The investigation into the six Pick Six bets that led to a payoff of $3 million in last month’s Breeders’ Cup now includes a Pick Four at Balmoral Park in south suburban Crete.
Investigators said they thought the Oct. 3 Balmoral bet and an Oct. 5 Pick Six at Belmont Park might have been dry runs for the Breeders’ Cup wagers.
“I think a Balmoral race might have been a guinea-pig race,” John Johnston, president of Balmoral Park, told the Tribune. “We scrutinize every race every night. We had been reviewing this race. The race was not unusual; the payoffs were.”
The total pool for the Balmoral Pick Four on Oct. 3 was $14,960, and a winning $2 ticket paid $1,851.20. One winning ticket originated from a telephone account at Catskill Off-Track Betting in upstate New York, where the suspicious Breeders’ Cup wagers were placed, investigators and racing officials said.
Balmoral officials said they originally became suspicious because they thought there should have been fewer winning tickets. The $2 win prices on the Pick Four races were $8.20, $39, $12.20 and $6.60.
The Balmoral bet was traced to Glen DaSilva, a third former member of a fraternity at Drexel University in Philadelphia being investigated in the Breeders’ Cup Pick Six probe. The other targets are Derrick Davis of Baltimore and Chris Harn of Newark, Del. None have been charged.
Investigators are looking into whether the computer system that handled the Balmoral and Belmont bets was manipulated so a bet made before the races in question had been run was later changed to reflect which horses had actually won the races.
Davis, who owns a computer-services business in Baltimore, used a touch-tone telephone betting system to place the six winning bets in the Breeders’ Cup Pick Six–the only winners in the country–investigators say.
Harn was fired last week from his job as a computer software engineer at Autotote, a company that processes 65 percent of racing wagers in North America and handled the bets under suspicion. DaSilva has a business Web site.
The Breeders’ Cup Pick Six investigation began the day after the Oct. 26 races at Arlington Park when it was discovered that a single bettor had used an unusual and, by racing standards, illogical configuration to pick the winner of six consecutive Breeders’ Cup races and that he held the only winning tickets.
The Balmoral and Belmont bets were configured similarly to the disputed Breeders’ Cup tickets with early races “singled,” or picking just one horse, and the late races having the entire field as possible winners, state investigators and racing officials said.
