Jockey’s Race Might Never Be Won : Hungarian Kallai Still Thinks of Returning to United States

As horses battle down the stretch at Kincsem Park, even a casual observer can quickly spot a jockey who stands out from the pack. While the others are flailing away, displaying the low level of skill that might be expected in a race with a $600 purse, one is riding American-style, sitting low in the saddle, whipping and pushing with power. Nobody who saw him from a distance would guess that Hungary’s top jockey is 59.

In his prime, riding in Maryland and New Jersey, Paul Kallai had been described as “a cross between Bill Hartack and Paul Bunyan.” His style evidently hasn’t changed much, but everything else in Kallai’s life has. Those successful years in the United States now seem as remote as if part of another life. He won 1,718 races before he was caught up in a race-fixing scandal and sentenced to prison, and then chose to flee his adopted country.

“Those days that go back so long--they still hurt me,” Kallai said.

Kallai was born here, the son of a professional prize fighter. He was a promising boxer himself, but racing was his great love, and he ran away from home to launch his career as a jockey. He was the leading jockey in Hungary from 1952 until 1956, the year Russian tanks rolled through the streets of Budapest and brutally crushed a revolution. Kallai left the country, rode in Austria successfully for four years and then emigrated to Canada. He went to Maryland in 1962, and he was a well-established member of his profession for the next 15 years, until the day that he and several other jockeys and trainers were indicted for fixing races at Garden State Park.

Tony Ciulla, a convicted race-fixer who already was serving time in jail, had made a deal with authorities and agreed to become the state’s star witness in the New Jersey case. He also made public his nefarious activities by granting an interview to Sports Illustrated and telling, in a sensational article, how he had orchestrated “wholesale rigging” of races for several years.

Many of Ciulla’s allegations--such as his claim that he had bribed Angel Cordero Jr. and Jorge Velasquez--were never proved, but Kallai acknowledged that Eastern racetracks were hotbeds of sinister activity during the 1970s. However, he denied--then and now--that he took part in the fixes. His only wrongdoing, he said, was his silence about what he knew.

“Many times I went to the stewards to tell them that I was approached” to fix races, Kallai said. He was the most prominent of the jockeys charged in the Garden State fixes, though the central figure in the alleged conspiracy was his friend Kevin Daly, whom Ciulla had described as his “go-between” for delivering bribes.

“I was trying to save a friend, and I didn’t speak up,” Kallai said. And Kallai’s attorney complained at the time that he and most of the other lawyers on the case lacked the financial resources to mount a defense that would discredit Ciulla.

When Kallai was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in jail, he decided, “I wasn’t going to let myself go down.” He became a fugitive.

For a decade, Kallai lived a virtually nomadic existence, riding in Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia. He couldn’t go back to his native Hungary, because his departure in 1956 had him branded as a political refugee.

But with the fall of communism and the advent of democracy, Kallai was able to return to Hungary last year. Even though he is the oldest active member of his profession in Europe, he had little difficulty establishing himself as the leading jockey here.

“I miss the United States,” he said. “That way of life was my way of life. And one day I have to return.”