Just finished "Not By a Long Shot", a recently published non fiction piece
centered around New England racing in general and focusing on the 2000 racing
season at Suffolk Downs.

Author TD Thornton was Director of Media Relations for Suffolk at the time.

I particularly enjoyed Thornton's retelling of the saga of Anthony P. "Fat
Tony" Ciulla, who was fixing races up and down the east coast in the 1970s.
If you have access to back issues of Sports Illustrated, the SI article
published in November of 1978 "Confessions of a Master Race Fixer"
is a great piece of journalism which reported on a very dark side of racing,
and called into question the honesty of some of the higher profile riders on
the New York circuit at the time.

Thornton reports in "Not By a Long Shot" that in 1974 Mike Hole turned down
offers of $5,000 and $10,000 to "hold" a horse at Saratoga; Hole was found dead
in his car 18 months later in what was conveniently labeled a suicide.

In discussing how on the racetrack things are not always as they seem, Thornton
quotes JFK: "The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-- deliberate,
contrived and dishonest, but the myth-- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."