Game Over

by Bill Moushey

  Dottie and Lloyd Huck sat on The Second Mile board. Lloyd, a former president and CEO of Merck & Company, was also a former president of the Penn State University Alumni Association. Board member DrueAnne Schreyer is the daughter of William Schreyer, the former chair and CEO of Merrill Lynch and a former Penn State board of trustees chairman. Katherine Genovese, former vice president of programming at The Second Mile and wife of the deposed CEO John Raykovitz, is an elected member of Penn State’s Alumni Association’s governing board. State Senator Jake Corman, another Penn State alum, joined the charity’s board in 2010.

  The Second Mile’s annual Celebration of Excellence dinner in Hershey, Pennsylvania, has almost always featured a Penn State presence. The quarterback Matt McGloin was the keynote speaker in 2011. In 2007 the banquet was touted as “A Salute to Linebacker U.”

  Penn State brought star power to Second Mile events with sports and Hollywood celebrities like the actor Mark Wahlberg and NFL coaches Lou Holtz and Dick Vermeil. Joe Paterno was often at the charity’s fundraisers and offered other financial support. Penn State students did internships there, and the football players were always offering their services, working with the young kids in the charity’s programs.

  After the scandal broke, The Second Mile announced plans to hire outside counsel to conduct an internal investigation into what happened, especially since Penn State leaders had twice informed them about improper conduct between Sandusky and children in the course of a decade. One of the actions The Second Mile is currently considering is shutting its doors.

  The child molestation charges against Sandusky were a huge embarrassment for Penn State officials. Having two top university officials, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, charged with perjury and failure to report abuse of children made the mess that much more upsetting. Prosecutors believed a culture of secrecy had become so pervasive in Happy Valley that officials there were accustomed to handling matters internally.

  Frank Noonan, the state police commissioner, said as much in a news conference the Monday after Sandusky’s arrest. Noonan criticized Penn State for “doing nothing to stop or prevent harm to the victims in this case.” President Graham Spanier had insisted he didn’t know about the allegations against Sandusky in 1998 and didn’t order a full-scale investigation in 2002, when similar allegations were made, because he was never told they included sexual abuse of children. Nevertheless Noonan blamed insularity and secrecy for allowing such heinous crimes to continue for as long as they did. He admonished Schultz and Curley for having no moral compass and refusing to do anything but cover up repeated allegations that Sandusky was using Penn State facilities to molest children.

  Guy Montecalvo, a former Penn State footballer, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The names of the people implicated in this scandal were personal friends. At Penn State he and Tim Curley had been roommates for four years and have enjoyed a friendship for four decades. Guy had introduced Curley to his wife, Melinda Harr. As a roommate, Curley had been a meticulous, committed, and dedicated student who was true blue-and-white.

  When Montecalvo’s Penn State playing career ended with his fourth knee surgery, he was given a chance to coach as a student and graduate assistant under Joe Paterno. Paterno’s guidance helped Montecalvo land a football coaching job at Washington High School, where he built a championship program. Montecalvo later coached football and other sports at Canon-McMillan High School near Pittsburgh before stepping down to serve as athletic director. In 1997 Sandusky had visited the cancer ward at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where Guy’s son, Jimmy, was in a fight against the cancer attacking his immune system and white blood cells. Sandusky brought along an authentic Penn State football jersey as a gift, and he stayed for a couple of hours to offer words of encouragement that would lift the young man’s spirits. “He just didn’t stop in to say hello. He went out of his way to spend some time,” said Montecalvo. “But that wasn’t atypical of Jerry. He seemed to be one of the most compassionate and caring individuals I ever ran across.”

  Montecalvo and Sandusky were both inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. Montecalvo had seen Sandusky in early October at Penn State’s game against Iowa, when the school marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of winning the 1986 national championship. Now Montecalvo was blindsided by the charges brought against Sandusky and Curley. “I was stunned and shocked. This can’t possibly be happening. Jerry Sandusky was a role model as a coach and as a humanitarian. The charges did not compute with the portrait of the man I know. My reaction to the news about Tim Curley was that this is something he would not have done. I do not believe he would lie to a grand jury. I watched the way these guys lived their lives and it helped shape how I’ve operated as a coach for thirty years. Incomprehensible is not an adjective that adequately described what I was feeling.”

  The timing of the 1998 investigation and Sandusky’s retirement in 1999 remains curious. Sandusky claimed he walked away from a prestigious, lucrative job as one of the best defensive coaches in the country to devote all of his time to the kids at his charity. Besides that, having reached the age of fifty-five, he was eligible for a comfortable retirement package under new regulations just approved by the state. Perhaps the mystery is best phrased in the form of an unanswered question. Why, after twenty-two years of balancing his duties as a coach and the head of a charity, did he leave the football program? Was there something else influencing his decision to leave quietly and remain in State College with all the perks that Penn State still offered him? Or was he really unwilling to cut back on his work at The Second Mile? It is perplexing that after so many successful years as a defensive coordinator, he would not want a head coaching job at another university. His departure, and the way it was handled, baffled many people in the sports world. Paterno didn’t even seem that concerned at losing his victory-producing assistant.

  By just about every account, Paterno knew everything that was going on at Penn State, especially within his football program. He was so tuned in he even knew when one of his players got an out-of-state traffic ticket. Yet he claimed he didn’t know there were police inquiries into his defensive coach’s behavior. Why did he give Sandusky, the mastermind behind so many of his victories, a bare minimum salute upon his retirement in 1999? Did the campus police, and later the state police, ever question Paterno about his second-in-command?

  Paterno, who has never been accused of any wrongdoing, said he was unaware of the 1998 report by the Penn State campus police, and the case was closed without criminal charges being brought. “You know,” Paterno said in January 2012, in an interview with the Washington Post, “it wasn’t like it was something everybody in the building knew about. Nobody knew about it.”

  But doubts have been cast by those who contend that Paterno knew everything about the behavior of his players and coaches. Matt Paknis, a graduate assistant on the Penn State coaching staff from February 1987 to August 1988, was sexually abused by a neighbor when he was a boy. Paknis said it was “impossible” that Paterno did not know about the investigation by campus police. “He knew everything that was going on at that campus,” Paknis argued. “For him to state he didn’t know, or that he was not aware, it’s total denial. That whole community was in denial. If this would have come out in 1998, Joe would’ve been out, or his name would have been tarnished. They tried to push it under the rug as long as possible. Joe is the dean, the master. How could he not have known? A fish rots from the head first. The image was more important than the health and well-being of kids.”

  Barry Switzer, a former coach of the University of Oklahoma Sooners as well as the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, told the Oklahoman, the largest daily newspaper in the state, that he believed Paterno must have known. “Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret. Everyone on that staff had to have known.”

  Perhaps more damning, a Pennsylvania state trooper with knowledge of t
he Sandusky investigation insisted that Paterno had to have been savvy to at least the big picture, if not the details. “It’s a no-brainer. He knew what the light bill was in that place,” the trooper said.

  Then came 2002, when Assistant Coach Mike McQueary contacted Paterno after he witnessed what he called a sexual act between Sandusky and a ten-year-old boy. Paterno waited a day before he contacted Athletic Director Tim Curley. “I contacted my superiors and I said, ‘Hey we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ ” Paterno told the Washington Post in his last published interview. Asked why he didn’t follow up more aggressively, he said, “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

  Chapter 12

  Sandusky Speaks

  NBC’s Bob Costas knew it was a big deal—the proverbial exclusive—when Joseph Amendola, the lawyer for the accused pedophile Jerry Sandusky, agreed to appear on a segment of NBC’s prime-time news magazine program Rock Center with Brian Williams. In later interviews Costas said he had little time before Amendola was due to arrive, about three hours before the show, so he quickly read and reread a wide assortment of reporting surrounding charges against Sandusky. He knew Amendola was there to dispute the indictment’s contention that Sandusky was a serial child predator whose deeds were covered up by Penn State officials for more than a decade. He could not foresee how the exclusive he already owned would reveal more than anyone anticipated.

  The standard was that before a trial criminal defense lawyers usually didn’t render much more than a few carefully crafted sound bites declaring the innocence of their client. But Amendola had been different. From the start of the case, Sandusky’s lawyer had directed a public frontal assault against the damning charges and the accusers who brought them.

  As the two men sat in the studio waiting for the cameras to roll, Costas learned that Amendola was conducting his own investigation into the charges filed against Sandusky in early November 2011. Before they went on the air, he told Costas they had already tracked down some supposed victims of Sandusky’s assaults. Contrary to what prosecutors contended in a twenty-three-page presentment filled with allegations of insidious abuse at Sandusky’s hands, Amendola said some of the young men were going to testify that he had never done a thing to them. Then, just before the taped interview was to begin, Amendola blew Costas away with a proposal: Would he like to interview Jerry Sandusky himself? Costas quickly accepted. Within minutes he had Sandusky on the phone for his first interview, an exclusive about the sex abuse scandal enveloping him and Penn State.

  The interview happened so quickly and so close to the 8 p.m. airtime that the network hardly had time to promote it. Nevertheless the November 14, 2011, interview would create great consternation and controversy. The show’s ratings spiked, and the interview quickly went viral on the Internet.

  COSTAS OPENED THE INTERVIEW BLUNTLY. “Mr. Sandusky, there’s a forty-count indictment. The Grand Jury report contains specific detail. There are multiple accusers, multiple eyewitnesses to various aspects of the abuse. A reasonable person says where there’s this much smoke, there must be plenty of fire. What do you say?”

  Sandusky’s response was equally to the point: “I say that I am innocent of those charges.”

  “Innocent? Completely innocent and falsely accused in every aspect?” Costas asked.

  “Well, I could say that, you know, I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids. I have showered after workouts. I have hugged them and I have touched their leg, without intent of sexual contact. But—so if you look at it that way—there are things that wouldn’t, you know, would be accurate.”

  “Are you denying that you had any inappropriate sexual contact with any of these underage boys?”

  “I, yes, yes, I am,” Sandusky answered hesitantly.

  “Never touched their genitals? Never engaged in oral sex?”

  “Right.”

  Costas tried to bring other known significant witnesses into his line of questioning. “What about Mike McQueary, the grad assistant who in 2002 walked into the shower where he says in specific detail that you were forcibly raping a boy who appeared to be ten or eleven years old? That his hands were up against the shower wall and he heard rhythmic slap, slap, slapping sounds and he described that as a rape?”

  “I would say that that’s false,” said Sandusky with questionable conviction.

  “What would be his motive to lie?” Costas wanted to know.

  “You’d have to ask him that.”

  “What did happen in the shower the night that Mike McQueary happened upon you and the young boy?”

  Sandusky stammered through the answer to that question. “Okay, we—we were showering and—and horsing around. And he actually turned all the showers on and was—actually sliding—across the—the floor. And we were—as I recall possibly like snapping a towel, horseplay.”

  Costas wanted to know if in 1998 a mother had confronted him about taking a shower with her son and inappropriately touching him. He wanted to know also about the two detectives who had eavesdropped on the conversation. “What happened there?” he asked.

  “I can’t exactly recall what was said there. In terms of—what I did say was that if he felt that way, then I was wrong.”

  “During one of those conversations, you said, ‘I understand, I was wrong, I wish I could get forgiveness,’ speaking now with the mother. ‘I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.’ A guy falsely accused or a guy whose actions have been misinterpreted doesn’t respond that way, does he?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t say, to my recollection, that I wish I were dead. I was hopeful that we could reconcile things.”

  Costas brought up the eyewitness report of a janitor. “Shortly after that, in 2000, a janitor said that he saw you performing oral sex on a young boy in the showers, in the Penn State locker facility. Did that happen?”

  Sandusky said no.

  Costas wanted to know why somebody would think he saw something so extreme and shocking if it hadn’t occurred. As with his response to Costas’s question about McQueary, Sandusky said he’d have to ask the janitor.

  Costas pushed on. “It seems that if all of these accusations are false, you are the unluckiest and most persecuted man that any of us has ever heard about.”

  Sandusky laughed. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” He agreed that these hadn’t been the best days of his life.

  As Sandusky remained on the line, Costas turned to Amendola. “You said a few days ago ‘Much more is going to come out in our defense.’ In broad terms, what?”

  “We expect we’re going to have a number of kids. Now how many of those so-called eight kids, we’re not sure. But we anticipate we’re going to have at least several of those kids come forward and say this never happened. . . . In fact, one of the toughest allegations—the McQueary violations, what McQueary said he saw—we have information that that child says that never happened. Now grown up . . . now the person’s in his twenties.”

  “Until now, we were told that that alleged victim could not be identified. . . . So you found him, the commonwealth has not?”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Amendola responded.

  Costas challenged Amendola, asking him if he would allow his own children to be alone with Sandusky. Amendola answered without hesitation. “Absolutely,” he declared. “I believe in Jerry’s innocence. Quite honestly, Bob, that’s why I’m involved in the case.”

  Costas ended the interview with a few more questions to Sandusky about Joe Paterno. He wanted to know if Paterno had ever spoken to him directly about the allegations regarding his behavior. Sandusky said no, he never had. Costas wanted to know about the fallout of Sandusky’s behavior on Penn State, the football program, and Joe Paterno personall
y. Sandusky answered, “How would you think that I would feel about a university that I attended, about people that I’ve worked with, about people that I care so much about? . . . I feel horrible.”

  “You feel horrible. Do you feel culpable?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Do you feel guilty? Do you feel as if it’s your fault?”

  “Guilty?” Sandusky parroted, puzzled. “No, I don’t think it’s my fault. I’ve obviously played a part in this.”

  “. . . What are you willing to concede that you’ve done that was wrong and you wish you had not done it?” Costas asked.

  Again, Sandusky was hesitant. “Well, in retrospect, I—you know, I shouldn’t have showered with those kids. You know.”

  “That’s it?” Costas asked.

  “Well, that—yeah, that’s what hits me the most.”

  “Are you a pedophile?”

  “No,” Sandusky replied.

  “Are you sexually attracted to young boys, to underage boys?”

  Sandusky had trouble with that one. He needed clarification. “Am I sexually attracted to underage boys?”

  “Yes,” Costas said.

  “Sexually attracted, you know, I enjoy young people. I love to be around them. But no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.”

  Costas continued giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Obviously you’re entitled to a presumption of innocence and you’ll receive a vigorous defense. On the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of information out there and fair-minded commonsense people have concluded that you are guilty of monstrous acts. And they are particularly unforgiving with the type of crimes that have been alleged here. And so millions of Americans who didn’t know Jerry Sandusky’s name until a week ago now regard you not only as a criminal, but, I say this, I think, in a considered way, but as some sort of monster. How do you respond to them?”