College admissions scandal: It’s sentencing day for the mastermind behind the plot. Is he headed to prison?

The college admissions scandal that sent celebrities and wealthy Bay Area parents to prison for paying bribe money to get their average kids into elite universities is finally coming to a close after nearly four years as the mastermind behind the scheme, Rick Singer, is set to be sentenced today in a federal court in Boston.

Singer made $25 million off those desperate, prestige-obsessed parents, then ratted them out by wearing an FBI wire and is now asking for a sentence lighter than the ones imposed on some of his clients.

Federal prosecutors are asking for six years behind bars and a $10 million fine. Singer’s defense lawyer asked for six months. Singer, who sold his luxurious Newport Beach home at the height of the scandal and was tracked down by the Bay Area News Group last summer living in a mobile home park in St. Petersburg, told a neighbor he was expecting a light sentence.

In a sentencing document, federal prosecutors said that Singer paid more than $7 million in bribes, and spent $15 million of his clients’ money for his own benefit. He also created a phony charity to funnel the bribe money so parents could deduct it from their taxes.

“Staggering in scope, Singer’s scheme was also breathtaking in its audacity and the levels of deception it involved,” prosecutors wrote. “His corruption and manipulation of others were practically limitless. Singer is far and away the most culpable of the Varsity Blues defendants – by orders of magnitude – and is therefore deserving of the longest sentence.”

Singer, 62, started his career as a college admissions consultant in Sacramento, and quickly tapped into the anxiety of parents who wanted their children to be admitted, without the qualifications, to the best universities, and the bragging rights to go along with it. Many paid upwards of a half million dollars for what Singer called the “side door” to admissions – not the front door where teens would be admitted on their own merits, or the “back door” when parents donate millions to universities and get their names on buildings. Instead, Singer arranged for expert proctors to take SAT exams, often without the students’ knowledge, and to bogus athletic credentials, sometimes with Photoshopped images of the teens participating in sports they never actually played. Former Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer, the only defendant who didn’t personally pocket bribe money from the scheme, was sentenced to one day after admitting to holding open two spots for Singer’s unqualified clients.

In a letter to the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, Singer said his “moral compass was broken,” he thrived at “winning at all costs” and “choosing right over wrong became less important than doing whatever had to be done to be recognized as the “best.” He blamed, in part, unspecified “suppressed childhood trauma.”