WAY OFF COURSE
Top horse trainer has new hope to end harsh ban
On June 7, 2008, trainer Rick Dutrow stood just 1½ miles and 2½ minutes from thoroughbred racing immortality on the dirt track at Belmont Park.
Today, he can’t get inside without a ticket.
Dutrow, who steered his horse Big Brown to within one victory of racing’s Triple Crown on that longago Saturday, is seven years into an unprecedented 10-year license revocation and $50,000 fine imposed in 2011. The punishment came after three syringes were discovered in his Aqueduct Racetrack barn — an offense that usually rates a 30-to-60 day suspension.
No performance-enhancing drugs were found. The syringes held Xylazine, a commonly used drug approved for usage up to 48 hours before a race. And none of that seemed to matter.
Dutrow relied on the generosity of friends to cover the fine. But his repeated efforts to reduce his sentence or reinstate his license have yet to reach the finish line, with repeated rejections in court and a deaf ear turned by the New York State Gaming Commission.
Yet the odds are moving in his favor. New Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, at the prodding of prominent civil rights attorney Norman Siegel and the prestigious Manhattan law firm Paul, Weiss, has reopened an investigation into Dutrow’s revocation.
The suspended trainer, now 60, is armed with what his lawyers call newly discovered evidence of his innocence — a letter written last year by former Gaming Commission steward Stephen Lewandowski alleging the syringes were planted.
On Feb. 28, Dutrow’s lawyers sent Katz a letter requesting a meeting in hopes of a sentence reduction that would allow the trainer’s return without the expense and ordeal of a trial.
“Hopefully people will see that there’s been an injustice here and correct it,” said a lawyer involved in Dutrow’s defense.
While a Katz spokesperson refused to comment, several people involved in the search of Dutrow’s barn told the Daily News they were contacted by investigators in the past month.
The racing establishment paints Dutrow as a habitual cheater, pointing to 72 alleged prior violations as a pattern of behavior worthy of the double-digit ban.
“Richard E. Dutrow Jr. is a person whose conduct at racetracks in New York State and elsewhere has been improper, obnoxious, unbecoming, and detrimental to the best interests of racing,’’ reads a passage of the suspension issued by the State Racing and Wagering Board on Oct. 12, 2011.
Dutrow’s supporters, including exYankees manager Joe Torre and leading New York thoroughbred owner Michael Dubb, contend the trainer was a convenient scapegoat for a fading industry fallen on hard times.
“Rick Dutrow is one of the best horsemen who ever lived,’’ said Dubb, also a member of the New York Racing Association’s board of directors. “Racing actually needs Dutrow a lot more than he needs racing.’’ The real world says otherwise. Since his suspension began in January 2013, Dutrow is barred from making his living in the only field he knows. Security guards at all of New York’s racetracks are ordered to keep
an eye out for Dutrow, with orders to eject him on sight. Reciprocity agreements among racing commission make it a national ban.
“He’s broke, and he has nowhere else to go,’’ said Karen Murphy, one of Dutrow’s attorneys. “He has no ability to be a bank teller or run a cash register at 7-Eleven. This is all he knows.’’
Dutrow never saw the hard times coming. As Big Brown made his unsuccessful charge toward a Triple Crown, Dutrow’s irreverent personality made him a favorite of the racing media — if not the sport’s bluebloods. His tastes ran to women, partying and gambling. There was a 1988 positive test for marijuana.
The cocky Dutrow, who made a habit of taunting rival trainers with “See you in the winner’s circle,” guaranteed (and delivered) a Big Brown triumph in the Kentucky Derby.
After the syringes were found, the hearing officer’s original recommendation was a lifetime ban, subsequently slashed to 10 years and the fine. John Sabini, a former state senator and the head of the Racing and Wagering Board at the time, remains convinced the punishment fit the crime.
“Our decision stands,’’ he told The News last week. “Other than that, I’m not going to comment on the ins and outs of the case.’’
The case put Dutrow’s career on indefinite hold and reduced his finances to a shambles. He lost his home, saw his bank account dwindle to $12.50, and filed for bankruptcy. The trainer currently splits time between the Floral Park, L.I., home of his former assistant Michelle Nevin and the Saratoga home of his widowed mother Vicki.
“They took everything from this guy,’’ said Lewandowski, who kept his job safe and his mouth shut until retiring from the Gaming Commission. “They wrecked him. He has nothing, nothing. And why? What has he done to deserve this kind of punishment?”
Lewandowski said he was told by Braulio Baeza Jr., the Gaming Commission steward at the time, that the syringes were planted in Dutrow’s barn. And NYRA investigator John McDonnell, an ex-NYPD detective, told the Queens DA’s office that something seemed hinky about the search.
According to McDonnell, state
investigator Joel Levenson discovered the proverbial needle in a haystack. Three of them, in fact.
“He just opened the first desk drawer and there they were,’’ recounted McDonnell. “It was whambam-thank you-ma’am. Never in all my years as a cop did I ever get that lucky.’’
McDonnell told the DA’s office that he did not see who planted the syringes, if they were planted. Siegel said proving the case was rigged after all these years remains the legal game-changer: “That is the smoking gun.’’
Baeza, contacted by The News, initially declined comment and referred all questions to the Gaming Commission. Within 24 hours, a statement attributed to Baeza was released: “I never indicated that any evidence was planted in this case. To say otherwise intentionally misrepresents my conversations.’’
The word “never’’ was underlined. The Gaming Commission later issued its own statement saying Baeza “did not participate in the Dutrow barn search and has no personal knowledge what transpired.”
A high-ranking racing official, speaking to The News on condition of anonymity, indicated Dutrow’s suspension had as much to do with his personality as his performance as a trainer.
“I believe in large measure it’s a character and fitness issue,’’ the man said. “It’s not one particular item. At a certain point you had the straw that breaks the camel’s back.’’
The man declined to specify what, exactly, was the final straw that broke Rick Dutrow .
. . . .
At its start, the Rick Dutrow story was a feel-good tale of a troubled man overcoming adversity to achieve unexpected greatness. The high-school dropout, at age 16, took a job assisting his father Dickie Dutrow, one of the leading trainers on the Maryland circuit. The teen dabbled in pot and booze, shared a fractious and ultimately fractured relationship with his dad, and lived for a time inside a 10-by-12 tack room behind a barn at Aqueduct.
From that rocky start emerged a talented trainer with a resume of more than 1,800 wins, including victories in the Woodward Stakes, the Met Mile, the Breeders Cup Classic and the two 2008 Triple Crown gems with Big Brown: The Derby and Preakness.
He lived in a $2 million mansion in Muttontown on Long Island’s wealthy North Shore, purchased in part with the winnings of a $160,000 bet on the Dutrow-trained Saint Liam in the 2005 Breeder’s Cup Classic. The horse tested clean after his profitable one-length victory.
As for the 72 violations on the Dutrow ledger, 31 were duplicates of the same infraction. Many of the rest were for paperwork and procedural errors. None were for administering illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
But Dutrow’s record was not spotless. There were several “overages’’ of legal, therapeutic medications, along with a single positive test for Butorphanol, a painkiller legally permitted for use in New York up to 96 hours before a race.
A trace amount of the drug turned up in the urine of Fastus Cactus, who won a claiming race at Aqueduct on Nov. 20, 2010 — 13 days after the syringes were discovered in Dutrow’s barn. The horse was disqualified, and the trainer suspended for 60 days. With the 30-day suspension for the syringes, Dutrow expected to return after three months away from the track.
Yet the case somehow morphed into something bigger between the day of the race and Oct. 12, 2011, when the decadelong sentence was imposed.
“This is a horrific story, such a miscarriage of justice,’’ Cerda said. “Rick did nothing to deserve this kind of punishment.’’
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By 2017, Dutrow faced $1.7 million in debts and filed for bankruptcy. He was forced to abandon the house purchased a dozen years earlier courtesy of the bet on Saint Liam. He owns no car, just his cellphone and the clothes on his back. He still rises every day at dawn, only to find no horses to train.
“I got nothing anymore,” he said. “Nothing but hope.’’
Part of Rick’s charm remains the child-like nature of his personality. Before Dutrow first met with attorney Karen Murphy in October 2015, she provided him with a detailed to-do list on how to take the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station. She arrived at their Manhattan meeting spot to find Dutrow chatting amiably with a homeless man.
“The two of them were talking as if they had known each other for years,’’ she recalled. “I think that’s why he’s such a great horseman. He has an incredible gift for communication with people and animals.’’
He’s not too bad with lawyers, either. Dutrow called Siegel, once the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, after watching an HBO documentary where the attorney helped acquit an accused murderer. Siegel is working pro bono on the case.
“Not everything is about money,” said Siegel. “It’s about doing the right thing.”
Back during Belmont Week 2008, Dutrow mused about his rise to the pinnacle of his profession.
“I started out at the very lowest level you can be at in this game, and I was happy then,’’ he said. “If all this is taken away from me, I’d still be happy because I’d be trying to get it all back again.’’
Twelve years later, Rick Dutrow just might get that chance.