State Racing Chief Drops Plan for Internet Wagering Site

The chairman of the state board regulating the horse racing industry announced Friday that he was abandoning plans to begin an Internet wagering business because it might be perceived as a conflict of interest.

Robert Tourtelot, a Los Angeles attorney and chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, made the announcement in Pomona at the end of the board’s regular monthly meeting.

Almost a year ago, Tourtelot filed a fictitious business name and obtained an Internet domain name for a company--Wagerbytel--intended to provide betting services on horse racing over the telephone or the World Wide Web, records and interviews show.

Such a business would require future contracts with the racing groups he now regulates, as well as approval from the board he now heads.

Internet wagering is illegal under California’s bookmaking laws. But a bill now on Gov. Gray Davis’ desk contains a provision that would allow it for horse racing.

If signed into law, the measure would permit so-called account wagering. Other states allow the system, which gives selected businesses access to a racing association’s betting pool and broadcast signal, thus allowing people to wager online.

Tourtelot announced Friday that he gave up the business idea after The Times asked him recently about its propriety.

“I received a call from a reporter who pointed out what he thought was a potential conflict of interest,” an agency spokesman quoted Tourtelot as saying. “I said I didn’t think it was, because I hadn’t done anything with it.

“After the phone call, I thought about it some more. Reality and perception are two different things,” he was quoted as saying. “I since filed a statement of abandonment for that name and I no longer have any interest in it.”

Tourtelot said he thought of the Wagerbytel idea more than a year ago when he was driving down the San Diego Freeway and saw a billboard for Autobytel--an Internet service to buy cars.

“I thought, ‘Gee, we could do Wagerbytel,’ ” spokesman Mike Marten quoted Tourtelot as saying. “I went back to my office and had my secretary file a fictitious business DBA [doing business as] form and then I forgot about it.”

Account wagering has been strongly supported by industry groups, which say they are losing money to out-of-state wagering systems that take bets on California races.

Records and interviews suggest that Tourtelot--who represented former Los Angeles Police Det. Mark Fuhrman during the O.J. Simpson trial--never lobbied for the pro-wagering provision, which was inserted in a bill aimed at cleaning up the conditions in the stables of California racetracks.

Yet, as chairman, he publicly advocated the idea.

“It’s a fantasy of mine that the governor is going to sign this and it’s going to happen in a couple of weeks,” Tourtelot said at a February board meeting, not mentioning that he had personally taken steps to go into the business.

Tourtelot previously told The Times that he saw no real conflict because he wouldn’t start the business until after his term on the board expired in July 2001.

He said his record on the board shows that he has been fair and wouldn’t curry favor with industry groups to get future business. Indeed, Tourtelot has asked tougher questions of horse racing groups than has been the practice of most past and present board members, who have sometimes been accused of being too close to the industry.

Last November, for example, as vice chairman, Tourtelot pushed the prospective buyers of the Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Albany to invest $5 million in fixing up the stable areas before the board would approve the purchase. The stables there are decrepit and have been a source of complaints from horse owners for four years.

But in the same meeting, he also told the new buyers, Magna International, they should keep the current general manager of the track’s racing association. Failure to do so, Tourtelot warned, would make him a very “unhappy camper” if they came before the board again.

Under an Internet betting scheme, that general manager, Peter Tunney, and others around the state could recommend who would get contracts for advance deposit wagering, government officials say.

Tunney was out of town Friday and couldn’t be reached. Other industry insiders contacted recently said they were surprised to hear of Tourtelot’s business plans.

Political watchdogs say there appeared to be nothing illegal about Tourtelot nascent business arrangement.

“This has a lot of appearance issues,” said John Wallace, senior counsel for the state Fair Political Practices Commission. “But I don’t know if there are any statutes that bar it.”

He said the only potential problem might be when Tourtelot had to seek board approval for wagering contracts. There is a one-year ban against former state officials’ trying to influence the agency that they previously worked for, but Wallace said it wasn’t exactly clear if seeking a license for wagering would fall under that statute.

Robert Stern, president of the nonprofit Center for Government Studies, said state employees often leave their jobs and go to work with the industries they once regulated.

Former state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, now president of the Thoroughbred Owners of California, said that in Tourtelot’s case, the issue is now moot.

“It’s always better if there’s any perception issue to clean it up,” he said. “This just takes it off the table now.”