Game Over

by Bill Moushey

  Although Spanier was well aware of the extent of the grand jury probe by the time he did his pre-interview with Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach on March 22, he wasn’t overly concerned. At that point it was clear that the outcome of the investigation was not going to cast the university in a positive light, but he intended to be as helpful as possible. Spanier considered himself to be a lifelong proponent of law enforcement; he saw no reason to change that philosophy before the grand jury. For years he had enjoyed top government security clearance through working with the FBI as chair of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board. He had also worked with the National Counterintelligence Group in Washington, D.C.

  To Spanier, the pre-interview was relatively uneventful, filled with questions about the operations of the university. As for Sandusky, Eshbach wanted to know what Spanier knew about the 2002 report by McQueary, when he knew it, and what he did about it. Spanier told Eshbach essentially the same things Curley and Schultz had said. He had received a nonspecific report from his underlings in 2002 about a staff member who said Sandusky and a young child were “horsing around” or engaged in “horseplay” in a football locker room shower. He said the senior officials did not tell him the event involved sexual abuse, did not identify the staff member, and did not tell him anything about the identity of the child. He said he did not even know Sandusky and the child were naked. He told the prosecutor Curley and Schultz told him about the incident in a short, unscheduled meeting at his Old Main office. Since the report did not appear to include criminality, Spanier said he quickly approved of their decision to ban Sandusky from bringing children to Penn State facilities and to report the inappropriate activity to The Second Mile’s administrators. It was not referred to law enforcement because neither of his close associates believed criminality was involved.

  When he made his appearance before the panel on April 13, Spanier expected his testimony would be about the workings of the university and the vague 2002 report Curley and Schultz had made to him. He did not know his underlings had become prime targets of the probe.

  Eshbach casually asked him questions about rules concerning children on campus, the hours of access to Penn State’s 1,700 buildings, and specifics about the Lasch Building, where many of the alleged assaults had occurred. Deputy Attorney General Frank Fina took over the questioning with a sterner tone. For the first time Spanier realized he was being asked questions that could implicate his aides in criminal activities, which he found abhorrent because he did not believe they had done anything wrong. He was aghast when Fina asked him angrily if he thought sodomy between a grown man and a boy in a Penn State football locker room shower was appropriate. Would he, the prosecutor wanted to know, insist on a full-scale investigation if he received a report about man-boy sodomy in a university shower? Spanier said that was the first time he’d heard of such a thing, but he most assuredly would sanction a probe under such circumstances. Not only had he himself been physically abused as a child, but he was trained as a family therapist, he said. He would never turn away from such information.

  Fina walked him through the inconsistencies between what McQueary said under oath and the testimony from Curley and Schultz. Spanier reiterated what he had told Eshbach in the pre-interview: his underlings had told him the incident involved “horseplay” or “horsing around.” He had not heard anything related to anal rape or sexual abuse. He didn’t even know McQueary was the staff member who had made the report until the prosecutor divulged that information to him.

  Spanier insisted that Schultz had never told him about the 1998 locker room shower incident involving Sandusky. He admitted that if he had known about the earlier incident his reaction may have been different in 2002. When Fina questioned him about Sandusky’s retirement shortly after the 1998 incident, Spanier said he believed the former coach left the employment of the university because Paterno thought he was spending too much time with the charity to do his job properly. He also said that Paterno had told Sandusky that he was not going to be his successor as head coach. Specifically Spanier testified that he thought Sandusky left Penn State because the State Employee Retirement System offered such a substantial early retirement incentive that the coach wanted to take advantage of it. After Paterno gave him the bad news about his head coach prospects, he saw no reason to stick around. Since Spanier claimed to know nothing about the 1998 investigation into Sandusky, he could only deny any cause-effect relationship between Sandusky’s quiet exit and the 1998 report.

  Spanier said he had not spoken to Curley or Schultz about their testimony, although he knew they had testified. In fact, he did not even tell them he too was appearing before the secret panel.

  When he left the grand jury that day, Spanier told his lawyer he felt he had been sandbagged. Now he realized that the scope of the investigation had been broadened to include questions about what Penn State officials knew about Sandusky’s conduct and what they had done about it. From the tone of the questioning, it was clear prosecutors were pursuing evidence of an illegal cover-up that had criminal implications for his trusted aides. That, he told almost anyone who would listen, was not true. He feared the prosecutors had not believed him.

  As time passed with no action from the grand jury, Baldwin told Spanier that they were nearing the eighteen-month point, when sessions expire. If that happened without charges being announced, the case would go away; prosecutors rarely presented evidence again to new grand juries. On the first Saturday of November Spanier would learn that Baldwin was patently wrong.

  Chapter 10

  The Arrest

  Jerry Sandusky emerged into familiar surroundings when he stepped out of the backseat of a police car in handcuffs on November 5, 2011. The car was in a courthouse parking lot off West College Avenue, one of the main routes to Penn State University. Just across the street was the university’s eighteen-hole Blue Course, one of two golf courses on the 17,000-acre campus. For three decades Sandusky had used the Penn State courses for his charity golf tournaments, which attracted big-name athletes and celebrities who participated in order to raise money for The Second Mile. During those tournaments Sandusky had ridden the fairways in a golf cart and always had a boy or two from The Second Mile with him. But golf and good times were the farthest things from his mind that Saturday morning. Escorted by two troopers and filmed by TV cameras, Sandusky was led into the courthouse to a district judge’s office to be booked on criminal charges of sexually assaulting eight boys from The Second Mile over a thirteen-year period. Charges from two more accusers would be added later. Once the charges were officially filed, Happy Valley would never be the same.

  Sandusky was brought before Magisterial Judge Leslie Dutchcot, a contributor to and a volunteer at The Second Mile, whom he knew well. The night before, he had been with family in Ohio. His son Jon was the director of player personnel for the Cleveland Browns, and he had gone for a visit. Now the heart and soul of the charity was standing in front of Judge Dutchcot, charged with forty criminal counts ranging from involuntary deviate sexual intercourse to unlawful contact with a minor, endangering the welfare of a child, corruption of minors, and indecent assault. The weighty charges carried a maximum sentence of 565 years in prison and $600,000 in fines. Sandusky stood glum and silent during the ten o’clock proceedings. He entered a plea of “not guilty” through his attorney, Joseph Amendola of State College. Prosecutors had sought bail of $500,000. They assumed if he made bail, he would be given an electronic ankle bracelet that would alert authorities if he left his house. To their dismay, Sandusky was released on $100,000 unsecured bond, which essentially meant he had to sign a piece of paper to say that he would not flee and would show up for future proceedings. No electronic monitoring device was ordered.

  The reaction generated by Sandusky’s arrest exploded beyond the sensational. The biggest scandal in the history of college sports had cracked open.

  At the time of Sandusky’s arraignment, the Pennsylvania attorney general’
s office in Harrisburg issued charges against two high-ranking Penn State officials, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance Gary Schultz. They each faced one count of perjury for making false statements to a grand jury and for failing to abide by the Child Protective Services Law, which compels school officials to report suspected abuse of children within forty-eight hours. They were to surrender in two days for booking. If convicted, Curley and Schultz faced a maximum punishment of seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine. Through their attorneys, both men maintained their innocence.

  A statement by Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly was posted on the office’s official website. The arrest confirmed the small-town rumors that had been circulating for years and tore away the veil of secrecy that had concealed Sandusky’s alleged dark side. Not only did Kelly lay out the criminal case for newspaper and media outlets; she alluded to a culture of silence that had covered it up: “This is a case about a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to prey on young boys. It is also about high ranking university officials who allegedly failed to report the sexual assault of a young boy after it was brought to their attention, and later made false statements to a grand jury that was investigating a series of assaults on young boys.”

  Prosecutors emphasized the two incidents that had occurred on campus: the inappropriate behavior involving Sandusky and the eleven-year-old boy in the locker room shower in 1998, and the sexual assault of a ten-year-old boy in the locker room shower witnessed by Mike McQueary in 2002. The first investigation had been dropped without prosecution. In the 2002 incident, McQueary hadn’t gone to police with his account, but he had contacted Coach Joe Paterno, who in turn had alerted the university officials Curley and Schultz. Prosecutors said there was no indication that anyone from the university had ever attempted to learn the identity of the ten-year-old boy in the 2002 case, or get his version of what had happened. But John Raykovitz, The Second Mile’s CEO, had been notified of the 2002 incident. “The failure of top university officials to act on reports of Sandusky’s alleged sexual misconduct, even after it was reported to them in graphic detail by an eyewitness, allowed a predator to walk free for years, continuing to target new victims,” the attorney general added in her statement. “Equally disturbing is the lack of action and apparent lack of concern among those same officials, and others who received information about this case, who either avoided asking difficult questions or chose to look the other way.”

  Featured on the attorney general’s website was the case of the Central Mountain High School student, whose allegations against Sandusky had sparked the in-depth investigation of the former coach by state police three years earlier. Even though the mother had complained that school officials were slow to act, the attorney general said they had immediately barred Sandusky from the school and reported the matter to authorities as required by state law: “The quick action by high school staff members in Clinton County in response to reports of a possible sexual assault by Sandusky is in marked contrast to the reaction of top officials at Penn State University, who had actually received a first-hand report of a sexual attack by Sandusky seven years earlier.”

  Although a news conference was scheduled for the Monday following the arraignment, the attorney general’s office released an unnervingly detailed twenty-three-page report. In the presentment, the prosecutor itemized the reasons why a statewide grand jury recommended charges of twenty-one felonies and nineteen misdemeanors against Sandusky. Citing the sworn accounts of young men who said they had been sexually assaulted by Sandusky, the report outlined how Sandusky had drawn the vulnerable boys into personal relationships with expensive gifts, clothing, and money and taken them to Penn State and National Football League games. Given the heinous nature of the charges, authorities had taken great pains to protect the identities of the accusers. In the presentment, the boys were referred to by number, from “Victim 1” through “Victim 8.” Most damning was the allegation that Sandusky had run his charity to target his prey. “It was within The Second Mile program that Sandusky found his victims,” the presentment said. “Through The Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations.”

  Each young man who had opened up when an investigator knocked on his door believed he was the only one who had been abused by Sandusky. Only when the young men read the presentment did they realize that what had happened to them had happened to others. The lawyer for one of the young men, identified as Victim 6, would later seemingly speak for all of them when he described his client’s reaction to the presentment: “He cried. He didn’t cry for what happened to him. He cried for the others.” The pattern of Sandusky’s activities had finally come to light.

  The document also cited an “uncooperative atmosphere” at Penn State during the investigation. The last sentence, placed in parentheses, pointed out that Sandusky was presumed innocent until proven guilty. Little attention, if any, was paid to that detail.

  When the news story broke, the shockwaves were unstoppable. Jerry Sandusky, known as a male Mother Theresa, charged as a sexual predator assaulting boys in his charity? Rapes of boys in the showers of the Penn State football locker room? Penn State officials covering it up charged with perjury? Penn State, the hallowed domain of the deified Joe Paterno and his “Success with Honor,” besmirched by scandal?

  What set this story apart from other media firestorms was how it crossed from news shows to the sports channels. Every channel seemed to be playing a continuous loop of Sandusky entering the district court in handcuffs. Newspapers posted accounts on their websites hours before the story could get into their Sunday editions. The social networks also spread the story. Smartphones programmed to receive updates on Penn State football were beeping with alerts. It was the kind of story nobody wanted to hear but everyone wanted to share.

  The Penn State administration knew the arrests were coming. The investigation of Sandusky had first been reported in March by the Harrisburg Patriot-News, even though the story then didn’t gain much traction beyond central Pennsylvania. Starting in May the thirty-two members of the Penn State board of trustees were briefed about the investigation. Besides Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier, as many as twenty other university personnel had been called to testify before the grand jury. Some were asked to describe Sandusky’s actions, others to explain why they didn’t take definitive action after they twice heard specific accusations against him dating back to 1998. Still, when the arrests came, the Penn State administration seemed to be caught off guard.

  Inside the president’s office in Old Main, Spanier spent hours trying to figure out what to say to the public, his staff, and everyone in the athletic program. He wrote and rewrote his statement as a few of his trusted aides peeked over his shoulder. After he had gone over it ten times or so, he called a meeting for four o’clock with his staff. He told them there was virtually nothing he could say about the charges against Sandusky, other than that he felt pain for the young men. As for Curley and Schultz, he told his staff one option would be to take a strict public relations stand, distancing the university and himself from them. Then he read them the statement he had crafted, which voiced unconditional support for both men. He told his staff that Curley and Schultz had believed Sandusky’s actions were inappropriate horseplay, not sexual molestation. Therefore the right thing for him to do was to support them, even if that approach cost him his job. Spanier said he would rather lose his job and live with the belief that he had done what he thought was right than refuse to support two loyal employees. In what Spanier considered a “teachable moment,” he told his staff that under similar circumstances, he would remain loyal to all of them too.

  The statement Spanier eventually released to the media was this: “The allegations about a former coach are troubling, and it is appropriate that they be investigated thoroughly. Protecting children requires the utmost vigilance. I have known and worked daily wit
h Tim and Gary for more than sixteen years. I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former university employee. Tim Curley and Gary Schultz operate at the highest levels of honesty, integrity and compassion. I am confident the record will show that these charges are groundless and they conducted themselves professionally and appropriately.”

  Meanwhile a statement was released by the CEO of The Second Mile, John Raykovitz, who had been told by Sandusky three years earlier that he was the target of a molestation probe. “All of us at The Second Mile are shaken,” the statement said. “This clearly is a difficult time for Jerry and his family, for all other involved parties, and for The Second Mile. However, The Second Mile clearly understands our highest priority must continue to be the safety and well-being of the children participating in our programs.” It concluded with the sentence, “At no time was The Second Mile made aware of the very serious allegations contained in the grand jury report,” distinctly ignoring the fact that top officials of The Second Mile had been told about the troubling 1998 and 2002 Sandusky incidents shortly after they were reported. .

  On Sunday, with no officials speaking publicly, media outlets sharpened their focus on the unfolding scandal by delving into the twenty-three-page grand jury report. Some reporters had already made their way to the campus, while assignment editors for national press organizations dispatched cameras, crews, and satellite trucks to State College. Once the media beast had found this juicy scandal, its appetite was insatiable.

  At his home on McKee Street, Joe Paterno was besieged with media requests for comments. He issued a brief statement: “If true, the nature and amount of charges made are very shocking to me and all Penn Staters. . . . The fact that someone we thought we knew might have harmed young people to this extent is deeply troubling. If this is true, we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families. They are in our prayers.”