Anyone who wants to know how truly messed up New York racing is must read this New York Times article on Yonkers Raceway, which
Despite running no races since June, when it closed to install video lottery terminals and make some renovations … continues to be paid millions of dollars a year from four Off Track Betting Corporations in the state, including $3 million from the corporation operated by New York City alone.
This arrangement makes, as readers might expect, no sense from any angle.
Friends of New York Racing is out with its final report that calls for just this sort of nonsense to disappear. The organization, headed by former NTRA commissioner Tim Smith, proposes a complete restructuring:
FONYR wants the state to completely rewrite its racing law to not only make it less complex and burdensome, but also to permit any entity — for profit, not-for-profit, and joint ventures that could include off-track betting corporations — to bid on the franchise. Smith said the law should make the bidding “permissive and wide open.”
The group said the 2006 changes in the law should also expand account wagering to include Internet wagering; some sort of customer loyalty programs, such as rebates; and to cut the pari-mutuel industry’s tax burden. Additionally, the group said the state should legalize video lottery terminals at Belmont. (A 2001 law forbids VLTs at Belmont and Saratoga.) The report also calls for consolidation into a single state agency to do the work of several agencies that now oversee lotteries, casinos, and racing.
In the longer term, which the group defines as much as two years out, Smith said the competing parties must come to a resolution after several decades of the “OTB situation” –the OTB parlors and racetracks are separate entities. The state, FNYR concluded, needs to restructure the current law that has led to fierce infighting between the tracks and OTB corporations.
It will be interesting to see what influence FONYR has in the coming year. I’m skeptical, but a correspondent quite knowledgeable about New York racing has written to say, “I believe Tim Smith is working magic behind closed doors. I am convinced he’s showing how useless the OTB system is, and that even though they generate a lot of money, it’s operated in a defeating manner.” Maybe …
Posted by JC in NY Racing Issues on 12/13/2005 @ 9:35 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
Yet another lawyer for Wayne Gertmenian claims that the checks the former Jockeys’ Guild president cashed the day he was fired were for money owed to him, reports Liz Mullen in the Sports Business Journal: “It was back pay and it was owed to him under his contract,” said attorney Mark Werksman. Guild lawyer Barry Broad alleges that not only did Gertmenian cash the checks without permission, but that he ran off with Guild memorabilia, including Bill Shoemaker’s boots and a bust of Eddie Arcaro. “We would like our money back,” Broad said. “We would also like Willie Shoemaker’s boots and Eddie Arcaro’s head back.”
The ongoing scandal is recapped in a lengthy LA Times article today. There’s not much new information (I’m assuming anyone landing on this site has a passing knowledge of the story), except for this bit:
Pepperdine, where Gertmenian, 66, is a longtime economics professor, is investigating questions about his resume. In an October hearing, U.S. representatives ridiculed his claim that he worked on U.S.-Soviet relations for the National Security Council during the Nixon and Ford administrations, while another organization told The Times that Gertmenian’s claim that he had served on its board of directors was false.
Looking for the link to Gertmenian’s resume (here), I came across this article from the Thoroughbred Times in 2001, when Gertmenian was brought into the Guild, which makes several familiar points about the fired president and his consulting company, Matrix Capital Associates:
Matrix is run out of Gertmenian’s Monrovia, California, home, Gaston said…. Matrix associates will not answer questions about its operation, Gaston said, and the company has been forced to put a “lockdown on the media” and others in the Thoroughbred industry because Gertmenian and Matrix employees and their families have been harassed….
Gertmenian’s resume on the Pepperdine Web site states that he held governmental positions during the Watergate era. In the 1975 Congressional Directory, he was listed as a special assistant to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in ’74. President Richard M. Nixon’s former HUD Secretary, James T. Lynn, said that he did not remember Gertmenian. Nor did HUD Deputy Secretary James Mitchell or Northwestern University professor Donald Haider, a former White House fellow who worked closely with Lynn and Mitchell….
Gertmenian’s resume states that he functioned as chief detente negotiator in Moscow for the head of the National Security Council and as an emissary to Tehran for the secretary of commerce, but those duties could not be confirmed. John Stempel, Ph.D., director of the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky, spent 24 years in the United States Foreign Service focusing on political and economic affairs in Africa, India, and Iran. From July 1975 through the summer of 1979, three months after the Iranian revolution, Stempel served in Tehran as the deputy chief of the political section for the State Department and was acting political consul.
Stempel said that most of the files for the U.S. Iranian embassy had been sealed and that seeking information that might be contained in those files would be “pretty hard.” He said, however, that if Gertmenian had been in Tehran during the years he served there he would have known him. “I can guarantee you he never showed up in Tehran as an emissary of anybody,” Stempel said….
Gertmenian’s statement that he serves on the board of directors of AmRus Life Insurance Co., a firm that is not listed with the California Department of Insurance, also could not be verified.
I am flabbergasted. How did this man manage to assume the Guild’s presidency and operate without much oversight for the past four years with this much stinking about his background from the start? Should there have been questions about Guild operations long before the October congressional hearings forced the matter?
Posted by JC in Jockeys' Insurance on 12/13/2005 @ 9:30 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
