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5. A Scandal I Didn’t Deserve
- Southern Illinois University Press
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50 5. A Scandal I Didn’t Deserve Those ERA demonstrators must have thought I had some magical power to change everyone’s minds. My dad, a barber by trade, was an avid horse player. When I was a kid, he took me to the track, usually Arlington Park. Once or twice we went way south to a track called Washington Park; it was like the South Side’s Arlington Park. Over time, I enjoyed the races more and more and started following the horses. I still do. Sometimes when I worked in my Chicago law office, I would go to Arlington Park just for a break. I’ve been to the Kentucky Derby a half-dozen times but not the other two races in the famous Triple Crown, the Belmont or the Preakness, and I’ve been to the Breeders’ Cup—the annual season-ending championship of thoroughbred racing—and to Saratoga in New York. Over the years, I made it my business to learn how to read and study the forms. When you get into it over the course of a season, you start recognizing the names, the jockeys, the trainers, and the owners. I got to know many of the track owners and some of the horsemen and horse owners from downstate Illinois. When I became a senator, someone told me that the Illinois Department of Agriculture had a legislative liaison by the name of Dick Davidson. Everybody knew him; he was a fixture. He had been there for years and years and knew a great deal about the operation of the Department of Agriculture and the Illinois State Fair and all things agrarian. So I got to know him and learned from him about the state’s interest in the regulation of breeding and racing horses. Historically, Illinois had a problem with the quality of its horses in the big races. At the Hambletonian in southern Illinois, which people called the Kentucky Derby of harness racing, horses from Illinois didn’t have a real shot at winning. It doesn’t sound good to say that, but everybody knew it was true. Illinois-bred horses could not be competitive on the track with horses from other states such as Kentucky. The horses in Kentucky, a scandal i didn’t deserve 51 frankly, were a little higher class for the most part, and they would march into Ohio and Illinois and New Jersey and go away with the big purses. So the Illinois breeders wanted some additional incentives. Richard Duchossois, the founder and chairman of Duchossois Industries, headquartered in Elmhurst, had a big breeding farm. He wanted to have races and purses specifically earmarked for Illinois-conceived and Illinoisfoaled horses. Illinois laws needed some changes to make these things happen. I had been around the tracks, and Duchossois and others knew of my big interest in horses. Unfortunately, the industry’s image was tarnished by a big scandal when the federal government indicted former Illinois governor Otto Kerner in 1971 for buying racetrack stock at a huge discount from Marjorie Everett, the former owner of the Arlington Park, Washington Park, and Balmoral racetracks in the Chicago area. Sports Illustrated once called Everett “the racing lady of Chicago.”1 Kerner was accused of paying Everett the small amount of $50,000 for $300,000 worth of stock in exchange for giving her favorable racing dates. Setting the dates was Kerner’s prerogative at the time of the purchase. James R. Thompson, at that time the U.S. attorney, and his chief assistant, Sam Skinner, prosecuted Kerner. Thompson claimed that Everett gave Kerner a $45,000 campaign contribution in 1960—big money in those days and 10 percent of Kerner’s entire campaign fund that year. It wasn’t illegal, just a lot of money, and it bolstered the implication that Kerner was beholden to the track owner and might have purchased the stock at a deep discount. But Kerner denied knowing the contribution was that large and denied accepting any bribe. The case just dragged on. Kerner, five years out of office and by then a sitting federal judge, was finally convicted in 1973 and went to prison in July 1974. So it was a black eye on the horse racing industry that stayed in the headlines. There was another scandal, too—depicted as a scandal, anyway—when word got out that a New Jersey businessman with an interest in horses had given $100,000 to Illinois Republicans in...