Three dim crims and a Fine Cotton fiasco
The plan was simple: swap a slow horse for a fast one, then cash in. What could possibly go wrong?
“Racing’s Darkest Day”. So screamed the headline in Queensland’s Sunday Mail on August 19, 1984, less than 24 hours after Bold Personality’s dismal impersonation of Fine Cotton was rumbled. The jig was up, the conspirators had fled, tyres screeching from the car park at Eagle Farm Racecourse and out of the state, with the cops in hot pursuit.
Punters were left angrily holding betting tickets that had less value than the cost of the ink printed upon them. Some, including members of the Queensland Fraud Squad, had had “the mail” — inside information that Fine Cotton would prevail in the Second Division Commerce Novice Handicap. Others were simply duped into betting on the nine-year-old picnic racing nag, drawn into shelling out their hard-earned on the back of a betting plunge that was without precedent for such a modest event.
The phrase still hangs over the Fine Cotton fiasco. Old salts in the racing caper still refer to it as “racing’s darkest day”. They furrow their brows at the audacity of it and the acute embarrassment that fell upon the industry when the forensic examinations of racing authorities and the criminal justice system commenced in earnest.
The truth is that there were many darker days in thoroughbred racing before the Fine Cotton fiasco and there have been many others since. Where the fiasco stands in terms of superlatives is the funniest, most farcical effort to strip bookmakers of their money ever seen in this country and, we wager, any other.
Race Day: August 18, 1984. Brisbane. Dawn. The three of them, Hayden Haitana, John Gillespie and Bobby North, peeled themselves off a lumpy couch (Haitana), a decrepit armchair (Gillespie) and the floor (North) at about 6am. Haitana opened his eyes, one after the other, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The place was a wreck, but it had never been pretty. It stank of stale beer and two or three hundred cheap cigarettes.
Grisly as it was, it wasn’t the state of the house that filled him with horror. It was the unfolding realisation of what being in the place meant, why they were there, and what the day ahead held in store. Regret was pointless. He would simply have to make the best of this. There could be a way through it, maybe even a way out, if he could make people, even very dangerous people, see sense. But right now, there was a horse to deal with.
The horse. The ring-in, a beast that allegedly might be able to run the distance in quick time — but one that looked nothing at all like Fine Cotton. “Oh God,” Hayden mumbled under his breath, remembering the hairdressing farce of the night before, involving a bucket of henna hair dye. “What the f..k does it look like now?”
Gillespie and North were in the kitchen, already into their second beers. “Come on, you two,” he growled, herding them to the back door. “Let’s check this out.” They stumbled onto the creaking veranda, squinting in the daylight as they took tentative steps down into the shabby yard. It was Gillespie who reacted first. “F..k me! Jesus, get a look at that, will ya?” North said nothing, his hysterical laughter making words redundant.
Haitana, his lower jaw having dropped far enough to please the most demanding dentist, and his eyes like saucers, was silent, though a thought flashed through his mind, one of those flippant, tangential notions that the brain can conjure up to protect itself from a vision of catastrophe. “Bold Personality. Good name for it. You’d bloody well need a bold personality to walk around in public looking like that.” The horse was orange. Not just “a kind of orangey shade of red”, or “a striking tinge of russet”, but bright, radiant orange. Like something you’d see in a fruit bowl. “We need a miracle,” Haitana said, looking at the horse, then at North. “And a hose.”
Haitana, a country racetrack trainer who plugged along eking out a living on slow horses and the punt, had not signed up for this. Neither had North, the Brisbane real estate agent, who had once considered their project a lark, a chance of some easy money without undue risk. The original plan had been cooked up by Gillespie in Boggo Road Gaol, a criminal cesspit where outrageous schemes were hammered into shape without due regard for consequence, the most likely of which was a return to a thin mattress inside its fetid walls. The plan, to swap their poorly performed horse with a lookalike, a Fine Cotton clone who would get around the 1400m at Eagle Farm eight lengths faster and salute at the ledger, had been hurled on to the scrap heap by grim circumstance and the keen edge of a barbed-wire fence. The lookalike, Dashing Solitaire, was injured, couldn’t race.
Now they had fallen into Plan B, a roughly concocted contrivance by Gillespie, the inveterate conman who already had a slew of convictions on his rap sheet. They still had the slow horse, Fine Cotton, and they had a faster one in Bold Personality, but the two animals had different colours and markings. Fine Cotton and Bold Personality were of the same genus and species, but it was there the similarities ended.
And so, with less than four hours to race time, they had an orange horse. The idea of Bold Personality turning into the straight at Eagle Farm ahead of the pack, a blazing, incandescent orange blur, made Haitana gasp with horror. If it ever got that far. A bright orange horse in the mounting yards was bound to catch the eye of the punters. But it wouldn’t even get to that point of abject humiliation. The steward’s inspection half an hour before the race would be when the shit hit the fan. An orange horse in the stables, glowing like a traffic light that screamed, “Warning, warning, ring-in!” That would be the end of it, right there.
He knew how it would go down. Within minutes of the steward poking his nose into the stable, the track PA would blare out, “Mr Hayden Haitana, to the stewards’ room, please.” That would be it. Ignominy, failure, despair. Warned off the tracks for years. Maybe life. And that wouldn’t be the worst of it. The wallopers would be called and he’d be frogmarched out of Eagle Farm in a pair of matching stainless-steel bracelets.
He slurped away at the stubby. Right. Time to move. If he was turning into the final straight to disaster, he may as well do it at a full gallop. He marched back into the living room: “Bobby, we’re going to your joint,” Haitana said. “We’ll hose the ringer down there.” North protested. His mind was instantly summoning up the ghastly image of two horses standing on his manicured front lawn, one a flaming orange, while he and Haitana went to work with the hose. “Bobby, it’s on the f..kin’ way and we’ve got to get moving.”
Meanwhile, the money kept pouring in for Fine Cotton and the bookies stood to lose a fortune. In the morning’s betting, Fine Cotton had come in from 33/1 to 4/1, moving up the line on the bookies’ scales from the bottom line of betting, where the old picnic race meet nag belonged. It was preposterous. The biggest betting plunge Australia had ever seen. Punters with inside mail were circling. Thousands were invested in betting agencies in Papua New Guinea, Fiji and over the phone in Darwin. On the tote in pubs and at TABs around the country, the Queensland screen blinked Fine Cotton’s price, and with just about every electronic blip the price came in. Thirty-three dollars to $30, then $25, all the way in to a lousy $4.50.
If any one of Fine Cotton’s thousands of supporters, anyone who had a lash on the nine-year-old gelding on the basis of slightly dodgy mail from a track insider, had been driving that Saturday morning around the original Brisbane leafy-green suburb of St Lucia, reeking of old money and National Party connections, they might have had cause to march back to the TAB and demand their money back.
There, on the front lawn of the expansive home owned by one of Brisbane’s “better” families, passers-by were being entertained by a gaggle of middle-aged men surrounding a wet, vaguely orange horse. The men were feverishly mopping and sponging the horse down, leaving puddles of ochre at its hooves to overflow and run across the lawn, over the retaining wall and into the stormwater drain. The men stopped from time to time to admire their handiwork and guzzle their beers. To one side of all the commotion stood Fine Cotton, dark chocolate brown, gently nibbling at the lawns, stopping only to drop a couple of enormous, steaming turds near the jacaranda tree.
Proud homeowner Robert North marinated in profound anxiety. He’d consumed more beers that morning than he cared to count, but the alcohol had only taken the edge off his sense of foreboding and held off the desperate urge to run inside, lock the front door and bury himself under a doona. As if captivated by a surreal table-tennis tournament, his eyes darted from the hosing down of the ringer to the street as drivers passed by, slowing to watch, mouths agape in incredulity at the lurid scene being played out on his lovely front lawn.
Not so lovely now. The grass was f..ked. He’d already consigned to oblivion thoughts of what was happening to his beautiful turf. His wife would never forgive him but that was the least of his worries. The orange horse had done it for him. The sight of the ringer standing in the stable that morning in a blaze of tangerine had etched itself deep into his subconscious and provided an ugly reminder of what he had got himself into. It was no longer a lark, a bit of fun and happy thoughts of a nice chunk of change over a few beers.
Finally, the hoses were turned off and Bold Personality stood before them, dripping. The horrid hue was gone, leaving only a bay horse, its light brown coat turned dark from the countless litres of water that remained on it. Fine Cotton gently nibbled at the lawn in the background and, for a moment, North thought they looked like they could be twins. All right, not identical twins but twins possibly. Fraternal, maybe. A bit.
North had deliberately overlooked the white socks on Fine Cotton’s four fetlocks. Let’s not get picky. At least the ringer didn’t look like it belonged in a freak show anymore.
“Waddya reckon?” Hayden asked.
“He looks cherry ripe, mate,” Gillespie answered. “What about the socks?”
Haitana was loath to concede that he had forgotten to add the peroxide the night before. The application of the henna rinse had been a difficult task, made more onerous by the fact that he’d quaffed eight stubbies during the process. When it had come time to sponge Bold Personality’s fetlocks down with hydrogen peroxide, he was heavily refreshed and beyond caring.
Examining Bold Personality now, he was glad of his drunken absentmindedness. An orange horse with bleached blond legs might have been a step too far. The hilarity that had met the sight of Bold Personality’s mandarin hue could have been notched up to the point where they’d still be rolling around in the stables laughing. “Easily fixed,” Haitana replied and pointed to a spray can of Dulux white high gloss beside the float. “Better let him dry off a bit first but.”
Haitana looked directly at Gillespie. “We keep the blanket on him right up until the jump. As long as possible. If the stewards haven’t jerried by then, we’ll be sweet. They wouldn’t have a f..king clue what it’s supposed to look like.”
Gillespie nodded. Smiles all round. Even North felt a sudden urge to grin. “OK. Let’s get this show on the road,” Gillespie said. The bonhomie was quickly shattered when Haitana swore out loud. “Shit.” It was loud enough to stir the neighbours, and North started to panic again. “We haven’t shod the f..kin’ ringer yet,” Haitana explained.
Gillespie didn’t seem overly concerned but North could see disaster looming anew. Disgrace. Humiliation. Jail. “What are we going to do?” North asked plaintively. “It’s all right, Bobby,” Haitana said. “Don’t f..kin’ panic. Pop inside and get me a copy of the Yellow Pages. Quick as you can. We’re cutting it a bit fine now.” Haitana tore through the phone book before scanning listings with his index finger. “Teddy. He’ll do the job. Good bloke too. Won’t say a word.”
While North stood nervously, Haitana grabbed the phone and placed the call. “Teddy, mate. I got a problem. Hope you can help. Got a horse needs some shoes. Quickish. And I mean yesterday.”
Teddy arrived on time as promised and drove his van straight up the driveway. “Which one?” he asked Haitana.
“The wet one.” Haitana handed Teddy a stubby. He squeezed the top off and drank the lot in a couple of deep gulps.
“Doesn’t look like a pacer.”
“He’s not, mate. He’ll be going around at Eagle Farm in little over an hour.”
Teddy told Haitana he wanted another beer. It was in his hand in a trice, and down his throat almost as quickly. “I’ve only got pacers’ shoes.”
“Really?” This was a problem. Shoes for horses in harness racing are heavier, helping the horse maintain its gait and still manoeuvre through the field. In thoroughbred racing, the plates are wafer thin, allowing for maximum bursts of speed. Haitana knew there was no alternative. “Bung ’em on, Teddy.”
Teddy finished up and Haitana stepped forward with the Dulux can. He blasted all four of Bold Personality’s pasterns, then stopped and stood back to admire his handiwork before returning to spray a bit more here and there on the horse’s legs until he was satisfied.
He threw the can into the back seat of his truck and called for order. “Let’s get ’em in, guys. We are now officially running late.” They scrambled the horses into the float and took off for their rendezvous with destiny at Eagle Farm.
Edited extract from The Fine Cotton Fiasco, by Peter Hoysted and Pat Sheil (Ebury, $34.99), out August 20.