Longtime Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos died aged 94 at the end of March. In a former life, he represented jockeys accused in a notorious Maryland case of race-rigging
Long before he bought the Baltimore Orioles for $173 million, before his family sold the team for $1.7bn, before a lot of things, Peter Angelos made a nice living in the courtroom.
Passing the bar in 1961, Angelos (right) tilted at windmills to the tune of billions of dollars in settlements, but in 1975 he bit off a smaller task that was nonetheless more daunting than getting elected mayor: trying to sell a Baltimore jury on the idea that a few jockeys didn't conspire to rig a race at the old Bowie Race Track.
The jockeys' scheme, which targeted the last race of the day on February 14 that year, became known in Maryland racing circles as the ‘Valentine's Day Massacre’.
Had it gone undetected, several jockeys would have collected more than $35,000 for less than $700 in bets. Instead, four jockeys – three of them Angelos' clients – were found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison.
Eric Walsh, who awkwardly rode the race favorite to a last-place finish, committed suicide before his appeal could be heard.
Besides Walsh, Angelos also represented Luigi Gino and Benny Feliciano. Another of the ringleaders, Jesse Davidson, who once led the country with 319 winners, hired a different lawyer. Because of prison time and a state ban against his licensing, Davidson sat out seven years of riding; the others suffered similar banishments.
Of the 43 witnesses who testified at a nine-day trial, the most crucial for the prosecution was Carlos Jimenez, an unindicted co-conspiritor who said that he had a small interest in the total bet but hadn't held back his horse as the four defendants were accused of doing.
Angelos, 94 when he died on March 23, made a closing argument in which he accused Jimenez of perjury and said his testimony was “unworthy of belief”.
Ernest Davidson, Jesse Davidson's brother, placed the bet. Several minutes before the six-furlong race, he plopped down $684, mostly in 10s and 20s, and said to the mutuel clerk: “I want a triple box on the 2, 8 and 12 – 38 times.” Each ticket cost $18, which covered those three numbers no matter what order they finished.
With Walsh's horse losing by almost 30 lengths and the horses of the other implicated jockeys also finishing off the board, the finish was 8-12-2, which meant the Davidson tickets were worth $927.30 apiece.
Uncashed tickets
But the race didn't pass the smell test, and Bowie officials quickly embargoed the payoff. The jockeys, already the center of an investigation, burned the uncashed tickets a day or two later.
At the trial seven months later, Angelos sought to prove that his clients, while guilty of breaking Maryland racing rules by betting on horses other than their own, didn't deliberately hold back their mounts, which was a more serious offense.
“That charge,” Angelos said, “is a figment of [the prosecution's] imagination. Nothing that's been said has proved that these men fixed the race. There was no bribe. There was no solicitation of a bribe. There was no acceptance of a bribe. This whole thing has been blown out of proportion.”
Angelos, who was in his mid-40s then and almost a decade removed from his weak 1967 challenge to Thomas J. D'Alesandro III – Nancy Pelosi's brother – to become mayor of Baltimore, said that Jimenez lied. Angelos contended that he was trying to avoid an indictment and a deportation back to his native Panama.
The jury of eight men and four women was not impressed. Taking about 10 hours over two days, they found.the four jockeys and a few fringe culprits guilty. The jockeys’ appeal, heard months after Walsh’s death, was denied.
“They were convicted despite speculation and equivocation,” said Angelos, in reference to Jimenez, who switched his stories on the witness stand.
‘That horse was a bum’
King Leatherbury, a future Hall of Fame trainer, defended Walsh's ride on his horse. “That horse was a bum,” Leatherbury said. “I knew it and Eric knew it, but the public didn’t know it. Eric didn’t [hold back] that horse. He finished last naturally.”
The 36-year-old Walsh said he was innocent despite a ride that left the three stewards scratching their heads. Walsh's horse, breaking from the outside post in a 12-horse field, stayed chummy with the outside rail all the way around the course. Walsh made no attempt to move his mount toward the inner fence.
In December 1975, Walsh ingested sleeping pills and shot himself in the chest with a .22-caliber pistol. He survived.
On May 1, 1976 – the day before, it turned out, Bold Forbes won the Kentucky Derby – Benny Feliciano went to visit Walsh, who was divorced and lived alone. The apartment manager let Feliciano in. They found Walsh in bed, covered with a sheet, a telephone receiver nearby. He had died from an overdose of sleeping pills.
“It drove him crazy,” Feliciano said. “Knowing he was innocent and not being able to prove it to anyone.”
Peter Angelos said: “He had never gotten over or came to grips with what happened to him. I know he was looking forward to the [appeal] hearing.”
After seven decades, the Bowie track ran its last horserace in 1985.
Bill Christine covered 24 runnings of the Preakness at Pimlico for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Bill Hartack: The Bittersweet Life of a Hall of Fame Jockey
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