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 basement 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