Fire on Ice

by Oregonian Staff

  In a corner of the press room, Kristin Matta listened incredulously. The USFSA’s director of communication knew Harding’s claims couldn’t be true. She began digging though financial records and in a short time was able to tell reporters that Harding had received close to $40,000 in grants, prize money, and athlete subsistence over the past eleven months. And the skater had passed up a chance to skate the previous spring in a pro-am competition that paid a $20,000 appearance fee.

  Harding backpedaled only slightly. She figured her financial year from March to March—the month of the world championships—she told reporters, and that meant she had received only $10,000.

  The off-ice controversies might have kept hounding Harding if it weren’t for her brilliant performance in the technical program of Skate America. She was supposed to be only a second-string performer to the big show: a pre-Olympic look at reigning 1993 world gold medalist Oksana Baiul of Ukraine and France’s Surya Bonaly, the world silver medalist. Skate America was Baiul’s first big competition since the fifteen-year-old orphan with the expressive body and show-stopping style had burst on the scene in Prague. Bonaly, often dismissed as a purely athletic skater, had meanwhile matured in her style and for the first time was considered an Olympic contender.

  Baiul was shaky in her short program, but she still had a slight lead over Bonaly. Then Harding skated onto the ice, her hair in a French braid and her brilliant orange costume radiating against the white of the ice. The Dallas Reunion Arena crowd had an American they could cheer for, and they applauded even before Harding’s music began. When she finished two-and-a-half minutes later, the crowd went wild. The judges were equally enthusiastic. Heading into the long program, Skate America was Harding’s to win.

  Tonya was ecstatic after the program. It was the best she had skated, ever. She had proved those faceless doubters wrong again.

  “I felt like I had to go out and prove I’m the Tonya Harding that people believed in and make sure they believe in me,” Harding said after her triumph. “And I think they believe in me now. I think there were a few people out there who thought I was a has-been, because I haven’t done anything win-wise in a few years.”

  The next night, Harding confidently skated onto the ice. With two triple jumps successfully completed, she was almost halfway through her long program when she faltered just slightly. Briefly, she rocked her right skate side to side. Harding skated on, nailing a triple loop jump, then paused again—this time obviously having trouble with her skate. With less than a minute to go in her program, Harding skated over to the judges’ table and, in the sudden silence of Reunion Arena, propped her right foot in front of head referee Sally-Anne Stapleford. The skate blade was loose, Harding complained. She couldn’t skate on it.

  Stapleford told Harding she could fix the blade and either start her program over again when all the other skaters had finished or pick up where she had left off. Harding chose the latter and skated to an entry gate, where she used a screwdriver to tighten the blade. Rawlinson saw the blade wobble, and she blamed the problem on putting new blades on a pair of old boots.

  “When she came over to the side, it was so loose, if she’d gone on she would have hurt herself,” Rawlinson said.

  Harding said later that she didn’t regret the decision to return immediately to skate, but she was distracted and had lost the important flow of the program. She fell on a double axel, turned a triple salchow into a double and, as she took her bows, cried.

  Baiul crashed in her long program and still won the competition. Bonaly was second. Harding, so confident only minutes before, fell to third.

  —

  Harding returned to Portland, her money problems right beside her. Safeway Northwest Central Credit Union filed a claim against Harding and Gillooly for $1,984 owed to their Visa account, and in early November the credit union won a default judgment.

  Meanwhile, the skater didn’t have long before her next competition, the Northwest Pacific Regional Championships the first week of November, to be held on Harding’s home ice at the Clackamas Town Center. A skater of Harding’s caliber normally would have graduated from such low-level competitions years earlier, but her fourth-place finish at the 1993 national championships in March meant that she had to qualify to go to Detroit.

  Publicly, Harding said she was excited to skate competitively in front of a hometown crowd. Promotions for the tournament were built around Harding competing and skating in a later exhibition. Young skaters who were used to skating in front of empty railings were thrilled at the prospect of the crowds Harding would attract. And Harding was practically guaranteed a victory since her rivals in the senior women’s division had nowhere near her experience and skills. Her fan club worked with organizers so that a portion from each program sold went to Harding for training expenses. The printed programs included an autographed color picture of the skater. But in private, Harding was infuriated that she was required to skate in an event she considered beneath her. She repeatedly asked local skating officials to let her bypass the competition. One high-ranking skating official said she had to tell Harding several times that she was required to skate if she wanted to go to nationals. Harding had no choice. She couldn’t get out of it.

  Harding and the other senior women were preparing to warm up for the November 4 competition when a tournament referee called them over to the judges’ table and told them the time of their event had been changed. Spectators were told that the women’s competition had been moved from the afternoon to 9:30 p.m. that night, after the mall was closed. No explanation was given, but skaters and parents inside the rink immediately said the abrupt change had something to do with Tonya.

  Their suspicions grew when rumors began to circulate among them that someone had telephoned a death threat, reportedly declaring that “If Harding skates, she’ll get a bullet in the back.” A handful of reporters, at the event to watch Harding, surrounded tournament official Joseph Driano for an explanation. What about the death threat against Tonya, one asked. Driano angrily refused to comment.

  Harding quickly put on her street shoes and was escorted from the mall. But she returned in the early evening and met with her coaches, tournament officials, and mall security officers for almost an hour. When the meeting was over, and Harding had been whisked out of the mall again, Driano announced that indeed a death threat had been received against Harding and as a result she had been given a bye from the competition. The rest of the skaters would perform as planned.

  Some officials at the rink were suspicious of the call almost immediately. That included Morry Stillwell, the USFSA second vice president who was overseeing the event.

  “The circumstances were extremely strange,” Stillwell said later. “We never knew, quite honestly.”

  What bothered Stillwell was that reporters knew the delay was because of a death threat to Harding, even though only a handful of people had been told about the call and officials hadn’t given the information to anyone else at the rink.

  “None of us said a word,” Stillwell said. “None of us said anything about why we’d rescheduled it. It wasn’t like ‘Was it a death threat?’ It was like, ‘What about the death threat?’ ”

  The next day, Harding issued a written statement, apologizing to her fans for having to cancel her appearance in the competition and a planned exhibition.

  Harding was distraught over the incident, Rawlinson said. “She feels like this is her rink, this is her home,” the coach said. “She feels really deflated now. She felt like this was a party on her own rink, and she was the hostess.”

  Soon after the competition, Morry Stillwell sent a letter to a few other USFSA members over a computer network. Friends of Harding saw the letter and gave her a copy. In the letter, Stillwell expressed his belief that the death threat had been staged. He noted that Harding was at the mall two days later, signing autographs. Not the kind of behavior you’d expect from someone who just had her life threatened, he wrote.

  Harding’
s supporters blew up. Gillooly sent an angry response to Claire Ferguson, president of the USFSA. “The factual errors….combined with his thinly veiled contention that Tonya or persons close to her authored the death threat—clearly indicate a lack of professionalism, objectivity, impartiality and intelligence on Mr. Stillwell’s part,” Gillooly wrote. “Mr. Stillwell’s defamatory and inaccurate letter is despicable!”

  Stillwell didn’t change his mind. Soon after the death threat, Harding would hire Shawn Eckardt as her bodyguard.

  —

  Harding had still to qualify for the 1994 nationals. She was given the choice of competing at the Pacific Coast Sectional Championships or skating in the NHK Trophy in Japan, where she wouldn’t have to finish in any particular place. Harding chose the tournament in Japan.

  Twice-bitten in competitions that fall, Harding saw the NHK Trophy as only a final preparation for the nationals. She wasn’t concerned about the competition—she and her coaches already had decided they wouldn’t need the triple axel in Japan.

  “It’s something that, if it’s solid like a rock, there’s no reason for her not to do it,” said coach Erika Bakacs, who would accompany Harding to Chiba, Japan. “She wants to do it. She’s strong enough to do it.”

  Harding was relaxed and in good spirits. She joked about having to carry her own food to Japan because she was allergic to seafood. She did not feel pressure to win. She would do her best, she said. “It’s important for me to see what I can do. It’s not how I do, winning-wise; it’s how I do for myself.”

  But disappointment struck again in Japan. Harding skated a clean short program but was left in seventh place. At least two skaters, Bonaly of France and China’s Chen Lu, fell during their programs but were marked in third and fourth places, respectively. Three of the judges were in their first women’s competition, Harding claimed. They didn’t know what they were seeing.

  “Both Erika and I felt like I was gypped,” Harding said. “The rest fell on their butts.”

  Harding was terribly upset when she called Gillooly after the short program. She had skated well—better than the other skaters—and the judges had marked her down. They wouldn’t let her win, even when she deserved it. Even though she managed to climb three places to fourth after the long program—a huge leap in an international competition—Harding brought her anger with her back to Portland.

  Gillooly also was upset. While Tonya was still in Japan, he told his old friend Shawn Eckardt about the politics of elite figure skating, how everything depended on whether the right people liked you. Take Tonya, for instance, Gillooly said. She isn’t the favorite at the national championships. Skating officials had assigned Harding and Nancy Kerrigan to different competitions because they were afraid Tonya would show up the East Coast Ice Queen, Gillooly said. They had even put Kerrigan on the cover of the USFSA magazine describing the national championships—as if she were guaranteed the U.S. and Olympic golds. She was going to win the national championship, no matter what, he said. That’s what the leadership in figure skating had decided.

  Eckardt listened to his friend and then wondered out loud: What if Nancy received some kind of threat?

  7

  A Plot Is Hatched

  Shawn Eckardt loved the world of espionage. Sitting in his bedroom at his parents’ house in a middle-class Portland neighborhood, he read the books he bought from special mail-order houses, books that described the operations of terrorists and how to silence an enemy. He told people he was in the personal safety business. His resume included counterterrorist work and international jobs protecting celebrities and potentates. He said he had been in the business for a decade.

  It was all talk. Eckardt grew up in Portland, an undistinguished student through high school and at a nearby community college. Later, he would enroll at Executive Security Institute in Aspen, Colorado, where his classmates would make fun of his bragging and he was kicked out for lack of progress.

  “He’s a wannabe who wants to be king of the mountain so bad he can taste it,” said one veteran of Portland’s personal protection industry. “He tried to impress me at every moment. He was always talking about the things he had done, the places he had gone and the money he had made. He claimed he had all this fancy computer equipment and could get information on anyone. He supposedly had the best photo equipment money could buy and had worked for foreign governments and had been in international counterespionage. And he said all this with a straight face. If you did the things he did, you wouldn’t tell. You know my theory: The guy talks a good game and that’s it.”

  When his friend Jeff Gillooly complained about the unfair treatment Tonya Harding had received at the hands of the international skating community, Eckardt drew on a fantasy world that was real to him. Threaten her rival, he said. Gillooly was receptive. He knew his wife had been upset when she was the victim of a death threat earlier that fall. Kerrigan too would fall apart, he reasoned.

  Eckardt didn’t want to let Harding in on the plan because he was afraid she would talk. But Gillooly said Harding, who was still in Japan at the NKH Trophy competition, would have to know. Otherwise, she could be psychologically affected when something happened to Kerrigan.

  When Harding returned, the couple discussed Harding’s having been snubbed by the U.S. Figure Skating Association when it needed another skater to fill out a pro-am competition. Skating in the event would have meant an appearance fee and, if she had placed well, thousands of dollars. Another, less experienced skater was chosen. Gillooly would later tell federal investigators that that was when he told Harding about his talk with Eckardt. They would benefit if Kerrigan couldn’t skate, Gillooly remembered saying. Harding, he told FBI agents, agreed.

  Gillooly was anxious to carry out the plan. He was mesmerized by the eventual windfall to Harding’s career if her way was cleared to make the Olympic team and, eventually, to win a gold medal. Eckardt, for his part, saw a chance to generate business for his fledgling bodyguard company. Scared skaters would need bodyguards, he figured.

  Just before Christmas, the two men talked on the telephone. Eckardt mentioned physical violence for the first time, that “taking her out” would be the solution. The best way, he said, would be to slice Kerrigan’s Achilles’ tendon. They would have to work quickly, though. The attack had to be done before Kerrigan left for the national championships, less than two weeks away. Gillooly wasn’t sure he could pay for such a hit. He knew that George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees and a patron of amateur athletes, had recently decided to take Harding under his wing. Gillooly had expected Steinbrenner to give Tonya almost $15,000 but was disappointed when he contributed only $10,000 through the U.S. Figure Skating Association. That wouldn’t be enough to pay someone to hurt Kerrigan, Gillooly thought.

  Eckardt came up with a cost estimate that included airplane and bus tickets, a car to use in Boston where the hit would take place, a hotel room, and food. It came to $4,500. Too much, Gillooly said. He could only afford a couple thousand dollars—unless he could persuade Steinbrenner to send more money for Harding. Until then, Gillooly wouldn’t give the go-ahead.

  Eckardt, meanwhile, set about assembling his “team”—without Gillooly’s knowledge.

  —

  Derrick Brian Smith had lived most of his twenty-nine years in Portland, but in the fall of 1993 he had moved his wife Suzanne and her two sons to Phoenix, where he was a group home coordinator for Developmental Systems. In less than two months, Smith grew unhappy on his job. Ten days before Christmas, he quit.

  Smith, balding, six-foot-one and two hundred fifty-eight pounds, had met Eckardt in the early 1980s, when both were students at Mount Hood Community College. The two became friends, although the relationship was strained for several years because Eckardt hadn’t repaid $2,000 he owed to Smith. Derrick eventually wrote off the loss and renewed his friendship with Eckardt in 1988. The two shared a love for the world of spies, espionage and survivalism. They even talked about starting
a survivalist school, where Eckardt could teach bodyguard work.

  Smith was immediately interested when Eckardt called before Christmas to say he might have some bodyguard work, and maybe a job roughing up someone. Eckardt said he knew figure skater Tonya Harding. The skater’s husband wanted bodyguards for Harding at the national championships and afterward as she prepared for the Olympic Games. Money wasn’t an object, Eckardt bragged. After all, George Steinbrenner was paying Harding’s bills and Smith could count on $1,000 a week through the Olympics if Harding made the team.

  Derrick Smith was all for it and ready to go. When Eckardt didn’t call back in two days as he had said he would, Derrick called Eckardt’s parents’ home. Shawn’s mother, Agnes, told Smith that her son had hurt his back and was in the hospital. Smith decided to seize the initiative. He called Jeff Gillooly and left a short message on his answering machine. Almost immediately, an alarmed Gillooly was on the telephone to Smith, who tried to explain that Eckardt was in the hospital and that now he, Smith, would take over the bodyguard team. Forget it, Gillooly said. He didn’t know Smith. He only worked with Eckardt.

  Two days before Christmas, Smith called his nephew, Shane Minoaka Stant, a hulking, two hundred forty-pound weight lifter who, like Smith, grew up in Oregon but had since moved to Phoenix. Smith had a job offer. When they had lived in the rural community of Corbett, east of Portland, Smith and the twenty-two-year-old Stant were known by their neighbors as survivalists who liked to dress in camouflage gear and “play army.” One neighbor described Stant as “a big dude,” with scars on his head from beatings as a child. Smith, the neighbor said, “is just different. He’s not very sociable. He’d just walk by you and not say anything.” Stant, who dabbled in martial arts, was arrested in October 1991 for taking a vehicle from an auto dealership in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and served fifteen days in a county jail. His uncle Derrick didn’t have a criminal record.