Game Misconduct

He was the most powerful man in professional hockey for 25 years. He organized the 1972 Summit Series. He founded the NHL Players Association. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He received the Order of Canada. He was a friend of prime ministers.

He was also stealing from the players he was supposed to represent for the entire time.

Robert Alan Eagleson, lawyer, politician, player agent, and first executive director of the NHLPA, pleaded guilty to fraud in two countries in January 1998. In the courtroom gallery as he entered his guilty plea were Bobby Orr, Brad Park, Frank Mahovlich, John Bucyk, Woody Dumart, and Milt Schmidt - Hall of Famers, every one. Men who had trusted Eagleson with their contracts, their union, and their finances.

Eagleson did not apologize. He did not return their gaze.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton: "You have defrauded and stolen from hardworking, professional athletes."

Game Misconduct tells the complete story of the most consequential fraud in professional hockey history:

The Rise - Eagleson negotiated Bobby Orr's first contract in 1966, making the 18-year-old the highest-paid player in professional hockey. He founded the NHLPA in 1967. He organized the 1972 Summit Series, one of the most celebrated events in Canadian sports history. These were genuine accomplishments, and they were the foundation of the trust that he systematically betrayed.

The Scheme - While serving as union director, Eagleson was simultaneously acting as the most prominent player agent, working with team owners against his own members' interests, skimming revenues from the Canada Cup tournaments he organized, collecting kickbacks from disability insurers in exchange for reducing injured players' payments, and managing Bobby Orr's finances in a way that left hockey's greatest player nearly bankrupt upon retirement.

The Investigation - In September 1991, Russ Conway, sports editor of the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Massachusetts, published the first installment of "Cracking the Ice," a five-year investigation based on more than 200 interviews. The series was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992. It became the primary evidentiary foundation for the FBI investigation that indicted Eagleson on 34 counts of racketeering, fraud, and embezzlement in 1994.

The Fall - On January 6, 1998, Eagleson stood in a Boston federal courthouse and entered his guilty plea without looking at the Hall of Famers who had come to watch. He was fined $1 million Canadian, sentenced to 18 months in prison, and served six months. He resigned from the Hockey Hall of Fame six days before the board was to vote on his expulsion - the first such resignation in the history of major professional sports halls of fame. His Order of Canada was revoked. He was disbarred.

The class action filed by approximately 1,000 former players against the NHL and its teams - alleging that the owners had known Eagleson was working against the players' interests and had benefited from the arrangement - was dismissed on procedural grounds. The economic harm of the Eagleson era was never compensated.

The final book of the Off the Ice series is the only one that doesn't involve physical violence. The crimes were committed with paper and accounting and organizational authority. And the harm, across the breadth of the people affected and the length of the fraud, may have been the largest of all six.

Book 6 of the Off the Ice series: hockey's criminal cases told in full.