FastTrain founder gets 8 years in prison

“It’s a terrible thing what happened to these students.” Alexander Angueira, defense attorney

Alejandro Amor, the convicted founder of a now-closed South Florida college called FastTrain, was sent to prison for eight years on Monday.

Amor, who credited his mother, a teacher, with inspiring him to start the forprofit college, ended up improperly securing millions in financial aid from the U.S. government — including money loaned or awarded to students who never finished high school and should not have been enrolled in college.

Amor, a one-time Miami resident, founded FastTrain in1999 and built it up to a seven-campus college in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and other parts of Florida. But the feds shut down Amor’s school and charged him in 2014 with stealing millions of dollars in federal grants and loans for students, including many who didn’t graduate from high school.

Amor, 56, was convicted in November. Three former FastTrain employees pleaded guilty before his trial and cooperated against him.

Amor’s defense attorney, Alexander Angueira, asked U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard to give him lesser punishment.

“There’s no doubt how the court views the seriousness of this crime — it’s a terrible thing what happened to these students,” Angueira said. But, he said, “Rightly or wrongly, his goal was to help these students pick themselves up and get them jobs.”

Prosecutor Amanda Perwin disagreed, saying Amor called the shots on the college’s policy of “enrolling ineligible students.” She said Amor, once an information technology teacher in the Miami-Dade public schools, was the “mastermind” of the scheme to bilk the U.S. Department of Education and “participated extensively in covering it up. ... There were very real victims — students were lied to.”

At trial, Perwin put on evidence showing FastTrain admitted about 1,300 students who didn’t have high school diplomas, using falsified documents to make the government think the students were eligible for financial aid. FastTrain took advantage of lax federal rules. A college seeking to enroll ineligible students can accept diplomas from a “diploma mill,” one that issues bogus credentials for a fee.

For those ineligible students, FastTrain received $6,560,000 in Pell grants and student loans. Forprofit colleges are known for aggressive recruiting, but FastTrain turned it up a notch. Ex-employees told investigators that Amor boosted enrollments by hiring former strippers as recruiters, some of whom wore “short skirts and stiletto heels” to work.