The Greatest Race-Fixer Of Them All

The voice was raspy and the tone was boastful and blunt. “I’m gonna write a book and they’re gonna make it into a movie,” master race-fixer Anthony “Fat Tony” Ciulla said. “I’m gonna get some big writer to do the book and then I’m gonna be a star.”The conversation was 25 years ago and, unfortunately for him, Ciulla was a better race-fixer and handicapper than fortuneteller. There was no book, no movie, no stardom – though he did get Geraldo Rivera to do a TV piece on him.Horse races have been fixed since before Julius Caesar and a lot of people have tried to pull off big betting coups, but nobody did it better than Fat Tony.His bulk – he stood 6 feet 3 inches and weighed 350 when dieting – and connections to Boston’s old Winter Hill gang made it easy for him to muscle jockeys, trainers, and jockey agents into playing ball with him.He plied his trade mostly at smaller tracks on the East Coast, though he implicated several big time New York jockeys like Angel Cordero, Jorge Velazquez, and Jacinto Vasquez, as well as a corps of lesser-known riders.Working out of hotel rooms, he fixed races at Suffolk Downs, the old Garden State racetrack, and a graveyard of now-dead tracks like Narragansett, Hialeah, and Green Mountain.Ciulla, who could be as charming as he was intimidating, admitted to fixing hundreds of races by paying off jockeys, usually for between $3,000 and $6,000 a race, and sometimes as much as $10,000.After buying off a few jocks in each race to hold their horses – usually the favorites – and finish no better than third, he would bet fists full of dollars on the rest in exactas and trifectas, often pulling 10 times what he paid out.Once, he told a grand jury in Detroit, a jockey failed to hold back his horse and won the race instead of finishing off the board. “I smacked him every which way but loose,” Fat Tony reportedly told the jurors.Ciulla, whose testimony led to the conviction of 40 people in six separate trials, claimed he had such great access to jockeys because he paid off the late Con Errico, a retired rider, to be his intermediary.Errico, who ended up doing four years in jail, kept his rider’s license active after he retired so he could get into the jockey’s rooms at racetracks up and down the coast, where he sweet-talked, or threatened, jockeys into going along.One rider, Jose Amy, testified in 1980 that he took several bribes from Errico – Fat Tony, really – to hold back horses in 1974 and 1975. Amy testified that he turned down Errico twice but then accepted after the former rider threatened him with “Mafia retribution.” Amy was banned from racing in 1981, ostensibly for life, but last year was reinstated and is back riding in New York at age 50.Fat Tony, who died of a heart attack a couple of years ago, was always proud of his race-fixing abilities. He once called the New York Times all in a lather after reading a story in which another race-fixer complained how hard it was for jockeys to ensure the finish of a race. “When I was in business, we hit 99% of the races we set up,” he said. “We controlled the infrastructure. If this guy can’t fix the races he’s trying to, he’s a dump truck.”After testifying, Ciulla disappeared into the federal witness protection program as Tony Capra (his wife’s maiden name) and lived in California, mostly Malibu. His wife Helen tried to claim a horse there in 1983, but regulators disallowed it when they found out she was Mrs. Fat Tony. All of this comes to mind in the wake of last week’s indictment of a New York trainer, Greg Martin, and a few mobsters on charges of fixing races and talking in millions in illegal bets. None of that should be a shock.Ciulla often said many top jockeys, including several Hall of Famers, were involved in race-fixing and that some trainers and racing officials knew about it but looked the other way. There have been many race-fixing allegations over the years, most of which don’t get more than a few paragraphs in the newspapers.It’s also mostly a given among horseplayers, with the most jaded convinced that every race is fixed.“You gotta figure some races are rigged,” says Red Hook Richie, a regular at OTB and the tracks. “There’s not much you can do about it as a bettor. You just hope you got money on the one that’s supposed to win.”

The Greatest Race-Fixer Of Them All

The Greatest Race-Fixer Of Them All

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