Suburban father, son charged with education fraud

April 28--A father and son who run two Niles -- based education companies stole more than $33 million in federal grants from school districts across the country by misrepresenting the tutoring services they were purportedly providing to low-income students and bribing school officials with cruises and "services" at strip clubs, federal prosecutors announced today.

Jowhar Soultanali, director of operations for Brilliance Academy Inc., and his son, Kabir Kassam, who is president, allegedly obtained between $8 million and $13.6 million for themselves and their families from the more than $33 million they fraudulently obtained from about 200 school districts around the country, including in Illinois, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago.

Prosecutors alleged that the father and son executives also paid bribes to three school officials in Texas and one state education official in New Mexico in exchange for recruiting students and steering federal and state funds from school districts, prosecutors said. According to prosecutors, the bribes included Caribbean cruise vacations, meals and "services at a gentlemen's club."

Soultanali, 58, of Morton Grove, and Kassam, 34, of Wheeling, were each charged with mail fraud and federal program bribery in an indictment returned last week.

Also indicted on one count each of federal program bribery were Arturo Martinez, 52, an educational administrator with the New Mexico Public Education Department; Cedric Petersen, 61, an assistant principal at Fox Tech High School in San Antonio; Armando Rodriguez, 54, a tutoring coordinator at Miller High School in Corpus Christi, Texas; and Brian Harris, 33, an official at Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, prosecutors said.

Between 2008 and 2012, Soultanali, Kassam, Brilliance Academy and its subsidiary, Babbage Net School Inc., allegedly misrepresented the nature and quality of the tutoring services the companies provided. The businesses actually provided substandard supplemental educational materials to students, falsely inflated invoices the companies submitted to school districts for purported tutoring services and created and distributed false student progress and improvement reports, prosecutors said.

The indictment seeks forfeiture from Soultanali, Kassam, Brilliance, and Babbage of more than $33 million, including approximately $1.77 million that was seized from the companies' bank accounts in 2010 or relinquished by Babbage in 2011, as well as Soultanali's and Kassam's residences, and three additional condominiums, five luxury automobiles, six whole life insurance policies, and a trove of diamond jewelry purchased in 2009.

All eight defendants -- six individuals and the two companies -- will be arraigned later in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

jmeisner@tribune.com

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