Barney Curley
Nick Townsend's new book on Curley.
Legendary punter Barney Curley
Fermanagh gambler Barney Curley is used to orchestrating coups.
For four decades he has been a thorn in the side of the bookies overseeing a number of major betting coups that have netted him a personal fortune and left bookmakers scratching their heads.
Now for the first time a book lifts the lid on what has been described as one of the most spectacular gambles of all time.
The Sure Thing: The Greatest Betting Coup in Horse Racing History was published this week offering a unique insight into how Curley took the bookies for an estimated £4 million.
The 2010 betting coup featured in the book needed an army of 30 trusted runners, 40 bookmakers’ shops in two countries and three years of meticulous planning.
It mirrored a previous sting orchestrated by Curley in 1975 which netted him £300,000 – the equivalent of more than £2million in modern terms.
On that occasion he heavily backed a horse called Yellow Sam which was running at Bellewstown, a small race track in Co. Meath.
There was only one telephone at Bellewstown, and Curley had a friend act out a prolonged call to a fictional dying aunt,
so blocking desperate attempts by off-course bookmakers to cut Yellow Sam’s starting price.
Such a ruse could never again be entertained since the advent of mobile phones but if anyone thought the door had been shut, they were wrong.
Driven by the greed of bookies Curley kept going.
“People were telling me that our day had gone,” Curley said years after Yellow Sam.
“Punters I knew over the years, said it’s finished, over. I never thought like that. Because bookmakers are always trying something new, to rob punters, to get them to bite. That’s what beats them. The greed.”
Thirty years later the gambler and horse trainer mounted his most audacious coup.
With help of Martin Parsons, an economics graduate, he discovered that while bookies closely monitor single bets and multiples, bets of £5 and under were not referred to head office.
To avoid suspicion they arranged for more than 1,000 small bets to be made within a few hours in Ireland and across the UK.
A small army of 15 runners in each country were to tasked with placing the bets, armed with maps and fold up bicycles they took to the streets.
Bookies were carefully selected on the basis of how long it took to walk or cycle between them.
Curley then chose four unfancied horses, only one of which had ever won a race, and got them into peak condition for the date of the planned coup – May 10, 2010.
On the day the team of punters placed their bets – unnoticed by head offices – between noon and 4.08pm, two minutes before the first race.
They had been instructed to place their bets with young
female staff who were considered less attentive and less likely to refer a bet to head office.
The horses, Agapanthus, Savaranola, Sommersturm and Jeu de Rouseau were running at Brighton, Wolverhampton and Towcester, all but one came home first, including Jeu de Roseau which hadn’t raced in more than two years.
It netted Curley winnings of more than £4.3million – the most ever won on a single day’s horseracing.
Three were trained by Curley himself, in probably the smallest stable in Newmarket. The fourth he had sold in 2008 to a trainer on Teesside.
Agapanthus won at Brighton, then Savaranola did the business at Wolverhampton. But Curley’s third runner, Sommersturm, was beaten later on the card. That left Grant’s horse, Jeu De Roseau, who made his first appearance in 742 days to win at Towcester’s evening meeting.
“Nobody will ever win as much on horse racing, this century,” he said at the time.
Had Sommersturm won, bookies would have been liable for an estimated £20million.
Bookies were forced into an urgent review of their rules and regulations as they tried to ensure it couldn’t happen again.
They were wrong.
Earlier this year Curley hit them again on January 23 when four horses with connections to the Fermanagh man came home.
Four horses priced as outsiders before their races were all heavily backed by punters before romping home.
A spokesman for Irish bookmaker Paddy Power said: “There’s no doubt this is one of the blackest days in the history of bookmaking.
“What looked like a mundane midweek’s racing has turned into one of the most newsworthy racing days of the modern era and we reckon it cost the industry £15million.”
Three of the winners, Eye of the Tiger, Low Key and Seven Summits, were all once trained by Mr Curley.
The reason behind Curley’s mission against the bookies can be traced back to a night at a Belfast race track over 40 years ago.
Barney’s father, a grocer by trade, decided to take a gamble, he bet and bet big on one of his own dogs.
During the race, the dog fell and broke his neck at the first bend. The sight of his dad walking back up the track, cradling the dead dog, has haunted Barney ever since.
The consequences were devastating, yet would be the driving force in Curley becoming in a league of his own where punters are concerned.
Curley’s father took Barney, the oldest of six siblings, out of school and sentenced him to 15 months of working double shifts at a plastics factory in Manchester.
The two Curleys stayed in Manchester working until enough was saved to pay off all his debts from the gamble.
“My father wouldn’t come back to Ireland until everyone was paid,” Barney recalled.
Each and every winning bet he makes is a bit more retribution for the ways that the bookies made him feel that night and suffer for the next 15 months.
“I wanted to prove myself, “ he says. “You have to be out of the ordinary to make money.
“I fancied myself as a race reader and I thought I could crack the system.
“My first big win was about £80,000 and within six weeks it had all vanished. I was drinking. I soon discovered that drinking and gambling don’t go together!”
With a seven bedroom mansion in Newmarket, a swimming pool in the basement and a Mercedes in the driveway, personal gain is not Curley’s motive.
Since the loss of his teenage son, Charlie, in a car accident in 1995, his chief purpose in life has been a charity he set up in Zambia – Direct Aid For Africa.
He’s a regular visitor and the charity has funded a school for 1,600 children in the south of Africa.
“The people giving their lives out there, they don’t want anything off you. And once you’ve been out, it draws you back – those children with their big brown eyes looking up at you, with nothing to eat.”