… you don’t know what you’re going to find.
… Mr. Martoma changed some of his first-year [Harvard] law school grades from B’s to A’s, including one in criminal law. He then sent the forged transcript to 23 judges when he applied for federal clerkships.
… After Harvard expelled him, Mr. Martoma, who at the time was known as Ajai Mathew Thomas, legally changed his name to Mathew Martoma in 2001, the same year he entered Stanford. It is not known what name Mr. Martoma used on his Stanford application.
Three years after graduating from Stanford [who knew Stanford had an eye for forgers?], Mr. Martoma landed a job as health care stock portfolio manager at SAC Capital. Jonathan Gasthalter, an SAC spokesman, has declined to comment about whether Mr. Cohen’s hedge fund was aware of the Harvard incident when it hired Mr. Martoma.
Why not be honest and say We not only knew about it; it made him a shoo-in…
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Details, in case you want to give it a go.
In late 1998, Martoma, a graduate of Duke, altered the transcript of his first-year law school grades: He gave himself A’s in Civil Procedure, Contracts, and Criminal Law, rather than the B, B+, and B he’d earned, according to a Harvard Administrative Board report. He applied for clerkships with 23 judges using the altered transcripts. Weeks later, someone in the school’s registrar’s office discovered that the transcript had been changed. Martoma then withdrew the clerkship applications and told Harvard that the doctored transcripts had been sent out by mistake.
In a classic example of how the coverup is usually worse than the crime, Martoma appealed his dismissal from Harvard by arguing that he’d withdrawn the applications before he was caught and that the improper transcripts had been submitted accidentally. His efforts apparently involved creating a fake computer data forensics company, complete with a professional-looking marketing flyer, to corroborate the time stamps of his e-mails.