Three in court over £2m 'scam'

Three men were due to appear in a New York court yesterday in the first step of a case that could unravel the biggest betting scandal in American racing history.

There was more than $3m (£2m) in the PickSix jackpot pool at Chicago's Arlington Park on Breeders' Cup day last month, challenging punters to find the last six winners on the card. Derrick Davis, Chris Harn and Glen DaSilva ostensibly did just that - but, officials believe, only by switching losers for winners when four of the races had already been run.

The scandal of the Breeders' Cup PickSix has prompted outrage and astonishment among American punters almost from the moment that Volponi, a 40-1 outsider, won the Breeders' Cup Classic. There were some two million $2 "lines" in the PickSix pool, but after victories for Domedriver (25-1) and Starine (13-1), Volponi's success seemed to have whittled them down to just six winning tickets, worth $428,932 (some £290,000) each, plus "consolation" bonuses adding up to a total payout of £2.2m.

When it transpired that all six were placed through the same off-track betting shop by the same punter, however, questions were soon asked. And when the structure of the winning bets became clear - each had nominated one horse only in each of the first four legs, and the entire field in the remaining two - the questions turned to accusations.

Derrick Davis, the winning punter, insists that he simply got lucky. But investigators soon discovered that while at Drexel university in the early 1990s, Davis was in the same student fraternity - a close-knit college social body - as Chris Harn, who went on to work as a computer technician with Autotote, the American company processing the PickSix bets, and who apparently had high-level password access.

Then they found that the same off-track betting office in Catskill, New York state, had recently paid out on several big jackpot-type bets placed by a man called Glen DaSilva which followed the same single-single-everything pattern used by Davis. And DaSilva, oddly, had also been in that same college fraternity.

The key to what may have been the most audacious attempted betting scam in history is the way in which the American tote processes information. In Britain, the Tote knows within seconds how many tickets are still active after every leg of the jackpot Scoop6. In the States, though, information is not analysed and transmitted back to the host racecourse until much later. In the case of the PickSix, it is after the fourth race.

The clear belief of investigators is that Harn was using his access to totalisator computer information to amend bets placed by Davis and DaSilva to ensure that they were on winners. Yesterday's hearing, at which the three men were due to appear before a district court judge, is a very early stage in the judicial process, and no charges have yet been laid against them. Most observers, though, believe it is only a matter of time, with "wire fraud conspiracy" the current favourite.

As in so many attempted betting scams, the group seems to have been undone - if the authorities' view of the matter is correct - by a mixture of greed, stupidity and bad luck.

Had they not targeted one of the most high-profile bets of the year, or if they had bothered to throw in some losers in the first four legs to hide the winning line, they might have got away with it. And had Volponi not come in, leaving their tickets as the only winners, they might not have stood out like the city's Sears Tower.

Whatever transpires with this case, the trust of American punters in their tote system will take a beating. If it is officially seen as so open to abuse, punters ask, how many fraudsters have already managed to get away with it? Are similar, but more modest, scams going down all the time?

Trust, once lost, is rarely won back. American racing and its billion-dollar betting industry are now scared that the PickSix scandal may run further and faster than Secretariat himself.