Читать книгу Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel - Joe Tone, Joe Tone - Страница 17

Night fell on Lone Star Park, a winter night in name if not forecast, and the horses clicked beneath the grandstand and through a parting sea of horse-racing fans, who themselves were swarming from the track to the ornate saddling paddock. This ritual had repeated itself before each of the night’s ten races: the grooms paraded the horses from the track, beneath the grandstand, through the crowd, around an ornately landscaped walking ring, and into the saddling paddock, where the horses were prepped by their trainers, loved by their owners, mounted by their jockeys, and led back through the crowd, toward the starting gate, to wait for the gates to fly.

At other tracks, this ritual took place on the inside of the track and felt like something private for the horse’s connections. At Lone Star, it happened behind the grandstand. A crowd formed. Bettors squinted and looked for signs of a winner. Kids marveled from high on their daddies’ shoulders.

The crowd grew especially large before the Texas Classic, the biggest race of the night. Outside the paddock, the onlookers studied the horses, which snorted and neighed as their trainers jostled to get riding saddles and blinkers in place. The crowd strained to find the favorite and found him in the seventh paddock. If the horse was small, he didn’t look it next to his squat, mustachioed trainer, Chevo, or the man who was now listed as the owner, José Treviño.

After Tempting Dash’s record-breaking win in the Dash for Cash, Operativo Huesos had been put into motion. Forty tasked Poncho, the Piedras Negras trafficker, with making sure Tempting Dash was legally transferred into José’s name from Ramiro’s. That way, any money the horse won could be kept in the Treviño family. José, Ramiro, and Poncho met in Mexico to finalize the deal. Thirty years after leaving Tamaulipas, José was back in northern Mexico, taking on the challenge and responsibility of owning an animal, and he seemed thrilled. Thrilled, and yet insistent that the deal come with a clear paper trail. He and Ramiro signed a sales agreement. Poncho asked his wife, a notary, to authenticate it after the fact.

José would never say publicly what he knew of Forty’s plan. He had a chance to buy Tempting Dash for cheap, he’d say, and he took it. The stated sale price was twenty-five thousand dollars, a bargain given that the horse had already won a half-million-dollar race. So they backdated the agreement to September, before Tempting Dash’s first big win. Later, if anyone wondered why Ramiro would sell a winning horse so cheap, the paper trail would show that he sold it before Tempting Dash ever won a thing.