The Betting Coup That Rocked London’s Bookmakers Goes Unsolved

The Betting Coup That Rocked London’s Bookmakers Goes Unsolved Lisa Lazarus, the top cop in US horse racing, woke up one morning this summer to find a flurry of missed overseas calls and e-mails. They were all from UK regulators and they all delivered the same urgent message: a series of large, unusual and suspiciously successful wagers on US races had been placed in London the day before, saddling some of the city’s famed betting parlors with hefty losses, and they needed her help. The wagers were on all these longshots that a pair of little-known horsemen — Angel Quiroz and Ernesto Ochoa — had dispatched to run in races on the Jersey shore and in upstate New York. An occasional 50-1 winner is one thing, Lazarus, the CEO of the US Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, would later say in an interview, but this was just too much of a coincidence.