College admissions scammer unloads $14M apartment

Gregory Abbott sold his full-floor Upper East Side home

Gregory Abbott and 1020 Fifth Avenue (Christies Real Estate, Getty, Streeteasy, Columbia University, Eden, Janine and Jim via Flickr)
Gregory Abbott and 1020 Fifth Avenue (Christies Real Estate, Getty, Streeteasy, Columbia University, Eden, Janine and Jim via Flickr)

This buyer passed the test.

Gregory Abbott, one of the wealthy parents swept up in the college admissions scandal nicknamed “Operation Varsity Blues,” has sold his full-floor apartment on the Upper East Side for $13.5 million. The sale price is more than 100 times the amount he pleaded guilty to paying for his daughter’s college entrance exams to be corrected.

The buyers are Aaron and Alyssa Kapito. Aaron is a co-founder at Politan Capital Management, and Alyssa is an interior decorator.

The new owners won’t be moving far — the address listed on the deed is just a few blocks south of 1020 Fifth. That apartment most recently sold for $10 million in 2013 and was signed for by real estate attorney Scott Claman.

(Sotheby’s Int’l Realty)

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The 14-story limestone prewar building sits adjacent to Central Park. The building was designed by Warren & Wetmore, the architects behind Grand Central Terminal whose drawings have been archived in research libraries and coffee table books.

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Abbott listed the home in June 2020 for $16.5 million before dropping the asking price by $1 million a little less than a year later, according to records. Serena Boardman of Sotheby’s International Realty, who had the listing, declined to comment.

In 2019, Abbott and his wife, Marcia, were each sentenced to a month in prison for paying $125,000 to boost their daughter’s SAT and ACT scores. The Abbotts paid $75,000 to get a test proctor to correct their daughter’s SAT answers and another $50,000 to clean up her ACT. Abbott was previously ​​chairman and chief executive officer of International Dispensing Corporation.