Fire on Ice

by Oregonian Staff

  Meaning that there would be a demand for protective services?

  Yeah. And that’s what he wanted to do, you know. And Jeff keeps going: “Yeah, you guys will be the bodyguards to the figure skaters.” And he also thought that by leaving a note of that type it would detract from any attention that might be put on any possible suspects. You know, like Tonya.

  Do you know if the note was ever delivered?

  No.

  As Eckardt recalls, as soon as Stant reached Boston, problems began surfacing. Smith, back in Phoenix, was calling every day or so, demanding more money, which he said Gillooly had promised. However, when Eckardt relayed the messages to Gillooly, Gillooly told him he wasn’t paying any more money until he saw some results. What was Stant doing, anyway?

  Smith, who had told Eckardt that he, and he alone, was Stant’s “control agent,” passed back the message that the reason Stant wasn’t doing anything was that he didn’t have enough money to rent a car.

  Gillooly began to press Eckardt, asking if Stant really was in Boston or whether the two of them - Smith and Stant - were sitting back in Phoenix with his $2,000. Eckardt says he was beginning to have some doubts of his own.

  Gillooly, who steadfastly refused to talk directly to Smith, demanded through Eckardt that Smith produce some receipts to prove that Stant was in Boston. Smith, for his part, threatened to do bodily harm to Gillooly.

  Eckardt, as he describes it now, was already getting tired of the cloak-and-dagger business. But now he was caught in the middle and didn’t know how to get out.

  Finally, says Eckardt, Gillooly told Eckardt to come to the Clackamas Town Center skating rink in suburban Portland, to meet with him while Harding was holding one of her midnight skating practices. Eckardt says that during this time, Gillooly requested his presence at the sessions twice. One of the times, he believes, was Dec. 31.

  On that night, Eckardt, who was suffering from severe back problems that put him in the hospital from time to time, “popped a couple of Vicodin” - a presciption painkiller - and drove to the rink.

  Gillooly took him aside.

  He says, “I need you to go out and find somebody who can actually do it.” And he says: “Offer them a lot of money. Tell these guys I’ll give them a $10,000 bonus if they’ll get it done.”

  And then he pulls out this $10,000 check from the United States Figure Skating Association. And I’m debating whether or not I should even bother with it. I should just let these guys break his legs….

  “I want receipts,” Gillooly says. “I want them to prove to me that there’s somebody back there.”

  And I say, “OK, I’ll let Derrick know.”

  At one of these midnight sessions, Eckardt says, Gillooly informs him that he has Harding’s permission to spend the money on the operation. He says he was sitting on some steps next to the rink at the time, and Harding came skating up.

  She said, “Hi, how’s your back- How’re you feeling-” I said, “Oh, not really well.” I feel like I’m drunk because I’m on my pain medication.

  And then she said that she was pissed off and disappointed that these guys weren’t able to do what they said they were gonna do. And why hasn’t it happened yet.

  But as the whole world knows by now, there was no attack in Boston. Smith called Eckardt, informing him that he had sent Stant to Detroit, by Greyhound bus, where the nationals were being held. At first, Eckardt says, Gillooly was annoyed, but soon he got used to the idea. After Stant left a message on Gillooly’s recorder - “Jeff, this is Shane - I’m in Detroit” - he says Gillooly was actually happy, because he finally had proof that someone was on the job.

  At this point, Eckardt says, the plan was to “do” Kerrigan in her hotel room. According to Eckardt, Gillooly wanted Stant to attack Kerrigan there. He says Harding identified the hotel for them.

  “Jeff wanted this guy to go to her room and do his business with her and then leave. And duct-tape her up so she wouldn’t be able to call out - so they’d find her in the morning with a damaged leg of some sort, wrapped up in duct tape.”

  Eckardt and Gillooly wired $750 to Smith in Phoenix so he could be in Detroit for the end of the competition. Later they sent $1,300 to Detroit.

  On the morning of Jan. 6, at about 10 a.m., Eckardt says he was awakened by a call from Gillooly who told him that he’d just heard that Nancy Kerrigan had been attacked. Somebody had come up to her and broken her leg.

  About an hour later the phone rang again, and it was Smith. “Hey,” Eckardt remembers Smith saying, “you should have seen what I saw on the news. When Kerrigan was coming out of her practice session, somebody came up and hit her on the leg and took off.”

  About an hour or so later, as Eckardt remembers it, he was watching the television himself, and there was Nancy Kerrigan lying on the floor, screaming and crying. He says he went into the bathroom and threw up.

  “I was very upset,” he said. “I couldn’t believe I had done this…I just kept seeing the same scene over and over again. Kerrigan was sitting on the ground, screaming and crying, ‘Why me? Why me?’ ”

  There was, however, no time for Eckardt to indulge his sorrow. The day after the attack, Smith called him from Detroit, asking for money.

  As Smith put it to Eckardt, if he didn’t get $1,250 fast, Stant would have to become a permanent resident of the Motor City.

  So once again Eckardt called Gillooly, who came over to his house with $1,300. Together the two of them drove to the Cub Foods store on Southeast 82nd Avenue in Clackamas, south of Portland, and wired the money to Smith.

  The next day Smith was on the phone again, demanding more money. This time the sum in question was $4,600, which, says Eckardt, is the amount that Smith figured Gillooly still owed him. Once again Eckardt relayed the request to Gillooly. Gillooly said they’d have to get back to him.

  Before that could happen, though, Gillooly was on a plane to Detroit, where that Saturday night Harding would win the national figure skating championship. Eckardt said that Gillooly wanted to take him along, too, to provide security for Tonya, but didn’t have enough money for another ticket.

  Monday night, January 10, when Harding and Gillooly returned to Portland, Eckardt was at the airport to greet them. He ushered her into her father’s truck, which was waiting outside. “Go, go, go!” he yelled. He and Gillooly left the airport in his car.

  “We gotta talk,” Gillooly said. Then he told Eckardt that the FBI had questioned him.

  “They asked me who Derrick was,” Gillooly said. “And I just told them I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gillooly said the FBI had also asked about Eckardt. They had asked for a description and were apparently disappointed when Gillooly told them Eckardt weighed about 330 pounds. They were looking for someone more in the neighborhood of 220 - about what Shane Stant weighs.

  At this point the authorities hadn’t got the cast of characters straight yet. But they were closing in. They knew someone named Derrick was involved.

  “Where did they get the name?” Gillooly wanted to know.

  Eckardt knew, but he wasn’t about to tell Gillooly.

  A couple of days before the attack on Kerrigan, Eckardt had played his tape recording of the conspirators meeting on Dec. 27 or 28 for a fellow student by the name of Eugene Saunders. As Eckardt tells it now, he did so in hopes that Saunders, a minister, would go to the authorities. Saunders had obviously told somebody.

  “No,” Eckardt told Gillooly, “I don’t know where they got the name. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  At Harding’s father’s house, Gillooly and Harding got in their truck and drove home. Eckardt followed after them with the luggage. Inside their house in Beavercreek, a rural area southeast of Portland, Eckardt says, Gillooly brought the subject up again. At first, he says, Harding just sat there, listening:

  Jeff kept saying how we were all going to go to jail. And, you know, I’m sitting there listening, and Tonya was getting upset. And then she s
tarted coming up with these excuses for the acts that she had done.

  She had made several phone calls back to the (arena) in Boston to try and find out how to get ahold of Kerrigan. And she said she was going to use the excuse that she had this poster with herself, Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan on it. She had signed the poster, and Yamaguchi had signed the poster, but she needed Kerrigan’s signature on it because she was going to send it to a fan.

  The wheels were spinning in Gillooly’s head too, Eckardt recalls. “What are we going to do?” he kept asking. Finally he hit upon it: They would say that Derrick — the one name they knew the FBI had — had gone to Detroit to drum up business for Eckardt’s protective service company.

  He wanted me to tell the FBI that I had surreptitiously sent Smith back on a sort of marketing expedition — to market to Claire Ferguson of the (U.S. Figure Skating Association) and some of the other figure skaters. And he told me to make sure I told the FBI that I did not tell Jeff because I didn’t want to (anger him) and lose the potential contract with him….

  “OK,” he said, “let’s get a hold of Smith and get our stories straight.”

  And so, Eckardt said, they went off to call Smith. Of course, they wanted to make the call from a pay phone. But to do so they had to get a disposable credit card. At 1:30 in the morning this was not the easiest thing to do. Finally they found one at Jubitz Truck Stop on Marine Drive in Portland.

  Wednesday morning, Eckardt was awakened by his mother banging on his bedroom door. She said that Harding had called and it was an emergency. “You gotta get out there now.”

  So Eckart showered, threw on his clothes and raced out to their home. Gillooly and Harding had a copy of The Oregonian with a story breaking the first news of the scandal.

  “We’ve got to get some damage control,” Gillooly said. “I’m great at damage control.” According to Eckardt, Harding was completely calm. “She’s not worried,” Eckardt said. “She told me…that she had absolutely convinced herself that she had done nothing wrong — and if she maintains the same state of denial that Jeff did, that everything would be OK.”

  Eckardt, himself, was not so positive about that. That night when two FBI agents showed up at his house, at first he gave them the agreed-upon cover story. They listened politely.

  Then one of them said, “Shawn, do you know it’s against the law to lie to an FBI agent?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Do you know what a conspiracy is?”

  Eckardt nodded.

  And then one of them — John King, as Eckardt recalls — said, “Do you know Eugene Saunders?”

  And that, Eckardt said, is when he knew the game was up. “Come on,” said King, “We know all about it. Why don’t you tell us what really happened.”

  And that, said Eckardt, is exactly what he did.

  Acknowledgements

  While J.E. Vader and Abby Haight wrote this book, many people helped produce the research, reporting and photography that went into it. During January and early February 1994, The Oregonian threw an enormous portion of its resources at the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding story. The result was exclusive, timely and comprehensive coverage. Inevitably, someone deserving will be inadvertently left off the list that follows. But this was truly a team effort of everyone at the newspaper: in the newsroom, in its production departments, in its circulation operation and its administrative departments. Among the contributors to the coverage:

  Reporters and writers: Dave Hogan, James Long, Phil Manzano, Tom Hallman Jr., Brian T. Meehan, Bill MacKenzie, Ken Wheeler, John Painter Jr., Ashbel S. Green, Fred Leeson, Dan Hortsch, John Snell, Peter Sleeth, Kathie Durbin, Barnes C. Ellis, Aaron Fentress, Risa Krive, Jim Hill, Bethanye McNichol, Steve Woodward, Roberta T. Ulrich, Stuart Tomlinson, Erin Hoover, Dwight Jaynes, Phil Stanford, Margie Boule, Norm Maves Jr., Pete Schulberg, Terry Richard, James Mayer, Web Ruble, Rose Ellen O’Connor, Richard Cockle, Jennifer Brandlon, Paul Pintarich and Marty Hughley.

  Editors: Executive Editor Sandra M. Rowe, Managing Editor Peter Bhatia, Therese Bottomly, Dennis Peck, John Killen, Galen Barnett, Jim Camin, John Harvey, Michael Rollins, David Austin, Kathy Nokes, Jill Thompson, Mary Joan O’Connell, Doug Bates, John Hamlin, Larry Kurtz, Tad Davis, and other editors of The Oregonian’s city desk, news copy desk, sports desk and features desk.

  Photographers: Doug Beghtel, Marv Bondarowicz, Benjamin Brink, Patricia Cordell, Joel Davis, Bob Ellis, Roger Jensen, Michael Lloyd, Steve Nehl, Angela Cara Pancrazio, Elaine Schumake, Dale Swanson, Tom Treick and Brent Wojahn.

  Photo editors: Serge McCabe, Randy Rasmussen, Kraig Scattarella, Ross Hamilton and Claudia J. Howell

  Artists: Michelle Wise, Ngoc Wasson, Kevin Hendrickson, Rene Eisenbart

  Researchers: Gail Hulden, Sandy Macomber, Kathy Blythe and Carol McMenamin

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABBY HAIGHT, a Northwest native, was a news reporter for six years before joining The Oregonian as a sportswriter in 1990. She has been reporting figure skating and Tonya Harding for two years.

  J.E. VADER became a sports columnist for The Oregonian in January 1993. She has covered figure skating for eight years, first as a reporter for Sports Illustrated and then as a staff writer for The National sports daily.

  The Oregonian, in a January 12, 1994, story by reporters James Long and Dave Hogan, broke the story of the involvement of those close to Tonya Harding in the plot against Nancy Kerrigan. It subsequently was the first to report virtually every development in the case.

  The Oregonian, based in Portland, has been published since 1850 and is available throughout the state of Oregon and much of the Pacific Northwest, an area of more than 100,000 square miles. The paper circulates 350,000 copies daily and 460,000 on Sunday.

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