Recently, Jim inquired (joke) as to the circumstances surrounding my leaving Ragozin and setting up my own shop (as Soup put it).
Among his other qualities, Alydar has the memory of an elephant, and although a portion of the archives index is corrupt, he was able to remember the title and approximate date of a post of mine on the subject. Paul did some heroic work to rescue it, so here it is, if anyone cares.

Briefly:
I went to work for Ragozin in the 70's, for a little money and free use of the data. Ragozin was managing a stable for the Esposito brothers, and I was training and studying to go into that end of it. In 1976 a guy named Dennis Heard approached Ragozin to manage his stable (2 horses). Ragozin didn't like him, and instead sent him to me. I began to manage Dennis's outfit, with Ragozin getting a big piece of the profits.
I claimed a few for Dennis right away (Penn Peg, Market Forge, and Stern). They won their first six starts for us, 8 of our first 12, and we never looked back. Three years later, in 1979, we finished third in the country in wins. (It's also worthy of note that at almost the exact moment I took over the Heard operation, August 1976, I started winning as a bettor, having 18 straight winning months. When Len found out I was winning, my deal for free sheets for work all of a sudden became a bad idea, after years of being a good idea. He wanted 1/3 of profits, and I gave it to him - he was the only game in town.)
Anyway, at the end of 1979 Dennis and I called it quits. Since he and I had a profit sharing arrangement (and I had left all my profits in the stable) I was entitiled to quite a bit, which I took in horses, some of which was breeding stock. At this point Len figured he had me over a barrel - I was 28, the best in my field, and had no marketable skills in any other, and needed his unique data to continue. He tried to raise my rates through the roof - 10% of the capitalization of the stable (which was substantial, I think around a million) per year, plus a chunk of profits. This meant if I broke even for five years he would own half my stable. This was far more than he ever tried to get from anyone else, before or since, and it was just for data - the expertise would come from me.
Anyway, we went back and forth for a while, and eventually I walked, between Genuine Risk and Codex in May of 1980. Len knew me pretty well, and it's possible he may have done this to force me out since I was having far more success than he both with the stable and as a bettor.
So I went out to the Hamptons and found myself going nuts. I also found out that breeding stock eats and doesn't earn any purse money, and that the bloodstock market was heading south quickly. I only had one area of expertise, so in the fall of 81 I began to create a data base, initially for my own use, and that of the horseman I had developed into sheet users - Leatherbury, Forbes, and Sedlacek. Obviously, we've come a long way from there.



TGJB