Board Calls Claims of Sklar ‘Talk’

Officials of the California Horse Racing Board had little to say Tuesday about convicted race-fixer Richard Sklar’s claim that he had fixed about 500 races at major thoroughbred tracks in the state in the last 10 years.

“I know [Sklar] only too well,” said Roy Wood, executive director of the racing board, who was attending a racing conference in Tucson.

“What he said doesn’t deserve a comment, and it would be stupid for me to do so. Five hundred races, 5,000 races, 1,000 races--he could pick out any figure, couldn’t he? All I can say is that we’re continuing to protect the integrity of the sport.”

Bob Nieto, chief investigator for the racing board, declined comment.

“Talk is cheap,” Nieto said.

Sklar, of Northridge, was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $5,000 in U.S. District Court on Monday after pleading guilty to trying to fix three races at Los Alamitos in 1995. He was ruled off California tracks in 1993, after an incident at the Del Mar off-track facility.

Security people and parimutuel clerks have seen Sklar at off-track sites since then, and he was implicated in a pickpocket incident at Oceanside a couple of years ago. Sklar says his interpretation of the ban is that it applies only to tracks and not off-track locations.

Sklar, 44, admitted having done business with jockey Richard Pfau in two of the three 1995 races at Los Alamitos, but was unwilling to name other riders and wouldn’t cooperate with FBI investigators in naming another man who was thought to have been involved in the three-race scheme.

Bob Hamer, an investigator for the FBI, said that Sklar failed a lie-detector test.

“At first Sklar said he had fixed 1,000 races,” Hamer said. “Then he changed it to 500. We had trouble developing leads on a lot of what he said. We found that the racing community is very tight-knit.”

Pfau, who admitted helping fix one race, an Arabian event at Los Alamitos, has been sentenced to three years’ probation. He testified that he took a $2,100 bribe from Sklar.

Sklar’s sentence might have been less but for the fact that he was on federal probation in 1995, at the time of the Los Alamitos fixes. He had falsified tax information after a parimutuel payoff on a race.