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In the village of Bellewstown, about 15 miles north of Dublin, Ireland, they still talk about what Barney Curley did back in 1975. It all happened during a horse race on the Hill of Crockafotha. It was just an amateur jockey race on a lazy summer day in a sleepy, remote town; it wasn’t meant to be anything special. The last thing anyone expected was to witness the making of history.

The race in question occurred on 26 June 1975. Barney Curley⁠—our protagonist, if you could call him that⁠—owned one of the horses running later that day. But at the racecourse, as preparations were being made, Curley was nowhere to be seen. And not because he wasn’t in attendance⁠—it was because he was taking great pains to stay out of sight. If the trackside bookmakers caught wind that he was at Bellewstown that day, or if they discovered that he was the owner of one of the horses, they would be on full alert, and take precautions with the wagers and odds. Curley had earned a reputation in horse racing circles⁠—he was known to engage in some gambling shenanigans from time to time. But the shenanigan he was planning that day was his most ambitious to date, hands-down.

As the spectators placed their wagers and settled in around the edge of the track for a pleasant afternoon of laid back horse racing, Curley was concealed in the thicket of gorse shrubs in the center section of the oval-shaped track. This particular infield wasn’t ideal for human occupation, it was all dust and thorns. Nevertheless he stood in his trademark felt fedora, shrouded by tall shrubbery, far from the other spectators, a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes.

In the distance the loudspeaker announced, “They’re off!” Curley tugged his hat down tight over his bald head as if he could hide inside of it, and peered through his field glasses toward the rumble of horse hooves. In the next five minutes, if everything went according to plan, all of Barney Curley’s considerable money troubles would be over. If the plan went sideways⁠—if his animal was not up to the task, or there was one inopportune stumble⁠—he would be utterly ruined.

His full name was Bernard Joseph Curley, but everyone just called him Barney. Born in 1939, he was one of six children born to Kathleen and Charlie Curley in Northern Ireland. Even as a lad he was a bit of a gambler. He got his first taste when his grandmother started slipping him 2 shillings to take to the bookmakers in town. He was always instructed to place a wager on Bill Rickerby, granny’s favorite horse jockey. Placing bets with bookies was not strictly legal at the time, but there was a long tradition of looking the other way.

Barney’s father Charlie was also a gambler, though his preferred creature of speed was the greyhound. The elder Curley raised and trained his own dogs, and he entered them into various racing circuits around Ireland. Old man Charlie Curley came to be known by his contemporaries as “Yellow Sam.” Some said that “yellow” referred to his dad’s sallow complexion, but unbeknownst to Barney, it probably had more to do with his dad’s inclination for cheating. The elder Curley had learned of a pharmaceutical tablet that could be fed to a dog shortly before a race to induce a bout of sluggishness, a practice disapprovingly known in the business as “stopping.” Yellow Sam put genuine effort into raising swift greyhounds, but whenever one of them earned fair odds to win an upcoming match, he’d adulterate the dog’s food with a stopping tablet, and quietly place a big bet against his own animal. It was almost as lucrative as an honest living, for a time.

Eventually Yellow Sam produced a legitimately impressive greyhound, one he christened with an unfortunate name. It was a word that was⁠—and continues to be⁠—regional slang for a cigarette: he was called The Fag. In a race in 1955, the greyhound performed so well that he became a clear favorite for another race coming up in Belfast. The day of the race, the bleachers were crowded with thousands of spectators, many of them with money riding on that fine dog. The bell rang, the hounds poured out. But the crowd favorite was lethargic, failing to approach his previously observed velocity. He was among the last to cross the finish line. It was a clear case of animal tampering. Thousands of disgruntled spectators began stomping on the bleachers, and a chant of “Out! Out!” filled the arena. Unprepared for the magnitude of the indignation, when it was time to collect the animal, Yellow Sam said to 15-year-old Barney, “You go up and get the dog.”

When Barney entered the race office, they told him, “Send your father up,” waving away his claim that his father’s whereabouts were unknown. Barney returned after a time with Yellow Sam, and the race official told him, “As long as your name is what it is, you’ll never run a dog here again.” The Curleys collected the adulterated animal, and departed with their metaphorical tails between their legs.

On another occasion, Yellow Sam gave Barney a small parcel of meat. He instructed his son to visit the kennels and feed it to a particular dog⁠—one who happened to be a well-performing animal that would be racing later in the day. Wise to his father’s underhanded ways, Barney took the parcel, went to the kennels, and fed the morsel to a wastebasket. He then went to the bookmaker and put down a wager for that dog to win. Barney Curley went home £12 richer that day⁠—equivalent to about $500 USD these days. Old Yellow Sam was furious that the drug hadn’t properly stopped the dog, and he stormed out of the house and down the road to the pharmacist to give him hell for the faulty formulation. Young Barney never told his father that he’d pulled a fast one.

Bad luck and bad choices eventually drove Yellow Sam deep into debt. He was desperate for cash. He owned a greyhound that he had been slowing with his tablets for months, with plans to stop the stopping once the animal’s grade was sufficiently low. Now was the time. He secured the dog a place in an upcoming race, and bet big on his freshly sober greyhound. When the race began, the animal pulled ahead of the pack, soaring, then stumbling, tumbling, and collapsing into a motionless heap. The fall had broken the dog’s spine. Curley’s father trudged down the track to gather the lifeless dog, tears in his eyes. “The party’s over, Barney,” he said, “I’ve played my joker and lost.”

In 1956, to earn money to settle the family debts, Yellow Sam and 16-year-old Barney journeyed to England to find work. They took on jobs at a plastics factory⁠—the Petrochemicals Industrial Estate in Urmston. It took 18 months of grueling double shifts to earn enough to break even. “It was strangely fulfilling,” Curley later said. “It made me realize how much I’d been pampered.”

Upon returning home from England, Barney Curley declared his intention to enlist in the seminary. This was a sensible career path for a young man at the time, and preferable to more manual labor. He began the 13-year commitment to become an ordained Jesuit priest, but his career in the cloth was cut short when he collapsed on a soccer field. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Priests sent him to the Catholic section of the local sanatorium. Nurses placed him in a horizontal orientation and injected him with massive daily doses of the newfangled antibacterial streptomycin. Nine months later, he was deemed well enough to go home, though it was another two years before he could function normally again. It was around that time, aged 22, that he went bald as a coot. But he didn’t seem to mind, he just started wearing a fedora everywhere he went. There is a saying in Ireland: “Wisdom is the comb given to a man after he has lost his hair.” The Irish are known for their fondness of folksy sayings.

Having survived his brush with death, Curley attempted to resume his professional religious training. But he found the program too taxing; he had not yet regained his mental and physical endurance. When he dropped out of the program, no one faulted him.

As a gift to himself for surviving tuberculosis, Curley bought a shiny new luxury car: a Ford Zephyr. The payments turned out to be more than he could afford, so he went to the supermarket and bought a great quantity of Gillette razor blades. The razors available in Curley’s region⁠—Northern Ireland⁠—were higher quality and less expensive than their counterparts in the Republic of Ireland to the south. The Zephyr was a big car with big doors, and he found that if he pulled off the interior door panels, he could hide a lot of razor-blade packets in those cavities. He was shrewd enough to avoid visiting the same border crossings too often, and he timed his visits with major pretext events such as football matches. After passing a cursory customs inspection, he’d drive to local shops, pop off the door cards, and sell the blades for pounds on the shilling. He’d then try to multiply his smuggling profits by visiting the bookmakers and betting on the races, with mixed results.

At that point in his gambling career, Curley had always been a “punter”⁠—the person placing the wagers. He decided to try his hand at being a “layer,” or bookmaker. The profession had been legalized in recent years. With his smuggling and gambling profits, he opened up some betting shops, and took up a position alongside other small-time layers at Celtic Park racecourse. He erected his large bookmaker board on a stretch known as “Murder Mile,” so named for the expected financial fate of anyone brave enough to place a wager there. As Curley himself put it, “It was reckoned every hoodlum in the country was there making a book and any unsuspecting punter would get murdered⁠—metaphorically, of course.” Curley learned a lot in the bookmaking business, foremost the fact that he himself was not cut out for it. After running at a loss most days for six months, he concluded that no one man can be both a punter and a layer. It was a fool’s errand. He sold his shops and retired his bookmaker board.

Soon thereafter, for reasons even Curley himself didn’t understand, a local showband called The Claxton implored him to be their manager. Showbands were an Irish phenomenon in the 1950s and ‘60s, large bands playing maudlin music for slow dancing. Curley declined, but they couldn’t seem to let the idea go. They kept asking him to take the reins. He thought the band members must be “a penny short of the full shilling” to pursue a man with no experience in the music business to be their manager. But eventually he relented.

The Claxton was moderately successful, touring dance halls around Ireland, but Curley felt there was untapped potential. He culled and cultivated members to reshape The Claxton into a smaller and tighter showband, and the newly formed group was called The Polka Dots. The remodeled band soon started filling dance halls to capacity, and in 1967 they hit the British Top 20 singles chart with the song “Five Little Fingers.” Money was pouring in, and Curley’s nights filled up with parties and drugs⁠—quite a pivot from the seminary a few years earlier. The band’s equipment vans also provided an excellent hiding place for Michelin brand automobile tires. Owing to certain economic forces, one could purchase new Michelin tires for £4 apiece in the North, and sell them for £10 in the Republic. But as the band flirted with fame, they started demanding larger and larger percentages of profits from venues. The dance halls had little choice but to pay the share they couldn’t afford, and over time they succumbed to neglect and disrepair, eventually becoming insolvent. The gravy train ground to a halt. “It was a classic case of slaying the golden goose,” Curley would later recall.

Looking at the wreckage of his brief career in band management, Curley decided to quit all of that irresponsible silliness, and become a professional gambler. His father was against the idea, but as an Irish person might tell you: “You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your father was.” By this time, Curley was married, with a child on the way, so it was a risky pivot. His father’s pharmacist, the same man who produced the stopping tablets for Yellow Sam’s greyhounds, told him, “‘Barney, please. Don’t be mad. Don’t be a fool. You’re crazy. Nobody has done it, and you’re not going to be the first. Forget about it.”

Nevermind the naysayers, Curley was intent to make a career out of punting. He still had connections in the bookie business. He had also purchased a pub, which gave him access to tongues loosened by drink. He learned to pay attention to rumors and routines. He’d show up at racecourses and place big bets, winning slightly more often than losing. By the early 1970s, Curley was regularly traveling to the Republic to bet on the greyhounds and horses. On one occasion, he left with £700 in his pocket, and after three days of wagers, he returned with more than £50,000. Between the gambling and the smuggling, it was a lucrative yet turbulent scheme.

One night on his way home from the races, as Curley stopped at the border crossing station, the officer posted there warned him not to go back into Northern Ireland. “You don’t want to be going over there,” he told Curley. “If you do, it’s at your own peril. They’re expecting trouble.” The “trouble” the officer alluded to was the “The Troubles,” a long-simmering political disagreement in Ireland that frequently boiled over into violence. That’s an oversimplification, but anything would be. As Curley considered the officer’s advice, gunshots rang out. The officer hissed at Curley to turn off his car headlights, and to keep his head down. He crouched in his car as bullets occasionally ricocheted around him. He credited the officer with saving his life that day.

When a small bomb exploded in his neighborhood, Curley decided to retire from the smuggling business, and move south to a safer part of Ireland, further from the front lines of the Troubles. He resettled his family in the quieter countryside in the Republic, and began a new pursuit⁠—raising and training his own thoroughbred racehorses. He acquired a stable, and secured the assistance of a seasoned horse trainer named Liam Brennan. As Curley acquired horses, Brennan prepared the creatures for a life of racing, while also preparing Curley for a life of racehorse ownership. One of the most important lessons he taught Curley was to stay tight-lipped regarding his horses⁠—keep his business to his business. Information is advantage.

With his new venture raising racehorses, and his previous experience in bookie shops, Curley made connections on both sides of the racing business. His informational edge gradually sharpened, and he used it as often as he could. In bookmaking, there is a term for when someone wins based on insider insights or maneuvering: it is referred to as a “coup.” Despite some big losses mixed in with the big wins, Curley spent years earning a reputation as one who flirted with horse gambling coups, and trackside bookmakers began to get nervous whenever he appeared in person at an event in his felt fedora. It became rational to presuppose that something was afoot if Barney Curley was at the track, and eyes were askance at any horse saddled with a Curley wager.

Despite his better-than-average betting record, by the summer of 1975, a succession of missteps left Barney Curley £30,000 in outstanding debt to the bookies⁠—about $380,000 in modern USD. This wasn’t a particularly large sum among his usual wagers, but, as Curley put it, £30,000 was a considerable amount when you couldn’t get your hands on it. His debts were about double his net worth. He knew that if he failed to pay in full within a few months, black marks from bookie shops would spell the death of his gambling career.

Curley consulted with his horse trainer Liam Brennan about the predicament. What they needed was an extraordinary animal that could dominate a race, but they knew that none of their animals met that description. Well then, if they couldn’t bring the horse to the race, they’d have to bring the race to the horse. Together, Curley and Brennan scrutinized upcoming race listings, looking at variables such as location, time of year, turf firmness, hurdles versus flat, racecourse infrastructure, and jockey availability. They cross-referenced this information with their roster of horses, looking at past performance, handicaps, and unusual traits. Slowly a potential plan began to materialize. It would require a crew of about half a dozen, with another 12 “generals” scattered around Ireland organizing hundreds of isolated foot soldiers.

The race they ultimately identified as the ideal venue was the Amateur Riders Handicap in the remote village of Bellewstown⁠—a low-stakes race on a lazy summer day, filled with Guinness and family activities. For their jockey, Curley and Brennan enlisted the appropriately named Michael Furlong⁠—one of the most skilled amateur jockeys in the region. And the horse they selected, upon which the entire plan hinged, was an unremarkable, middle-of-the-pack brown gelding. In the few races the horse had run so far, he had never placed better than eighth. “In all honesty,” Curley later recalled, “he was one of the worst horses I’ve ever owned.” The horse happened to be called Yellow Sam. Curley arranged for Yellow Sam to race in Bellewstown.

Back at his house at Wicklow, Curley sequestered himself in his office. He began writing down the names of every person in Ireland he thought he could trust. He hung paper maps on his office walls, and marked each name’s corresponding location⁠—Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick.

“I was like a recluse as I sat in my little room at the Boswell Stud with my maps and my lists,” Curley said later. “I spent hour upon hour, over many weeks, poring over my lists and maps, striking names out if I wasn’t sure about them, to make sure I had the best possible team. It was not that I feared they would be traitors; just that too many men cannot be charged with keeping a secret. It was vital that no one broke the line.” He chipped away at the list until just a dozen well-connected and trustworthy names remained. These would be his field generals.

Curley withdrew everything from all of his bank accounts, scraping up every shilling to his name. He called in a few debts owed to him by friends and neighbors, and presumably upturned the couch cushions. Another of those Irish sayings: “If it’s drowning you’re after, don’t torment yourself with shallow water.” All told, he put together £15,300. He met with each of his generals one-on-one, handed each a stack of cash, and conveyed the part of the plan he needed them to understand: Reach out to about 25 people you can trust, give each man £50 to £300, plus a little more for their trouble, and tell them to be ready to visit a betting shop to make a wager on Wednesday, 26 June. And don’t mention Barney Curley.

A week and a half before the Bellewstown race, Curley walked into a bookie shop owned by a fellow called Sean Graham, one of the largest and most influential bookmakers in all of Ireland. Despite being rivals in many ways, Curley and Graham had a friendly history, and mutual respect. Curley described Graham as “the greatest bookmaker that I have seen in my career,” a mixed compliment if there ever was one. In any case, Curley knew that if Graham caught wind of his plans, the whole caper would be banjaxed. “I’ve hit a brick wall, Sean,” he told Graham, “I’m going to do something in about ten days time, and I want you not to interfere. You’ll have to give me your word you’ll not tell a soul.”

“Listen,” Graham said, “if you do any of my betting shops, I’ll hang you.”

On the hot summer morning of race day⁠—26 June 1975⁠—Barney Curley climbed into his red Jaguar and began the 50-mile drive to Bellewstown. On the way, about an hour before the race was scheduled to start, he stopped at a phone booth and dialed each of his generals. He said to them, “Right, the name of the horse is Yellow Sam. On you go.” The men had been instructed to call specific people in their networks, who in turn would call others, to get word to the 300 or so footsoldiers on the streets. The footsoldiers’ responsibility was to go to bookmaker shops in major cities, and put inconspicuous wagers on Yellow Sam. Sean Graham’s betting shops were not to be among those visited.

Meanwhile, Curley drove to the house of a friend who lived somewhat closer Bellewstown, a woman called Ann Brogan. He accepted a cup of tea, and asked her if she could drive him to the Bellewstown track in her motorcar. He didn’t want anyone to recognize his big, flashy red Jaguar. She was happy to oblige. As they approached the venue, rather than joining the crowd, he asked Brogan to drive him to the seldom-visited far side of the track. Being a good sport, she parked around back, and they snuck into the infield to view the race surreptitiously.

The Bellewstown track was a left-handed course, oval-shaped, with 13 flights of hurdles. It was about 2.25 miles of turf, or 3.6 kilometers. It was one of the oldest horse racing tracks in Ireland, with records dating back to 1726. King George III had sponsored a race there in 1780, His Majesty’s Plate, valued at £100.

In amateur races, it was typical for the jockey to get his first look at his horse just before riding it. When Yellow Sam’s jockey Michael Furlong entered the staging area, his first impression of Yellow Sam was one of disappointment. The plain brown gelding was not very muscular, on the large side, but not in a good way. Horseracing uses a handicap system to try to even the odds⁠—lead weights are added to horses’ saddles, with the most weight on the fastest horse. Race officials had given Yellow Sam a very light handicap based on past performance. “This horse couldn’t win a dog race,” Furlong thought to himself.

Curley’s horse trainer Liam Brennan helped Furlong into the saddle. “Look,” Brennan told him, “don’t be too far back. But if you’re happy with the pace, you can increase it.” Furlong was deeply skeptical, the animal was clearly nothing special. Nevertheless, as they walked side by side on their way to the race starting point, Brennan told Furlong, “This fella will win.”

“He can’t!” Furlong said, looking at the horse’s bulky build and slight handicap. “He’s not good enough.”

“He will,” Brennan said.

Curley and Brennan’s plan to make a slow horse win a real race was based upon an intersection of five unlikely circumstances:

Number one: In all of his races to date, conditions had been stacked against Yellow Sam. When races require horses to jump over obstacles such as hurdles, most horses perform best in what is known as “heavy ground,” where the soil under the turf is moist and springy. But during training, Curley and Brennan had observed that Yellow Sam was an exception⁠—he was faster with hurdles when the ground was dry and hard. And notoriously moist Ireland happened to be having a rare dry spell.

Number two: Many of Yellow Sam’s previous races had been at high-profile racecourses, where the best performing horses tended to compete. This created a contrast that made the gelding seem slower than he really was. His best performance to date⁠—eighth place out of 17⁠—had been at a major track against serious competition on heavy ground.

Number three: Yellow Sam’s light handicap would contribute to a more favorable “starting price” (SP) from the bookies⁠—the amount a wagerer’s money would be multiplied in the event of a win. If the winning horse had a starting price of 4-to-1, for example, a £10 wager would become £40. The larger the gap, the bigger the potential payoff. Owing to Yellow Sam’s previous performance, Curley was hoping for an SP of 12-to-1, which would win him a cool £183,600 if Yellow Sam placed first. If the animal failed, either by underperforming or taking a fall, Barney Curley would be destitute. His wife Maureen never asked about his gambling, so she was unaware of the perilous wager.

Number four: The summer race at Bellewstown was a low-key event; many of the attendees were just there for the fresh air, a pint, and family activities. As a consequence, the horses sent to race at Bellewstown tended not to be top-tier specimens; the best horses stayed home to rest.

And lastly, number five: Bellewstown race track was remote and seldom used, and the only working communication with the rest of the world was a single public telephone booth. The usual routine was for the bookie shops in town to exchange phone calls with their trackside counterparts to report all betting activity. Based on the risk indicated by incoming wagers, trackside bookies could adjust horses’ starting prices right up until the moment the race began⁠—the moment known as “the off”.

About half an hour before the race was to begin, a strapping fellow called Benny O’Hanlon entered the phone booth, picked up the handset, and inserted a coin. Soon passersby could hear him loudly lamenting his dear aunt. She was evidently on her hospital death bed at the other end of the line. A line of people began to form outside the phone booth door. “Oh dear,” the growing queue of would-be phone users heard him say, “She’s taken a turn for the worse again!”

The waiting bookmakers sympathized with O’Hanlon’s plight⁠—at first. As the phone call dragged on for 10, 15 minutes, and O’Hanlon fed coins to the insatiable machine, his aunt interminably wavered near the mortal precipice⁠—on the mend one moment, then setting a foot in the grave the next. The bookies became increasingly exasperated, ailing aunt be damned. At 20 minutes, O’Hanlon and the booth were surrounded by testy gesticulations. Without the data from the shops, the bookmakers would be unable to maximize their own profits at the expense of the betting public. It ticked along to 25 minutes.

In cities across Ireland, bookmakers attempted to relay their liabilities to Bellewstown, including an unexpected last-minute uptick in wagers on a ho-hum horse called Yellow Sam. But all they got was an earful of busy signal⁠—or the “engaged tone” in the regional dialect.

Back at Bellewstown, at 3 o’clock, the loudspeaker crackled in the distance with the announcer’s voice: “They’re off!” Nine horses galloped from the starting line with their jockeys astride, the hoofbeats like distant thunder. O’Hanlon hung up the phone, opened the booth door, and walked away, job done. God rest her soul. The phone began ringing immediately.

Curley and Brogan watched with binoculars from their vantage point in the gorse shrubs, the announcer’s voice attenuated by distance. Yellow Sam and Furlong were near the middle of the pack, as was the horse’s habit. After jumping several hurdles, Furlong evidently decided to push the button, because Yellow Sam began to surge ahead. As Curley contemplated the fate of his £15,300, his boyhood memory of his father’s stumbling greyhound was likely in the forefront of his mind.

Curley watched the initial acceleration, but as the pack of horses rumbled past his hiding spot, and he peered through his binoculars, he realized there was a flaw in his plan to hide in the infield: Once the horses passed, he was unable to see which horse was in the lead. The view was eclipsed by the horses trailing behind, and a cloud of dust.

On the track, amid the hoofbeats and panting horse breaths, Furlong was surprised by this newly awakened Yellow Sam. The animal sailed over the hurdles with horse-like majesty. The steed landed each hurdle without missing a beat. Furlong pressed his advantage, and the veil of mediocrity slipped, revealing an almost competent thoroughbred, unencumbered by leaden weights, moist soil, or a guilty conscience. Grassy clods churned behind them as they approached a velocity that would have been respectable at a mainstream racing event. Yellow Sam didn’t need to be phenomenal, he just needed to be slightly better than the middling horses that he was starting to leave behind⁠—horses called things like Silver Road, High and Mighty, and Gerties Beauty.

At 5 minutes and 51 seconds, Curley and Brogan could see that the race was over, but it was impossible to see which horse had claimed victory. “I wasn’t absolutely sure,” Curley later recalled, “so we dashed across the racetrack, back into the car and drove round to the entrance.”

In the spectator area, the dispersing crowd was gobsmacked. One fellow recognized Curley, and said to him knowingly, “Well done, Barney.” Yellow Sam had cleared the 13th and final flight of hurdles with a lead of two and a half lengths, much to the bewilderment of spectators and bookmakers. Yellow Sam and Michael Furlong had done it, and it wasn’t even a close one. Yellow Sam’s starting price hung there on the bookmakers’ boards: they hadn’t been giving odds of 12-to-1 as Curley had originally hoped. It was 20-to-1, almost double the hoped-for payoff.

As is custom, Furlong trotted the winning horse to the parade ring alongside the track. But there was a burgeoning commotion. The shops in town had finally gotten through on the phone, and the scale of what had just unfolded was beginning to be understood. Indignant bookmakers pressed their way into the parade ring, airing slobbery grievances. Ordinarily jockeys would return to the locker room with their saddles for the “weigh in,” to ensure there had been no tampering with the handicap weights, then they would shower, change into street clothing, and head out. Brennan made his way through the crowd to Furlong and suggested conspiratorially, “You just weigh in now, don’t bother changing. And go.” Furlong was mystified, but did as he was told.

Ann Brogan drove Curley back to her house, where they had another cup of tea. She lent him £5 for gas money⁠—he was dead broke until he collected his winnings⁠—and he went on his way home for supper. Curley was not the type to celebrate, so he had a bite and went to bed. He said to his wife Maureen, “We’ve had a touch.” He slept like a baby.

The following day, Furlong saw a photo of himself riding Yellow Sam on the front page of The Sporting Life newspaper, with the headline, “Biggest SP job ever landed in Ireland ⁠⁠— Yellow Sam at 20-1!” This was how he discovered he had been drafted in Curley’s coup.

A few bookmakers balked at paying out the winnings, but Curley hadn’t broken any laws, and no individual shop was on the hook for more than a few thousand pounds, so they begrudgingly complied. The spiteful proprietors handed over the winnings in large sacks filled with crumpled £1 notes. A friend advised Curley to not take the cash home, his caper had been too high profile. “There were people there who would cut your throat for £1,000,” Curley later recalled, “never mind the money we had.” So Curley rented a hotel room, assembled his generals, and the crew spent several days flattening, sorting, counting, and stacking tens of thousands of banknotes. When it was all accounted for, they had about £300,000⁠—equivalent to about $3.6 million in modern USD.

For Curley’s generals, he paid them about £1,200 each. For Michael Furlong, an amateur jockey who was not eligible to be paid in cash, Curley handed over the keys to a new, white BMW⁠—one that would handily win a dog race. To his friend and former betting shop employee Benny O’Hanlon, for his one-time, one-man dramatic performance at the Bellewstown phone booth theater, an undisclosed cash sum. With the money that remained, Curley paid off his debts, and had plenty to spare. He would later recall, “I had no qualms whatsoever about it. I wish I could do it again. It was there to be done–and it worked.” It also worked out well for the bookmaker Sean Graham, who knew what part of a gift horse one mustn’t inspect, and used Curley’s loose lips as intelligence in his own lucrative wagers.

A few days after the race, Curley received a phone call. It was his father. He’d read about what happened with his nicknamesake in the newspaper.

“I see you had a ‘touch’?” his father said.

“I did.”

“Did you get paid?”

“I did.”

“That’s what matters.”

They never spoke of the Bellewstown race again.

Racing officials increased Yellow Sam’s handicap for subsequent races, and bookmakers adjusted their starting prices. The animal finally met his true destiny⁠—he became a humdrum, mediocre, middle-of-the-pack horse. He remained so for the rest of his racing days.

As the details of Curley’s caper spread through the local media and amid gambling circles, the events of 26 June 1975 in Bellewstown came to be known as the Yellow Sam Betting Coup. Barney Curley became something of a folk hero in Ireland for getting the best of the bookies. Yet this was not the last noteworthy shenanigan in Barney Curley’s storied life. On one occasion, when he was moving to a new home, rather than selling his sprawling Georgian mansion, he set up a raffle where it was the grand prize. This earned him several times the estate’s value in ticket sales. Unfortunately he had failed to acquire a license for the sweepstake. He was arrested, then released on probation after agreeing to donate £5,000 of his ill-gotten gains to a local charity. He was also suspected to be the architect of several other major gambling coups over the years, though he mostly stayed out of the spotlight, and none of his subsequent undertakings were as spectacular as the Yellow Sam flimflam.

In his later years, Curley developed a more philanthropic philosophy. In 1995, after his son died in an automobile accident, Curley honored his son’s memory by founding Direct Aid For Africa (DAFA), an organization that funds schools and hospitals in Zambia. Curley later chronicled his life of haps and mishaps in an autobiography titled Giving a Little Back.

On 29 June 2005, race officials at Bellewstown hosted the Seamus Murphy Yellow Sam Hurdle, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the coup. Curley, then 65 years old, was in attendance, wearing his trademark felt fedora, along with Liam Brennan. Curley was in the spectator area rather than hiding in the gorse shrubs⁠—he had no horse in this race. The crowd greeted the folk heroes with warm applause. Sadly, Benny O’Hanlon was not available to reprise his role as grieving telephony nephew⁠—he had passed away some years earlier. As they say in Ireland: “Do not resent growing old, many are denied the privilege.”

Speaking of sayings, there is another one that goes, “May misfortune follow you the rest of your life, and never catch up.” It never did quite catch up with Barney Curley. He lived a life of tumult, but mostly prosperity, right up to his passing on 23 May 2021, at a ripe age of 81, passing peacefully at his home near Newmarket. He is survived by Direct Aid For Africa, which continues to support the underprivileged people of Zambia.

The telephone booth at Bellewstown racecourse still stands to this day, one of the few phone booths remaining in the Western world. Inside is a plaque memorializing the Yellow Sam Betting Coup. It reads, in part, “Yellow Sam, the greatest gamble in racing history.”

There once was a man called Curley
Whose phone friend was loyal and burly
His slow horse went runny
He made lots of money
And the bookies were understandably surly

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