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NYRA Officials Indicted

Last December, New York state police raided NYRA offices for an investigation into jockey weights. The New York Post reports this morning that NYRA officials, including suspended chief of scales Mario Sclafani, will be indicted today for falsifying jockey weights:

Sources say the indictment claims that officials failed to report the accurate weights of the jockeys before the races and lied about their weights afterward — cheating bettors out of accurate data to make well-informed wagers and allowing “people who knew of the fraud” to have a definite edge when it came to picking winners.

The sources were unable to say whether investigators uncovered hard evidence that the indicted NYRA officials profited directly from betting on “tampered” and “tainted” races.

A spokesman for Spitzer declined comment and wouldn’t reveal which officials were involved. Sources say Spitzer’s probe also targeted Sclafani’s top deputy, Braulio Baeza, a Hall of Fame jockey who won 3,140 races in a 16-year career.

More details: NYRA clerk of scales Mario Sclafani and assistant clerk of scales Braulio Baeza were indicted this afternoon in Saratoga County court on charges of falsely reporting jockey weights (Blood-Horse). The two officials, both suspended from work since January, were immediately fired by NYRA.
The 116-page indictment also names several jockeys as un-indicted co-conspirators:

The indictment alleges Sclafani and Baeza conspired with five prominent jockeys — [Jose] Santos, Robby Albarado, Herberto Castillo Jr., Ariel Smith, and Cornelio Velasquez — on 67 different occasions between June 2004 and December 2004 to allow them to ride when they weighed as much as 15 pounds over* their announced weight.

“Co-conspirator jockeys then rode horses in races and thereby caused the horses to carry in excess of five pounds over the designated weight,” the indictment alleges. “In so doing, the defendants, acting in concert with the co-conspirator jockeys, fraudulently obtained compensation from the owners for riding, and deprived bettors of hundreds of thousands of dollars by misrepresenting the jockey’s weights and thereby tricked said bettors into betting on said horses.”

According to the indictment, the jockeys (including, in addition to the five named above, Aaron Gryder, Pablo Fragoso, Jorge Chavez, and Oscar Gomez) paid Sclafani and Baeza their riding fees for the races in which their overweights were misreported.
The New York Attorney General’s office has issued a press release and the full text of the indictment.
NYRA responds to the indictment: “… NYRA has terminated the employment of former Clerk of Scales Mario Sclafani and former Assistant Clerk of Scales Braulio Baeza effective immediately. NYRA suspended Sclafani and Baeza on January 12 when the allegations first came to light and appointed Timothy D. Kelly as the Acting Clerk of Scales. Since then, the association has instituted a number of reforms, including the use of digital scales at each of its three racetracks…. In providing background to today’s announcement, NYRA President and CEO Charles E. Hayward emphasized the association’s role in initiating the investigation and its ongoing commitment to complete transparency to ensure the integrity of racing.”

Posted by JC in NY Racing Issues on 09/21/2005 @ 3:00 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter