Leslie Morris walked quickly up and down the rows of boards looking at the offered prices and I acted as his shadow. Fortunately, he was too busy to notice me as he was concentrating on the odds boards and also on a red notebook and a small calculator that he held in his hands. He tapped in figures on the calculator and made notes in the book. Try as I might, I couldn’t get quite close enough to read what he was writing.
Suddenly, he began moving down the lines of bookmakers, stopping about every second one to make a single bet using high-value banknotes that he peeled from a large bundle of cash he had in his coat pocket. I pretended to make a call on my mobile phone while actually taking several photos and a short video of him making the bets.
Even though I wasn’t close enough to catch what Morris himself said, I could sometimes hear the bookmaker as he repeated the bet to his assistant, who then logged it into a computer and printed the ticket. Morris wasn’t putting money on the same horse on each occasion, that was for sure. As far as I could tell, he was backing most of the eight runners, some of them multiple times with different bookmakers.
It was a slick operation and, in all, he must have placed between thirty and thirty-five separate bets, each with a different bookmaker. He had timed his approach well, when most other punters had already made their selections and gone to watch the race from the grandstand. Hence making each of his bets took just a few seconds and, by the time the race began, the large bundle of cash in his pocket had reduced to nothing.
I followed him as he also climbed the grandstand steps to watch. With a tiny bit of pushing, I managed to position myself a few steps above and behind him.
The race was a two-and-a-half-mile novice hurdle for four-year-olds and, initially, it was a slow-run affair with none of the eight jockeys seemingly wanting to make the running from the start.
They popped over the early flight of hurdles at barely a gallop, and it was not until they turned into the home straight for the first time that a couple of them kicked on and decided to make a proper race of it. The others followed suit and all eight were fairly closely bunched as they passed the winning post with a complete circuit still to run.
The pace began to quicken as the horses ran downhill away from the grandstand, all of them safely negotiating the first three flights of hurdles although the two outsiders came under pressure early, their jockeys pushing hard and giving their mounts a few ‘hurry-up’ slaps with their whips, but without any great response.
However, at the last hurdle on the far side, Wisden Wonder, the favourite, hardly jumped at all, crashing through the obstacle and unseating his rider, much to the displeasure of the crowd, which groaned loudly en masse.
By the time they turned for home around the bottom end of the course, the remaining seven were well spaced out. One of them pulled up before the last two hurdles and the other six finished in line astern, with the winner returned at a starting price of five-to-one.
Leslie Morris had not cheered the winner home, nor had he moved a muscle when the favourite had come to grief. Now he merely stood in the grandstand sorting out his betting slips before moving back to the lines of bookmakers to collect his winnings, making notes all the time in his red notebook.
And the winnings were considerable.
By the time he had collected from eight different bookmakers, Morris had two large bundles of banknotes in his coat pockets. But he didn’t hang around to reinvest any of the winnings on the remaining races. Instead, he walked quickly out through the grandstand to the main foyer and exited the racecourse.
I followed him out to the owners and trainers’ car park and watched as he climbed into a silver Audi A4 and drove rapidly away. He had departed so quickly that even if I’d wanted to stop him, I doubt that I would have been successful. And he would probably have thought I was trying to rob him.
He’d have been right.
I particularly wanted to get my hands on that red notebook.
My questioning of bookmakers about the bets they have taken and paid out on is a delicate area.
Racecourse bookmakers are not registered or licensed by the BHA in spite of the fact that they ply their trade on BHA-licensed property. Rather, they hold operating licences from the Gambling Commission.
Hence my authority is severely restricted and not helped by the fact that many bookmakers consider the BHA to be obstructive in not allowing jockeys and trainers to discuss openly with them the prospects of their horses.
In spite of all that, I went back to the betting ring and went up to one of the bookies who had paid out to Mr Morris.
‘How much did the man in the blue fedora win?’ I asked.
‘Who wants to know?’ he replied in a less-than-friendly manner.
I showed him my BHA credentials with the word ‘investigator’ and he then looked up at my face. ‘Was it fixed?’ he asked.
‘Was what fixed?’
‘The race.’
Good question.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘I’m only interested in how much you paid the man in the blue fedora.’
‘Three grand,’ said the bookie. ‘He’d a monkey on at fives.’
A ‘monkey’ was betting slang for five hundred pounds. At odds of five-to-one the winnings would be two thousand five hundred pounds. Add back the stake money and the payout was three thousand.
I went to each of the seven other bookmakers Leslie Morris had collected from. Three wouldn’t tell me but four confirmed that he’d had a bet of five hundred pounds at five-to-one. If all eight bets had each paid out three thousand pounds then Mr Morris had left the racecourse with twenty-four thousand pounds in cash in his coat pockets.
But how much had he started with?
I went down the line of bookmakers speaking to each of those I could remember Morris betting with but not winning. I asked them how much the man in the blue fedora had wagered and on which horse but none of them could really remember. The eight he had collected from had only remembered him because a three-thousand-pound cash payout was a little unusual.
I asked them all if they had taken many bets of five hundred pounds from Morris but it seemed that he had bet varying amounts on the different horses.
One bookmaker told me he knew he’d taken a monkey on the fifteen-to-one shot but couldn’t be sure it was from a man in a blue hat. ‘Punters are punters,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy checking for counterfeit notes to worry about what they’re wearing.’ He was also far too busy taking bets for the fourth race to give me any more of his time.
‘Come back after the last,’ he said, but, if he couldn’t remember now, he would have even less chance in a couple of hours’ time.
I asked all the bookies if they’d taken any bets on Wisden Wonder from the man in the blue fedora. None of them thought so, and I certainly hadn’t heard him placing one. They all said they’d taken lots of big bets on the favourite from other punters and they were very grateful not to have had to pay out.
I walked back through the grandstand to the weighing room and into the broadcast centre, the room from where all the racecourse public address and closed-circuit television coverage was transmitted.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the technician in charge.
I showed him my BHA credentials.
‘I’d like to see the video of the third race.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But not just at the moment. The fourth is about to start and I need to concentrate.’
I sat on a stool next to him and together we watched on a screen as the fourth race unfolded.
‘We have Channel 4 here today,’ he said. ‘They do all the TV production but I have to be sure that the racecourse closed-circuit systems are all working and tied in to their output. And we have our own commentary team separate from them to pipe through the on-course speakers.’