As Levine writes:
Being deceived once in a while is not going to prevent us from passing on our genes or seriously threaten the survival of the species. Efficient communication, on the other hand, has huge implications for our survival. The trade-off just isn’t much of a trade-off.
Markopolos’s communication at the library was, to put it mildly, not efficient. The woman he gave the envelope to, by the way? She wasn’t one of Spitzer’s aides. She worked for the JFK Library. She had no more special access to Spitzer than he did. And even if she had, she would’ve almost certainly seen it as her responsibility to protect a public figure like Spitzer from mysterious men in double-size overcoats clutching plain brown envelopes.
5.
After his failures with the SEC, Markopolos began carrying a Smith & Wesson handgun. He went to see the local police chief in the small Massachusetts town where he lived. Markopolos told him of his work against Madoff. His life was in danger, he said, but he begged him not to put that fact in the precinct log. The chief asked him if he wanted to wear body armor. Markopolos declined. He had spent seventeen years in the Army Reserves and knew something about lethal tactics. His assassins, he reasoned, would be professionals. They would give him two shots to the back of the head. Body armor wouldn’t matter. Markopolos installed a high-tech alarm system in his house. He replaced the locks. He made sure to take a different route home every night. He checked his rearview mirror.
When Madoff turned himself in, Markopolos thought—for a moment—that he might finally be safe. But then he realized that he had only replaced one threat with another. Wouldn’t the SEC now be after his files? After all, he had years of meticulously documented evidence of, at the least, their incompetence and, at the most, their criminal complicity. If they came for him, he concluded, his only hope would be to hold them off as long as possible, until he could get help. He loaded up a twelve-gauge shotgun and added six more rounds to the stock. He hung a bandolier of twenty extra rounds on his gun cabinet. Then he dug out his gas mask from his army days. What if they came in using tear gas? He sat at home, guns at the ready—while the rest of us calmly went about our business.
1 But wait. Don’t we want counterintelligence officers to be Holy Fools? Isn’t this just the profession where having someone who suspects everyone makes sense? Not at all. One of Scott Carmichael’s notorious predecessors was James Angleton, who ran the counterintelligence operations of the CIA during the last decades of the Cold War. Angleton became convinced there was a Soviet mole high inside the agency. He launched an investigation that eventually covered 120 CIA officials. He couldn’t find the spy. In frustration, Angleton ordered many in the Soviet division to pack their bags. Hundreds of people—Russian specialists with enormous knowledge and experience of America’s chief adversary—were shipped elsewhere. Morale plummeted. Case officers stopped recruiting new agents.
Ultimately, one of Angleton’s senior staffers looked at the crippling costs of more than a decade of paranoia and jumped to the final, paranoid conclusion: if you were the Soviet Union and you wanted to cripple the CIA, the most efficient way to do that would be to have your mole lead a lengthy, damaging, exhaustive hunt for a mole. Which meant the mole must be Angleton.
The final casualty of James Angleton’s witch hunt? James Angleton. He was pushed out of the CIA in 1974, after thirty-one years. Had Scott Carmichael behaved like James Angleton and suspected everyone of being a spy, the DIA would have collapsed in a cloud of paranoia and mistrust like the CIA’s Soviet division.
Chapter Five
Case Study: The Boy
in the Shower
1.
Prosecution: When you were a graduate assistant in 2001, did something occur that was unusual?
McQueary: Yes.
P: Could you tell the jury about that occurrence?
March 21, 2017. Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The witness is Michael McQueary, former quarterback turned assistant coach of the Pennsylvania State University football team: strapping, self-confident, with close-cropped hair the color of paprika. His interrogator is the Deputy Attorney General for the state of Pennsylvania, Laura Ditka.
McQueary: One night I made my way to the football building—Lasch Football Building—and proceeded to one of the locker rooms in the building.…I opened the locker room door. I heard showers running, heard slapping sounds, and entered another doorway that was already propped up open. My locker, in an aisle of lockers, was immediately to my right. Turned to my locker, and obviously I knew someone was in the locker room taking a shower. And the slapping sounds alerted me that something more than just a shower was going on.
At that point, Ditka stops him. What time of day was it? McQueary says, 8:30 at night on a Friday. That corner of the campus is quiet. The Lasch Building is all but deserted. The doors are locked.
P: OK. I interrupted you. I wanted to ask you another question. You’ve described something as slapping sounds. You aren’t talking about like clapping, like applause?
McQueary: No, no.
P: You were talking about a different kind of sound?
McQueary: Yes.
McQueary said he looked over his right shoulder to a mirror on the wall, which allowed him to see, at an angle, into the shower. He saw a man, naked, standing behind someone he called a “minor individual.”
P: Were you able to make—you say a minor individual. Are we talking about a seventeen- or sixteen-year-old, or somebody who appeared younger?
McQueary: Oh, younger.
P: OK. What would be the estimation of the age of the boy you saw?
McQueary: Roughly ten to twelve years old.
P: OK. Were they clothed or unclothed?
McQueary: Unclothed, naked.
P: Did you see any movement?
McQueary: Slow, very subtle movement, but hardly any.
P: OK. But slow, subtle movement that you saw, what kind of movement was it? What was moving?
McQueary: It was Jerry behind the boy, right up against him.
P: Skin to skin?
McQueary: Yes, absolutely.
P: Stomach to back?
McQueary: Yes.
The “Jerry” McQueary was referring to was Jerry Sandusky, who had then just retired as defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team. Sandusky was a beloved figure at football-obsessed Penn State. McQueary had known him for years.
McQueary ran upstairs to his office and called his parents. “He’s tall and he’s a pretty strapping guy, and he’s not a scaredy-cat. But he was shaken,” McQueary’s father told the court after his son finished his testimony. “He was clearly shaken. His voice wasn’t right. Enough that his mom picked it up on the phone without ever seeing him. She said, ‘There’s something wrong, John.’”
After McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in February 2001, he went to see his boss, Joe Paterno, the legendary head coach of the Penn State football team.
P: Did you explain to him that Jerry Sandusky was naked in the shower?
McQueary: Yes, absolutely.
P: Did you explain to him that there was skin-on-skin contact with the boy?
McQueary: I believe so, yes, ma’am.
P: And did you explain to him you heard these slapping sounds?
McQueary: Yes.
P: Okay. What was—I’m not asking you what he said. What was his reaction? What was his demeanor?
McQueary: Saddened. He kind of slumped back in his chair and put his hand up on his face, and his eyes just kind of went sad.
Paterno told his boss, the athletic director at Penn State, Tim Curley. Curley told another senior administrator at the university, Gary Schultz. Curley and Schultz then told the school’s president, Graham Spanier. An investigation followed. In due course, Sandusky was arrested, and at his trial an extraordinary story emerged. Eight young men testified that Sandusky had abused them hundreds of times over the years, in hotel rooms and locker-room showers, and even in the basemen
t of his home while his wife was upstairs. Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of child molestation. Penn State paid over $100 million in settlements to his victims.1 He became—as the title of one book about the case reads—“the most hated man in America.”
The most sensational fact about the Sandusky case, however, was that phrase “in due course.” McQueary saw Sandusky in the shower in 2001. The investigation into Sandusky’s behavior did not start until nearly a decade later, and Sandusky wasn’t arrested until November 2011. Why did it take so long? After Sandusky was put behind bars, the spotlight fell on the leadership of Penn State University. Joe Paterno, the school’s football coach, resigned in disgrace and died shortly thereafter. A statue of him that had been erected just a few years before was taken down. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, the two senior university administrators McQueary had met with, were charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and failure to report a case of child abuse.2 Both went to jail. And in the scandal’s final, devastating conclusion, prosecutors turned their attention to the university’s president, Graham Spanier. He had led the school for sixteen years and had transformed its academic reputation. He was beloved. In November 2011, he was fired. Six years later, he was convicted of child endangerment.3
At the height of the controversy, Sandusky gave an interview to NBC sports anchor Bob Costas.
Costas: You say you’re not a pedophile.
Sandusky: Right.
Costas: But you’re a man who, by his own admission, has showered with young boys. Highly inappropriate.…Multiple reports of you getting into bed with young boys who stayed at your house in a room in the basement. How do you account for these things? And if you’re not a pedophile, then what are you?
Sandusky: Well, I’m a person that has taken a strong interest…I’m a very passionate person in terms of trying to make a difference in the lives of some young people. I worked very hard to try to connect with them…
Costas: But isn’t what you’re just describing the classic M.O. of many pedophiles?…
Sandusky: Well—you might think that. I don’t know.
Sandusky laughs nervously, launches into a long defensive explanation. And then:
Costas: Are you sexually attracted to young boys—to underage boys?
Sandusky: Am I sexually attracted to underage boys?
A pause.
Costas: Yes.
Another pause.
Sandusky: Sexually attracted, you know, I—I enjoy young people. I—I love to be around them. I—I—but no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.
Graham Spanier let that man roam free around the Penn State campus.
But here’s my question, in light of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff and Harry Markopolos and every bit of evidence marshaled by Tim Levine about how hard it is for us to overcome our default to truth: do you think that if you were the president of Penn State, confronted with the same set of facts and questions, you would have behaved any differently?
2.
Jerry Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. His father headed the local community recreation center, running sports programs for children. The Sanduskys lived upstairs. Their house was filled with baseball bats and basketballs and footballs. There were children everywhere. As an adult, Sandusky re-created the world of his childhood. Sandusky’s son E.J. once described his father as “a frustrated playground director.” Sandusky would organize kickball games in the backyard and, E.J. said, “Dad would get every single kid involved. We had the largest kickball games in the United States—kickball games with forty kids.” Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, adopted six children and were foster parents to countless more. “They took in so many foster children that even their closest friends could not keep track of them all,” Joe Posnanski wrote in a biography of Sandusky’s boss, Joe Paterno. “Children constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his persona.”
Sandusky was a goofball and a cutup. Much of Sandusky’s autobiography—titled, incredibly, Touched—is devoted to stories of his antics: the time he smeared charcoal over the handset of his chemistry teacher’s phone, the time he ran afoul of a lifeguard for horseplay with his children in a public pool. Four and a half pages alone are devoted to water-balloon fights that he orchestrated while in college. “Wherever I went, it seemed like trouble was sure to follow,” Sandusky wrote. “I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world,” he continues. “I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been part of me.”
In 1977, Sandusky founded a charity called the Second Mile. It was a recreational program for troubled boys. Over the years, thousands of children from impoverished and unsettled homes in the area passed through the program. Sandusky took his Second Mile kids to football games. He wrestled with them. He would give them gifts, write them letters, take them on trips, and bring them into his home. Many of the boys were being raised by single mothers. He tried to be the father they didn’t have.
“If Sandusky did not have such a human side, there would be a temptation around [Penn State] to canonize him,” a writer for Sports Illustrated said, upon Sandusky’s retirement from the Penn State football-coaching staff. Here, from the same era, is part of an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
In more than one motel hallway, whenever you encountered him and offered what sounded like even the vaguest sort of compliment, he would blush and an engaging, lopsided grin of modesty would wrap its way around his face. He isn’t in this business for recognition. His defense plays out in front of millions. But when he opens the door and invites in another stray, there is no audience. The ennobling measure of the man is that he has chosen the work that is done without public notice.
The first questions about Sandusky’s conduct emerged in 1998. A Second Mile boy came home from a day with Sandusky, and his mother saw that he had wet hair. The boy said he had worked out with Sandusky, and then the two had taken a shower in the locker room. The boy said that Sandusky had wrapped his arms around him and said, “I’m gonna squeeze your guts out.” Then he lifted him up to “get the soap out of his hair,” with the boy’s feet touching Sandusky’s thigh.4
The mother told her son’s psychologist, Alycia Chambers, about what happened. But she was unsure what to make of the incident. “Am I overreacting?” she asked Chambers. Her son, meanwhile, saw nothing amiss. He described himself as the “luckiest boy in the world” because when he was with Sandusky he got to sit on the sidelines at Penn State football games.
The case was closed.
The next reported incident happened ten years later, involving a boy named Aaron Fisher, who had been in the Second Mile program since fourth grade. He came from a troubled home. He had gotten to know Sandusky well, and spent multiple nights at Sandusky’s home. His mother thought of Sandusky as “some sort of angel.” But in November 2008, when he was fifteen, Fisher mentioned to his mother that he felt uneasy about some of Sandusky’s behavior. Sandusky would hold him tightly and crack his back. He would wrestle with him in a way that felt odd.
Fisher was referred to a child psychologist named Mike Gillum, a believer in the idea that victims of sexual abuse sometimes bury their experiences so deep that they can be retrieved only with great care and patience. He was convinced that Sandusky had sexually abused Fisher, but that Fisher couldn’t remember it. Fisher met with his therapist repeatedly, sometimes daily, for months, with Gillum encouraging and coaxing Fisher. As one of the police investigators involved in the case would say later, “It took months to get the first kid [to talk] after it was brought to our attention. First it was, ‘Yeah, he would rub my shoulders,’ then it just took repetition and repetition, and finally we got to the point where he would tell us what happened.” By March 2009, Fisher would nod in answer to the question of whether he had had oral sex with Sandusky. By June, he would finally answer, “Yes.”
Here we have two complaints against Sandusky in the span of decade
. Neither, however, led to Sandusky’s apprehension. Why? Once again, because of default to truth.
Did doubt and suspicions rise to the level where they could no longer be explained away in the 1998 case of the boy in the shower? Not at all. The boy’s psychiatrist wrote a report on the case arguing that Sandusky’s behavior met the definition of a “likely pedophile’s pattern of building trust and gradual introduction of physical touch, within a context of a ‘loving,’ ‘special’ relationship.” Note the word likely. Then a caseworker assigned to the incident by the Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg investigated, and he was even less certain. He thought the incident fell into a “gray” area concerning “boundary issues.” The boy was then given a second evaluation by a counselor named John Seasock, who concluded, “There seems to be no incident which could be termed as sexual abuse, nor did there appear to be any sequential pattern of logic and behavior which is usually consistent with adults who have difficulty with sexual abuse of children.” Seasock didn’t see it at all. He said someone should talk to Sandusky about how to “stay out of such gray-area situations in the future.”
The caseworker and a local police detective met with Sandusky. Sandusky told them he had hugged the boy but that there “wasn’t anything sexual about it.” He admitted to showering with other boys in the past. He said, “Honest to God, nothing happened.” And remember, the boy himself also said nothing happened. So what do you do? You default to truth.
Aaron Fisher’s story was just as ambiguous.5 What Fisher remembered, during all those conversations with his therapist and sessions with the grand jury, kept changing. Once he said the oral sex stopped in November 2007; another time he said it started in the summer of 2007 and continued until September 2008; another time he said it started in 2008 and continued into 2009. He said that he had performed oral sex on Sandusky many times. A week later he said he had done it only once, and then five months later he denied ever having done it at all. Fisher testified about Sandusky before a grand jury twice in 2009, but it seems the grand jury didn’t find him credible. They declined to indict Sandusky.
Talking to Strangers Page 9
