- A commenter mentioned Donald Groth, the president of Catskills OTB, which has thrown its hat into the New York franchise ring, and this quote attributed to him from 2002: "We've found nothing to indicate that this was anything but a legitimate wager by a guy who got very lucky." [Baltimore Sun]
This was actually the infamous Ultra Six scandal of 2002, in which three men, betting by phone through Catskills OTB, conspired to rig the Breeders Cup pick six payoff and almost got away with a $3 million windfall. Computer programmer Chris Harn was able to configure the tickets after the fact so that they singled the first four winners in the sequence. The three pleaded guilty and received prison sentences ranging from one to three years. The scandal shook up the industry, inspiring new security measures to insure the integrity of wagering systems. The NTRA hired Rudy Giuliani's security consulting firm, from which Giuliani profited greatly from exploiting the tragedy of 9/11, which you can be sure he will doing in his presidential run as well.
Anyway, back to Groth, he was pretty wrong about the guy who got very lucky. I imagine he's hoping that the new panel to select the new franchise holder isn't scoring the bidders on the issue of their record on 'wagering integrity.'
RSS Feed for this Blog
Friday, March 09, 2007
Not Very Lucky
Posted by Alan Mann at 7:11 AM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 Comments:
For what it's worth, I do remember Mr. Groth stated after the fact that any comments he made (and he was clearly referring to this one) were done at the request of the investigating authorities, and should not necessarily be taken at face value.
Dennis -
OK, thanks for letting us know about that.
Nice catch, Alan.
As if they have a Zippy Chippy's chance in the Travers.
Post a Comment