Making (Up) the Grade: Top All-Time Harvard Grifters

(May 18) -- Given Harvard's knack for attracting the brilliant and industrious, it follows that any campus con artists would be similarly gifted. Long before Adam Wheeler scammed his way into this fabled Ivy League university, dozens of frauds ingeniously infiltrated the Crimson. Here are the most notorious six.

1. Esther Reed (aka Brooke Henson, Natalie Bowman) makes Wheeler's alleged crimes look like child's play. The serial con artist and identity thief showed up in Cambridge, Mass., in 2002 as Natalie Bowman, a skilled chess player who joined the Harvard debate team (too bad the real Natalie Bowman graduated in 1999). Posing as Bowman, Reed sporadically attended Harvard until 2005, when she disappeared, only to resurface at Columbia University as Brooke Henson, the name of a South Carolina girl who had been missing for years. An employment background check would uncover the scam -- but not before Reed vanished again. After being featured on "America's Most Wanted," she was finally arrested at a suburban Chicago motel in 2008. All told, Reed collected more than $100,000 in fraudulent student loans and assumed the identities of at least three people. Now 31, she's midway through a four-year prison sentence. A movie starring Amanda Seyfried, based on Rolling Stone's article about Reed, is in the works.

2. Kaavya Viswanathan, Harvard class of 2008, signed a $500,000 two-book deal with Little, Brown while still in high school. Her first novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," climbed to No. 32 on the New York Times best-seller list before being unceremoniously yanked from the shelves in 2006 amid allegations of plagiarism. In fact, several passages in Viswanathan's novel were strikingly similar to those written by young-adult authors Megan McCafferty, Meg Cabot and Sophie Kinsella. Despite the ensuing media maelstrom, Harvard never formally reprimanded Viswanathan; on the contrary, famed novelist Jamaica Kincaid oversaw her senior thesis. Viswanathan was soon accepted to Georgetown Law School and is currently interning at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, one of the most blindingly white of all white-shoe law firms.

3. So-called "brilliant researcher" John Darsee came to Harvard Medical School in 1979 after earning a medical degree at Emory University. But suspicions among his colleagues soon sparked an investigation, which revealed that Darsee had fabricated data for more than 100 research papers, including work published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, among others. (In one instance, Darsee had recorded data from tests on dogs that required the excision of their hearts. Investigators, however, determined that at least one animal had been buried with its heart still intact.) The findings, along with the fact that none of his study co-authors were apparently aware of his misconduct, sent deep reverberations through the medical community. The National Institutes of Health asked Harvard to refund more than $100,000 that had been awarded to Darsee for research, and the scientific community was forced to acknowledge that journals' peer-review system provided few safeguards against intellectual dishonesty. Darsee left Harvard in disgrace, but he was able to secure a non-research-based medicine fellowship at a hospital in upstate New York.

4. Before there was Clark Rockefeller (who, by the way, manage to convince many that he had attended at Yale) there was James Hogue. The 31-year-old Kansas City, Kan., ex-con enrolled in Princeton in 1989 as Alexi Indris Santana, a self-taught Utah ranch hand. He managed to stay for two years, competing on the track team and winning admission to the Ivy Club, an elite eating club, before a high school classmate recognized him at a track meet. He was convicted of defrauding the university, spent nine months in prison and was forced to pay back $22,000 in student loans. Yet it wasn't long before he popped up as a student at the Harvard Extension School, where he took a part-time job at the university's Mineralogical Museum in 1992 -- and was arrested a few months later for stealing $50,000 worth of gems from it. In and out of jail after that, he drifted back West. In 2007, Hogue pleaded guilty to burglarizing homes in Colorado and is serving a 10-year sentence.

5. And before there was Bernie Madoff, there was Gregory Earls. The wealthy, Washington, D.C.-based merchant banker sent his three children to Harvard in the 1990s and co-chaired the Harvard Parents Fund, an alumni fundraising vehicle. He used these university connections to find new prospective investors, who poured $20 million into a private firm he set up while CEO of U.S. Technology. Of the $20 million, Earls used almost $14 million for personal expenses, including -- wait for it -- his daughter's Harvard tuition. In 2005, he was sentenced to a decade in prison.

6. Unlike the others, Gina Grant didn't pad her resume, steal someone's work, assume a fake identity or bilk people out of tons of money. No, the 18-year-old high school valedictorian from Lexington, S.C., merely left one small biographical detail off her Harvard application: the fact that she had bludgeoned her alcoholic mother to death with a crystal candlestick at age 14. Granted early admission in 1995, Grant was soon featured in a Boston Globe article about disadvantaged students who managed to excel. Shortly thereafter, newspaper editors received anonymous tips about the murder case, which had been sealed because Grant was a minor at the time. Harvard quickly rescinded its offer, but Grant didn't have to go far to continue her schooling. She graduated from nearby Tufts University in 1999.