B-school hopefules -- fell under ethical scrutiny.

Read the rest of this entry »