https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/05/27/barney-curley-racing-punter-grand-scale-trainer-behind-legendary/Barney Curley, born October 5 1939, died May 23 2021
Barney Curley, who has died aged 81, pulled off one of the most celebrated betting coups in the history of the Turf.
It happened on June 25 1975 at Bellewstown, an obscure racecourse in Co Meath in the Irish Republic. Even more obscure was the horse that, at 20-1, landed the money, an indifferent hurdler called Yellow Sam.
If what occurred was legal, there were plenty of people – chiefly, it must be said, bookmakers – who thought it should not have been. Curley had persuaded the Irish trainer Liam Brennan to enter Yellow Sam in the handicap for amateur riders.
In his two seasons on the track the horse had never finished higher than eighth. The leading amateur jockey Michael Furlong, who was booked for the ride, later remarked: “I thought, why the hell does he want me riding this thing? His form was terrible.”
Curley, however, was confident that the horse would win, on the fast ground that suited him and against even more negligible opposition. The important thing was to pile on the money while ensuring a handsome starting price.
This was where the racecourse at Bellewstown was crucial: the on-course bookmakers there had only one means of receiving information from the betting shops around Ireland to hear of significant moves in the market which would influence the SP – a single public telephone box.
Curley stationed a small army of friends and accomplices in betting shops in large towns around Ireland. Shortly before the off they were instructed to invest between £50 and £300 on Yellow Sam to win.
To prevent the on-course bookies being alerted, Curley detailed a man called Benny O’Hanlon to go into Bellewstown’s phone box 25 minutes before the start and block the line until the race was under way. O’Hanlon duly spent the best part of half an hour pretending to be talking to a hospital in Drogheda about the condition of a dying aunt.
Curley himself was well-known as a big punter, and, anxious to avoid being spotted on the racetrack, watched proceedings from behind a gorse bush as Yellow Sam won with some ease. The bookmakers discovered that Curley’s henchmen, each of whom received a £200 “fee”, had invested a total of £15,300 (virtually all the money Curley had at the time), guaranteeing a payout of £306,000 – equivalent to around £2.5 million today. Some were so miffed that they paid out in single pound notes, requiring the money to be taken away in sacks.
Curley used his winnings to purchase Middleton Park House in Co Westmeath, formerly the home of George Boyd-Rochfort, who won a VC in the First World War and was the brother of the trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort.
Curley remained unrepentant about the Yellow Sam affair, declaring: “It was quite simply one man’s brains against the bookmakers. I’d outwitted the system and taken advantage of unique circumstances.”
Bernard Joseph Curley was born at Irvinestown, Co Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, on October 5 1939, the eldest of a Roman Catholic couple’s six children. By all accounts his father, a shopkeeper, set a poor example, devoting much of his time to greyhound racing and the bottle.
By the time Barney was 15 he had to join his father working in a Manchester factory to help pay the family’s debts. His studies for the priesthood at Mungret College, a Jesuit school near Limerick that also educated the great trainer Vincent O’Brien, were curtailed by a severe case of tuberculosis which almost cost him his life.
The priest manqué began his career as a bookmaker in Belfast, then, in 1968, ventured into the music business as manager of a successful Irish showband, the Polka Dots, who the previous year had reached No 19 in the UK Chart with a song called Five Little Fingers. He looked after several other bands, including Brian Coll and the Buckaroos, and tried his hand at smuggling razor blades into the Republic.
In his late twenties Curley married Maureen Curley (not a relation), who was from Lancashire. They would have a son and two daughters, and his new responsibilities persuaded him to refocus: he decided that he could further the family’s prosperity by gambling.
At first things went well. He is said to have turned £700 into £50,000 at the 1971 Cheltenham Festival, but despite a handsome touch on Roberto to win the following year’s Epsom Derby, by 1975 he was struggling – until he masterminded the coup with Yellow Sam.
At Middleton Park House, Curley began raising young horses, which would include the future Cheltenham Gold Cup winners Silver Buck and Forgive ’n Forget, both sold into British stables. He also took out a permit to train, and in 1982 moved to England as assistant to Dave Thom at Harraton Court Stables near Newmarket. Later he branched out on his own, buying Cleveland House Stables in Newmarket.
As a trainer, Curley was noted for encouraging talented young jockeys, among them Frankie Dettori, Declan Murphy, Jamie Spencer and Tom Queally. There were no spectacular prizes (his biggest training success was Magic Combination in the 2000 Imperial Cup), but he continued to be a thorn in the side of the bookmakers.
In 2010 he helped orchestrate a spectacular coup in which three horses trained by or linked with him realised a profit of £4 million for him and his associates.
A team of people in London and Ireland placed more than 1,000 small multiple bets on four unfancied runners. Before the bookmakers knew what was going on, three of them had won. Had the fourth emulated them, the payout would have been an estimated £20 million.
Four years later there was a £2 million payout on four winners which had associations with Curley, who had handed in his licence in 2013.
Needless to say the Jockey Club was unenthusiastic about Curley’s methods. Yet he was happy to admit that he ran his horses to suit his betting purposes – for example campaigning them on unsuitable going or at the wrong trip until he decided to set them up for a big wager.
Apart from the bookmakers, the losers in all this were, of course, the small punters (the lifeblood of racing) who could have no clear idea of what was going on. This did not matter to Curley, who in 2002 made his motivation clear: “I’m the only person who’s ever run a stable of horses, owned them myself, had no factories or oil wells or anything else, and made the job pay, every year, simply from betting.”
As for the bookmakers: “They love the fiver, the tenner and the twenty from the cannon fodder, but don’t like anything else; like a boxer with a glass jaw, they’ll not take a hit.”
In 1995 Curley’s 18-year-old son Charlie was killed in a car crash, an event which led his father along a more reflective path. “I decided I had not always been a very nice human being,” he later said.
In 1996, he launched Direct Aid for Africa (DAFA), a charity in Charlie’s memory which has since provided millions of pounds to build schools and hospitals in Zambia. It became the consuming interest of his final years, and “the achievement in my life that has given me the most satisfaction”.
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