ANYONE REMEMBER LISA DRUCK

[findeight]

IIRC the mag artical is a synopsis, more or less, of the nasty saga chronicled in "Hot Blood".

Far as this blonde ditzoid? Not coming off too well in the press...happened to catch Geraldo the other night-he referred to her as delusional.

But, hey, anything that makes the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism is entertainment even if a little surreal.

[findeight]

Or there is no Melissa? Wasn't that just a phone interview or an off the record quite asking them to back off "sis"?

[fair judy]

there was a quick interview with "melissa" on the communist news network last night. didn't look like any of the girls, but then i don't look like i did at 17 anymore either. just a heads up. the media has this side line in their teeth and they are running with the bit. i have a flock of emails, some from legit national outlets, some not so much.

[viv555]

Pictures

I work for a national news program and was wondering if anyone would have pictures of Lisa Druck with her horse or James Druck. We can pay for the use of the pictures.

[Figment]

Viv55 and others - we all need to know and remember what happened. I'm sure someone else on this thread will provide pictures shortly.

Blood Money
5392 words
16 November 1992
Sports Illustrated
18
Volume 77; Issue 21; ISSN: 0038822X
English
Copyright (c) 1992 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

On the rainy night of Feb. 2, 1991, in despair over the prospect of causing the death of a horse by breaking its hind leg with a crowbar, Tommy (the Sandman) Burns sat in a bar outside Gainesville, Fla., and got drunk on gin and tonic. "Really wasted," Burns recalls. "I had never done one like that before."

For a decade the cherubic 30-year-old had made a sporadic living as a hit man hired to destroy expensive horses and ponies, usually so their owners could collect on lucrative life-insurance policies. But no owner had ever ordered Burns to dispose of a horse by breaking one of its legs--that is, by causing a trauma so severe that a veterinarian would be forced to put the animal down with a lethal injection.

Burns's preferred method of killing horses was electrocution. It had been so ever since the day in 1982 when, he says, the late James Druck, an Ocala, Fla., attorney who represented insurance companies, paid him to kill the brilliant show jumper Henry the Hawk, on whose life Druck had taken out a $150,000 life-insurance policy. In fact, says Burns, Druck personally taught him how to rig the wires to electrocute Henry the Hawk: how to slice an extension cord down the middle into two strands of wire; how to attach a pair of alligator clips to the bare end of each wire; and how to attach the clips to the horse--one to its ear, the other to its rectum. All he had to do then, says Burns, was plug the cord into a standard wall socket. And step back.

"You better get out of the way," says Burns. "They go down immediately. One horse dropped so fast in the stall, he must have broken his neck when he hit the floor. It's a sick thing, I know, but it was quick and it was painless. They didn't suffer." And it was, for the collection of insurance claims, an ideal method of execution. According to doctors at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center, one of the nation's leading large-animal hospitals, even the most-experienced pathologist would be unlikely to detect signs of death by electrocution--unless, perchance, the pathologist was looking for it and the clips happened to leave singe marks. Many of the horses Burns electrocuted were assumed to have died of colic.

So Tommy Burns (a.k.a. Timmy Robert Ray), who had worked around horses since he had run away from home in Connecticut at the age of 15, became a serial killer of horses and got away with it for 10 years. According to federal agents, Burns destroyed some 20 horses, mostly show jumpers and hunters, on the show-horse circuit from Florida to Vermont to Illinois. "In 1989 it got crazy," Burns says. "I killed three horses in one week." Indeed, toting the canvas athletic bag in which he hid his deadly wires, Burns became such a regular presence among the wealthy show-horse crowds that he earned a sobriquet of which he would remain, until recently, unaware. "People knew what was going on," says a prominent West Virginia horsewoman. "When Tommy arrived at a show, they would say the Sandman was around. They knew a horse would be put to sleep." In almost every case, something about a horse--its performance, its health, its age--had made the unthinkable occur to its owner.

By that night of Feb. 2, Burns had, by his own admission, run "hard and wild for 10 years." A few days earlier he and his associate, Harlow Arlie, had driven a vanload of show horses from their base in northern Illinois to Canterbury Farms in Florida. Among the equine passengers was Streetwise, a sporty chestnut jumper with a white stocking on each leg, a blaze on its face and a $25,000 insurance policy on its life. Burns has told federal investigators that the 7-year-old gelding's owner, Donna Brown, a prominent horsewoman on the clubby show-horse circuit, had hired him for $5,000 to arrange a fatal accident for Streetwise. According to Burns, the insurance policy did not cover death by colic--Streetwise had a history of colic, a life-threatening condition in a horse--so Brown insisted that he break the animal's leg.

"I don't want to break his leg," Burns, at the bar near Gainesville, sang to Arlie in his executioner's song. "I'm not into that."

"I'll do it," Burns says Arlie told him. "For half your fee."

The two men left the bar and returned to Canterbury. Burns figured the rain that night would make the perfect alibi: They were loading Streetwise into the van when the horse slipped, fell off the ramp and broke its leg. At about 10:10 p.m., after helping to load three other horses into the van for a trip south to West Palm Beach, Burns stood in the middle of a brightly lighted lot and held a lead shank tethered to Streetwise's halter.

Unbeknownst to Burns, investigators for the Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, acting on a tip, had been * his van ever since it had rolled into Florida, and on this night they were staking out the farm. One of the investigators, Harold Barry, lay flat and still on the top of a beat-up horse trailer less than 100 yards away, watching helplessly as the dark, rain-swept scene suddenly turned from eerie to macabre.

The powerfully built Arlie appeared behind Streetwise's right rear leg, a crowbar in his hand. Arlie swung the bar like a baseball bat, and agents across the highway could hear a crack. Neighing loudly, in a high, panicky scream, Streetwise began thrashing on his dangling leg, fell to the ground as a stunned Burns hung onto the lead--"I'd never seen anything like it; the horse went into shock," he says--and then scrambled back to his feet. The keening horse tore the shank from Burns's hand and took off around the stable, disappearing in the night, * again, bellowing, only a sound now, an echo behind the barn now, in the dark now, in the quiet rain.

Tommy Burns punched numbers on a cellular phone, calling Donna Brown in West Palm Beach to inform her of events. Meanwhile Arlie informed Carlie Ferguson, president of Canterbury Farms, who summoned a vet. The vet phoned Brown, and on her instructions he called the insurance company on its 800 emergency number. Of course, the company authorized immediate euthanasia for the suffering animal. Moments after arriving on the scene, the vet put the horse down.

Burns and Arlie did not get far. After the death of Streetwise, Burns fired up the rig and took off. But two miles down Route 26, Florida Highway Patrol cars converged on the van from all directions. "They were even coming out of dirt roads," says Burns. He made a run for it, but he was quickly subdued, handcuffed and arrested at shotgun point. "What were you guys doing at the farm?" a cop yelled in Burns's ear.

They had him cold. Agricultural investigators found the crowbar and the electrocution wires in Burns's white pickup. An accomplice who had helped to load the horses at the scene, Chad Sondell, said in a sworn statement to state investigators that Burns and Arlie had told him they were to be paid $5,000 by Brown to kill Streetwise. Arlie confirmed Sondell's story, according to police reports, and admitted having struck Streetwise with the crowbar. Arlie soon pleaded guilty to charges of insurance fraud and cruelty to animals, and he eventually served six months of an 18-month sentence before being paroled.

Federal authorities had been investigating Burns for months--it was they who had tipped the Florida agricultural department that the Sandman was heading south with a potential victim in his van--and Burns's arrest turned out to be the major break in what had become a difficult collection of cases to crack.

Underscoring the importance of the arrest, an FBI agent and a top Justice Department prosecutor from Chicago, Steve Miller, descended on Gainesville only hours after Burns was taken into custody. Caught in the act, incriminated by Arlie and Sondell and * certain conviction and a jail term on charges of insurance fraud and cruelty to animals, Burns decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors. He spent three weeks in jail, and after the Alachua County Circuit Court finally released him on $100,000 cash bail--under an order that he stay away from horses--he returned to Chicago, where he began cooperating with a grand jury that has been looking into the killing of horses for insurance money.

Burns quickly unraveled his sordid tale to law-enforcement officials, giving names, places and dates from his history as a professional horse-killer and a co-conspirator in cases of insurance fraud. Burns faces sentencing Dec. 14 in the case involving Streetwise, and he expects the feds to seek leniency on his behalf on grounds that he is a key government witness in what has become an investigation of stunning scope.

"Tommy Burns turns out to be the tip of the iceberg," one federal agent says. In the next few weeks, as agents from the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wind up their investigations, sources estimate that as many as 40 owners, trainers, veterinarians and riders will be indicted on various charges related to the killing of horses for insurance payments. Law-enforcement officials are piecing together felony fraud cases against the owners and trainers who hired Burns, and they're tracking down itinerant stable hands and grooms who can confirm details of the killings that the Sandman carried out for their bosses. The inquiries have led agents on a long, circuitous trail from one scene of electrocution to the next, and along the way investigators have picked up leads on other insurance-related deaths not involving Burns and on still other crimes that include suspicious stable fires and the fraudulent sale of overvalued horses.

In the 21 months since Burns's arrest, investigators have developed hard evidence that such crimes have not been confined to the show-horse business and that Burns is not the only hit man working expensive stables. During that time the investigators have concluded that killing horses for insurance claims is business as usual at all levels in the world of show horses.

This phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it confined to jumpers and hunters. Twenty years ago, at some prominent thoroughbred racetrack barns, animals were dying at such an alarming rate that insurance companies were refusing to insure the trainers' horses. At one Belmont Park barn where horses were expiring mysteriously in the night, cynical grooms would show up in the morning and ask, "Anyone die last night?"

Veteran insurance adjusters say, however, that the number of suspicious claims by horse owners has increased dramatically in the years since the 1986 Tax Reform Act eliminated performance horses as depreciable assets. That "reform" and the anemic state of the economy cut the bottom out of the horse business, leaving a cash-starved industry with farms and stables struggling desperately to stay afloat.

Unlike paintings by Renoir or baseball cards bearing pictures of Honus Wagner, horses experience wild, often unforeseen fluctuations in value. Say, for instance, that a thoroughbred investor spends $500,000 for a well-built, well-bred yearling, insures him for that sum and sends him off, as a 2-year-old, to a racetrack trainer. And say that the trainer then informs the owner that the colt is so slow that he couldn't beat a $15,000 maiden claimer. Or that he is an ill-tempered, untrainable rogue. Or that he is about to bow a tendon and will never race. The humane sportsman might wince and take the loss, but more than a few others would make other arrangements. "The insurance is there, and it is very tempting," says one federal agent.

Over the last few years, says Harvey Feintuch, a New York lawyer who specializes in the investigation of equine insurance claims, "we have had a very, very significant increase in the number of claims that just don't look right."

Given the current economic climate, the sudden deaths of expensive, stall-bound horses tend to raise suspicions, even at the highest levels of the horse business. A widely respected free-lance turf writer, Carol Flake, sent shudders through the thoroughbred industry when, in a meticulously reported article in the February 1992 issue of Connoisseur magazine, she raised the possibility that the death of Alydar--one of the most popular racehorses of modern times and one of the world's prepotent stallions--was not an accident (box, page 22).

In the investigation of thoroughbred fatalities, federal agents have found more than mere suspicions. In Brooklyn and South Florida, the feds say, they recently uncovered an insurance scheme that led to the death of one horse, a son of Seattle Slew named Fins, and nearly resulted in the death of another, Cutlass Reality, a New York stakes winner of $1.4 million. Prosecutors say that the scheme involved Victor Arena, the reputed head of the Colombo crime family; Howard Crash, a New York securities broker who is under indictment for bribery; and Larry Lombardo, a licensed owner and trainer of thoroughbreds who has been indicted on federal charges that he killed Fins "while making the death appear to be due to natural causes." Sources speculate that the horse was injected with parasitic bloodworms that brought on a case of thromboembolic colic, a fatal illness.

According to a 21-count indictment handed up in Miami on Aug. 4, Lombardo purchased Fins for $7,500, inflated the horse's value to $400,000 through a series of sales of phony shares, insured Fins for that amount and then collected on the policy after the horse died. Ron Rubinstein, Lombardo's defense attorney, claims that Fins died of natural causes and argues that the colt, at $400,000, was not overvalued as a breeding prospect. But Seth Hancock, the president of Claiborne Farm, which bred Fins and has been in the thoroughbred-breeding business for 80 years, said that Fins was a big, crooked-legged colt who couldn't run a lick.

Lombardo is also charged with conspiring to kill Cutlass Reality, the terrific winner of the 1988 Hollywood Gold Cup (and conqueror of the Horse of the Year, Alysheba), in an alleged insurance-fraud scheme. Crash and his former business associate Mark Hankoff--the two key government witnesses against Lombardo, according to sources close to the case--owned the horse in partnership with Lombardo and several others. What saved Cutlass Reality is unclear, but the hit was never made. "Somebody got scared and backed out," an FBI agent says. What is clear, according to the sworn testimony of an FBI agent involved in the case, is that Crash, Lombardo and Arena would have each received $1 million from the insurance settlement if the horse had been killed. Instead, Cutlass Reality will be standing stud in California next spring, servicing mares at $5,000 a pop--and that beats colic.

While the company that insured Fins had some doubts about the horse's stated value and was suspicious of the timing of the claim, which was made six months after the purchase of the policy, it nonetheless sent the $400,000 check to Lombardo and his cohorts. (Lombardo goes on trial next March 22; if convicted, he may be forced to make restitution to the insurance company.) Increasingly, however, insurance companies are balking at paying suspicious claims and are * them in court. The companies are also investigating suspicious claims more assiduously, looking for signs of fraud such as the bogus inflation of a horse's value and the concealing of ailments and infirmities. "We began to take more time and more care," says Feintuch, adding that Lloyds of London and other carriers have toughened their approach to paying claims.

Lloyds's increased vigilance dates back eight years to a case that rocked the highest levels of the thoroughbred breeding world and drove some of its biggest players to hide behind the woodshed in embarrassment. When, on March 25, 1984, an imported English horse named Pelerin died of vitamin D toxicosis shortly after ending his inconsistent career by * out of the money in a race in Louisiana, the underwriters of the insurance on the horse, all associated with Lloyds, had reason to be skeptical of the $1.45 million policy that Kentucky horseman Harold Snowden held on his half of the animal. Not only did Pelerin pear to have been poisoned, as the term toxicosis implies, but his value (Snowden and a partner had purchased him for $2 million) had dropped sharply in light of his less-than-stellar racing career.

Snowden, co-owner of the Stallion Station farm and breeder of two Kentucky Derby winners, Dust Commander (1970) and Bold Forbes (1976), had been one of the most active players in the business, the syndicator of more than 100 stallions and a prolific insurer of horses. In a gesture aimed at staying in Snowden's favor, the underwriters offered him $1 million--exactly what he had paid originally for half of the horse--to settle the claim. Snowden held out for $1.35 million. The carriers refused to budge, and Snowden took them to court. It was the first time that an equine insurance company had opposed someone of his stature.

Snowden came armed with 10 letters from fellow horsemen, all dated before Pelerin's death, in which each breeder expressed interest in buying a share in the horse for $75,000 upon his retirement to stud. At the 40 shares Snowden said he would have sold, Pelerin's claimed value now rose to $3 million. Among the nationally known breeders who sent letters were Warner Jones, then chairman of the board of Churchill Downs; J.T. Lundy, later head of Calumet Farm; and the late Leslie Combs II, then the aging pillar of Spendthrift Farm.

Snowden looked as if he would win in a gallop when--in a maneuver Perry Mason would have envied--Feintuch, acting on the underwriters' behalf, called two witnesses who destroyed Snowden's case and earned him the glowering wrath of the judge, Henry Wilhoit. One of the witnesses, a secretary for breeder Dwayne Rogers, testified that she had typed Rogers's letter to Snowden. The problem was that she had not begun working for Rogers until 10 months after Pelerin's death. She explained to the court that Rogers told her to backdate the letter to Jan. 5, 1984, two months before the horse's demise. The other witness, a receptionist at Spendthrift Farm, testified that she had typed Combs's letter to Snowden but that she did not go to work at Spendthrift until July 1984, by which time Pelerin had been dead four months. She testified that Combs had her type the backdated letter late one day, after everyone else had left the office.

Snowden was in trouble. His lawyers withdrew on him, leaving him to face a furious Wilhoit. Snowden hired F. Lee Bailey to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but that did no good. After a third horseman admitted that his letter was a fraud, Wilhoit concluded that "all 10 letters had been backdated." While never addressing the question of whether Pelerin was poisoned, Wilhoit charged that "a fraud had been practiced upon the court." Not only was Snowden out the $1 million that Lloyds had offered in the original settlement, but he was also left with a dead horse, a court-ordered judgment against him for $194,131.12 (to cover court costs and the amount Lloyds spent in legal fees * his claim) and bills from his own departed lawyers, not to mention from Bailey.

While the thoroughbred business has had its sorry share of cases involving insurance fraud, it has experienced nothing like the maelstrom that Burns is about to set spinning in the show horse business. Sources say that, based on Burns's testimony, some of the most celebrated figures in the game are targets of the grand jury probe. They include Donna Brown and her husband, Buddy Brown, a member of the U.S. equestrian team at the 1976 Olympics and still one of the nation's leading performers in Grand Prix jumping. Not only does Donna face allegations in connection with the death of Streetwise, but she and Buddy are also under investigation for the death of Aramis, another show jumper. According to sources, insurance records show that Aramis, while insured for $1 million, died under suspicious circumstances. (No charge has been filed in either case.)

Asked about the federal investigations into the deaths of two of the Browns' horses, the couple's lawyer, Mark Arisohn, a Manhattan criminal defense specialist, says, "I wish I could give you a response. We will plead not guilty. Our defense will be established in the courtroom."

Another horseman who has attracted the attention of investigators is George Lindemann Jr. of Greenwich, Conn., who has emerged as one of the nation's most accomplished equestrians since graduating from Brown University in 1986. Lindemann has ridden his stable of gifted show jumpers to victory in some of the Grand Prix circuit's richest and most prestigious events, but federal investigators are more interested in what role, if any, he played in the December 1990 death of his champion hunter Charisma.

Tommy Burns has told authorities that Charisma was insured for $400,000 when Burns electrocuted him for Lindemann in a stall at the Lindemann family's Cellular Farms, in Armonk, N.Y. According to another source, Lindemann had purchased Charisma for $250,000 in 1989. Minus Burns's alleged $35,000 fee for the hit, the insurance payoff would have left Lindemann with a $115,000 profit. It also left investigators wondering why, if Burns's allegations are true, the enormously rich Lindemann--the name Cellular Farms refers to cellular phones, the source of the family's wealth--would take so big a risk for so small a sum.

Asked about the inquiry into Charisma's death, Lindemann referred all questions to his lawyer, Elaine Amendola, who said, "Why should I be talking about this when George has the FBI hanging all over his neck?" She added, however, that "George is completely innocent."

Additionally, federal agents are looking into the possible involvement of veterinarian Dana Tripp, also an accomplished equestrian, in the death of Streetwise. Florida investigators say that Tripp's red pickup truck--with DANA TRIPP, D.V.M. emblazoned on its doors--was part of Burns's caravan as it made its way toward Canterbury Farms. It was Tripp, according to sources cited in the police report, who recommended to Donna Brown that she hire Burns to stage Streetwise's accident. Prosecutors have phone records revealing Tripp's numerous conversations with both Brown and Burns in the two days leading up to the death of Streetwise. Tripp has refused to respond to SI's questions about the matter.

The Sandman's trail has led federal agents to stables in at least eight states. Sources say that Paul Valliere of North Smithfield, R.I., one of the show circuit's leading trainers, is under federal investigation. Burns has told authorities that Valliere hired him to destroy Roseau Platiere, one of Valliere's own horses. Burns says he electrocuted the animal one night in its stall at a horse show in Sugarbush, Vt. Reached at his Acres Wild Farm in Rhode Island, Valliere refused to answer any questions. Seeking corroboration of Burns's Sugarbush story, SI spoke to a woman who said that she had picked Burns up at the airport in Burlington, Vt., and taken him to the horse show. (The woman said she had given this information to the FBI.) SI also spoke to others who described Roseau Platiere as vigorous and healthy in the hours before Burns's visit. Burns says he has told federal agents that Roseau Platiere was one of the three horses he destroyed in 1989 during the busiest week of his career as a contract killer.

Agents are also * up Burns's account of the death of a show horse named Rainman. His owner, Chicago businessman Allen Levinson, collected a $50,000 insurance policy on Rainman's death, but he denies any wrongdoing. "I have never heard of Tommy Burns," Levinson says. "I was trying to sell that horse. I had it sold for more money than the insurance policy. There was a complete autopsy."

For the agents, investigating horse killings has been a difficult, unfamiliar experience. Only rarely has there been a body on which to perform a necropsy, as there was in the case of Streetwise; the carcasses usually have been lost to the rendering plants. So this has been in good part a paper chase. In some cases agents have served subpoenas on claims adjusters who had long before paid the owners for their losses. But the owners' files and personal financial records have been valuable, frequently confirming details of Burns's story of a horse's death--including in some cases the exact barn and stall where it occurred.

In fact, investigators have been struck by the ease with which they were able to follow the paper trail that some of Burns's clients left behind. Burns's presence on the circuit and the things that tended to happen when he was around became so accepted that he was treated like the feedman or the farrier. His employers frequently paid him with personal checks and sometimes with cashier's checks purchased at their banks.

Even federal agents, who thought they had seen everything, were shocked by the insouciance of some of those who dealt with Burns. Burns recalls one woman's approach to him at a horse show: "She said, 'Do you think you could kill my horse for $10,000?' So I did. She bought another horse with the insurance money and came up to me two months later and asked me to kill her new horse. She didn't like it."

There is a troubling banality about the evil at work in these cases. "We are dealing with a way of life here," one investigator said. "These people thought they had some sort of right to do these things."

Largely because of the nature of the crime ("These animals are so vulnerable that I'd compare it almost to hurting children," says Florida agriculture commissioner Bob Crawford), some law-enforcement officials have pursued the investigation with an inspired intensity. "This is a case where you can lose your detachment," says one federal agent. "These were beautiful animals. They were standing there helpless in their stalls. Most of these people had plenty of money. So you get outraged. And you work a little harder."

Burns knows better than anyone how the horses were standing in their stalls, wearing their halters and alligator clips and watching him curiously, like deer in a clearing, as he stepped outside and moved for the socket. He wants it known, as he has been telling the feds, that he wasn't there on his own. "I was not alone in all of this." he says. "I feel terrible about what I did. But I did not advertise. I did not do any sales calls. People found me and came to me. Very important people. Very wealthy people. They came to me because they somehow knew that I might be willing to do something they wanted done. They wanted these horses dead."

What the clients wanted, the clients got. However well he warbles, Burns knows he will do some jail time, just as he knows there will be no escaping, ever, what he did for so long with his life. There's no escaping that night in Florida, in the dark, in the rain, and the sight of Arlie with the crowbar, and the crack and the screams, the horse * and thrashing, rising and running. Burns can still hear the cops yelling at him after his arrest: "You killed all those horses, and we know you did!"

"They were right," says Tommy Burns.

They always will be. That is his sentence.

QUESTIONS ABOUT ALYDAR

On Nov. 15, 1990, when Calumet Farm announced that its great thoroughbred stallion Alydar had been humanely destroyed after he kicked his stall so hard that he shattered his right hind leg, there was no reason to believe that one of America's most popular racehorses was the victim of anything but a tragic accident. In the ensuing months, however, as Calumet slipped into bankruptcy, some observers began thinking the unthinkable. Had Alydar, whose life had been insured for $36.5 million, been the victim of an insurance scam?

The 15-year-old horse was Calumet's most prolific cash cow, bred to more than 100 mares a year for service fees totaling $12 million. But as financial records soon made clear, Alydar might have been worth more dead than alive. On the eve of the horse's destruction, according to court records, Calumet owed a total of $120 million to various banks, vendors and investors. Foremost among them was First City Bancorporation of Houston. As Calumet's debt had grown, the farm's president, J.T. Lundy, had sold and bartered away so many lifetime breeding rights to Alydar that the stallion's projected cash income to the farm in 1991 had dropped to about $7 million, of which $2 million would have gone to pay his life-insurance premiums.

Indeed, the farm was $2.6 million behind in its total premium payments. John Mabee's Golden Eagle Insurance Co. had said two weeks before Alydar's death that it would not renew its $5 million policy on the horse in December. Lundy needed a large infusion of cash to ward off foreclosure. He was barred from selling Alydar by the will of Calumet's former owner, Lucille Markey. The farm's quickest source of money, court documents reveal, was the $36.5 million in policies on Alydar--of which $15 million eventually went to owners of breeding seasons in Alydar, $20.5 million to First City and $1 million to Calumet.

In the months after Alydar's death, a few veterinarians expressed doubts that he could have shattered his hind leg, the strongest, densest bone in a horse's body, by kicking the door of his stall. They said such an injury was usually caused by a powerful blow--say, being hit by a car. On the night of the accident, Lundy's insurance agent (his sister, Kathy Jones) had hired Lexington insurance adjuster Tom Dixon to do the investigation. The next day, after Alydar underwent surgery to repair the break and then broke the leg again by putting weight on it, he was destroyed, and Dixon recommended to Lloyds of London that it approve the $36.5 million claim. It was the largest equine payoff in U.S. history.

Significant factors in his assessment, says Dixon, were the concern people at Calumet displayed toward Alydar, and the desperate surgery performed on the horse. "Why would they go to all that trouble?" he asks. Skeptics say there are 36.5 million reasons.

In the end the insurance payment on Alydar's life was not enough to save Calumet for Lundy. He lost the farm in 1991, and it was eventually purchased at auction, for $17 million, by owner-breeder Henryk de Kwiatkowski. Alydar is buried in Calumet's historic cemetery. There, with the glory days long gone, only the doubts surrounding his death yet linger.

Some greedy horse owners have hired killers to murder their animals for the insurance payoffs. Tommy Burns made his living for ten years as a hit man hired by horse owners to kill their animals.

[tidy rabbit]

Jesus christ. I read through the third paragraph and about got sick. I had to stop reading.

[Glimmerglass]

The sorted tale (Rielle Hunter a/ka/ Lisa Druck) connection to the past has been in a few newspapers this week

Palm Beach Post 8-13-08 "Dad of Edwards' mistress had dark side"

Born Lisa Druck in Fort Lauderdale, Hunter didn't leave much of a footprint there. Or in Ocala, where she went to high school. Or in Tampa, where she briefly lived.

Her father, however, left a legacy that Florida's horsey set, especially in Wellington, would rather forget.

In a 1992 cover story, Sports Illustrated named Druck an early figure in a frightening trend: The killing of show horses and ponies for insurance money.

FBI informant Tommy "The Sandman" Burns told the magazine that Druck, for whom he worked as a stable hand, taught him how to electrocute horses. That way, insurers would believe the animals died of disease.

Burns said Druck paid him to electrocute Druck's brilliant jumper, Henry the Hawk. And because Burns didn't know how to do it, Druck showed him. He sliced an extension cord, attached one end with a clip into the horse's ear and the other to its rectum, then told Burns to plug the cord into an outlet.

Druck got a $150,000 check from the insurance.

"You better get out of the way," Burns said when he described the 20-or-so executions he would then claim. "They go down immediately. It's a sick thing. . . ."

In time, The Sandman was arrested by authorities near Wellington. That night, he watched an associate break a horse's leg with a crowbar. He was sentenced to a year in jail.

Burns' most famous "hit" came in 1990, when he was hired by Wellington cellphone heir George Lindemann Jr. for his champion jumper Charisma. Multi-millionaire Lindemann served 33 months in prison, all for a $115,000 insurance payoff.

What about Druck?

According to records, he died at 56 in New York, a rich man. The grotesque killing of the horse, Smith told Page Two, wasn't something Hunter and her sisters talked about.

"The girls spoke very highly of their dad," Smith said.

With all due respect you know it's pretty sick when someone's dad was the guy who taught 'The Sandman' how to kill horses.

[REH]

she also has a flopped movie career as "lisa hunter"

http://www.236.com/news/2008/08/13/g...riell_8284.php

[Glimmerglass]

she also has a flopped movie career as "lisa hunter"

Also credited as 'Lisa Jo Hunter'

You think a SAG carrying member with such credits as being one of "Grant's Girlfriends" in Overboard to be followed up by 'Dancer in Nightclub' and then 'Reporter' in two direct to VHS films is a flop?

[Moesha]

It is amazing how the horse insurance killings have come up again........it just shows how lasting and far reaching a scandal this was and how it affected and involved so many people. I think that speaks volumes to why so many keep these horrible events alive in threads and discussions, every new story or tale really makes this era seem like a "time of terror."

I worry about the consequences with this and the eventing fatalities being in the news what image is being created on horse sports...maybe nothing, maybe nothing new...but it is worrisome that the majority of good people might face reprecussions from animal rights groups and others because of these unfortunate accidents and deliberate acts sweeping the news.

[Coreene]

I hope John Edwards' thing falls off. I hate cheaters.

[TexasAggieEventer]

Whatever happened to some of the others...

that were being investigated? Lindemann, Ward. I see Lindemann was convicted - can't recall what happened to the other trainers, riders. Did they receive bans from USEF (or AHSA at that time)?

I guess its more of "where are they now?"

Update to my own question: I did find this on TheHorse.Com

Nor is current membership in an organization required. Following a 1996 guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud relating to a scheme in which horses were killed to obtain insurance proceeds, noted rider Barney Ward was expelled by the American Horse Shows Association (AHSA, now USEF). He also was barred from attending any recognized competition as a participant or spectator.

Ward took the AHSA to court, saying that he wanted to watch his son compete in horse shows. He argued among other things that he already had resigned from the AHSA, and that the organization had no authority to discipline a non-member. The Supreme Court of New York found that argument meritless, ruling that Ward's membership in AHSA at the time of his criminal conduct, plus his promise to be bound by the organization's rules, authorized the AHSA to discipline him, regardless of his current membership status. The Court also implied that the organization could discipline anyone who violated AHSA rules, even if the person had never been a member.

Wonder if the FEI took this same stance - if he is able to attend the competition in Hong Kong??

[Blinky]

Yea well when her friend was being interviewed yesterday about how warm and generous a person she is I about threw up.

[fair judy]

new espn article on druck

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/colum...ter&id=3533725

[tidy rabbit]

So Lisa didn't have anything directly to do with it right? It was all her dad's doing? She was just a victim of circumstance? Guilty by association?

[pds]

So Lisa didn't have anything directly to do with it right? It was all her dad's doing? She was just a victim of circumstance? Guilty by association?

Nuts don't fall far from the tree.

[fair judy]

the article states... "In fact, Lisa Druck was in the back of a pickup truck with her then-boyfriend, Louis Whelen, when Burns slipped into Henry the Hawk's barn with a handbag filled with his deadly equipment."

[tidy rabbit]

Nuts don't fall far from the tree.

FOR SURE!

the article states... "In fact, Lisa Druck was in the back of a pickup truck with her then-boyfriend, Louis Whelen, when Burns slipped into Henry the Hawk's barn with a handbag filled with his deadly equipment."

So the speculation then is that she turned a blind eye to it or that she knew what was going on? I couldn't tell from the article what was being implied really... it said "they chased after Burns but he slipped away in the shadows" or something like that.

The really disturbing thing in all of this (in my mind anyhow) is how many people seemed to know who he was and what he was doing there and didn't escort him off the show grounds.

[fair judy]

the author states, and correctly by my memory, that tommy burns looked the least likely to do something this despicable. he was affable, a little dopey, and would offer to help when he saw someone struggling with a heavy trunk or some other benign task. i don't want to start a wheelbarrow full of recrimination in my direction, but burns was a nice guy. he just killed horses. really hard to reconcile the dichotomy of his life, and choices.

[Donnalynn]

So, how does someone who is running for President not know about Google?

The calibre of riders in that whole series of carnage just makes me so, so sad. And mad. And frustrated.

I mean, was it drugs? Madness? Heck, was it contagious or something?

On another BB there is a lot of defense of Donna Brown.

People are saying all over that Barney Ward should be allowed to see his son compete.

People in California were buying horses from George Lindemann and Wally Holly until the day the doors closed on Wally.

It's hard to admit what great horsemen they all were. And how sad that they all had some place inside them that could allow them to even consider torture.

I believe we lost a lot when they broke bad. So I feel like the crimes weren't just committed against insurance companies and wonderful horses, but also against us. Here. Now.