No. 152: JOHN PAUL ROBY / The monster as a cipher. My casual conversations with a serial sexual predator.

Returning to the theme of the secret lives of I look at my chance acquaintance with the Maple Leaf Gardens usher who'd later be convicted of assaulting young people at the arena.

THIS week, in How to Succeed in Sportswriting No. 151, I wrote about Jerry Sandusky, a former coach at Penn State and a serial sexual predator who’ll die behind bars. Okay, not behind bars, that’s just a metaphorical turn. Sandusky, who was convicted in 2012 on 45 accounts of sexual abuse of young boys and sentenced to a minimum of 30 years, will almost certainly shuffle off this mortal coil in a hospital bed at a federal medical institution that specializes in the warehousing of geriatric convicts. Yesterday’s SubStack described my meeting Sandusky back in the spring of ’87 when Penn State was coming off a national championship. To my mind, he was out there, weird but to my mind harmless. Which is to say, I never had prospects as a law-enforcement profiler.