Pick Six Fraud Is Uncovered

In a betting scandal that is bound to riddle the confidence of horseplayers everywhere, a tote company in Delaware fired an employee Thursday, after which a New York off-track betting executive said that the dismissed worker conspired with a Baltimore man to engineer more than $3 million in winnings via the pick-six bet on Breeders’ Cup day last Saturday at Arlington Park.

For racing, a game that has taken a back seat to other sports and other gambling options, Thursday’s developments, following a weeklong, interstate investigation, were the kind of public-relations smear that will be difficult to overcome. All of racing’s innovative marketing efforts -- off-track betting, betting by phone and the Internet, betting from home, getting rich quickly with a single bet -- have been sabotaged. Caught in the mess is the Breeders’ Cup, an annual series of nationally televised, internationally appealing races that have been successful since they were introduced in 1984.

It was at last Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup, in suburban Chicago, where a barrage of longshot winners resulted in only six winning ticket combinations in the pick six, a wager that requires a bettor to select the first-place finishers in six consecutive races. It turned out that all six winning combinations were purchased on one ticket costing $1,152 by a 29-year-old man identified as Derrick Davis, a self-employed computer repairman. On Thursday, Davis was linked with an unidentified software engineer who works in Newark, Del., where Autotote Corp., the national leader in processing horse racing bets, has its hub.

The winning pick six combinations may have been punched into the system after the first four races were run. The combinations included the winners of those races, plus all of the horses in the remaining two races. That betting pattern was what triggered a multi-agency investigation that included the Breeders’ Cup, the National Thoroughbred Racing Assn., the New York State Racing and Wagering Board and the Catskill Off-Track Betting Corp. in New York. The tickets were bought with a newly opened telephone account that Davis reportedly had with Catskill.

“The tickets were created by a rogue working for the tote company,” said Donald Groth, president of Catskill OTB. “If you said that the guy with the tote company and [Davis] worked together on this, that would be a very good assumption. It is also safe to say that the winning tickets, as they stood last Saturday, will never be cashed.”

Lorne Weil, chairman and chief executive officer of Scientific Games, Autotote’s parent company, said that an internal investigation led to the dismissal of the Autotote employee. The employee, Weil said, knew the password that would have enabled him to enter the data system and alter an existing ticket after the first four races were run.

Weil said the name of the employee and evidence from the investigation have been turned over to New York’s racing board and the New York State Police. While no one was saying so, the filing of criminal charges would seem inevitable.

Davis, an elusive figure all week, couldn’t be reached Thursday. In an interview that he gave the New York Post on Wednesday, Davis tried to explain the rationale behind the horses he bet and said he was innocent. “They’re dragging my name through the mud and saying that I tapped into the computer system,” Davis said. “Man, I just picked a few horses and got lucky.”

Davis bet only one horse in each of the first four races, then added all eight starters in the Breeders’ Cup Turf and all 12 horses in the Classic. The Classic was won by Volponi, at 43-1 the longest shot in the race. Volponi’s win eliminated all pick-six players except Davis.

Betting every horse in a field is not uncommon for serious pick-six players, but “singling” -- betting only one horse -- in races that were won by 26-1 shot Domedriver and 12-1 Starine sent off alarms. In particular, Davis was betting against Rock Of Gibraltar, the 4-5 favorite in the Breeders’ Cup Mile. Breaking slowly, Rock Of Gibraltar was in last place early, before a desperate stretch rally left him three-quarters of a length short of Domedriver at the wire.

“That was the part of the ticket that caught everybody’s attention,” said Chris Scherf, executive vice president of the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. “How could you bet that race without having Rock Of Gibraltar on your ticket?”

Once the investigation was launched, payoffs on the pick six were frozen. Each of Davis’ six winning combinations would have been worth $428,392. To bring his total payoffs to more than $3 million, Davis was also holding 108 of the 186 consolation payoffs (for five winners) that were worth $4,606.20 apiece.

Donald Groth, the Catskill executive, said that payoffs would have to be refigured for the holders of the 78 remaining consolation payoffs. By one estimate, the return on those consolation tickets will increase almost tenfold, to about $44,000.

“The integrity of the system wasn’t compromised,” Groth said. “It’s the integrity of someone with access to the system that was. We’ve got to improve on that. We’ve got to do better.”

Weil was hard-pressed to muster a positive spin. “The good news -- if there is any in this situation -- is that our detection system worked,” he said.