Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401160068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN T. MEEHAN NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: PORTLAND, ORE. LENGTH: Long
But even as the 300-pound Eckardt was shepherding the feisty, 5-foot-1-inch skater to safety, his talent for shooting off his mouth had charted a course that would tarnish Harding's championship and implicate himself, Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and two other men in an astonishing scheme to KO the competition, Olympic medalist Nancy Kerrigan.
The figure skater who never fit in had a bodyguard who never was what he claimed to be. And the world of figure skating was changed forever.
Within a week, authorities had jailed Eckardt and another man, Derrick Smith. They were charged with hiring the thug who walloped Kerrigan's right knee with a "hard, black stick." The blow left Kerrigan weeping on the floor of Detroit's Cobo Arena, asking "Why me?"
Much of the country asked the same question. At first, the Jan. 6 incident was viewed as another crazed attack on a celebrity. Eckardt himself, in an interview with The Oregonian before the scandal exploded, said the assault was the work of a deranged individual. But as the 1990s seem determined to prove, reality has grown stranger than fiction.
The Texas cheerleader scandal had nothing on this Olympic thriller. As an ESPN announcer said Thursday night, America waits only for Joey Buttafuoco to skate in from the wings. The target was the graceful ice princess from Plymouth, Mass. Most believed Kerrigan, the defending U.S. champion, would win and renew her quest for Olympic gold.
Her chief rival was the high-flying jumper from Portland. The blue-collar Harding was a continent - and a world - removed from the elegant Kerrigan. Harding is the most athletic woman ever to strap on figure skates. But the erratic Portlander was as famous for calamity - loosened costumes and skate blades and bouncing to a fourth-place finish at the '92 Winter Olympics - as she was for her dizzying leaps. Figure skating officials held their breath before the unpredictable Harding - on or off the ice.
But even the most creative imaginations were not prepared for this: a conspiracy to maim the competition in a sport marked by sequins, tuxedos and roses. The cast was pure Damon Runyan: a short-tempered skater and her volatile ex-husband, a bodyguard with the profile of a nose tackle and a yen to be James Bond, and two guys who liked to play guns in the woods.
"It's shocking because the world of figure skating is so squeaky clean," said Rick Verburg, a Portland skating coach. "This is like a soap opera."
On paper, he bills himself as an expert in counterintelligence, international terrorism and foreign intrigue. His resume says he worked in New Zealand and has been schooled at an elite executive protection academy in Aspen, Colo.
From 1984 until 1988, the resume says Eckardt worked as a "contract specialists officer" for The Blackstone Corp in Laussane, Switzerland. His forte: counterterrorism. But there's a hitch: overseas operators have no Swiss listing for Blackstone, and Eckardt would have been 16 years old while tracking "terrorist cells" and conducting "a successful hostage retrieval operation."
"My impression is he is a braggart," said Jerry Spires of Metro Investigative Services Inc., a Portland detective agency. Spires said Eckardt came to him for a job in the fall.
"He has grandiose delusions," Spires said. "I think he is a local kid who wanted to go big as a super spy guy."
Eckardt touts his training at Executive Security International, an expensive Aspen school that trains corporate bodyguards. Bob E. Duggan, president of ESI, said Eckardt enrolled in a correspondence course in 1989 but was booted from the program last year for lack of academic progress. Duggan said Eckardt attended an intense 2-week training program at the Aspen school in 1990.
"From what I can see of his performance during his resident training here, it is below average and yet he has an immense concept of himself," Duggan said. "He thinks he is a James Bond, but I've gotten a few profiles of him from former students and they didn't have anywhere near that opinion of him."
Peer evaluations from fellow ESI students have this to say about the 26-year-old Eckardt: "Overweight braggart. Uses the `I' word in excess. Has a misconception of what protective service encompasses." And "Good leadership in that he will get things done, one way or another, good or bad, right or wrong."
Duggan says he wouldn't hire Eckardt as a bodyguard "in a lifetime."
Eckardt attended Mount Hood Community College but did not graduate. He is enrolled in a paralegal course at Pioneer Pacific College in Wilsonville, Ore. Last week, he spilled his guts to a classmate, setting in motion the events that led to his arrest.
The classmate, Eugene Saunders, passed the story on to his teacher. The teacher, Gary Crowe, a Portland private investigator, said Saunders told him a fantastic story about a tape Eckardt had played.
"Shawn told Eugene of a meeting with three people, Shawn and [Jeff] Gillooly and a guy from Arizona," Crowe said. "Shawn said he went in first and swept the room, which means he checked it for bugs with his own equipment. In the process, he planted his own tape-recorder and tape-recorded the entire meeting. He told Eugene he did this for security purposes."
Crowe said the tape-recorded meeting was about planning the attack on Kerrigan. He said Eckardt talked to classmate Saunders, who has been unavailable for comment, after he became worried because Kerrigan's assailant had not yet been paid.
Crowe sent Saunders to the FBI.
In an interview with The Oregonian last week, before he was implicated, Eckardt spoke about Secret Service training, Israeli anti-terrorist tactics, pipeline sabotage in Peru and the security failures that led to the death of Italian premier Aldo Moro. His speech was peppered with jargon such as "observational psychology," and "Secret Service characteristics matrix for assassins."
He blamed the Detroit arena and the figure skating association for lax security which permitted the attack on Kerrigan.
"If Nancy Kerrigan would have had a protective detail with her, or at least one person, or even if her family would have been with her, I do not believe the attacker would have been able to get to her," he said.
He also commented on the quality of help in the bodyguard business.
"There are so many people who want to play bodyguard in this industry,' he said. "I have talked to so many bouncers who claim to have done bodyguard work and the extent of their protective services work has been walking dancers to their car or driving them home. It hardly qualifies them for anything other than standing by a door."
The comment seems to fit Tonya Harding's bodyguard, who didn't even make the trip to Detroit.
Trouble has never had to travel far to find Tonya Harding. She grew up lonely in a family where money was scarce. Her mother, who waited tables at night to pay for skating lessons, was married six times. Tonya never really knew her older step-siblings. For extended periods, her father was unemployed; the family lived in eight different houses.
Her parents, Al and LaVona Harding, split up when she was 15. It was a pivotal year for the high school sophomore in the Portland suburb. She dropped out of school and met Jeff Gillooly, the man who would keep her close to trouble.
The pair married March 19, 1990, and the marriage has been a roller coaster ride marked by confrontation, legal battles and violence. She filed for divorce in 1991, but the couple reconciled a week before trial. Harding twice obtained restraining orders against Gillooly, telling the court she feared for her safety.
The most recent time, last July, Harding wrote: "It has been an abusive relationship for the past two years and he has assaulted me physically with his open hand and fist. . . . He is not in the right frame of mind, and he follows me and he has broke into my house and into my truck and I am afraid for my safety."
Harding later asked a Clackamas County judge to drop the restraining order. By this time, Sept. 7, 1993, Harding and Gillooly had been granted a divorce in Columbia County Court.
In the summer of '91, Harding called police during a confrontation with Gillooly over the couple's prized 1987 Bluewater motorboat. A police report says Gillooly threatened to break her legs.
Last October, police in the Portland suburb of Milwaukieresponded to a report of gunfire about 3:15 a.m. in the Crystal Lake Apartments. Police found Harding and Gillooly. The couple said the 9 mm Beretta had accidentally discharged while Harding was moving her things out of the apartment.
In November, Harding withdrew from a regional qualifying tournament after receiving a death threat. Even though she and Gillooly were legally divorced, she continued to tell reporters they were husband and wife.
by CNB