"History’s Greatest Horse Racing Cheat..."

From Narratively:

The bathtub was still full of champagne when Peter Christian Barrie barged into the gamblers’ hotel room just after dawn on Labor Day in 1926 with bad news to share.

The party had been rolling since Saturday at the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago, and as the sun rose on Monday there were still some women over, and everyone was half-drunk. The gamblers, described enigmatically in the New York Daily News a decade later as “a railroad man and a local millionaire,” were celebrating the $250,000 they planned to win that afternoon at Lincoln Fields, a new racetrack 30 miles south of the city.

Nothing is certain on the thoroughbred racetrack, but the men thought they had something as close to can’t-lose as it gets. Their planned coup wasn’t exactly on the level, but it wasn’t exactly illegal either. It relied somewhat on the gullibility of the betting public, but mostly on the extraordinary talents of Barrie, the Scottish horseman who blew into their pre-race victory celebration with a warning that all was not well.

Barrie had red cheeks, black hair, and an indistinct sort of face that could pass as a stablehand’s or a stockbroker’s, depending on the exigencies of the particular con he was running at the moment. His antecedents were hazy: A veteran of the Battle of Gallipoli and Dartmoor Prison, he trailed alibis like ex-lovers.

He was a master, at 38, of the various measures a man could take to bend the odds at the track. He knew, for example, just how much heroin to shoot into a horse’s neck to make him “think he was Pegasus,” as the Daily News put it in 1932 (about 30 milligrams by hypodermic needle, or 160 milligrams down the throat).

But it was Barrie’s fingernails that told the story of his particular genius: They were nearly gone, eaten away by the bleach and ammonia he rubbed into the hides of thoroughbred horses so that racetrack stewards, detectives, jockeys, and even the horse’s own trainers mistook them for entirely different creatures.

The horse bleaching was in the service of an elegant scam that the gamblers called “ringing.” You take two horses, one slow and one fast. The very slow one doesn’t actually need to exist, but it’s convenient if it does. You enter the slow horse in a race for slow horses, but on the day of the race, run the fast one instead. No one but you and the gangsters staking you know that the slow horse is really the fast one, so the horse goes off at long odds, and when he wins, you clean up.

The art of the con is in making the track stewards and the bettors believe the winner really was the slow horse having an inexplicably good day. That’s where Barrie came in. He was a horse painter, perhaps the best in the world. His tools were simple: bleach, ammonia, bandages, silver nitrate, and henna in shades from blood to chocolate. He could turn a bay with a white star on its face into a dappled gray, and he could do it so convincingly that the gray’s last trainer would swear it was his horse.

If the painter was really good — and Barrie was the best — it was hard to go wrong. But that Labor Day in 1926, when dawn broke over a muddy track at Lincoln Fields, Barrie realized he had a problem....

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