**I.**
------
This is the story of a non-story, and the people who I insist are it’s non-characters, little guys and girls who ride horses very fast in a circle while non-people try to guess which one will win. There’s a shadowy and racist Doctor with money and power who owns the track but operates with little intrigue. There’s brief mention of Mexican drug cartels and the FBI, and a few stale gestures toward the “Golden Age.” Nobody remembers it anyway, can’t describe how the land rose and fell in the SoCal twilight. It’s something we miss, though it doesn’t miss us. And then there’s the Voice of the Institution, whose sole duty is to keep me from saying what I inevitably can’t say.
Friday, 18 January 2013, I stand beside Orlando Gutierrez, my hand on the white fence, waiting for the race to start. The lights across the track illuminate the varying intervals between the tall palms in ghostly sheets that seem snapped to the sky. Beyond the track, a rich darkness that exists in its own time. This, after all, is the Los Alamitos Race Track, the relic of an important man’s lifelong passion in Cyprus, California, still plugging along. I’m here to interview the jockeys, except they seem only a small part of something larger and more desperate. Strange vibrations luster the quiet. The air, redolent of horseflesh and crap, hay and cold dirt and fried food, conveys something brittle.
The track is fast. Gutierrez preps me for what’s going to happen. He points off to a white structure at the far end of the field; the starting gate. “And they’re riding this way?” I ask. Gutierrez’ enthusiasm for the race owes its depth to the years he’s spent in the employ of the track. When he first got here, 20 years ago, it was totally different. I follow his hand. Now land, in various stages of development, wanders beyond the Los Al acreage; to the east the mega-mall doppelgänger, SeaCoast Grace Church (which advertises itself as “not your ordinary church”), occupies what used to be a nearby school’s athletic field; and to the west, where there was once a country club and golf course, carwashes and parking lots. He doesn’t seem to point this out with melancholy. This is just what happens behind the Orange Curtain. Things change.
And then they’re off, but I don’t quite hear a starting gun. The lack of pageantry or tension has the effect of creating spectacle without origin. Horses are racing, and only a faint noise of interest rises up from the grandstands to my back. Separated by those tall palms and lights and a black and glassy looking pond, the horses jolt forward as though toys. But those impressions last only a few seconds—if that—because then the blur of motion opposite the grand stand shapes itself into a force rounding the bend. It’s like a dull roar coming toward you, like when you walk through the hallway toward the gymnasium for a high school basketball game. In about another second, I’m able to pick out the individual voices of the jockeys and the smack, swack of their whips. The crowd reaches its energetic height, some grunts, a few solitary cries of encouragement, “¡eeeee!” But their noise is minimal comparatively. Of course the hooves thunder, and the jockeys urge the horses on with insults in Spanish and English.
Then the race is over, a voice comes on over the intercom announcing the results, which I make little to no sense of without the help of Gutierrez.
**4 1/2 Furlongs. Maiden Claiming. Purse $8,000. Claiming Price $2,500.
Off at: 7:26. Times:**
**PN Horse Name Jockey Win Place Show**
7 Annie's Journey Joy Marie Scott $16.20 $6.40 $5.20
6 Jans Iva Devan Torres $4.40 $3.80
3 Sumart Tizzy Ramon Guce $2.20
Also Ran (in order): Shamrock Bay, Free Itch, Jans Sky Pete, Rosita Fresa
Scratched: Jm's Golden Legacy
**Daily Double (3-7) paid $29.80 Exacta (7-6) paid $56.20 SUP (7-6-3-2) paid $225.80 Trifecta (7-6-3) paid $190.50**
Winning Owner: Annabelle M. Stute Winning Trainer: Jerry Wallace, II
**II.**
--------
Earlier that day is the initial meet with Gutierrez, the media contact and marketing director for Los Alamitos, and I feel heavy. With only a couple hours sleep, it’s hard to pretend like you know what you’re doing. Small talk is out of the question. I let the photographer prattle as we’re showed into the racing offices. Inside, it’s dank and heinous smelling brown carpet and wood paneling, and on the walls faded black and white pictures from the “glory days,” when big crowds flocked to Los Al to watch famed horses like “Go Man Go.” It’s awful how obvious this place screams “those days are long gone” but that’s what it is. Dusty clumps of paper yellow on the disarrayed shelves. Boxes of old racing magazines (_The Thoroughbred of California_, 25 cents, August, 1952) collect dust in a small closet that doesn’t have a door. A potted fern droops forlornly in the corner, as though being punished.
In Gutierrez’s office, waivers are duly presented and signed. In case of injury and so on. And then he asks again what it is I’m doing. He’s adamant that the story be positive. I assure him that it is. “I want to write about the jockeys as little warriors but also the nobility of it too. Like these guys get out there and risk a lot. For really only themselves. Because it doesn’t seem like people are paying any attention.”
The littleness of the jockeys comes up a lot. Gutierrez wants me to avoid certain clichés. Like what I ask him. “Oh you know that they use drugs or don’t eat to stay under the 125-pound limit. These guys are athletes, man, I’m telling you. You have to be strong to be a jockey.” I tell him I won’t go there. His eyes narrow in an expression of thoughtfulness and we head outside for the stables. “It’s this way,” he says, sweeping his chubby arm.
Gutierrez will eventually turn on me but it’s early, he’s still accommodating and admittedly sympathetic to the journalistic art. We get to know one another on the walk to the stables. I ask him how he got started at Los Al. He tells me when was 18 or so, he was a sports journalist, covering high school football for a local newspaper. When a job writing for Los Alamitos opened up, he took it. Maybe he didn’t plan on staying at the track for 20 years, but that’s what happened. Dreams deferred, a life led. “Los Alamitos is like family,” he says.
We meet with the female jockey, Cheryl Charlton, at Keith Craigmyle’s stable. It’s about noon and there isn’t any breeze or cloud coverage. It feels like a wet 90. Gutierrez points out the insignia identifying the stable area as Craighmyle’s: a black flag bearing a skull wearing a gasmask. Craigmyle, I’m being told, owns and trains horses, but he’s also the track outrider, which means he wears a red jacket and leads the horses onto the track before the race and away from the track after. If any horse makes a break for it, Craigmyle is the guy that has to get it.
A dark-skinned woman sprays down a shit-smeared stall with a big hose. Animals move about unattended. There are puddles of stagnant water the color of creamed coffee and roosters strut around trying to be obvious. Flies swarm the goats and between the rows of stables little Hispanic men in jeans and flannels called grooms lead the horses in the endless circle dictated by the metal arms of a giant pole apparatus. The horses frighten easily and rise up on their back legs when we come near. “They’re not very smart animals,” Gutierrez warns. They’re training them to do something, but I’ve stopped paying attention.
Charlton emerges from behind a stack of hay bales, her riding helmet buckled neat under the chin of her little head. She has a sharp nose, intense eyes, and a small stud beneath her lower lip that I can’t stop looking down at. She walks me by each stable as I try to think of something moderately intelligent to ask. Horse heads emerge out of the dark. With dumb intention they crank their necks to side to snatch mouthfuls of the hay that hangs in the baskets next to the doors. “So there are the horses,” I said. “These are all race horses,” Charlton says. “They’re all basically the same.”
I like her attitude, her stern obliviousness to the barn animal chaos surrounding us. She looks me in the eye and then turns around and tells Craigmyle “some guys from some magazine are here.” He nods. “We’ve met.”
She grew up in Pomona. Her family had horses. Her whole life, she says, has been horses. When she was 17 she met Craigmyle. He trained her to ride on the track, “a completely different way of riding” than the stock saddle riding she was doing as a kid. “You wanna know that you ride like a guy, you wanna make sure that when you’re in a race they can’t pick you out because you look like a girl, you ride like a girl.” Most of her story hits the same notes as the other ones I hear. Proving people wrong. Being aggressive. Not showing fear. Craigmyle says she has no fear. Gutierrez has no fear. She boasts she led Los Alamitos in wins the year prior. She’s had something like 270 first-place-finishes, earning something like $2,000,000 in the 5 years she’s been racing. “When you win, you get 10% of what the owner gets. So if the purse is like $5,000, you get $1,600.” The math feels right, so hey. She continues in her clip, “But if you place second, you only get like $50 more than the mount.” The mount is the money you’re paid for being in the race. If you finish dead last you still get the mount money, which is something like $75. “I like that first place money,” Charlton says. Gutierrez laughs. “Cheryl loves to win.”
The photographer interrupts us to tell Charlton and I he’s been talking to this agent who has a handsome jockey willing to pose for us. The photographer seems excited. Charlton asks who, and he replies Leslie L. Navarro. “She’s a bad agent,” Charlton frowns. “Don’t talk to her, she’s a bad agent.” An agent helps jockeys get mounts with different owners. There are owners, trainers, agents, and jockeys. The trainers work for the owners, though they’re sometimes also trainers, and the agents are the point of contact between the jockeys and the owners. I ask what makes Navarro bad. Charlton says she’s just bad. Explanation isn’t really her strong suit.
When I’m writing this story a week later I find this on the internet:
JULY 30, 2010
RULING # 76
JOCKEY AGENT LESLIE L. NAVARRO IS SUSPENDED FOR THREE ENTRY DAYS (AUGUST 3RD, 4TH, AND 5TH, 2010) FOR VIOLATION OF CALIFORNIA HORSE RACING BOARD RULE #1581.1 (ENTRIES - UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY) ON MAY 6, 2010. DURING THE TERM OF SUSPENSION ALL LICENSES AND LICENSE PRIVILEGES OF LESLIE L. NAVARRO ARE SUSPENDED AND PURSUANT TO CALIFORNIA HORSE RACING BOARD RULE #1528 (JURISDICTION OF STEWARDS TO SUSPEND OR FINE) SUBJECT IS DENIED ACCESS TO ALL PREMISES IN THIS JURISDICTION.
LIC# 296837-11/2010
CASE# 10LA0131
**III.**
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Of course by the night’s end Gutierrez is certain I’m a screwball, trying to write something awful, and _Flaunt_ is an entirely depraved bit of garbage coming 70 MPH down the 405 to poke fun at the weirdo set stilling hanging around Los Al.
Things between us become a little tense when I ask about getting Charlton to pose nude with a horse. Gutierrez stifles his displeasure and protests with a small shake of his head and small chuckle. He kicks the dirt. After he sees the magazine (“Dear Pavel” etc) his meddlesome behavior turns incessant. He’s always at my hip, interrupting my interviews. He looks at his cellphone. “How much longer do you guys need?” so eager for myself and the photographer to go.
This is when the photographer and I separate. Gutierrez can’t follow us both. He decides to tag with the camera so I slip into the jockey training room and watch a man pray in front of a shrine while the absurdly fitting classic rock jam “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” plays from a small radio. “This shit is no joke,” the valet tells me. And what do you do, I ask. “I take care of these guys.” I follow the contour of his tits beneath his wet button up shirt. Taped to the side of the folding station where he prepares the jockeys’ outfits is an oily picture of a woman spread eagle. He catches me looking at it and starts laughing at my back as I wander off. In the back of the locker room is a pool table where the jockeys gamble. When I enter one slips an enormous wad of cash into his pocket. I pretend like I don’t see it. But their game stops anyway.
Hell, I think to myself, all these jockeys are pretty great. They look and joke like rascals. I meet Vinnie Bednar, a boy from Utah who used to ride dirt bikes. He looks like he could either be 20 or 40. He pulls his small mouth into an expression of mirth he tells me how he got into horse racing. “I was a dike bike rider but I overshot this jump and went smack right into it. I shattered both my ankles. I went through all sorts of surgery. For a year I couldn’t stand, and then when I finally could, I was four inches shorter. Since I couldn’t race bike I started roofing and one of these guys I worked with told me, hey man, you’re perfect size to be a jockey. So here I am.” A stoic looking guy says, “Everyone falls. But what determines whether or not you are jockey is if you get back on the horse.”
I wander out into the area with the simulcast screens and the betting counter. There’s a concession stand and maybe two hundred badly dressed people shuffling around. At the other end of the concourse is a dim looking restaurant, named The Vessels Club. The Wikipedia entry for Los Alamitos says, “The Vessels Club has even been named the top sports park restaurant in Southern California.” There’s no link. I get the feeling Gutierrez wrote the entry. But whatever. I find myself at the cocktail bar listening to an enormous couple with southern accents berate the lone bartender about their Miller Lite being flat. The bartender is a woman who must be 80-years-old, mixing cocktails at the same speed her bones are turning to dust. “When was the last time you turned the barrels,” the woman with the thick blonde face asks nastily. The old woman shrugs and takes my order. When I tip her three bucks for my bottle of Heineken, she stretches her face into the ghastly approximation of a smile.
Truth be told, Los Al is a pretty dismal scene, like the old arcades on Broadway in DTLA, or the jai-li courts in Miami. Fed up with the sorrow I feel clinging to me, I’m about to head back down to the track when I bump into the “bad agent” Ms. Navarro. By the third sentence of her speech, I’m convinced she’s pilled out of her gourd. “Jockeys are typical Latins,” she tells me, “they wear everything they own.” She laughs but it’s a slow and defective chuckle, as though stuck a month away in the back of her throat. She leans in confidentially and tells me she’s been married to a couple of jockeys. “Is this on the record?” she asks. “You bet,” I tell her, turning my head so she doesn’t breathe into my face. She talks about the jockey groupies. She alternately refers to them as rock-stars or cocky little pricks. Oh she knows jockeys. She’s loved jockeys. She says that they’re terrible with their money. Will blow through the day’s winnings in a single night, drinking and partying. She introduces me to her husband whose name I don’t catch. He’s about a foot shorter than she is, wearing a black cowboy hat, tight jeans, and chains of gold. The deep wrinkles in his face speak of obscure and dusty troubles. I tell him I love his watch and he grins. “See what I mean,” Navarro says, “they wear everything they own!”
He was a jockey for a long time, she tells me. “Many years,” he confirms. An entanglement in a race resulted in a nasty, tumbling fall and an irreparably damaged back that forced him to give up riding. Now he’s on disability, and he can’t do anything, he can’t sit without pain, he can’t stand without pain, he can’t work. I ask him if it was worth it and he shrugs. “Sure.” At that time, so what, he was young and the money was good and “you love to win. There’s no better feeling than winning a race.” Navarro interrupts and shows me the race program for Los Al. It’s printed on goldenrod pages stapled together, like a teacher’s lesson in some country school. “Look at this crap,” she says, “there’s nothing here.” Then she shows me the Santa Anita race program. Santa Anita is the classier, bigger brother to Los Al. Its program is bound and printed on glossy paper. There are advertisements, color photographs, detailed paragraphs containing information. Part of me wishes I hadn’t chosen the Los Al angle.
This is when Navarro starts talking about the Doc who owns Alamitos, Edward C. Allred. “He has all the money in the world.” Her bitterness is sloppy. I nod. Then I see Gutierrez coming up from the track, looking around frantically. We lock eyes. Then I watch the expression on his face turn south as he realizes who I’m talking to. The Bad Agent.
IV.
---
It’s not the first time Allred is brought up, but Navarro is the most candid (or mean) in her comments. Gutierrez is adamant that Allred doesn’t give interviews. He’s a guarded guy, Gutierrez tells me. Someone else describes him as something like a gangster, sharply dressed, pretty intimidating. Another calls him a cheap bastard. Someone else, an asshole.
A _Los Angeles Times_ article a few years back tells Allred’s story with the typical rag- to-riches bonhomie. Poor family, grew up around the races, pedaled his bike to the track every Sunday to scrounge around the grandstands for possible winners some careless man may have left behind and so on. Eventually the young Allred grows up to own a racetrack. Dream come true. But there’s a twist. Before he comes to control Los Alamitos and, to a small degree, the city of Cyprus, he becomes a doctor and then the owner of the largest chain of private abortion clinics nationwide, Family Planning Associates Medical Group; first in the late 60’s performing legal “therapeutic” abortions for wealthy clients in Los Angeles. When 1973’s _Roe v. Wade_ lands, Allred seizes the opportunity to expand with shrewd abandon.
_The Times_ profile quotes something he said in 1980 to what was then the _San Diego Union_: "Population control is too important to be stopped by some right-wing pro-life types. Take the new influx of Hispanic immigrants. Their lack of respect for democracy and social order is frightening. I hope I can do something to stem that tide. I'd set up a clinic in Mexico for free if I could. Maybe one in Calexico would help. The survival of our society could be at stake." Obviously Allred doesn’t stand behind the statement anymore, in the same way Ron Paul doesn’t stand behind the racist libertarian newsletters penned under his name in the 80s and 90s. But the program (the anti-welfare, anti-tax stances) remains more or less embedded in Allred’s ideology. His rhetoric is now fiscal. In the 2012 elections, he made 16 donations to the Republican, effort totaling $147,800. Per each contribution he lists himself as either retired, or self-employed investor, or the functioning Los Alamitos Race Track executive. He apparently sits on the board at Santa Anita too. But campaign contribution regulations are laughable. Apparently it’s possible to be simultaneously self-employed, employed, and retired, at three different ventures.
After retreating from the public spotlight in the late 80’s, Allred began trying to secure the deal for the Los Alamitos land. Along with two other investors (one being the gaming magnate R.D. Hubbard), Allred pays $45 million for the acreage and the track, a deal that in hindsight seems like a major fleecing of the town of Los Alamitos. Soon thereafter Allred begins turning the dilapidated track into the premiere quarter-horse racing site in the country. He paints the bleachers and builds his Vessels Club (which has a dress code and requires an entrance fee of $10). _The Los Angeles Times_ refers to it as a “gem” but when I’m there it sure doesn’t feel like a gem. There’s hardly anyone in the stands. Those rich, presumably white Vessels are nowhere to be found. That is to say, it’s mostly Hispanics listlessly talking among themselves.
Gutierrez is quick to acknowledge the sparse crowd. “But it is January,” he reasons. It’s foolish to expect big crowds, but still, how is this place staying in business? The desolation is thick like a fog. You try to move through it, for somewhere else, but so much about this part of Orange County feels this way. Up and down Katella Ave sit the square buildings of gas stations, Subways, and laundromats. The only new looking structure is the SeaCoast Grace Church, though the irony of its funding is subsumed by a greater one: SeaCoast stands nowhere near the sea.
So many head scratching contradictions. Los Alamitos stays open in part because it’s a “Live Race Track” that simulcasts races so that people can bet from anywhere in the country. When the day races on the East coast are over, bettors can watch three men in suits banter about the day’s racing news to one of two TV cameras in a brightly lit tent built upon a stage near the Los Al “Winner’s Circle.” Gutierrez tells me that if “anyone in the country wants racing news, they’re probably watching” the station Allred started.
The only problem is the wagers aren’t coming in like they once were and viewership is down. Off-track betting fronts are closing. Perhaps causing the issue are the meager payouts California sets for quarter-horse races. Allred complained in 2010 (as did most Americans in the throes of a financial crisis) that the “situation was dire.” He requested that the California Board of Horse Racing raise the payout by 2%. When the payouts are increased, Allred takes an ambivalent stance. It’s hard to ascertain whether he or the bettors will benefit from the hike.
**V.**
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On 24 June 2012 a horse owned by Tremor Enterprises going by the name “Mr. Ease Cartel” qualified for the Million Dollar Futurity race at Los Al, the biggest purse for quarter-horses in the country. Later that week, _The New York Times_ reported, the FBI raided the Tremor stables, after establishing a connection between Tremor and a vicious drug cartel in Mexico, some sort of laundering scheme involving horses and brothers. _The Times_ wrote, “One week in May began with the authorities pointing fingers at Miguel Ángel Treviño for dumping the bodies of 49 people — without heads, hands or feet — in garbage bags along a busy highway in northern Mexico. The week concluded with José Treviño fielding four Tremor horses in a prestigious race at Los Alamitos Race Course, near Los Angeles.”
Nobody wondered where the money was coming, as long as the checks cleared, and I guess a practiced insouciance is not all that surprising in the horse racing world. There will always be large areas for development, new arenas and tracks and schools and parking lots, and there’s always someone willing to play the game, to stand on the corner with the balloons, or ride the horse when the gates open. But there’s a vagueness and distance about Los Alamitos, a sense that even the criminality and the vice, the recklessness and greed, are just barely hanging on—like the world has moved on. Allred doesn’t practice abortions anymore. He doesn’t even come to the races as much as he used to. After that profile in the _Union_, he backed away from public life.
Gutierrez and I arrange a photo-shoot for the following morning. He tells us to come back at 10 so we can get more studio style portraits of the jockeys with their horses. “Everyone will be there,” he promises, but when we show up, the place is empty. A jockey we met last night waves to us from his passing car. Gutierrez leads us back to Craigmyle’s stable. Charlton is the only one still there. We snap her picture with the horse, but she’s not even in her riding silks, like I’d asked.
This is Gutierrez’ revenge but it’s also his life, and the sad fact of it all is that these goddamn stables, and the far away expressions the horses wear, are only confirmation of a greater emptiness. I can feel Gutierrez’ eyes on me as I look around but I don’t do him the privilege of returning his gaze.
There’s no story here. Everyone, Allred, “Go Man Go,” the drug dealers and the FBI, Leslie Navarro and her broken husband and the _Golden Age_ and the young would-be-sports writer, everyone. They already came and went.
* * *
Written by Randy Lee Maitland
Photographed by Ian Morrison
