Jockey Didn’t Consider the Fix He Put Himself and Others In

When Tony Ciulla was fixing races in the 1970s, thumbing his nose at frustrated investigators who chased him from New England to San Francisco, he not only put up the bribe money, he also told the jockeys how to hold a horse without drawing the attention of the stewards. Quite a detail guy. They should have called him cover-all-bases Ciulla.

“When you come into the stretch,” Ciulla said, “act like you’re riding the hell out of the horse from the right side. But you can break the horse’s jaw [with the reins] on the other side. The horse is between you and the guys upstairs. They won’t even notice.”

Richard Pfau could have used a crash course in race-fixing from the master. That night at Los Alamitos in 1995, when Pfau admitted he kept a favorite off the board in a cheap Arabian race, many people noticed. Such as Nancy Gjerset, who bred and raced the horse. Such as Danny Garrett, her trainer. Such as dozens of bettors, who disgustedly slapped their programs into their free hands after they watched the television replay.

“Expresss [Pfau’s mount] always ran with his tail up,” Gjerset said. “But that night, his tail was so curled that it almost made a complete circle.”

Expresss, who finished fourth, was indicating that he wanted to run, but his jockey wouldn’t let him.

About a year later, the FBI called on Gjerset.

“In a way I was surprised, and in another way I wasn’t,” Gjerset said. “I saw the race, watched the replay many times, and I thought I knew what had happened.”

Expresss was winless going into the fixed race, but he was an honest-running horse. “He had seconditis, but he picked up a lot of checks without winning,” Gjerset said. “He was my best partner. He earned his money one step at a time, the old-fashioned way. We should have named him Smith Barney.”

Garrett, livid that a fit horse at the top of his game couldn’t come within six lengths of the winner that September night at Los Alamitos, replaced Pfau as Expresss’ jockey after the race. Daron Long won with Expresss before the year was over, and so did the veteran Jerry Lambert. In 10 starts, Gjerset said, Expresss had two wins, three seconds and one third before he was retired.

“We’re not rich people,” Gjerset said. “He [Pfau] was fooling around with our future,” since every win could increase his potential as a stallion.

In 1995, this was the only horse Gjerset had in training. An owner of show horses before Expresss, she had a close attachment to the colt’s entire family. She saved Marhaba’s Magic, the dam of Expresss’ dam, from the slaughterhouse.

“In the early 1980s, there was a woman out in the desert who had about 120 horses,” Gjerset said. “But she had money problems, and she was evicted from her place. The horses started running wild. This mare was one of them. They were all going to be slaughtered. I’ll say one thing for the government, they gave us a lot of time to try to round them all up. We got a lot of them. That’s how I got Marhaba’s Magic.”

Gjerset, who is no longer training horses, took a back-row seat in a downtown federal court last Monday, to watch Pfau plead guilty to race-fixing. The maximum penalties for the jockey are five years and $250,000.

“I’ve only seen one guy more nervous in court,” Gjerset said. “That was Kato Kaelin.”

Early in 1995, Gjerset was about to remove Expresss from the track and send him to the show ring.

“This horse is no comet,” Garrett said.

But for Pfau, Expresss would have moved on to his new career.

“Expresss had a workout scheduled one morning, but I got slowed down in fog on the way to the track,” Gjerset said. “By the time I got there, the regular exercise rider had something else to do and had left. So we put Richard on my horse and he worked in something like 1:09 [for six furlongs]. The work was so good, we continued running him, and his races got better.”

Last April, three men got into Gjerset’s home in the middle of the afternoon. Ron Gjerset, her 68-year-old husband, encountered one in the living room, and after a struggle he subdued the 22-year-old, while the two others escaped through the back door. An arrest was made, but it’s still not clear why the intruders were there. There was nothing missing.

“Was it related to the goings on at Los Al?” Nancy Gjerset said. “I don’t know. But it’s enough to get you wondering.”

Gjerset gave an interview with the understanding that the name of the town in which she lives not be used. Another owner of horses at Los Alamitos said he found a funeral wreath in his front yard. Pfau told a federal judge Monday that he fears for the safety of himself and his family.

“I’m fearful to an overwhelming degree,” Pfau said. “You don’t have any idea how much I’m afraid.”

Traditionally, race-fixers don’t fool with social niceties. When he was rigging races, Ciulla was 6 feet 4 and 340 pounds. In Detroit, Ciulla told a jury how unhappy he was when he bribed jockey R.J. Bright and Bright failed to restrain the horse as agreed.

“I smacked him every which way but loose,” Ciulla said.

Cliff Wickman, who died recently in Southold, N.Y., at 74, was one of the racing investigators who hounded Ciulla.

“My testimony helped convict 50 people,” Ciulla once said. “Then guys like Wickman still give me a rough time.”

Wickman was nonplused.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “He talks about what he’s done for racing? How about what he’s done to racing?”