On its seventh day of deliberations, a jury found Aaron Hernandez guilty of first-degree murder. Photograph by Dominick Reuter/Pool/AP

When Aaron Hernandez’s murder trial began, in late January, the proceedings received surprisingly scant attention—perhaps because the former New England Patriots tight end seemed so obviously guilty of killing his friend and designated blunt roller Odin Lloyd, who was twenty-seven. But drama abounded as the trial wore on for weeks and weeks, thanks in part to Hernandez’s astute legal team. Damning evidence was excluded and key prosecution witnesses were made to look foolish; the lack of a credible motive seemed to be a boon to the defense. When the jury entered its seventh day of deliberations, this morning, a hung jury seemed like a safe bet; that its members instead returned with a first-degree-murder conviction is a testament to their ability to see through the best legal obfuscation that Hernandez’s money could buy.

Now that Hernandez, who is twenty-five, has been sentenced to life without parole, numerous interview clips from his football career seem quite sinister in hindsight. None is eerier than one from November 8, 2012, two days after the birth of his daughter, in which he opines on the life-changing nature of fatherhood. At that moment, Hernandez’s chief sins were assumed to be an excessive fondness for strip clubs and cannabis. “I may be the young and wild but I’m not. ... I’m engaged now, and I have a baby,” Hernandez mused by his locker in Gillette Stadium. “It’s just gonna make me think of life a lot differently. And doing things the right way, because now another one’s looking up to me, I can’t just be young and reckless Aaron no more.” Hernandez sold the redemption cliché perfectly, employing pensive pauses and a sheepish grin to emphasize the sincerity of his newfound dedication to domestic bliss. According to Boston prosecutors, however, Hernandez’s criminal résumé already included a double homicide, possibly over a spilled drink. (Hernandez will stand trial for those charges at a later date, still to be determined.)

In the months following the birth of his daughter, Hernandez behaved less like a family man than like an arrogant personification of the human id, intent on testing just how much his celebrity and wealth could protect him from the consequences of malfeasance. He punched out windows when his fiancée dared to break up one of his bacchanals; he engaged in tussles with fellow night-club patrons, during which handguns were flashed; he allegedly shot one of his friends in the face when the man questioned how a bar tab should be divvied up. The murder of Lloyd, who was shot repeatedly in an industrial park near Hernandez’s palatial home, on June 17, 2013, was not a surprising next step for a man whose greatest pleasure appeared to be chortling at the reporters, fans, and even teammates who were unable—or at least reluctant—to recognize his true nature.

Given how badly he botched the finer points of Lloyd’s murder, Hernandez might easily be dismissed as a classic N.F.L. meathead: What kind of killer leaves the keys from his rented S.U.V. in the victim’s pocket, for example, or fails to turn off his home’s security cameras while parading around with the murder weapon? But, though precise planning does not appear to be his forte, Hernandez clearly has one valuable intellectual gift: an ability to identify weaker individuals and then bend them to his will. The only reason that Hernandez had a reasonable shot at acquittal was the extraordinary fealty of his inner circle: one of his alleged accomplices, Ernest Wallace, refused to testify against him, despite facing murder charges himself; Hernandez’s cousin, Tanya Singleton, pleaded guilty to contempt of court rather than testify before the grand jury; his fiancée and another cousin both experienced suspicious cases of selective amnesia while on the stand. And let us not forget that Alexander Bradley, the man who is now suing Hernandez for shooting him in the face, never pursued criminal charges; after he was discovered in a Riviera Beach, Florida, alleyway with blood gushing out of a pulverized eye socket, Bradley refused to help the police identify his assailant. Such extreme loyalty is rare even in the highest echelons of organized crime—veteran gangsters and their family members betray one another all the time. That Hernandez was able to maintain discipline in his ranks is a testament to his knack for domination. He used the glamour of his athletic success to attract and control the easily dazzled, much in the way a cult leader uses glib ideas to impress the spiritually hungry. And, like a cult leader, he was capricious in doling out extreme punishment for slight infractions, some of which were probably mere figments of his paranoid, drug-addled imagination.

It is comforting to think that, many years hence, Hernandez might wake up one morning overwhelmed with horror at just how much he squandered—a forty-million-dollar contract, the adulation of a sports-crazed city, enough natural athletic prowess to achieve football immortality. But the mind of a likely sociopath is not prone to experiencing rough epiphanies. I keep thinking back to the words of the Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Nate Newton, who once tried to explain why he spent the early years of his retirement trafficking hundreds of pounds of pot. “I’ve always been competitive; I’ve always been in sports,” Newton said. “I couldn’t see myself not being the biggest dope man.” Because Newton, like most human beings, is capable of self-reflection and empathy, he was able to opt for a less perilous course through life. Hernandez seems to have no such moral impulse to check his hyper-competitive nature; in prison, it’s likely that he will not look for a way to make amends but, rather, that he’ll seek out more people to manipulate and harm. And, in its own twisted way, that game may bring him a measure of happiness—perhaps even more than football ever could.