Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A Snowy Day at Attica

Los Angeles, November 18, 2008--Karen Johnson's interesting profile of the trainer David Jacobson in The Blood-Horse brought back vivid memories of the time I visited Howard "Buddy" Jacobson, David's father, at the infamous Attica prison in 1988. Buddy Jacobson, once the leading trainer in the U.S., was doing 25 years to life for second-degree murder. He was also dying of bone-marrow cancer that had spread to his spine.

"Sit over there," Jacobson said as he motioned to a chair on the other side of a long table, directly across from him. "I'm going to tell you I'm innocent, and I want to look you in the eye when I say it. The pain's so bad I can't turn my head to see you if you sit anywhere else."


Eight years before, a New York jury, after telling the judge they were "hopelessly deadlocked" after two days of deliberations, came back three days later to decide that Jacobson, in a crime of high passion, had killed John Tupper, the restaurant owner who had become the new live-in lover of Melanie Cain, the Redbook and Cosmopolitan model who had lived with Jacobson for several years. Cain, at 23 young enough to be Jacobson's daughter, moved out of the apartment in the Upper East Side building Jacobson owned, and went across the hall to be with Tupper. Two weeks later, Tupper's body was found in a smoldering wooden crate on a vacant lot in the Bronx. He had been shot several times, stabbed repeatedly and bludgeoned. The trial, longest and most expensive in Bronx County history, lasted 11 weeks and didn't end until 79 witnesses had been called. Cain herself spent nine days on the stand.

It was Bobby Frankel who had led me to Attica and Jacobson. Frankel had worked alongside Jacobson when he was just breaking in as a trainer, and knew Buddy's sister, Rita Costello, who was still trying to marshal an appeal of her brother's conviction. Costello asked Frankel if he knew any journalists who might revive the case.

"Look," Frankel said to me one day at Hollywood Park, "I don't know if he did it or not. That's up to you. But if you want to go back there and visit Buddy, I think Rita can help set it up."

Before I left Los Angeles, Jacobson sent me a typewritten note that read: "Drop in anytime. I'm always here." He signed it Howard Jacobson, Prisoner No. 80a3899.

I flew into Buffalo and drove the 50 or so miles to the little village of Attica. It was early January and there was snow on the ground and more falling. The prison's high walls and cold exterior were intimidating. I had the feeling that winter wasn't the only time the sun didn't shine at Attica. Willie Sutton, Mark David Chapman (who murdered John Lennon) and H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers had been billeted there. In 1971, at a time when prisoners were allowed one shower a week and one roll of toilet paper a month, there was a four-day riot at Attica that left 39 dead.

A bus took me from a distant visitors' parking lot to the front gate. The only other passengers were a handsome, well-coiffed woman and her young son. I don't know where she got them, but she carried a plastic bag filled with the biggest avocados I've ever seen. She told me they were for her husband. Without asking, I knew he wasn't inside because he tore up too many parking tickets.

At the metal checkpoint, I took off my shoes, emptied my pockets, and passed through without any problem. The woman went through several times, and kept setting off the alarm. One of the guards suggested that she might have to go into a private room and take off her bra, but another guard said: "Lady, you wearing any bobby-pins?" She was, and when she removed them, that fine do collapsed faster than a bad souffle. Her husband would like the avocados, but hate the hair.

I had never met Jacobson, whose three uncles, including Hall of Famer Hirsch Jacobs, were trainers. Between 1963 and 1965, Buddy saddled 509 winners, mostly claiming horses, and five times he led all New York trainers in wins. Jacobson wore his wrong-side-of-the-tracks persona on his sleeve, once irreverently said that if it were kangaroo racing he'd be claiming kangaroos instead of horses, and in 1969 led a strike of lowly backstretch workers over pensions that closed down Aqueduct for nine days. Not long afterward, a ticky-tack suspension in Maryland, and a beef with an owner over the sale of a horse, brought on a 45-day suspension, which stretched out to five years when the New York tracks repeatedly denied him stalls. Jacobson left the game, sold his farm and ran the money up in Manhattan real estate. He lured Melanie Cain, ripe for a Svengali, away from the Ford agency, and with the My Fair Lady agency that they formed, Jacobson's stable was transformed into models and airline stewardesses who lived in some of his buildings.

"I loved every one of them," Jacobson told me in that room at Attica. A small man, he was about 170 pounds, heavier than when he worked at the track, but still wore a droopy black mustache. Before he had been sentenced, while confined to the Brooklyn House of Detention, Jacobson shaved off the mustache and he and a bartender friend, Tony DeRosa, engineered a bold escape that took him all the way across the country to California. DeRosa, who bought a Vermont ski lodge from Jacobson a few months before a winter bereft of snow, was forgiven the mortgage and owed Buddy a favor. He posed as a lawyer and smuggled a gray tweed suit into the prison. Jacobson put it on, added a necktie and somehow walked out the front door.

"The signature of your visitor had to look the same going out as it did coming in," Jacobson told me. "I practiced (DeRosa's) signature hundreds of times, to get it just right. But when I got to that book at the door, my hand was shaking so bad that all I could make was a wavy line. But they still didn't stop me."

Running down Atlantic Avenue, Jacobson bumped into a woman with a shopping bag and knocked the contents all over the sidewalk. He instinctively stopped to help her pick everything up.

"Here I was, down on the ground, picking up boxes of cereal and apples and oranges, when it hit me," Jacobson said. "I was escaping from prison. I didn't have time for any of this."

Waiting for him, in a 1980 Dodge, was Audrey Barrett, a 22-year-old ex-model, college student and sometime Bible teacher. On their cross-country hegira, they happened across a cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa, and shopped for aliases from the headstones. Jacobson became Lonnie Sherman Rumbaugh and Barrett turned into Rhonda Sue Guessford.

Jacobson, who claimed that Tupper had been killed because of some sort of drug deal, later told the authorities that there was an important witness living in Northern California, who would be crucial to his appeal. But he told me in that lonely room, away from the snowstorm, that "the only reason I ran was to be free. I hadn't done anything."

In California, Barrett called a brother, who talked her into going back to New York and turning herself in. Jacobson, unshaven, wearing a wig and a battered baseball cap that made him look older than his 49 years, took up residence by himself in a motel in Manhattan Beach, a Los Angeles suburb. He bought a typewriter and told the motel manager that he was a writer. He fell in love again, this time with the fried zucchini at a local diner. On July 11, 1980, he went into the place, got a half-order of zucchini and a cup of coffee. His buildings back East were worth millions, but all he had in his pocket was $1,800 and five dollars worth of quarters. He had been on the lam for 39 days.

He finished the zucchini, got $10 more in quarters from the cashier, and walked to the back of the restaurant, where there was a pay phone. He told me that he called his son, David Jacobson, although David has denied over the years that he was implicated in either his father's escape or capture. During his interview with Karen Johnson, David Jacobson said that he wouldn't talk about his father's murder case.

Buddy Jacobson had trouble completing the call. "This phone's taking all my quarters," he shouted to a waitress.

"Write the phone company and they'll send it back to you," she said.

"Sure," Jacobson said.

The phone conversation lasted about 20 minutes, enough time for authorities in New York to contact the Manhattan Beach police station, which was just across the street, about 200 feet from the restaurant. Before Jacobson hung up, there were two cops at his back, one with a shotgun and the other with a revolver. Three other armed cops were outside, eyeballing all the exits.

"Can you ID yourself?" one of the cops said.

"I'm Howard 'Buddy' Jacobson," he said.

As he was led away, Jacobson said, "I've still got 20 quarters left. At least I got change to call a lot of lawyers."

"Not from that phone, you won't," one of the cops said.

Jacobson left without paying the check.

"It was a dollar and six cents," he said.

The Attica interview lasted four hours. Visiting hours had ended, and I left. Outside, in darkness, my rental car was covered with the snow that was still falling. It was dicey getting out of the parking lot. I had to baby the car, backward and forward several times, before I got out of the hole that I was in. I had visions of spending the night at the prison.

Jacobson told me that he might have only a year to live, but what was important was reversing the conviction. A little later, I asked the New York journalist Pete Axthelm, who knew Jacobson, about the Tupper murder. "Buddy didn't do it," Axthelm said with conviction. "He was too savvy, too street-smart, to kill somebody as sloppy as that. That wouldn't have been Buddy's style."

Ramsey Clark, who was Lyndon Johnson's attorney general, had a small role in Jacobson's appeal early on. Jacobson, 58, died in May of 1989, lasting slightly longer than the year he gave himself at Attica. Months later, I was back in New York and met Rita Costello, Jacobson's sister, at a coffee shop. She told me that their mother, who was almost 90, hadn't been told her son had cancer, and the family had no plans to tell her that he had died.

"Buddy's appeal was going to be heard," Costello said. "It was to go before the judge the day Buddy died."

During our interview at the prison, we got sidetracked into talking about some of the horses Jacobson trained. He didn't win many important races, one of the biggest the Belmont Futurity with Bupers, a horse that cost $16,500 after Ogden Phipps and his trainer, Bill Winfrey, had given up on him. But the day we were together, Jacobson talked more about a horse who had beaten the great Kelso one day at Atlantic City.

"What was his name?" I asked.

"Call the Witness," Jacobson said. He hurt too much to even chuckle, but the irony was not lost on either of us.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Blueprint for the Sheik

Los Angeles, November 11, 2008--If Sheik Mohammed really wants to win a Kentucky Derby, he should treat himself to a history lesson. Clive Brittain, an English trainer, brought a horse from overseas more than 20 years ago, and finished second, 2 1/4 lengths behind Ferdinand, at Churchill Downs. Brittain, who did everything right in preparing Bold Arrangement, has never been back to the Derby, but he's left behind a blueprint that any foreign horseman, including the sheik, ought to follow.

I'm relaying, free of charge, this professional advice to the sheik because anybody who's spent as much money as he has over the years should eventually win the Derby. It is not hard to predict that Sheik Mohammed will win the Derby one day, but because he is his own man, has fierce national pride and is walking proof that royalty is not exempt from bullheadedness, he's determined to pick up the roses with a horse who's prepped for the race in Dubai. If the sheik won the Derby using Clive Brittain's blueprint, he'd probably throw the trophy back.


By 1986, the year Bold Arrangement ran in the Derby, Brittain already had a small reputation in the U.S. The year before, in the second Breeders' Cup and the only one that will ever be run at Aqueduct, he brought to New York the remarkable filly Pebbles, whose daily diet included a pint of Guinness stout and several eggs (brown shells only). Pebbles beat a band of males in the Turf, justifying the $240,000 penalty that was paid to make her eligible for the race, and was voted an Eclipse Award.

Ironically, Pebbles raced for Sheik Mohammed. The next year, had he been paying attention, the sheik would have noticed Brittain, while working for another client, marching into Kentucky with Bold Arrangement. The chestnut colt ran often as a 2-year-old in England and France, winning four of nine starts. All of the races were on grass, none of the wins was farther than seven furlongs, but at a mile Bold Arrangement proved that he was a stiff competitor. On the side, Brittain trained him on a sandy track with the Kentucky Derby in mind.

Brittain figured that at three, Bold Arrangement needed only one race. It wouldn't be on grass at Goodwood, Newcastle or Sandown (nor in Dubai--the UAE Derby wasn't even a pipedream then), but at this far-off kingdom called Keeneland. Far off from Brittain's yard in Blighty, but only 70 miles up the road from Churchill Downs and the Derby. The Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland was a mile and an eighth, the perfect prep for another eighth of a mile, and at the time was run only eight days before the Derby. Unlike now, the Blue Grass was still a fashionable way to get to the Derby; Gato Del Sol and Spectacular Bid, of recent memory, had the Blue Grass-Derby double on their ledgers.

Several jockeys, including Lester Piggot and Pat Eddery, had ridden Bold Arrangement at two. For the Blue Grass, Brittain went with Eddery, who rode the colt to a fast-closing third, beaten by less than a length. That result aside, Brittain wanted to switch to Laffit Pincay, who had ridden in the Derby 12 times and had finished first (Swale) and second (Stephan's Odyssey) the two years before. But Pincay had already signed up to ride Groovy, for a $25,000 mount fee. Here's where Brittain got lucky. He retreated to Eddery, which would have been a mistake, because Eddery, a star in Britain and the jockey who had ridden Pebbles at Aqueduct, had never ridden in a Derby. Brittain was saved from the miscue when Eddery drew an overseas suspension just before the Derby, and the assignment went to Chris McCarron, a Derby veteran and a quick-study expert at getting to know a new horse. McCarron rode the race perfectly, and but for Ferdinand and Bill Shoemaker negotiating an eye-of-the-needle hole in the stretch, would have been aboard the winner. (For the record, Groovy led for six furlongs and finished last).

Quarantine restrictions prevented Bold Arrangement from running in the Preakness. I would have liked to have seen Brittain get another chance. Instead, he went back to England, to be remembered as the trainer who reached the warning track instead of knocking one out of the park.

With several Derby horses, Sheik Mohammed has yet to hit one out of the infield. His Derby starters have been an assortment of hard-luck, ill-prepared horses, starting in 1992 with Arazi, who came to Louisville with two surgical knees, an unenthusiastic trainer and a woeful loss of flesh since his 2-year-old season. After prepping his Derby horses in the UAE Derby and, worse, trial races in Dubai, the sheik should look up Clive Brittain and borrow his formula.

The sheik's best shot at the roses was Worldly Manner, the Del Mar Futurity winner who was bought from John and Betty Mabee for an estimated $5 million. Instead of leaving the colt in California, with Bob Baffert, Worldly Manner was sent home to Dubai, where a trial race was his only foundation as a 3-year-old. In the 1999 Derby, his first bona fide start in almost eight months, Worldly Manner had only Cat Thief to beat at the quarter pole, but faded to seventh place. This was a Derby that was anyone's to win, as witness Charismatic's victory at 31-1. "If (Worldly Manner) had had a U.S. prep race, he might have won the Derby," trainer Nick Zito said.

Now Sheik Mohammed has revisited the past, swooping in to take over another Baffert-trained colt and spiriting him off to Dubai. Will the sheik run Midshipman in the UAE Derby, then return him to Baffert a few weeks before the Derby and ask him to pretend he's War Emblem? By then, Vineyard Haven, bought from trainer Bobby Frankel, Joe Torre and others for what was probably more than $10 million, might be the Derby horse of the sheik's choice. The sheik could even reunite Vineyard Haven with the Derby-seasoned Frankel in time for Louisville, but I won't give him any ideas.

Unless Sheik Mohammed exorcises himself from this set-in-stone plan to capture Louisville, the only way he'll win a Derby is to show up with another Worldly Manner in a Charismatic kind of year. He'll need to have a very good horse facing a compromised crop. Years like that happen, but considering the sheik's wherewithal, it seems like an obtuse way to go.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tall Order

Los Angeles, November 4, 2008--Sam Spear, on his San Francisco radio show, asked how Zenyatta ranked in the pantheon of female racehorses. "She's way up there," I said boldly, vaguely. When people complained about what they read in the newspaper, I used to say, "What do you expect for 50 cents--the truth?" Radio, which costs next to nothing, isn't much better, sometimes.

The first mistake in ranking the undefeated Zenyatta is that her career probably isn't over, and the Horse of the Year ballots haven't been sent out, much less counted. To give Zenyatta a finite number before the books have been closed is folly. But even if I had her final record in front of me, it would be foolhardy to say that she's just beneath Ruffian, and better than Fashion.


Fashion? She was a mare who won 32 of 36 starts in the late '30s and early '40s, including 20 in a row at one stretch. That's late '30s and early '40s as in 1830s and 1840s, just so you understand this ranking problem. Fashion's best distance was four miles. In a hypothetical match race over a route of ground, who do you take, Fashion or Shuvee?

To attempt the impossible, I started off with a working list of 28 fillies. Fashion, unfortunately, did not make the first cut. I couldn't find any of her old races on YouTube, and what was the foal crop when she ran? Fifty?

I also quickly threw out Pan Zaretta, a more contemporary filly. She was a foal of 1910, and won 76 races, but the trouble was, it took her 151 starts to do so. You look at Pan Zaretta's PPs and take a deep breath. At the end of her career, as a 7-year-old, she ran seven times in 38 days. She might still be running, if she hadn't been felled by a fatal strand of pneumonia in New Orleans.

When the smoke on my desk had cleared, I still had room for Miss Woodford, a foal of 1880, who beat males, won 37 of 48 starts and was the first horse to go over the $100,000 mark in purses. Money is a poor way to assess horses of any era, but there was something about a hundred grand in 19th-century dollars that moved me. Another 19th-century filly who was around at the end of the exercise was Firenze, once ranked by the late Whitney Tower, the Sports Illustrated pundit, as one of the 10 best horses--fillies and colts--of all time. Good friend Tower was a tough sell. Writing in Classic magazine in the late 1970s, he left both Ruffian and Secretariat off his list. He didn't like the idea that Secretariat didn't run at four, and didn't beat anybody carrying 137 pounds, as Forego did. He favored Shuvee, twice the winner over colts at two miles in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, instead of Ruffian.

Since this study is restricted to fillies, I've got room for both Ruffian and Shuvee. Two of the three fillies that have won the Kentucky Derby, Regret and Genuine Risk, are also on my list. Winning Colors is not. But include Twilight Tear, Busher and All Along, all Horse of the Year champions. Personal Ensign, like Zenyatta so far, never lost, so she obviously belongs. The two double Breeders' Cup winners from overseas, Miesque and Ouija Board, are tough to evaluate. They were grass horses, and ran sparingly in the U.S., but two wins on the big stage, combined with their phenomenal achievements back home, are good enough for me.

Sorry to say, but I've left off Bayakoa, despite her two Breeders' Cup wins. Go for Wand, who broke down when she appeared to be beating Bayakoa in one of those races, is on the list. Some say she was the equal of Ruffian. My also-eligible list is formidable: Besides Bayakoa, there are Azeri and Lady's Secret, who ran some salty races against colts, and even beat them once.

You may ask, why Twilight Tear and Busher, but not Lady's Secret. Busher, off the board only once, beat the boys four times at distances up to a mile and a quarter. Twilight Tear beat males seven times, one of them a win in the Pimlico Special against Devil Diver, who was the country's best older horse in 1944.

Get back to me later about Zenyatta. Brad Free, of the Daily Racing Form, took exception when his colleague, Mike Watchmaker, called the huge filly "one for the ages." Free says that any coronation of Zenyatta is premature. "The letter 's' should be dropped from ages," he wrote. "Zenyatta currently is one for the age--the age of synthetic." I reckon Zenyatta will face colts sooner or later in 2009. What she does then will be the litmus test, no matter the surface.