The Gangs of Kalorama

Burner phones, FBI stakeouts, search warrants—Season 6 of The Wire? No, just our social betters street fighting their children’s way into elite colleges. In March, we got Operation Varsity Blues, which charged a group of wealthy parents and an alleged conman with conspiring to get lackluster students into posh colleges in a scheme so improbably complex that it triggered the use of the RICO statute. Earlier this month, Sidwell Friends School, bastion of the Washington, D.C., elite, was the site of a fantastical, Real Housewives of the Independent Schools cavalcade of hideous parental behavior, which apparently included a “verbal assault” on college counselors, secretly taping conversations with them, calling them from blocked phone numbers to run down other kids in the applicant pool, and trying to obtain copies of other students’ records.