The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
– Damon Runyan
Antonios Mokbel had a passion for the track rivalled only by his love of food, women and filthy lucre. At about five foot six, or 167 centimetres, he was eleven centimetres shorter than some of the taller jockeys. That made him the right height to get on the back of a horse and channel his racing passion in a constructive, legal way. Of course for Tony to become a jockey a substantial slimming of the girth would have been required, as would have an increase in discipline and a reduction in la dolce vita. So instead, Mokbel opted to keep his danger, thrills and spills off-track. And rather than a jockey he became something else entirely – the scourge of the racecourse.
In making his choice Mokbel was following in an ignoble but strong national tradition of criminals exploiting legal and ethical blind spots at the track. The Mr Bigs of the drug world, like Griffith don Robert Trimbole, had used the punt to wash their money years earlier, and colourful racing figures like George Freeman had made fortunes fixing races with jockeys. Sometimes the fix has come at a deadly cost. In the 1980s the body of trainer George Brown was found broken and burnt in a torched car south of Sydney. He had been got at and was meant to secretly swap one horse – not expected to win and attracting good odds – for a much faster horse. But Brown got an attack of morals and put the original horse in the race. His eleventh-hour decision to play it straight attracted the chagrin of the would-be fixers and cost Brown his life.
In another incident dubbed the Fine Cotton affair, linked to Robbie Waterhouse, a member of the Waterhouse racing dynasty, the switch actually went through. A horse called Bold Personality was brought in to play the role of slower steed Fine Cotton. The two animals were far from doppelgangers in either appearance or form. Bold Personality had white feet. The horse it was impersonating, Fine Cotton, did not. The fixers tried to conceal the anomaly with brown paint. But word of the plot spread. The horse’s feet came out a strange red colour from the paint job, and the fix descended into farce. Odds on Fine Cotton shortened from 33-1 to 7-2 and even as the equine impostor tore past the post, punters in the stands shouted ‘wrong horse’ and ‘ring-in’.
Not even the horses themselves have been safe from standover tactics when money has been on the line. There were attempts to shoot Beau Vite and Phar Lap. And the conventional wisdom now is that Phar Lap’s sudden demise was a deliberate killing.
In 1969 Bart Cummings-trained Melbourne Cup favourite Big Philou was snuck a debilitating dose of laxatives on the eve of the race. A strapper to Cup king Cummings, Les Lewis, who later came clean on being behind the sabotage, was candid about the power of the almighty dollar to corrupt the integrity of racing: ‘Money was speaking all languages, which it always has. And you get a thousand dollars waved in front of you when you’re only working for a dollar an hour,’ Lewis said. ‘It’s a lot of money to have put in your hand, a lot, and you’re willing to take that risk for it.’
To Mokbel the sport of kings, with its thin veneer of respectability, fitted well with his own delusions of grandeur and nobility. The thunder of racehorse hooves coming down the straight provided him with a soundtrack to a thousand dodgy deals stretching from the stables to the bookies’ enclosure. Then on race day beautiful women would appear dressed up in heels, flesh on show, with feathers sticking out of fascinators like rare exotic birds. It was heaven. But the track and its characters were more than cause for a punt to Mokbel. They provided the insidious charmer with a smorgasbord of lucrative illegal schemes.
Mokbel was a big fan of Scorsese gangster flick Casino and felt an affinity with Joe Pesci’s pint-sized psychopath character Nicky Santoro. The mobster narration in Casino is about another type of quasi-legitimate gambling – the slots and tables of Vegas. But it perfectly sums up the attraction the track held for a crim with a creeping record like Mokbel. ‘For guys like me Las Vegas washes away your sins. It’s like a morality car wash. It does for us what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples,’ a mobster recounts in the film. ‘And along with making us legit comes cash. Tons of it.’
In the nineties Mokbel created a corporate vehicle he wanted to use to build a ten-storey tower in Brunswick and named the company for his passion – Trackside Pty Ltd. His actual trackside ventures, while similarly ambitious, were much less respectable. And it seemed Mokbel’s passion for the horses was surpassed only by his love of arranging the order in which they arrived past the post.
Mokbel made his first major appearance on the scene during the nineties as the leader of an unorthodox group of punters called ‘the tracksuit gang’. Tony and the designer tracksuit-wearing group had an uncanny knack for picking winners and would simultaneously unload thousands on the same bet at the last minute. The scheme allowed uncapped wagers while protecting the group from shortened odds and too much attention. It was no new trick. Commission agents who place bets for punters who value their privacy are an accepted part of the food chain at the track. A variety of people have adopted the tactic of using a team of helpers and agents for last-minute cash drops on multiple bookies to maintain the best possible odds. But Tony’s cartel of tracksuited terrors brought it to a new level of organisation and combined the synchronised plunges with improperly obtained inside information. They struck up and down the east coast for years, troubling the sleep of the nation’s bookmakers. If Mokbel and his casually attired associates were plunging heavily on a horse, London to a brick it would run well.
In 1997 at Flemington the group put $100,000 on Swords Drawn at $3.50, making a quarter-of-a-million-dollar profit. They also reportedly won half a million after a national punting swoop on Timeless Winds, a winner at Queensland’s Doomben racetrack. On some swoops Mokbel also took the opportunity for a criminal double dip, money-laundering the payout by insisting bookies pay in fresh $100 green notes after the bets were placed with the older ‘grey ghost’ $100 notes.
The tracksuit gang would also buy winning tickets from punters, paying them handsomely for paperwork seemingly showing legitimate track profits. The one certainty in gambling is, no matter how smart or tinny the gambler, the house always ultimately wins. But after much hard work buying win tickets and arranging bent paperwork, Tony’s financial records said different.
The tracksuit gang’s picks did not always come in but wins were frequent enough to rattle the bagmen. One rails bookie lamented during the tracksuit gang’s reign that the members threw money on regardless of the odds, and as they shortened they did not stop punting. ‘They had bundles of tickets and a bigger bundle of cash,’ the bookmaker said. ‘They’ve been around for a while now. They’ve just got an unlimited supply – a truckload of money. And when they bet they rarely miss.’
Over time Mokbel became one of the biggest racetrack punters the nation had seen since late media mogul and ‘Prince of Whales’ mega-gambler Kerry Packer. Mokbel would openly brag of bets in the thousands and wins in the hundreds of thousands. But tactics as much as ego were behind the boasts. Mokbel would pretend to some he had made his small fortune through property. But his self-perpetuated image as a professional punter meant that whenever authorities inquired how an unemployed Brunswick boy had garnered a fortune in assets, Mokbel, with more credibility than most, could answer with three words: monster winning streak.