by John McEvoy
“Ah, Henry,” Arnie Rison said, “let us put that depressing statistic behind us.” He beamed at his old friends around the table. “We defied the odds yesterday. Let’s ride the goddam waves, that’s what I say. All these years, we’ve been playing the horses. Up one year, down the next, on and on. Some of us were looking at it like what many an old horse player has said, ‘Please, Lord, let me break even. I need the money.’”
Joe Zabrauskis picked up the orange juice pitcher and filled his glass. He said, “Remember that story about one of the horse-playing movie actors—Jack Klugman, maybe Mickey Rooney, Walter Matthau. I’m not sure. One of those guys.”
“No,” Charous said. “I don’t.” Neither had the others.
Zabrauskis said, “He’s at Del Mar one day when this regular, a guy he’s known at the track for years, comes rushing up to him. Guy called Harry the Hopeless Horse Player. Says he’s got a huge problem. Harry’s wife needs major surgery the next day. Yeah, they have health insurance, but with a big deductible. Could the actor loan him $2,500 for the operation that’s set for the morning?
“The actor, a good-hearted fella, thinks it over and says, ‘Well, okay. I’ll have to cash a check. I’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes.’ When he comes back and hands over the cash, Harry is extremely grateful. He says thanks about a dozen times. Then they hear the bugle for the first race. The actor, he’s in kind of a generous mood now, says, ‘I know that money I loaned you is going for the operation, right? But, Harry, you need a few bucks to bet the double?’
“Harry the Horseplayer looks at him, shocked, his eyebrows raised, like he’s almost insulted. Harry pulls out his wallet, which is thick with cash. He says to the actor, ‘I don’t need a few bucks for the daily double. I’ve got betting money!’”
The other six broke up, laughing. Joey Z stood up and took a bow. “I only tell you that story,” he said, because I know we’re going to do better than Harry the Hopeless Horse Player. We did all right, and had a helluva lot of fun, over the years. We did terrific yesterday. We made the biggest score we could ever imagine ourselves making. We are definitely going to keep this going. Why shouldn’t we be in the 5 percent that makes money?” He sat down to a round of applause that caused the other veranda breakfast guests to look up from their omelettes.
Steve Charous signaled the waitress to refill their coffee cups. The men discussed what flight times they had that afternoon. Six were destined for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Chris Carson was headed for Washington, D.C., to plead the case of one of his clients before an IRS official. “And I’m going to tell that son-of-a-bitch,” Carson vowed, “how insane our U.S. tax system is regarding gambling earnings. Do you know we’re the only major country in the world that taxes them? You win a lottery in Britain, or Ireland, France, or Italy, wherever, the damn government takes nothing in taxes.” His little face had turned red. Joe Z patted him on the back. “Chris, Chris, you’ve said it before, and I’m sure you’re right. And I’m sure you’ll tell us again. We love you anyway.”
“I’ve got to say,” Rison interjected, “on this wonderful August morning in Saratoga Springs, I never in my craziest dreams thought the seven of us would be sitting here on a day like this, planning what we are.”
“Graduates of the Doherty’s Den Unofficial School of Horse Playing,” said Mike Barnhill.
“Here’s to a great University of Wisconsin education. In horse playing and friendship,” Marty Higgins added.
Joey Z raised his glass of orange juice. “Here’s to horse ownership,” he said. “I think we’re going to do this right. Honest to God, I really think it’s going to happen.”
***
The next day, the following story appeared at the bottom of page one of Racing Daily under Ira Kaplan’s byline:
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY—Saturday’s huge Pick Six payout here at Saratoga Race Course went to a group of Midwesterners who have decided to parlay their pari-mutuel bonanza into horse ownership.
Fans of American Western movies are familiar with “The Magnificent Seven.” Horse racing fans are certain to be interested in the prospects of an entity hereby dubbed “The Significant Seven.”
This fortunate group combined talents, money, and, as they admit, luck, in purchasing the only winning ticket on Saturday’s Pick Six here. It paid nearly $1 million after taxes. The men, who each put up $200 toward their $1,400 ticket, are Arnie Rison, Chris Carson, Judge Henry Toomey, Joe Zabrauskis, Mike Barnhill, Marty Higgins, and Steve Charous. They became friends some thirty years ago while students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, bonding through their shared passion for thoroughbred horse racing. They have been playing the horses and attending races together on a regular basis ever since. This was their fifteenth straight year of coming together at old Saratoga. It was their first monumental betting score.
“We’ve cashed a couple of small Pick Six tickets over the years, and a few five-out-of-six. But never anything like this,” said Rison, a Chicago area automobile dealer. Five of the others are also businessmen. Toomey is a Dane County, Wisconsin, circuit judge.
After taxes, each member of The Significant Seven enjoyed a return of some $150,000 for his initial $200. They decided to devote a portion of their winnings to realizing another “life-long horseplayer’s dream,” as Zabrauskis put it: “Owning some race horses.”
Whether they create what they say will be their “small stable” via the sales ring or private purchases “has yet to be determined,” according to Judge Toomey. “We’ll iron that out in the next couple of weeks,” he said. “We’d love to have a horse good enough that we could bring him here to run at Saratoga in a year or two.”
Considering their experience here last Saturday, who can discount the chances of The Significant Seven?
Chapter Two
April 14, 2009
Jack Doyle loped around the south east corner of his north side Chicago block, then finished his morning run with as good a fifty-yard sprint as he could muster at age forty-three. It wasn’t enough to shake the leaves off the nearby trees, but it wasn’t bad. He was blowing just slightly as he pulled up at the front entrance to his condominium building. Blowing like he used to do after many minutes jumping rope or hitting the heavy bag, back in his amateur boxing days. He bent over, collecting his breath, feeling the kind of pleasure produced by righteous pain. Then he looked up to see two familiar figures emerging from a car so nondescript that it had to belong to an arm of law enforcement. It did. “Oh, Christ,” Doyle said, “You two again?”
“Morning, Jack,” said FBI agent Karen Engel. She offered her hand. Doyle accepted, smiling at the tall, attractive woman.
“What about you, Damon?” Doyle said to Engle’s dour looking companion. Like his partner, agent Tirabassi was in his early forties. “No friendly greetings for the man who made you a Bureau legend?”
The short, stockily built Tirabassi grimaced. “Doyle, I suspect you’re just as much a pain in the ass now as you were when we first met.” Tirabassi managed a brief smile as the men shook hands. Doyle said, “Ah, Damon, you can’t help it. You’ve still got that same cheery aura about you. Like somebody about to have their second colonoscopy of the morning.”
“You continue to have that effect on me, Jack.”
Doyle’s thoughts flashed back to that pivotal first meeting. It had come after he had been fired, unfairly in his view, from his advertising account executive job with a major Chicago ad firm. An acquaintance, Moe Kellman, reputed to be Chicago’s “furrier to the Mob,” had convinced Doyle to help fix a horse race at a local track and earn $25,000 in doing so. The plan worked, but Doyle’s illegal proceeds had been stolen from him. Worse than that, the FBI had linked him to the crime, then coerced him into helping break a ring of criminals who were killing thoroughbred horses for their insurance values. It was an unsettling period, even for a life like Doyle’s that was generously dotted with stratospheric highs and ocean-bottom lows. He
looked back upon that period with lingering angst.
“We’ve been following your career, Jack,” Engel said. “From aide to us, for which we are truly grateful, to racetrack publicist, to your current period of between opportunities. As you might put it on one of your résumés,” she said smiling, amusement lighting her eyes.
Engel hadn’t seen Doyle in three years. He hadn’t changed, she thought, same fit looking ex-boxer, sandy hair, same lively and knowing expression. She said, “You look good, Jack. Really, it’s nice to see you again.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Doyle said before asking, “Karen, are you still happily divorced?”
“Yes, Jack. You too?”
“Yeah, I had some rewarding times with a couple of very nice women, but nothing permanent came out of it. Story of my life. So far.”
Leaning against one the few remaining trees on his block, he stretched his legs, saying over his shoulder to the agents, “Let’s go into my place. I don’t want my law-abiding neighbors to see me talking to the likes of you two.” He went ahead of them and opened the building’s front door.
He ushered the agents into his third-floor condo. Tirabassi gave an appreciative whistle. “This is several steps up from that dump you used to rent where we first met you.”
Doyle said, “I’ve made some decent money in the past few years, Damon. Honest gelt. Betting horses, even a paying job as a racetrack publicist. And I had some luck in the market before it went in the dumper, which my broker saw coming, God love him. I bought this place from a grain trader who’d coked himself out of his fortune and was desperate for cash. I had some.”
“How’d you find the condo seller, Jack?” Karen said.
“He found me, as a matter of fact. My friend Moe Kellman pointed him my way. And don’t give me that look of yours about Kellman. You think he’s mobbed up, maybe he is, but neither of us can prove it. I’ve got no need to, and obviously you and your people can’t. Moe’s a friend of mine, Damon.” He peeled off his old, gray, sweat-soaked shirt. “I’ve got to shower, then we’ll talk. There’s coffee made in the kitchen.”
Fifteen minutes later Doyle, his hair damp from the shower, dressed comfortably in khakis and a short-sleeved shirt, sat down across from the agents. “Karen,” he said, “somehow you’ve managed to get even better looking since we last saw each other. You still playing volleyball as well as nailing criminals?”
She said, “Yes, as a matter of fact. I play beach volleyball on Sunday mornings. I still love the game.” Engel, Doyle knew, had gone through the University of Wisconsin on a volleyball scholarship. “You’re obviously in great shape,” Doyle said, adding, “women’s beach volleyball is my favorite outdoor spectator sport. Love the uniforms. As for you,” Doyle said, turning to Tirabassi, “you still genuflecting each morning before your photo of J. Edgar?”
“Doyle,” Tirabassi said, “let’s get down to business. We’re not here to have you assess us.”
“So, what do you want?”
Karen said, “We need your help again, Jack.”
Doyle looked at the two of them incredulously, just staring. Then he started laughing. “Are you two fucking kidding me? The last time we did business, you had me by the proverbial, factual, realistic balls. I knew you could ruin me if I didn’t cooperate, and to tell you the truth I wanted to. I hated what those insurance thieves were doing to those horses.” Doyle took a breath. “But now, friends, things have changed. You’ve got nothing on me. And I’ve got no interest in again becoming an arm, no matter how unofficial, of federal law enforcement.”
Engel leaned forward in her chair. “Jack, at least listen to why we’re here.” Tirabassi barked, “You’re not exactly number one on our list of people to deal with, believe me.”
Engel signaled her partner to let her proceed. “Jack, have you heard of the sponging of horses?”
“Sponging? Of course. What the hell, that’s what I did when I was working as a groom for that little dictator Angelo Cilio. Horse comes back from working out, you cool him out, then wash him and sponge him off till he’s dry. So what?”
“There’s another sponging,” Engel said. “It’s rare, it’s cruel, and it’s criminal. And it’s going on at Heartland Downs right here outside Chicago.”
Doyle said, “Damon, what the hell is she talking about?”
Tirabassi said, “This is the deal, Doyle. Say somebody wants to bet not on, but against, a big favorite, wants to insure that the horse runs poorly. One way to be certain to accomplish that is to insert a small, egg-shaped piece of sponge in the horse’s nasal cavity. That cuts off between forty and fifty percent of its normal oxygen supply. Horses breathe only through their noses. With a sponge in them, it’s like, well, like a car’s not getting enough gas when it’s being driven. The horse doesn’t look in distress. And it sure can’t tell anybody about what happened.”
“How many cases have there been? And, how do they determine the horse has had this done to it?”
“At least three races at the current Heartland Downs meeting have been involved,” Engel said. “In each case, the horse that looked like the favorite on paper, but didn’t get as much money bet on it as you would expect. Then it ran terribly. With the favorite guaranteed to run poorly, the crooks could structure their bets leaving him off their tickets. As a result, the exacta and trifecta payoffs were huge. Winning tickets were cashed both on-track and at area off-track betting parlors, but not many of them. There were only a few people involved in the cashing. Each one was an old guy, what they call a ten percenter at the track, a person who pays almost no income tax because he’s retired. He signs the IRS forms. Then, from what we can figure out, he gives the cash proceeds to whoever asked him to carry out this chore, and is paid with a tenth of the winnings. Ten percenters.
“All of the names used to fill out the IRS forms were completely fictitious, backed up by phony Social Security numbers. This tells us this is a pretty sophisticated and widespread ring. If we hadn’t kind of stumbled upon one of these cashers, as I guess you could call them, and scared the crap out of him, we wouldn’t even know this much. What we don’t know is who is running this ring. Who is doing the sponging to the horses.”
She said, “I need another cup of coffee.” Doyle and Tirabassi waited in silence until she returned.
“The spongings were discovered,” Engel said, “after the horses’ trainers noticed unusual nasal discharge, sometimes accompanied by a strong, foul odor. They’d call in a veterinarian. Using an endoscope, he’d find the sponge. There were a rash of these sponging cases at the New York tracks back in the 1930s, then nothing for many years until the mid-nineties in Kentucky. They convicted a former horse trainer down there of carrying out these more recent ones. Then he disappeared before he was imprisoned.”
Doyle said, “Well, that’s some nasty business. But what have I got to do with it? What’s your point?”
“Our point,” Tirabassi said, “is this. We want you to help us catch whoever is doing the sponging.”
Doyle’s laugh was long and loud. “Aw, Jesus, Damon, you’ve developed a real sense of humor over the past couple of years.” He paused to look directly at the now red-faced agent. “How would I do something like that, Damon? More importantly, why would I do something like that?”
There was a momentary silence before Doyle said, “I’m Irish, and I was raised Catholic, and we don’t have any statute of limitations on guilt. But don’t think you’re going to hold that race-fixing caper over my head again. You gave me your word I was signed off after we broke the insurance ring. Right, Karen?”
“Yes, Jack,” Engel said. “And we’ll keep our word. We’re not threatening you with anything. We’re pleading with you to help us. We’ve arranged for you to begin working as a groom for a trainer named Ralph Tenuta. His barn is centrally situated on the Heartland Downs backstretch. It’ll make a good spot for you to base yourself.”
Doyle stood up and wal
ked the few feet into his condominium kitchen. “I’m making more coffee,” he said. Karen sat back in her chair, crossed her long legs, and gave Tirabassi a discreet thumbs up sign.
As he waited for the coffee to perk, Doyle thought over what he’d just heard. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he felt a sense of excitement. He hadn’t done anything but travel and laze about for almost a year now, after his work as publicity director at old Monee Park. He’d made a good deal of money during that venture. He didn’t really need money. What he needed was something to do.
Following his amateur boxing days, Doyle had held a succession of advertising jobs, moving up the corporate ladder until he’d been abruptly dismissed for brandishing his wise ass persona too broadly in a business world that he’d never really enjoyed or cared about. Next came his first association with the FBI, then the Monee Park publicity job, a bittersweet experience at best because of his dealings with, and feelings for, the track’s very attractive co-owner Celia McCann.
His thoughts went back to the first horse he had groomed, City Sarah, the one he’d stiffed and which later won the race that the Mob guys had bet on. He’d developed a real sense of respect and liking for that little black filly. He’d come to not only admire but like City Sarah and her backstretch colleagues, fey, one-thousand pound animals that, for the most part, tried to do their best. The thought of some asshole purposefully stopping that quest aroused a deep anger in Doyle.
He brought the coffee cups into the living room. “Tell me this,” he said, “how in the hell can somebody manage to stuff a piece of sponge down the nose of a horse.”
Tirabassi sipped his coffee, giving Doyle a nod of approval. “Good coffee. As to your question, what Karen and I have been able to establish is that it would probably take two people to manage it. One has to hold the horse’s head, the other handles the insertion. These would have to be people who know horses. These spongings are an inside job. If you can call ‘inside’ anything that happens in a racetrack barn area, hundreds of acres, a couple thousand stalls at Heartland Downs.”