Drexel Connect At the 2002 Breeders’ Cup, three frat brothers
won $3 million dollars.
The three guys at the heart of this horse race scam are Chris Harn, Glen DaSilva, and
Derrick Davis.
They’re a trio of frat bros who met at Drexel University in Philly during the late ‘90s.
They were all members of the campus fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon, and they still kept in
close contact after graduating from Drexel.
DaSilva went to New York City.
Davis wound up in Baltimore.
Harn, with a degree in computer science in hand, took his talents to Newark, Delaware.
By 2001, Harn had worked his way up to being a senior computer programmer at America’s
leading collector of horse race bets, a company called Autotote.
As a senior employee at Autotote, Harn could tap into 65 percent of all the bets placed
on horse races around the country, and his distinguished position made him something
called a “super user”, the highest level of access at the company.
Harn’s high-powered career did more than offer him a nice salary and a place to use
his computer skills.
It also gave him an inside look at all the horse racing data that Autotote keeps in its
system.
One such data point was the sheer volume of racing bets placed by people looking for a
payday at the track.
You see, while horse racing has fallen a bit out of fashion in recent years, in the early
2000s, it was the 2nd most-watched sport in the United States behind baseball.
$14.5 billion was wagered on horse races in 2001, and Harn wanted in on the action.
He came up with a plan to get a small piece of that enormous pie when he found hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of unclaimed tickets in the Autotote system from people
who hadn’t yet cashed in their winnings.
All he had to do was print the tickets and claim the money at a racetrack.
Unclaimed Tickets There was just one problem: as an Autotote
employee, Harn wasn’t allowed to bet on races himself.
Besides, he was a familiar face at all the local tracks and would have been recognized
immediately.
He needed someone else to cash the tickets in for him.
Who better than his old college pals?
With his friends on board, the plan was set into motion.
Harn reprinted the tickets from the Autotote database through a clever computer program
of his own design.
This program compiled unclaimed tickets with a balance under $1500 to steer clear of IRS
detection.
He then duplicated the tickets to remove any specific track identification from them.
He printed the duplicates and sent them to Davis and DaSilva to withdraw the money.
Those two made their way down to various tracks around New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania
to cash in the stolen winnings, careful not to collect too much at any one track for fear
of generating suspicion.
They kept this up for a little while and got their hands on more than $80,000 in unclaimed
winnings, which they split between them.
The scheme was successful.
It yielded the extra cash that Harn was after, but he soon realized that it wasn’t sustainable.
What if some Joe Schmoe from Kentucky went to cash in his real winning ticket and denied
the money he rightfully won?
If it happens one time, maybe he gets reimbursed, and it gets swept under the rug.
But if it started happening consistently, people would start asking questions, and the
three amigos would likely be found out.
The Breeder’s Cup So instead of watching the money trickle in
through piles of unclaimed tickets, Harn and his trusty frat brothers decided to go after
one single jackpot.
One big payday, and then they’d walk away.
The target was obvious: the Breeders’ Cup.
The richest day in horse racing where people line up to get their share of the $31 million
in cash prizes.
It’s one of the most important events in the sport, and while it’s not quite as popular
as, say, the Kentucky Derby, it does feature some of the most impressive thoroughbred racers
in the world due to its strict breeding standards.
There are six major races at the Breeders’ Cup, and the reward for correctly picking
the winner of all six is called an Ultra Pick 6.
It’s a wager rarely won by horse race bettors because of the high degree of difficulty involved
in picking the winning horse for six individual races.
Still, it would result in the kind of lucrative prize they were pining after, so Harn decided
to go for it.
Simple Flaw He hatched yet another plot to win him and
his friends some cash.
He did this after uncovering a flaw in the Autotote system.
There was a 30-minute delay in the database’s processing capabilities, a half-hour period
between the end of the Cup’s fourth race and the time when Autotote’s computers received
the wagers.
If somebody could gain access to the company’s servers during that 30-minute window, they
could conceivably change their bets on the first four races to the actual winners.
But who would be able to get into those computers?
Maybe an Autotote super user?
The plan was for DaSilva to place Pick 6 bets for the 2002 Breeders’ Cup.
After the conclusion of the fourth race, he’d contact Harn and let him know the winners.
Harn would go into his office, access the bets in Autotote’s system, and change the’
wagers to the right ones.
It seems like a foolproof plan, right?
The guys went through a couple of trial runs to be sure.
DaSilva bet on races at Balmoral Park and Belmont Park to ensure Harn could pull off
the scam on his end.
Both dry runs were successful, and DaSilva walked away with nearly $200,000 from it.
But they had their eyes on a much bigger prize, and with the confidence of two successful
test runs under their belt, they set their sights on the upcoming Breeders’ Cup.
Plan in Motion The trio sought a betting parlor that wouldn’t
catch wind of their scheme too easily, one with very little security that didn’t require
in-person betting.
They found the perfect place in the town of Pomona, New York: The Catskills Hub.
Not only did Catskills lack a strong security system monitoring its bets, but you could
also open an account with them over the phone rather than setting one up in person.
It was exactly what they were looking for, and better yet, the parlor didn’t keep track
of past transactions, so the paper trail to their scam would be neatly cleaned up on its
own.
Davis opened his own account at Catskills, just in case the authorities started to get
suspicious of DaSilva after he previously had two other big payouts.
Everything was in order.
All they had to do was wait for Breeders’ Cup Day.
When the fateful day finally came, the Drexel Three sprung into action.
Davis made his picks for the first four races.
Then, to ensure he wins, he bet on every horse in the final two races, which is perfectly
legal.
Once Harn changed his first four bets, they’d be instant winners.
In total, the bet cost $1,152.
Harn kept in close contact with him throughout the day, making several phone calls to him
while the initial races were taking place.
Harn used his genius hacking skills to remotely eject the backup security tape in Catskills
to cover his tracks even further, so there’d be no record of his illicit activities.
The fourth race ends, and Harn’s accomplice notifies him of the four winners.
He dives into the Autotote computers and erases Davis’ original bet, replacing it with the
names of the correct horses.
He then calls The Catskills Hub and claims to have accidentally ejected their backup
tape while doing routine maintenance on the system.
Another footprint covered.
Too Much Winnings After the 2002 Breeders’ Cup, the three
frat brothers became millionaires.
The scheme worked as smoothly as they could have possibly hoped for, and the result was
$3.1 million.
The payout was so large because one of the winning racehorses, an American thoroughbred
named Volponi, went into the day with 43 to 1 odds to win.
Nobody else bet on Volponi, so Davis’ wager was the only Pick 6 winner.
The guys must have been thrilled, right?
Well, not exactly.
The unlikely odds that Volponi had to win made them a lot of money.
However, it also made their bet on him look more than a little suspicious, especially
since it helped them complete the already-unlikely Ultra Pick 6.
If one of the favorites had won, nobody would have batted an eye.
But because the winner was a longshot, and the resulting winnings were so massive, it
raised some eyebrows, and the Arlington Park racetrack withheld their winnings until an
investigation was launched.
The New York State Racing and Wagering Board started looking into Davis’ bet, trying
to find any abnormalities that might exist.
As their investigation began to pick up steam, Harn, Davis, and DaSilva realized that they
were in hot water.
If they didn’t get out ahead of the story soon, things might get ugly.
Victim Card So rather than accept their grim fate lying
down, they went on the offensive.
Davis came out and demanded his winnings be given to him, playing the victim card in the
press, hoping that he might get the court of public opinion on his side.
He insisted he was innocent of any wrongdoing and challenged New York authorities to come
forward with whatever evidence they may have against him.
It didn’t matter how defiant he was publicly.
Privately, he and Harn both knew that their scheme was in serious danger of being uncovered.
If that happened, all three of them would have some major consequences to face.
It wasn’t long before the first shoe dropped.
Investigators had been looking into Autotote’s system, trying to find some evidence that
the database had been hacked on the day of the Breeders’ Cup.
The company itself considered the possibility of an inside job and underwent thorough questioning
of its entire staff.
It was soon discovered that Harn was in the Autotote offices on the day of the race, even
though he was not scheduled to work.
If that wasn’t suspicious enough, Autotote soon unearthed digital evidence in their system
that showed Harn had manually changed Davis’ bet in the middle of the event.
Harn was immediately fired, and the company turned over its findings to the authorities.
The snowball was officially rolling.
Investigators looked for any connection between Harn and Davis.
They found it in the two’s shared alma mater, Drexel University, and their involvement in
the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
Once those dots were connected, the jig was pretty much up.
Federal authorities also looked into Glen DaSilva’s two dry runs at Balmoral and Belmont,
and he too was implicated in the investigation.
Aftermath Prosecutors had a rock-solid case against
all three of them.
They knew Harn was in his office when he wasn’t supposed to.
They traced the multiple calls he made to Davis’ cell phone while he was there.
They knew he altered Davis’ bet, and they knew DaSilva’s wins were rotten, too.
The horse race hustlers had no other choice but to fold.
Harn decided to cooperate fully with investigators, admitting to his various misdeeds, including
his unclaimed ticket scam, which prosecutors had no clue about.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and computer fraud and conspiracy to
commit money laundering.
Because of his transparency with the feds, he was sentenced to just a year and a day
in prison.
On the other hand, Davis pleaded guilty but got smacked with a jail sentence of 37 months.
DaSilva admitted his Balmoral and Belmont bets were rigged but denied any knowledge
of Davis and Harn’s Breeders’ Cup racket.
He ended up with two years in the slammer anyway.
The $3.1 million jackpot they swindled was divided amongst 78 people who bet on 5 of
the 6 winners.
Guess it sometimes pays to lose, huh?
At least when the winners commit gigantic financial fraud.
The scandal led to sweeping changes in the betting industry.
Companies that manage wagers, companies like Autotote, are now required to download the
data from the racetrack immediately upon the race ending, getting rid of that pesky 30-minute
delay that allowed Harn to do his thing in the first place.
That means the scam that was masterminded by the Drexel Three truly can never be repeated.
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