Is This Horse That Horse?

"I know Doc Gerard," says Jack Price, who owned and trained Carry Back. "I always got along with him fine. In reading about Lebón and Cinzano I get the feeling that he must be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I haven't been around him much in recent years. Certain things about this case make no sense whatsoever. Why would a vet with such a practice risk his career to pick up some money on a bet if he ran a ringer? Hell, a guy with his practice can make $250,000 a year just giving Butazolidin shots."

Gerard has drawn suspicion for a number of reasons. An elegant blonde who identified herself as Mrs. Gerard and who indeed resembled Alice Gerard (a tall, thin, stylish horsewoman of around 40) visited Uruguay and told Roberto Forné, who owned Cinzano, that she was buying Lebón to ride, not to race. The Uruguayans were suspicious about her shipping a cheap animal like Lebón such a long distance. It would seem a costly way to acquire a saddle horse. In the opinion of the South Americans, Lebón was finished as a racehorse, but his record (he won the first three starts of his career) might have appeared good enough to an American unfamiliar with Uruguayan racing—a Jack Morgan.

During September the Gerards appeared daily at Barn 59 at Belmont, where Lebón was stabled. A trainer whose horses are bedded down close by says, "I believed Gerard owned and was training the horse, though Morgan was the trainer of record. Since Saratoga I've been arriving at the track at 4:30 a.m.—the time most people come to work—and finding the Gerards already cooling out their horses. They were working them in the pitch black and were secretive."

Morgan's role in the affair is a mystery. He has admitted he won less than $2,000 on Lebón in the Sept. 23 race, but said that he had never been suspicious that the animal Gerard sent to him was a ringer. Indeed, Morgan said he would take a lie-detector test. It could be that he was an innocent. But before "Lebón's" first start, Morgan allegedly approached a vet working for another trainer and asked if he would check the horse's mouth to see if he could ascertain the animal's age. The vet declined to inspect the horse, knowing Gerard was caring far him. One might have thought Morgan, who had experience as a vet's assistant, could check out the teeth himself. However, South American horses are born in the fall of the year, rather than in the spring—so Morgan might have been confused. Why he did not ask Gerard, who was on the scene daily, is another matter. Was he suspicious?

Racetrackers, a notoriously distrustful lot, are asking questions about other matters. For instance, was it significant that Larry Adams, a 41-year-old journeyman jockey who has a reputation for riding long shots and who not long ago was reinstated after a lengthy suspension related to drugs, rode "Lebón"?

Then there is the mystery blonde who is said to have bet the bundle on "Lebón's" first Belmont start. Is she Christa Mancusa, a 5'2", 40-year-old, blue-eyed German who for years has raced horses in New York and Florida? Two of the men whom Dr. Gerard hired to train animals for Mancusa never met the woman, though she sent them monthly checks.

Who performed the autopsy on the bay horse said to be Cinzano and why was he removed from the Muttontown premises by Anthony Minieri of Dix Hills, N.Y. and—after Minieri had paid a $5 fee—thrown into the Huntington town dump? The dump register shows a 7-year-old bay (not a 4-year-old, as Cinzano was), with head injuries, being brought in. Dump officials say 60,000 tons of garbage now rest on the head of the bay with the fractured skull.

To try to make some sense of the swindle and find out if Cinzano is indeed the ringer, Joseph Mayer of the New York State Racing and Wagering Board, two New York vets, the registrar of The Jockey Club and a detective traveled to Uruguay last weekend to take blood samples of the relatives of the horses involved and question the South American principals. But to make a case against Gerard, authorities will have to produce evidence that he or agents acting with his consent knowingly switched horses or that he made false statements in order to collect the insurance on Cinzano.

Another necessity would seem to be to establish a foolproof method of registering horses entering the U.S. As things now stand, one could import a mule as a thoroughbred and it might go unnoticed. Unfortunately, The Jockey Club believes honorable people do honorable things and that most people in racing are honest. But the game has changed—as the Cinzano/ Lebón affair has demonstrated all too well.