'This is box-office stuff' - Johnny Ward on the 'Fair Hill Five' gamble that cost British bookies millions

Dubbed the "Fair Hill Five," a recent transatlantic betting coup involved five horses, four of which won at Monmouth Park and Saratoga within a short time frame.

The connection between all five was that they all had scheduled workouts at the Fair Hill training centre in the weeks preceding their wins.

Three of those horses - The Great Amira (16-1), Tepeyac (19-5) and Scootaloo, (finished fourth) are trained by Angel Quiroz, and the two that won at Saratoga are trained by Ernesto Ochoa - Classic Rock (2-1) and M Bs Melanie Cares (13-2).

All four winners were heavily backed. Four won; the fifth was unlucky not to win having missed the start.

The reported six-figure betting coup was pulled off in UK betting shops through in-person wagers.

Twelve different shops across London were hit. It's a story with lots of different layers, and it seems there's more and more coming out as the days go on.

Johnny Ward’s opinion on the coup

This is why horse racing and dog racing - sport that involves betting - is different.

Obviously you'll get coups in football, but this is just box-office stuff.

In essence, there was a coup hatched on horses all linked to the well-named Angel Quiroz, in some shape or form - either he trained them, or used to train them.

On paper they were off layoffs, and they would have been long odds on the morning line, as they say over there.

But it seems to have entailed a potential half-a-billion liability for bookmakers over here - that's my understanding. I know it's mentioned in one of the pieces that five different firms were hit, including the machines.

As a punter at heart, if you're trying to pull off a coup, you're always trying to think of ways to get around the systems bookmakers have in place to stop you winning.

I know friends who frequently just can't get on, so they use the machines. These guys seem to have produced American passports in the betting office.

They were essentially flown over from the States to put multiples on a scatter of horses that were all linked to the one guy, if not necessarily trained by him.

The horses did very well - they didn't all win, but some of them did.

The price they were available at in Britain was conflicting with the price on the Tote system in the States, because I imagine bookmakers eventually cottoned on to it and had to start managing liabilities and these were all starting-price (SP) bets.

Payment withheld

Barney Curley could pull that off. Barney had the temerity, as I recall from his book, of William Hill closing his account.

I wouldn't be laying Barney Curley's bets the way he campaigned his horses, but when he pulled off the Yellow Sam coup, he was able to manipulate the SP, which is very, very difficult to do and it's especially difficult with a load of horses running one after another.

I think payment has been withheld, and my understanding is that, subsequent to the horses running, there was a positive drug test for a horse from the same trainer.

So I presume the bookmakers are withholding the payments, I presume, I'm not entirely sure. There were all these multiples placed across horses running at different tracks in the States, while the bets themselves were placed in London, either on machines or over the counter.

If betting shops are as moribund over there as they are here now, I'm sure they would have attracted a bit of attention.

Banned substances

It's an extraordinary coup, and there's no suggestion that these horses were dishonestly campaigned, or that anything illegal or corrupt happened, but I'm not sure we know the full end of the story yet.

A banned substance was subsequently found in another Fair Hill horse, and Angel Suarez was charged in relation to that. So I presume that's relevant to the whole thing.

But I love these coups, the ethics of them you can certainly debate; it's not necessarily "Robin Hood, robbing the rich," not that simple.

It shows that people complain about bookmakers - "oh, they're this, they're that", yet these gambles, like the Barney Curley gambles and the Charles Byrnes gambles on multiples.

’Like a movie’

It's a bit like the movie The Big Short, where you're betting against the entire system, a small bet can basically bring the whole thing down. The liabilities can be absolutely colossal.

There was a very bizarre one in Ireland too, almost forgotten now, involving different trainers who, you literally could not have put the four of them together.

That was another play on the Barney Curley playbook: don't have them all trained by, or even associated with one horse.

Really extraordinary stuff - one horse with no form whatsoever was sent off odds-on and nearly won. Mad stuff.

So bookmakers, as much as they want to lay bets on horse racing, this kind of thing would scare the living daylights out of them,

Bookmakers are afraid of multiples for the very reason that there's only so much they know; they're not privy to inside information.

They have as much control as they can to try to stop this happening, but I'd say there were some seriously worried people as this gamble developed.

Now maybe they'll have an out and we saw with the Queally Gamble, when the layers withheld payment, they were absolutely lambasted for it.

And I have to put my hand up here, I do tipping for bookmakers in the shops, but when you're talking about massive liabilities, sometimes you are entitled to hold on to the money for a little bit longer, and certainly in this case I think they are.

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