Pick-Six Player to File Class-Action Suit

A former Hollywood actor and stuntman, who left those professions to become a devoted pick-six horseplayer in California in the 1980s, is filing a class-action lawsuit against the tote company responsible for processing the fraudulent pick-six bets at the Breeders’ Cup in October.

A spokesman for the Pasadena law firm that represents the bettor, Jimmy “the Hat” Allard, said that the suit would be filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court. The defendant is Autotote Systems Inc., which processed the six winning tickets -- worth more than $3 million -- on the Breeders’ Cup at Arlington Park. The money was not paid after Autotote discovered that one of its employees had been rewriting tickets to match the results after four of the six races had been run. The employee, Chris Harn, a senior computer programmer, was fired and has pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges in connection with the scam. Two of his former college fraternity brothers have also been charged and are scheduled for a court appearance next Wednesday in New York.

Allard, 48, reportedly is a shareholder in some of 78 consolation tickets that are worth about $4,600 each but will grow by about $39,000 apiece if the $3 million from the winning pick-six tickets is redistributed. The consolation-ticket holders picked five of the six race winners.

“This is the ultimate example of technology going amok,” Allard was quoted as saying by a friend. “The Breeders’ Cup was only the tip of the iceberg. This has been going on for a long time. In the last three to five years, there were some things that just out and out smelled, and while I was suspicious, it wasn’t anything I could really put my finger on.”

The National Thoroughbred Racing Assn., facing widespread erosion in horseplayer confidence, is conducting a review of almost 500 pick sixes and pick fours that paid $10,000 or more per winning ticket this year.

According to Harn’s guilty plea, he and his partners, operating much as they had on Breeders’ Cup day, also cashed an earlier $107,608 pick six at Belmont Park and a $1,757 pick four at Balmoral Park. Harn also said that they’d pulled off a ticket-counterfeiting scheme at five Eastern tracks that reaped almost $100,000.

In a statement, Joseph Lisoni, Allard’s lawyer, said that Autotote, the biggest handler of horseracing bets in the country, would be charged with negligence. According to Lisoni’s statement, the suit will allege that through the manipulation of the company’s software, bettors “may have been cheated out of countless millions of dollars for possibly the last eight years.”

A spokesman for Lisoni said that he expected other pick-six players to join the suit.

An Autotote spokesman said that the company would have no immediate comment.

“The suit hasn’t been filed yet, and we haven’t seen it,” he said.

The $3 million in question has been deposited by Arlington Park to an escrow account at a Chicago bank. The Illinois Racing Board is expected to review the situation Monday.

Allard is said to be part of a group that bets the pick six every day at the Southern California tracks. He has said that he has invested more than $20 million in the pick six since 1986, and has cashed the bet more than 200 times, including three worth more than $1 million apiece.

A native of Rochester, N.Y., Allard moved to Los Angeles in 1974. He has said that he worked as an extra and stuntman in more than 500 television shows and movies, among them “Love Boat,” “Happy Days” and “Fantasy Island” on TV and the movies “Airplane!” and “The Blues Brothers.”

One of the shortcomings of the Autotote system, which surprised industry officials and many seasoned bettors when they learned of it after the Breeders’ Cup, was that the tote company stored pick-six bets in its system in Newark, Del., until as many as four races had been run. Brooks Pierce, president of Autotote, said at a California Horse Racing Board meeting last month that his company would soon be scanning the bets after the first leg had been run.

“Autotote is undercapitalized to make many improvements,” said Donald Groth, president of the Catskill Off-Track Betting Corp. in New York, where the fraudulent winning bets in the Breeders’ Cup were made. “Their costs have continued to go up, which is the result of aggressive negotiating by the tracks that they do business with.”

Asked recently about this, Pierce said that executives at Scientific Games Corp., Autotote’s parent company, would be better qualified to answer the question. A. Lorne Weil, chairman of Scientific Games, has declined to return several calls.

The Breeders’ Cup scam was discovered Oct. 27, the day after the Arlington Park races, by some alert executives at the New York Racing Assn., which this week uncovered a small scam closer to home. One of NYRA’s three tracks, Aqueduct, fired and filed theft charges against a security guard who had stolen promotional mutuel vouchers from the track’s mailroom.

Vouchers, good for bets or cash, between $2 and $10,000 were mailed to 43,000 fans, and the guard attempted to cash tickets from 30-40 of the mailers that were returned, addressees unknown. He was caught when one of those vouchers was for $10,000, the biggest prize in the promotion. The Breeders’ Cup scam might have also gone undetected but for a similar situation: The six winning tickets -- all made by bets on the same telephone account -- cried for an investigation after Volponi, a 43-1 longshot, won the last race.