It is Kentucky Derby week...and thoughts have a way of wandering back in time to the greats of the sport. To what was. To what could have been. Especially to the killing of one of the Country's Greatest Racehorses and Sires,
Alydar.
With Laura Bush joking about BushCo "milking" a male horse (and our country of it's future), thoughts go to another dishonest Texan, J.T. Lundy, who "milked" the life and death of this great horse for his own monetary gain.
Skip Hollandsworth wrote in the Texas Monthly on this sad horse tale(tail) of greed, avarice, the death of a beloved champion and the complete financial ruin of one of the greatest farms in our country's history, Calumet.
He was a beautiful, proud thoroughbred, headstrong and demanding, the kind of horse who would snort impatiently if he decided the grooms were not paying him enough attention. Each day, his oak- paneled stall was swept, mopped, and replenished with fresh straw. His richly colored chestnut coat was constantly brushed. For his daily exercise sessions, he was taken to his own three-acre paddock, where he could frolic alone in perfectly tended bluegrass.His name was Alydar. To sports fans, he was known for the thrilling duels he staged with his rival, Affirmed, for the 1978 Triple Crown. But to the world's wealthiest horse breeders, he was revered for a different reason altogether. Alydar was one of the greatest sires in Thoroughbred history--a 1,200-pound genetic wonder whose offspring often became champion racehorses themselves. Each spring, the breeders would come with their convoys of horse trailers to Kentucky's Calumet Farm, one of the country's premier horse-racing operations, willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have Alydar mount their finest mares.
It was difficult for Kentucky horse people to believe that such a calamity could have happened. A few of them quietly said they were haunted by the strange circumstances of Alydar's death. A foreman from the stallion barn, for instance, couldn't remember Alydar having ever kicked anything hard enough to do any damage to his leg. And it was difficult to understand how even a powerful horse could have kicked that solid oak door with enough force to knock it off its hinges. Yet there was never an official investigation into the events of that night. No public accusations were made. As everyone in the horse business knew, horses could be unpredictable, and they could also be fragile. Alydar's death, no doubt, was one of those accidental, heartbreaking tragedies that no one could have done anything about.
And that, by all accounts, was the end of the story--until one afternoon in 1996, when a young assistant U.S. attorney in Houston was sitting in her downtown office, flipping through some bank records. The attorney's name was Julia Hyman (she now goes by her married name, Julia Tomala), and she knew nothing about horse racing. She spent her days investigating one of the worst financial scandals in American history: the widespread failure of hundreds of Texas financial institutions. Her job was to unearth the most complicated of white-collar crimes, such as money-laundering schemes and check-kiting operations
It is a blockbuster of a story, a sweeping saga of greed, fraud, and almost unimaginable cruelty that could have been lifted straight from a best-selling Dick Francis horse-racing novel. The settings range from the raucous pageantry of the Kentucky Derby to the hushed, baronial offices of Lloyd's of London in England, and even the minor characters--from an uneducated, chain-smoking Kentucky farmhand tormented by a secret to a corrupt Texas banker living in luxury at Houston's Four Seasons Hotel--seem right out of central casting. "This story has got blood and money, scandal and intrigue, and one hell of a beautiful horse," says Allen Goodling of Houston, one of the many lawyers who became involved in the case. "What more does anybody want?"
Go to the Texas Monthly and read this award winning piece.