The quartet of eye-catching Aug. 9 wins at Monmouth Park and Saratoga by horses returning from months-long layoffs, all prepped at Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland by the previously low-profile (178 wins in 17 years at a 12% clip) trainer Angel Quiroz, started out last week with the potential to be the simmering scandal of the summer.Now, seven days later, the alleged coup is gaining enough notoriety that it could end up as American racing's most audacious attempted betting takedown of the last quarter-century.Although no one has been charged with pari-mutuel wrongdoing or sanctioned for in-race cheating, the swirl of intrigue includes enough plot thickening to warrant significant scrutiny.The first red flag was the strikingly low $12.80 daily double payout involving Quiroz's consecutive-race Monmouth winners, a 17-1 shot that aired by nine lengths, and a 7-2 winner by half a length.Within the same time frame, two wire-to-wire Saratoga long shots–both put through unremarkable workouts by Quiroz at Fair Hill before being sold to 8% lifetime winning owner/trainer Ernesto Ochoa–won by 8 3/4 lengths at 8-1 odds and by 3 1/2 lengths at 12-1 odds. Returning from nine- and seven-month layoffs, they recorded lifetime-best Beyer Speed Figure improvements of 31 and 34 points, respectively.Also that Sunday, there was a 5-1 near-miss on another Quiroz-conditioned Fair Hill layoff gelding who ran second at Colonial Downs. This one had been away for six months before getting transferred to the barn of owner/trainer Monica McGoey, another 8% lifetime winning conditioner.That Colonial runner-up reportedly took outsized betting action in overseas pools, as did two other Quiroz-prepped entrants who were supposed to run Monday at Mountaineer Park and Presque Isle Downs. Those last two ended up being scratched from their Aug. 10 races as news of the previous day's training and betting patterns filtered up to regulators.Quiroz, who doubled his victory total for the year with the two Aug. 9 Monmouth winners, denied doing anything wrong when interviewed last Monday by TDN's Bill Finley.“I don't see what the big deal is or what the problem is,” Quiroz said. “I'm supposed to run all the time and not try to win the race? There are too many people behind social media who don't show their faces and post too much stuff that is not true.”Quiroz has a point about the perils of trial-by-social-media. But by Thursday, he had a more concrete concern: He's now facing up to a two-year suspension and a $25,000 fine after one of his Fair Hill trainees (a filly not among those entered last week) allegedly tested positive for a vets' list violation for non-inhalation albuterol, a bronchodilator that the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit (HIWU) considers a banned substance when administered by any route other than inhalation.When TDN's Dan Ross asked a HIWU spokesperson if other out-of-competition tests on Quiroz-trained horses were in the pipeline, he got an emailed reply stating that targeted testing “has been and will continue to be administered” in relation to the Aug. 9-10 events, but that HIWU could not share details.As per protocol, results are still pending for the winning Quiroz-related horses that had to go through HIWU's standard post-race testing.Although HIWU and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) generally only release adverse analytical findings, given the heightened public interest, perhaps they will disclose the results if those horses test clean.Of the many unknowns in this constellation of curiosities, the drug testing is unlikely to be the weak link.Figuring out the betting part of it will be far more difficult.Right now no one knows for sure who, specifically, might have profited and how.The New York Racing Association (NYRA) told TDN that it has referred the matter to HISA, HIWU, and the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (TRPB). The New Jersey Racing Commission is reportedly also looking into the issue.But neither HISA nor HIWU specialize in pari-mutuel forensics. Their mandates are focused on racetrack safety and medication control.State racing commissions certainly do have the power to obtain betting information from the tracks they regulate. Whether or not they have the resources to sift through and parse the data meaningfully is a fair question to ask.The TRPB has monitored wagering since 1946. But it's a private investigative agency that reports to the racetrack and regulator clients who contract for those services. It is up to those clients to release–or not release–the results of any investigations. The TRPB is not a publicly accountable entity.And while the TRPB has sophisticated tools at its disposal, times have changed.At one point not too long ago, the TRPB's number-crunching and pattern-detection capabilities might have clearly outclassed the computing power available to the average horseplayer.But since the advent of big-database handicapping and computer-assisted wagering (CAW), that gap has closed.It is now far more likely that the people who use such software to try and make money betting on a daily basis possess the more powerful tools.It's conceivable that some bettors were on to the Aug. 9 patterns with the Quiroz-related horses as they emerged in real time.And by sending supposedly smarter money after smart money, their wagering decisions could have amplified any original pari-mutuel aberrations.Although our sport deals with garden-variety fraud and people pushing boundaries to get an edge on a regular basis, major benchmark wagering scandals happen only about once every 25 years.Volponi won the Breeders' Cup Classic in the 'Fix Six' year | HorsephotosIf we were to build a “Mount Rushmore” of orchestrated race results, the most recent one would be the Breeders' Cup “Fix Six” of 2002.Three accomplices who had access to the tote system placed six identical Pick Six bets after the first four legs had been run, singling the known winners and using “all” combinations in the last two races to steal the $3.1 million pool.When executives at NYRA–in particular, a very observant Bill Nader–first noticed the highly unusual sequences and the fact that the tickets were all bought through the same OTB by the same bettor, they reported their findings to racing commission and law enforcement officials (even though NYRA was not directly involved in the running of that year's Breeders' Cup).The scammers were caught and served prison sentences, and their ill-gotten gains were later redistributed to bettors who had five of six horses correct on their tickets.Prior to that, you have to go back another 25 years to the Cinzano-disguised-as-Lebon ringer case at Belmont Park in 1977.That one involved a champion horse from Uruguay being reported as dead, then passed off as his far-less-accomplished but similar-looking (and probably killed) stablemate to win at 57-1 odds.When a Belmont cash-room messenger who had worked as an exercise rider was delivering $75,000 to the window to be paid to the bettor collecting on the coup, the messenger recognized the man who made the big score as a veterinarian who had imported both horses.That identifying info, when coupled with a chance recognition by a Uruguayan racing editor who happened to see a photo of “Lebon” after his surprise victory and knew it wasn't him, resulted in the veterinarian being convicted of fraud, fined $1,000, and sentenced to a year in prison (shortened to four months on appeal).I wouldn't get the chisels and dynamite out just yet to start carving this latest suspicious series of events at Saratoga and Monmouth into that fictional version of Mount Rushmore.But it is notable that in both the Fix Six and the Cinzano/Lebon cases, regulators were not the ones who first noticed things weren't on the level.And the same was true last week about the out-of-the-ordinary patterns involving the Fair Hill trainees, which were flagged (and dissected) by skeptical horseplayers on social media for a full day before anyone in an official capacity issued a statement or launched an investigation.If you were involved in the sport back in 2002 when the Fix Six unfolded, you might recall one of the more perplexing (yet predictable) reactions by the racing industry at the time: A number of prominent racetracks announced they were changing the locks on their tote rooms and posting armed guards outside those doors.Presumably, this extra layer of physical security was supposed to prevent future pari-mutuel fraud, even though the Fix Six was a cyber-perpetrated inside job.In the wake of what happened last week–and especially considering the betting public again had to spark the powers that be into action–it seems legit to question how far the industry has actually come in terms of policing its pools in the past 2 1/2 decades.I also wonder if the tote room guards might again soon be assigned to their posts.The post Week in Review: When Tracks Again Post Armed Guards Outside Tote Rooms, We’ll Know It’s a Real Betting Coup appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.