In the early 1980s, Stephen Roye had it all. The den in his comfortable home in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Tenafly was bedecked in awards he had won as a successful television producer at what was then WWOR, Channel 9. He earned a respectable salary, $70,000, good money for the news business in the 1980s. He had a lovely and loving wife and a young son, who was, by all accounts, the light of his life. As his friends put it, Roye back then had an almost-irrepressible sense of his own value and an unflagging conviction, as The Bergen Record reported after his arrest in 1995, "that whatever he did he would be successful."

He had good reason to have such faith in his success. He had only recently started at Channel 9 News, an up-and-coming station in metropolitan New York that had, with its aggressive and inventive news technique, been putting the other more established and traditional news outlets on notice that a new kid was on the block.

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As his now ex-wife, Stephanie Roye, put it in a 1995 interview with The Record of Hackensack, Stephen Roye had the brains, the exuberance, and above all the breadth of expertise to make him a star player on the News 9 team. He was, his ex-wife told the newspaper, "a very intelligent guy with expertise in everything from politics to sports."

He was also a winner, the kind of guy capable of racking up the kind of prestigious awards that news executives love to tout. During the course of his career, he won several major awards, among them a raft of Emmy Awards, the most well-known, if not the most prestigious, award in television journalism. One piece he had produced, an on-air "job-a-thon," had even garnered kudos from Washington; he was honored for it by then-President Ronald Reagan. Perhaps his most significant television achievement, and one that would later become tinged with irony, was a series of anti-drug specials hosted by David Toma, the former Newark narcotics detective who later became a prominent anti-drug crusader and whose exploits on the streets were subsequently dramatized in a television action series.

But despite his success, he was sometimes difficult to work with, as former boss Peter Leone, a man who would later pay a steep price for Roye's misbehavior, put it. "He had a problem with authority. He thought himself more important to the station than he was," Leone later told the Record.

Roye's rebellious streak and his seemingly unshakable ego are hardly remarkable in any newsroom, and such traits certainly were not in short supply in the WWOR newsroom in those days, Leone had said. Maybe it's a self-propagated myth; it's surely a self-serving one -- but journalists, most of them at least, pride themselves on being insouciantly insubordinate. To them, a carefully cultivated aura of arrogance and ego are as essential to the successful practice of the craft of journalism as flop-eared notebooks and leaky pens and handheld microphones. Even journalists who are, in fact, quivering milquetoasts often strive to project themselves as characters ripped from the script of "His Girl Friday" or "The Front Page."

But even by those standards, Roye's behavior was sometimes excessive. Privately, some of his coworkers, including some of the on-air talent, were beginning to complain about his aggressiveness, a trait that sometimes, they later said, bordered on abusiveness.