Convicted Race Fixer Is Still Talking a Good Game

A visitor to Richie Sklar brought a box of chocolates.

“Is there a Racing Form in there?” Sklar asked. “Just kidding. I’m able to get the Form.”

A convicted race fixer, Sklar is nearing the end of a six-month sentence. The federal government nailed him for bribing jockeys to hold horses in two Arabian races and one for thoroughbreds at Los Alamitos three years ago.

But investigators were disappointed and frustrated when they couldn’t uncover more, and said Sklar’s penalty was lenient.

At the time of his sentencing, Sklar bragged about having fixed hundreds of races at tracks all over California. He still is talking.

During a recent interview at a small, minimum-security facility in Southern California--a condition for the interview was that the exact location of his lockup not be revealed--Sklar said one of his accomplices had been the late Ron Hansen.

Hansen was a Northern California jockey whose badly decomposed body was found in 1994 on a levee near the San Mateo Bridge, where months before he was believed to have been involved in a late-night automobile accident.

Sklar said that during the Hansen era, there were two small groups of jockeys fooling with races at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields, one that revolved around Hansen, the other operating independently. Sklar said that the groups were smart enough not to get in each other’s way.

Hansen, consistently one of Northern California’s top riders, was ruled off the track for six weeks during a race-fixing investigation at Golden Gate in 1990.

Sklar, 46, talked about the day he missed out on a potential $1.7-million pick-seven payoff when a horse ridden by Hansen won a race he wasn’t supposed to.

Sklar hit the last six races of the pick seven--two of them longshots--but it was the first race that got away. In that one, Sklar needed to win with a 7-1 shot and Hansen, riding the favorite, was supposed to lose.

In the stretch, Sklar’s horse was making a mild late move on the outside. Hansen’s horse was on the rail, with no quit in him, no matter what the jockey did.

“Ronnie did everything he could to get his horse beat,” Sklar said. “When he saw that he was still going to win, he got his horse to lug out in the last 50 yards. He thought that if he fouled my horse, they’d take his horse down. There was a long inquiry, but they left Hansen’s number up.”

Sklar said that at the most there might have been two live pick-seven tickets alive on the pick tickets that included the first-race 7-1 shot.

“So we blew at least $850,000, and maybe $1.7 million,” he said.

Were there any repercussions for Hansen?

“No,” Sklar said. “We laughed it off and moved on to other races.”

The relationship with Hansen was so tight, Sklar said, that he bought the jockey a cellular phone, so they could stay in contact during race cards. Calls were made, according to Sklar, to and from the jockeys’ room. When Hansen called from the room, he’d use one of the toilet stalls, Sklar said.

“You always knew when he did that,” Sklar added. “There’d be an echo on the phone.”

Sklar would not name other jockeys that he did business with, but he said that one day he thought he’d sewed up a race in Northern California by bribing five of the six jockeys who were riding. The win, place and exacta bets, totaling $28,000, would have returned $168,000.

But in the stretch, with a five-length lead, one of Sklar’s horses broke down. The one jockey he hadn’t bribed won the race and Sklar didn’t cash anything.

Theoretically, the investigation into Hansen’s death hasn’t been closed, but investigators apparently are convinced there was no foul play.

Ron Volkman, a horse owner and friend of Hansen’s, disagrees. At the time of Hansen’s disappearance off the east end of the bridge, Volkman put a private investigator on the case, but he found nothing.

“People have too big of an imagination,” Sklar said. “Before that night, Ronnie Hansen already had one DUI or two on his record. He rear-ended a car on that bridge and it flipped. Then he looked back in his rear-view mirror and saw all that behind him. It looked like it could have been bad. He didn’t want to get caught again, so he jumped out of his car and took off, running down the bridge.”

The passengers in the other car weren’t seriously injured. Authorities have theorized that Hansen jumped from the end of the bridge--about 10 feet--and got caught in the mud bank.

Jack Kaenel, another jockey, has told Sklar that several times he took his boat to an area not far from where Hansen’s body was found.

“Kaenel said that he almost got stuck there once himself,” Sklar said. “And he wasn’t drunk, and it wasn’t in the middle of the night.”

Only one jockey, Richard Pfau, was implicated with Sklar in the race-fixing at Los Alamitos. Pfau got three years’ probation and has been suspended indefinitely by the California Horse Racing Board.

Sklar, in trouble previously, had been banned from California tracks for four years before the filing of the Los Alamitos charges.

Sklar said that his method was to use another jockey as a go-between with the jockey he planned to bribe.

“I still can’t figure why Pfau told them anything,” Sklar said. “If he says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ they don’t have a case.”

At his sentencing, Pfau said that he’d cooperated with investigators because of a fear growing out of Hansen’s death.

Sklar said that he had cooperated to protect his girlfriend, identified only as Karen.

“She didn’t know a lot about what was going on, but she did know a few things,” Sklar said. “They were going to force her to testify, and she’s not capable of not telling the truth. If they got her on the stand, it would have been tough on her, and she would have had to tell them what she knew.”

There are only a few dozen inmates serving time with Sklar. Some of them go to their jobs during the day and return to the lockup overnight. The day of the visit, Sklar was dressed as if he were going to the beach.

“I’m the senior guy here now,” Sklar said. “Everybody who was here when I first came is gone. It’s not that bad, but it’s going slow.”

Sklar will be released in early August. He says that a movie treatment of his race-fixing story is finished and is being shopped around.

He said he has no immediate plans, but talks of trying the senior pro golf tour when he’s eligible in about four years. Tall, athletic-looking and reasonably trim, his passions have been betting horses and playing golf, and he says he can hit a ball as far as Tiger Woods.

Asked if six months in prison won’t have dulled his golf game, he pointed to a big push broom in the corner of the facility’s recreation yard.

“See that?” he said. “I swing that about 35 times, every day. There aren’t that many guys on the tour that dominate. With a little time, I think I can play with most of them.

“When it’s time, I want to give it a real good shot. I have this dream of winning my first tournament, with Karen standing at the final green to congratulate me.”