A group of top New York Racing Association officials has been indicted on charges they “altered the outcome of races” by lying about the weight of jockeys and the load being carried by horses running at Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga, The Post has learned.
Mario Sclafani, NYRA’s chief of scales at the scandal-racked agency, is among those expected to surrender today to investigators for state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer when a 190-page indictment is formally unsealed in Albany.
Sources say the indictment claims that officials failed to report the accurate weights of the jockeys before the races and lied about their weights afterward – cheating bettors out of accurate data to make well-informed wagers and allowing “people who knew of the fraud” to have a definite edge when it came to picking winners.
The sources were unable to say whether investigators uncovered hard evidence that the indicted NYRA officials profited directly from betting on “tampered” and “tainted” races.
A spokesman for Spitzer declined comment and wouldn’t reveal which officials were involved. Sources say Spitzer’s probe also targeted Sclafani’s top deputy, Braulio Baeza, a Hall of Fame jockey who won 3,140 races in a 16-year career.
NYRA, the governing body of thoroughbred racing, has come under widespread scrutiny from federal and state law-enforcement officials.
NYRA was indicted in December 2003 on tax-fraud and corruption charges and placed under a monitor’s supervision.
But the feds moved last week to dismiss the indictment after the organization admitted wrongdoing and paid a $3 million fine for permitting tax evasion by some parimutuel clerks and revamping its operations.
Last June, state Comptroller Alan Hevesi described the New York Racing Association as the “poster child for mismanagement and corruption” when he released an audit citing a litany of abuses, including a no-bid $800,000 contract awarded to the son and daughter-in-law of its then-chairman, Barry Schwartz.
Schwartz’s daughter, Stephanie Leigh Schwartz, and her husband, Michael Ferdman, were hired by NYRA for $797,913 to run the agency’s Web services, Hevesi said, adding that “the impression people have that this is an agency run amok is an accurate one.”