SKIN GAMES OUTSIDE THE TRACK.
One of the very worst features that attend race meetings is the unavoidable presence, at every convenient point of proximity to the race track, and lining every approach and avenue to the central scene, of all the known skin games of which the reader of this book will have been afforded ample knowledge elsewhere. Here assemble the three-card-monte swindler, the shell-game shark, the wheel of fortune fakir, and in short every conceivable representative of the smaller forms of swindling by means of the practice of gambling. They cannot, it is true, get into the enclosure. Race-track representatives draw the line of its virtue there. True they are not a whit worse than their brethren inside, who play for higher game. Both are merely plundering honest people by means of gambling schemes. It is the case of the pot saying to the kettle, “Keep off; I fear you may besmut me.” But the shell game man and his confreres do not hanker to be within the sacred high fence. They can catch their kind of suckers just as well outside, as they come and go; and many a confiding innocent beside, who has not enough money to buy a seat on the grand stand, nor to make a bet on the race, has yet sufficient to lose by a turn of the wheel. They are not particular, bless you, these smaller knaves. They do not want the earth. So long as they get all the sucker has got, even though it be but a little, they are content.
Again, there are cases where the winning horse actually has become sick; so sick that he has had to be scratched, or been compelled to fail in even getting a “place,” and that even where the stable has been watched night and day by a man with a blunderbuss. Of course everybody knows, including the dupes who have laid their money on him, that the favorite has been “dosed.” Some suspect that the watcher may have been bribed by the enemy, and permitted his care to be drugged for a fee. It might be; but the odds are in favor of his innocence. The experienced mind will look for a larger villain. There was a big sum of money on the race: it would be an easy matter for the owner of the horse winning to scratch him, or allow him to be beaten, and win more than was on the board and in the stakes. Horses have been sold out by their owners, on American and English race courses, and will be again, so long as knavery lasts in the form of gambling on horse racing. And when you observe that said owner is particularly tumultuous and volcanic in the expression of his wrath, and encrimsons the surrounding air with richly embroidered profanity, then you may be tolerably sure that you might reach the secret of the case if you could only get deep down into his trousers pockets.
WAYS THAT ARE DARK AND TRICKS THAT ARE NOT VAIN.
In no other human enterprise is it more frequently demonstrated that “the race is not always to the swift.” It is a not uncommon practice for owners of a horse by confederacy with book makers, and other necessary aids, to groom a horse to win a heavy stake upon a dead certainty. First the horse and his capabilities are discovered. Then he is ridden in one or two races to lose. He becomes regarded as a permanent tail-ender. His appearance on the blackboard is greeted with derision. Reports are circulated that the horse is “sick,” particularly just before the event for which he is being held back. He makes his appearance when his time has come. Nobody will bet on him. The wildest sort of odds against him are cheerfully offered, and as quietly gathered in by the confederates of the owner and pool-seller. He takes the field and comes in an easy winner in such a handsome manner that old sports who were not in the combine, recognize, with words not loud but deep, as they go down into their pockets to settle, that they have been “sold again.” In this as in all other ways the average bettor or amateur gambler stands no show. He has no chance, though he may think he has. He is simply food for sharks.
THE JOCKEY.
As the “king maker” to the claimant to the thrones of the days of old, so the jockey to the horse race, and to the high hopes which rest upon the particular animal in his charge. The jockey is generally a kind of person who would be a stable-boy, a boot-black or a street sweeper, if he were not a jockey. Being a jockey, he is clothed in purple and fine linen, and gets his $10,000 or $12,000 per year—which would pay salaries for two ministers of the gospel of the very first water, or of at least four superintendents of schools. Is the jockey paid this magnificent salary for being a jockey? Not at all; nor is he paid for being honest. It is for being honest to his employer in carrying out his wishes in regard to the horse, as it may happen to be more profitable to the owner to win or lose. Do jockeys ever sell a race? Probably: sometimes in obedience to the orders of the owner, and occasionally on his own account. In the latter event it is generally his last race; but he can afford to retire to an opulent private life, for his reward is exceedingly liberal. Who shall tell when the jockey is riding honestly or dishonestly? He alone knows the minutest shade of the temper and capacity of the horse. Half a nose may lose a race when he has seemed to have done his best. And yet he might have won by a neck had he so elected. The plain amateur, everyday sport who is slated to be swindled in any case, as well as the anxious owner, the vendor of pools, and the maker of books, are all at the mercy of the discretion of the jockey. Hence the frills upon his raiment; hence a salary so large that it is concluded that life can offer him no other temptations. In very many instances, indeed, the jockey is the instrument through whom the thousands of dupes are sold, the owner sometimes directing the robbery, and on other occasions being included in the list of goods delivered. The high-salaried jockey is a part of an evil system. Take away the gambling feature from horse racing, and let us have honest sport, and the jockey would be glad indeed to ride “square” for a dollar a day and found. And there will be no honest competitions of speed on the race-track until the immoral, rascally and thieving element of betting on the result, or gambling, as you may be pleased to term it, has been abolished, either by legal enactment, by public opinion, or by repudiation on the part of the people who now patronize it—in which latter case, the victims refusing to come to the fold to be sheared as they do now, the evil would die for want of pockets to pick.
THE HANDICAP FRAUD.
In the “handicap” race lies one of the great opportunities for rascality on the race track. There is no doubt that some of the events which offer the largest prizes, in which the public takes the deepest interest, and which seem on the surface to be about the fairest tests of all for a square contest of speed, have become masterpieces of organized scoundrelism. The theory of the handicap is that all the horses are so exactly weighted that they start on a footing of perfect equality in the race, and that if it were possible for them all to cross in an exact line at the starting point, they would come under the wire nose to nose. Of course, to secure such an exact start is an impossibility, and the struggle is presumed to be a supreme effort on the part of each jockey to make up the space lost at the start. It makes a grand and thrilling spectacle to witness a handicap race: but it is generally a delusion. They are just going through the motions, and any gentlemen in the combination can tell you when the “start” is declared which horse is destined to come out first at the finish. In cases of crooked races of this kind, the horse is generally selected a season in advance and a combination between certain leading horsemen is made to allow him to be the winner and divide stakes and betting winnings. The stable from which this “dark horse” comes will have generally two or three others in the field, and the selected winner is ridden falsely for a whole season, and given a bad record, so as to give him so ridiculously light a weight at the handicap race that his winning is a comparative certainty. To be sure, other elements of fitness to win the race have been carefully ascertained, and his exact speed and staying qualities are well known to those interested. When he goes into the field a certain winner, he gets lightest weights and the longest odds to be had, and when he comes under the wire he is worth his weight in gold to his owner or managers. Sometimes it happens that there are two cliques working in the dark in this fashion, and then a division has to be made. A private meeting between the two selected horses is had, and this is a race for keeps and in which the best horse wins. Then both parties form a common syndicate, and labor to double the anticipated profits. Being leaders of the turf, they have ample opportunity to gull the public. The sporting papers, or sporting editors are “tipped” to systematically “bear” the winning horse, and to “write up” other horses which appear to give the public a fair chance for winning, or at least an even chance in betting upon the few favorites which have been selected for “stool pigeons,” which are “bulled,” in the estimation of the public without stint. When it comes to the test, the dark horse has a comparative walk-over; the syndicate reaps a golden harvest, and the public can divide the loss between the individual suckers who have been gulled. Sometimes it has happened that a genuine dark horse has honestly won, and these schemers come to grief. But that is as rare as teeth in the mouth of a hen, and the fact remains, generally speaking, that in this as in every other department of betting on the events of the turf, the confiding public is swindled on a deliberate system by which the professional gambler could not lose if he chose, unless he were to conspire actively to attain that end. This, however, there is no fear of, for a more selfish, cold-blooded and rapacious breed of blood-hounds never pursued a defenceless prey.
OFFICIALLY PROTECTED CRIME.