He Hits for $230, Draws a Phony $20, and Is 86ed

Anil Agarwal was having an up-and-down day at the track Saturday when he hit a big one in the seventh race at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona. One of the bills that the betting window clerk counted out in Agarwal’s $230 payoff was a counterfeit $20 bill.

When he tried to turn in the phony money, Agarwal, an engineer with an electronics company, was apprehended by race track security officers, searched, photographed and kicked out of the fairgrounds.

“I’m the good guy in this case,” the Placentia man said, “but they tried to make me look like the criminal.”

But chief of security Dick Smith contended Sunday that Agarwal had instigated the trouble by trying to “break and run” from security guards.

The counterfeit bill--actually, a $1 bill with the corners of a genuine $20 bill pasted onto it--had been the second one that had been passed through the betting windows last week, Smith said. “Our people thought this might be the guy that was starting to hit us,” he said.

He said Agarwal had tried to pass the bill through a betting window, but a clerk had spotted it as counterfeit. Agarwal acknowledges that he attempted to make a bet with the bill, but he said it was unwitting. “The clerk handed it back to me and I realized that it had $1 written on the bottom corners.”

It was when he took the bill to an information window that he was treated “abusively,” Agarwal said. “This plainclothesman claimed to be a cop but he wouldn’t show me his badge,” he said. “He forced me to go to a room below the track. He closed the door and harassed and threatened me. He used abusive language. He searched me and looked at all my papers and credit cards.”

Agarwal said he had resisted because the man had not shown any identification. “I didn’t want to show him my wallet until he showed me some kind of I.D.,” Agarwal said.

After the search, Agarwal said, the security man photographed him and told him, “Leave this place and don’t come back again.”

On Sunday, however, county fair officials apologized to Agarwal, acknowledging that their suspicions of him had been mistaken. They offered to reimburse him for the confiscated bill, and they invited him back at no cost.

“I did not say yes to that,” Agarwal said.