Sport of Kings Merely a Pawn in Game of Fixer-Upmanship

The story that recently convicted race-fixer Richie Sklar hopes to sell some day has been coming out in dribs and drabs, and the other day one of the dribs was that rigging races is a tough way to make a living.

“I’ve only won about a third of these races,” Sklar told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “There’s not much a jockey can do when he’s paid to run third, but the horse running first or second suddenly stops badly and drops back. He can’t just fall off the horse. He’s got to make it look good. [We] lost when a horse we didn’t use, one we didn’t think had a chance, would unexpectedly pop up and run the race of his life.”

Told about Sklar’s claiming only a 33% success rate over a 13-year span, Tony Ciulla sniffed.

“When I was in business, we hit 99%,” he said. “That’s because we controlled the infrastructure. This Sklar doesn’t sound like much to me. When you talk about race-fixers, he’s a dump truck.”

Ciulla is retired, so to speak, admittedly having fixed hundreds of races at dozens of Eastern tracks in the 1970s. He claims to have had many of the top jockeys, including some who are in the Racing Hall of Fame, on his payroll. Ciulla eventually was a witness for the federal government in a case against jockeys accused of fixing races and now lives under another name.

“Jockeys weigh just over 100 pounds, and horses can weigh 1,000 or more,” Ciulla said. “So you’re talking about a jock being outweighed by as much as 10 to one. He’s not going to be able to hold a horse once the horse gets in full gear. At least he can’t hold him without being obvious. He can’t just stand up [in the saddle] in front of the stewards.

“One of the ways is to get them coming out of the gate. You’ve got to get them before they get rolling. Those first five strides out of the gate--which take about one second--are when you can get them. But that’s not the only way. You can take a natural speed horse, put him on the burner and he won’t have anything left.”

This is how tough betting horses is: The three races Sklar tampered with were part of the Pick Six at Los Alamitos on Sept. 28, 1995. For a couple of thousand dollars, Sklar said that he stopped the favorite in all three races. Yet he still didn’t hit the Pick Six. No one cashed a six-winner ticket that night. A winning 27-1 shot might have been the undoing for everybody.

“Only a novice would try to fix the Pick Six,” Ciulla said. “It’s virtually impossible. There’ll always be some riders who won’t go along.”

Exactas and trifectas--picking the first two or three finishers in a race--were Ciulla’s meat. He would approach the jockey of a heavy favorite and ask him to hold his horse, to keep him off the board.

Sometimes the jockey would say that he couldn’t do that without telling the horse’s trainer. The jockey might be riding most of the horses in the trainer’s barn and he wouldn’t want to lose all that business over one suspicious race. Sometimes the trainer wouldn’t want to go along. That called for creative fixing.

“You might pay the trainer $2,000 to scratch the horse,” Ciulla said. “Tell them he’s got the colic. But you’d only do that if you already had the second and third choices in the race in the package.”

After admitting to trying to fix three races at Los Alamitos in 1995, Sklar was sentenced earlier this month to six months in federal prison and fined $5,000. He is scheduled to start his sentence in January. Except for jockey Richard Pfau, who was put on three years’ probation, Sklar has named no accomplices.

Sklar’s estimates of races he fixed in California have ranged between 500 and 1,000, and he said hundreds were at major thoroughbred tracks. But he added that harness races were the easiest to fix.

“It’s so easy to get harness horses beat by getting them trapped [along the rail behind other sulkies],” he said. “Or just racing single-file behind a slow pace. We won 90% of the fixed harness races, mostly at Los Alamitos, but we took the worst of the price because the idiot drivers took my money and bet it through the windows, killing the price.”

Before his sentencing, Sklar thought he might get probation, as did Pfau. And before that, Sklar said, he didn’t think he would ever get caught.

“[The FBI] did an unbelievable job,” he said. “I never thought they would prove race fixing.”

On federal probation for tax evasion at the time he tampered with the three Los Alamitos races, Sklar was the subject of this recent report by a probation officer: “He is a self-promoter who basks in publicity. The world ‘humble’ is not in his vocabulary.”

R.D. Hubbard, the chairman of Hollywood Park, questions Sklar’s credibility.

“If he had anything substantial, I would have thought he’d have given it to the FBI by now,” Hubbard said. “I know they tried hard to cut a deal with him.”

The California Horse Racing Board has soft-pedaled Sklar’s claims, and Cliff Goodrich, president of Santa Anita, is skeptical.

“Here’s a guy with this terrible background saying he fixed all these races at our track and elsewhere, and it’s almost being taken as gospel,” Goodrich said. “Some of these things he’s saying go back 10 or 15 years. I don’t believe what he’s said, but my overall concern is the harm it does to the game.

“We’ve only had a glimpse of what kind of a character Sklar is, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s got no credibility. Look, we deal in a cash business, and there’s a lot of cash exchanged, and I don’t think we’re bulletproof. But I’m pretty darn certain that the game’s on the up and up, especially at the big tracks.”

Joe Harper, president of Del Mar, echoed that sentiment.

“The integrity of racing is paramount in our business,” Harper said. “So we shouldn’t turn our backs on reports that things are going on. But this guy has some personal gain in mind, and you’ve got to weigh that with what he says. I don’t put much stock in what he says. I don’t think he’s always that reliable.”

Sklar is contemptuous of the state racing board, which has banned him from its tracks since 1993, and a prison sentence has left him undeterred.

“I’m not finished with the racing board,” he said. “Tell those . . . at the racing board that they better fasten their seat belts.”