by Bill Moushey
Bracken added that the attitude at Penn State was to “protect the image at all costs and if the truth has to be whitewashed to hide it, well, break out the buckets and the brushes.” His take on the reaction by the Penn State officials who were notified of Sandusky’s activities on campus prior to the state investigation was this: “One after another, five adult males dismissed it as inconsequential, doing the bare minimum to even acknowledge it, then passing it up the chain of command and getting back to the business of cultivating and polishing the image. So at the risk of an unsightly blemish on the program, young lives were permanently altered in terrible ways.”
One example of the measures Penn State took to guard its secrets was the five-year court fight it waged to keep Paterno’s salary from being disclosed, a battle that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In a lawsuit filed in 2002 the Patriot-News of Harrisburg argued that the state’s public records law, known as the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act, required Penn State and the State Employees Retirement Board to reveal salaries of top officials at institutions that receive public money and to reveal public records if asked. Penn State received about $450 million a year in state funds. But the university balked and took its case to the state supreme court. The school argued that it should not be bound by the law because disclosure would violate the privacy of the officials whose salaries were the subject of the argument. Justice Cynthia Baldwin recused herself from the case. She was a Penn State graduate and trustee and therefore thought she was too personally involved. She later became the university’s general counsel.
In November 2007 the court ruled against Penn State and the salaries were made available. Paterno, the university’s chief fundraiser, was the highest paid person at the school. In his final year he was paid more than $1 million, not counting money from contracts with Nike and television deals. In the wacky world of college sports, his salary sat in the bottom half for coaches in the Big Ten Conference and was a fraction of the megadeals in place at other colleges. Still, as a football coach, he made $200,000 more a year than the university president. At the time his salary was made public Paterno told a gathering of sports writers, “It bothers me that people have to know what I make. What difference does it make what I make? I don’t know what you guys make.”
Another insight into Penn State insularity was its fight to avoid being included in a new Pennsylvania public records law that was approved in 2009. Graham Spanier even made a personal appearance before the legislative committee developing the law. He argued that including Penn State in the law would affect fundraising from private individuals and companies that would not want their contributions to be made public. He said the university’s costs would grow and employee morale would be destroyed if the university was forced to abide by the rules of transparency. Spanier also said that inclusion in a public records law would compromise the $100 million the school receives in grants and contracts from industry each year. Public notification would violate the confidentiality of donors, erode privacy rights of individuals, and hinder incentive and merit pay programs because all employees could have access to what others earn. Spanier pointed out if Penn State was included in the public records law, it would also have to reveal information about complimentary tickets to football games, or free bowl trips or other considerations it might have offered legislators.
Despite the fact that most state universities in Pennsylvania are obliged to follow the open records law, Penn State successfully fought to keep itself excluded. In the wake of the Sandusky scandal, a bipartisan group of state legislators was considering an end to the exemptions. State Representative Eugene DePasquale introduced a bill that would require all state and municipal government entities to provide access to records, including all financial documents, campus police reports, contracts, and emails.
The insularity of Penn State and the way it controls its athletic endeavors became the focus of an investigation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. While Penn State has long enjoyed a reputation as one of only four schools never sanctioned by the regulatory body, after the Sandusky scandal erupted the NCAA announced that it was starting a probe into whether its regulations governing the ethical conduct of a sports program had been compromised. Under a rule regarding “institutional control,” which requires member schools to conduct appropriate oversight in order to detect and investigate violations, the NCAA is trying to determine whether the school lived up to its obligations. Failures in that area could cause a range of sanctions, including bans from participating in intercollegiate athletics and bowl games and the loss of athletic scholarships. Along with the NCAA, the Big Ten Conference and the university itself are conducting separate probes to, as the Big Ten said in a written statement, examine “significant concerns as to whether a concentration of power in a single individual or program may have threatened or eroded institutional control of intercollegiate athletics at Penn State.”
Transparency was also an issue when the former FBI director Louis Freeh was named to head a nine-member investigating committee looking into the Sandusky scandal, because the school initially refused to disclose how much Freeh’s firm is being paid. The university took great pains to declare the probe independent, yet Freeh is the only person associated with the probe who does not have Penn State ties. He is empowered to take the investigation in any direction he deems necessary, but it is the committee who will receive the findings and determine who should be held responsible. Most important, the committee of insiders will decide what, if anything, is made public. Penn State also refused to disclose how much it is paying Ketchum, the public relations firm it hired to control its message about the scandal. Later, the university said it had paid the Freeh group $1.1 million and Ketchum almost $500,000 through the end of 2011.
In the aftermath of Sandusky’s indictment, critics of Governor Tom Corbett suggested that politics may have caused the investigation to languish for years.
During a speech before the Pennsylvania Press Club after the indictment was released in November 2011, Corbett said he had been driven by a desire to conduct a thorough investigation, not by politics. “The one thing you do not want to do as a prosecutor is go on one case. You want to show a continued course of action,” he was quoted as saying in a transcript of his remarks. If he had filed a set of charges as soon as one credible accusation was established, it could have ruined the entire investigation. “It would be much more difficult to bring charges in other cases because it would be seen by you, by the public, as vindictive.”
The governor said he was very careful about mentioning the probe in a political context because he did not want to reveal anything about it, even though a Harrisburg newspaper had reported its existence just two months after he took office in March 2011. “I gave a lot of thought to it on a constant basis,” Corbett said. He claimed that only two people in his administration knew any details about the investigation: the commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, Frank Noonan, and Corbett’s press aide, Kevin Harley.
“Given the nature of the charges against Sandusky, why not simply arrest Sandusky without a grand jury and then proceed to a grand jury to investigate the cover-up?” one reporter asked.
After a long sigh, the governor replied, “The grand jury, as you know, takes quite a while. It doesn’t necessarily have to take quite a while, but in cases like this, it does. Once you arrest somebody, particularly if they would have arrested Mr. Sandusky in the very beginning when the case was first brought to us with one witness, now you have times that have to be met [under] rules of criminal procedure. The one thing you do not want to do when you arrest someone, as a prosecutor, is go on one case, at the very beginning, until you have documented everything.” In cases of pedophilia, prosecutors should develop more than one incident to show a pattern of action, Corbett said.
Ultimately, the governor said, he was content that the prosecutors made the correct tactical decisions, even if they were being questioned by the media. “You have a right to qu
estion them. But these are people that have experience in these fields and they made decisions that I agree with—I made a decision with them when I was there and [current Attorney General] Linda Kelly made the decisions thereafter—this will all play out in the courts.”
At a later speech, in Philadelphia, Corbett talked about why the probe took as long as it did. “Could anybody guarantee [Sandusky] wasn’t out there touching children? There are no such guarantees, unless he was sitting in jail. But we did what we thought was in the best interests of the investigation in getting a good case put together.”
State Police Commissioner Noonan, a Corbett appointee, said there were no politics involved in the investigation. It was true that only one state trooper was assigned to the Sandusky case in the run-up to the governor’s election, but Noonan said he added seven investigators in late 2010 because the evidence merited it. Decisions were made out of necessity, not politics: “I can say that I was intimately involved in every decision that was made in this case, and nothing could be further from the truth. Governor Corbett gave us everything we needed to do the investigation and was anxious for it to be concluded as quickly as possible and I had known that because I was involved with it and with him the entire time.”
Pennsylvania politics is a lot like its rain: both have some acid in them. The political map of the state is such that a Republican must win big in the conservative middle of the state to offset Democratic strength in the major cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In his campaign to become attorney general Corbett developed strong support in central Pennsylvania, including from big donors. Many of his supporters there were connected to Penn State and The Second Mile, a fact of life in the region. Penn State, for example, is the largest employer in Centre County, and many of its graduates operate businesses in the region. Large campaign donations to Corbett from those associated with The Second Mile have been documented. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a website that charts contributions to candidates, almost $650,000 in contributions were made over the years to Corbett from donors affiliated with The Second Mile.
State spending was another matter. Corbett, a fiscal conservative, slashed state funds from virtually every area of government to overcome a $500 million budget shortfall. But even though he knew The Second Mile was under the cloud of the Sandusky investigation, he did nothing to stop a $3 million grant to the charity that had been approved by his predecessor. The money was intended to reimburse the charity for expenses incurred in planning for the construction of a 45,000-square-foot education center. Allowing that reimbursement to go forward seemed to run counter to how Corbett handled matters during the biggest criminal investigation of his tenure as attorney general. As the state’s top law enforcement officer, he had gone after state legislators suspected of using their public resources and staff workers for private political gain. By the time Corbett left the attorney general’s office, that investigation had produced nineteen guilty pleas or convictions of lawmakers and people on their staffs. The investigation had political overtones, and Corbett returned every campaign contribution from anyone who may have been associated with or connected to the investigation.
However, he did not return donations received from Second Mile board members, their businesses, or their families during the initial two years of the Sandusky investigation. The largest of the contributions to Corbett came from the Second Mile board member Lance Shaner, owner of thirty-four hotels in the United States and Italy, including Toftrees Resort and Conference Center in State College. Toftrees runs the hotel where the Penn State football team stays on nights before home games; Joe Paterno didn’t like to have his players stay in their dorm rooms then, fearful that they would disrespect curfew. Toftrees was the perfect hideaway, within ten minutes of Beaver Stadium and yet isolated on 1,500 acres, away from campus and the Friday-night Penn State rah-rah. It was later mentioned as the site of at least two allegations of child abuse involving Sandusky. Shaner and a family member contributed $163,275 to the Corbett campaign.
Louie Sheetz, a Penn State grad who sat on the board of The Second Mile, is the executive vice president for marketing at Sheetz Inc., an Altoona-based company that operates a chain of gas stations and convenience stores in Pennsylvania. Sheetz didn’t contribute directly to Corbett’s campaign chest, but the family-owned company and Sheetz family members contributed a total of $113,350 to Corbett.
Ray Roundtree, regional vice president of finance for Comcast Cable, is also a Second Mile board member. His company and its employees donated another $100,000 to Corbett.
Robert Poole, president of S & A Homes, is chairman of the board of The Second Mile and a long-time Republican donor. He contributed $11,000 and held a fundraiser in January 2010 for Corbett. Poole, an active Penn State alum, also serves as chairman of Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College and is a member of the board of visitors for the university’s Smeal College of Business.
Corbett said his dual role as the law enforcement officer who started the Sandusky probe and later as the chief executive in control of the state’s purse strings complicated his decisions. He thought that rescinding the $3 million grant to The Second Mile or returning contributions from those affiliated with the charity could disclose details of the investigation. “I could not act publicly on [the $3 million grant] without saying certain things that would have possibly compromised the investigation,” he told reporters.
Corbett also denied he had any inside information on when Sandusky would be arrested. “I did not know the date that the presentment would come down, or if it would ever come down, because I had pulled myself away from the investigation.”
Corbett said he believed the mission of The Second Mile was a good one, and that its programs were beneficial to the vast majority of at-risk kids referred to it. But he withdrew the $3 million state grant shortly after questions were raised about the charity.
Kevin Harley, Corbett’s press secretary, did not respond to written questions or otherwise discuss the governor’s actions related to the Sandusky probe or the campaign contributions by those affiliated with The Second Mile.
Meanwhile Penn State’s new president Rodney Erickson sought to reassure faculty, students, and the public that the university would strive to be more transparent in the future. A native of Wisconsin, Erickson was as much at home farming corn and wheat in the fields outside State College as he was serving in relative obscurity as Penn State’s second-highest-ranking administrator. He had arrived at the university in 1977 after earning degrees at the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington. In his thirty-four years at Penn State, he had served as the dean of the graduate school, the vice president for research, and the executive vice president and chief academic officer. Then, under the most challenging conditions imaginable, he took command of the school the night Graham Spanier resigned and Joe Paterno was fired. As the seventeenth president in university history, Erickson promised to rebuild trust and confidence in an institution that had been shaken to its core by a child sex abuse scandal. He pledged to begin a new era of openness to replace a culture of silence that helped foster the conditions that had brought shame to Penn State. He conceded that the insular nature of the school had to change. “Penn State is committed to transparency to the fullest extent possible,” Erickson said in his inaugural message, which was addressed to the Penn State community and sent electronically to the school’s alumni. “My door will always be open.”
Transparency faced challenges from the start, however. Erickson was appointed president without a search, and Pennsylvania’s open meetings law, known as the Sunshine Act, may have been violated when a November 9 vote by the thirty-two members of the board of trustees named Erickson president. The law, designed to prevent public agencies from taking action in secret, requires public agencies to give notice of at least twenty-four hours of when and where meetings are to be staged. It also states that individual employees or appointees whose rights could be adversely affe
cted may request that matters be discussed at an open meeting. Paterno was not notified that his job status was on the agenda that night. Although the vote was announced as unanimous, it was not taken in public and therefore could be considered null and void. To make sure it was in compliance with the Sunshine Act, the executive committee of the board of trustees met in a public session weeks later to formally approve its decisions of November 9. In effect, they fired Paterno again.
The Second Mile and Penn State were inextricably linked. The Nittany Lion mascot went to Second Mile golf tournaments and other events wearing a Second Mile T-shirt over his costume. In April 2000 a Jerry Sandusky Dinner and Roast was put on by Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics and sponsored by the credit card giant MBNA as part of the Blue-White Kickoff Weekend. Proceeds went to the Second Mile/Jerry Sandusky Endowment Fund. In 2001 the university sold 40.7 acres in Patton Township to The Second Mile. Of the thirty-seven members on The Second Mile’s board of directors, the body that oversees the entire operation, twenty-four are Penn State graduates.
