skippy the bush kangaroo

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

note to awol...this isn't a cow....do not attempt to milk


Posted by Hello however, one of your fellow texans, jt lundy, milked and bilked the life and death of this horse....one of the great racehorses of our time, alydar.

skip hollandsworth in the texas monthly:
in her 1992 connoisseur story, flake hinted that alydar's death might not have been accidental. after learning that the farm's insurance policies on alydar totaled $36.5 million, making him the most heavily insured horse in history, she went so far as to suggest that alydar might have been worth more dead than alive. yet no law enforcement official had shown any interest in pursuing the issue—until tomala began flipping through records about calumet in 1996.

what she realized was that lundy had to have been frantic in the months before alydar's death. there was no way he was going to be able to come up with that $15 million payment to first city by february 1991. an accountant who had studied calumet's records told tomala that the farm was then losing almost $1 million a month. lundy was unable to find new bankers to loan him money, and he was equally unsuccessful in persuading investors from as far away as japan to purchase a minor interest in calumet. what's more, lundy couldn't get any more income out of alydar, who was already being bred so often that, according to one veterinarian, the muscles of his hind end were constantly sore. and lundy suffered another blow in 1990 when his best horse that year, criminal type, who was favored to win the breeders' cup, the most lucrative purse in horse racing, was injured just before the race, depriving a clearly distraught lundy of the chance to receive millions.

tomala also verified that lundy had a big problem with the insurance companies that held multimillion dollar "equine mortality" policies on alydar. in 1990 they were threatening to cancel those policies because of calumet's slowness in paying its premiums. lundy had been forced to send matthews and his own sister, who handled the insurance on calumet's horses, to london to beg exasperated lloyd's representatives to give them one more chance—which they did. but the head of another equine insurance company, golden eagle insurance out of california, told lundy's sister in the early fall of 1990 that he had reached the end of his patience with calumet's delinquent payments. he said the company's policy on alydar would not be renewed when it expired in december.

tomala realized that if there was a perfect time for alydar to die, it was precisely in november 1990, just after frank cihak's resignation and just before one of alydar's insurance policies expired. she looked at another record. calumet had indeed used alydar's insurance proceeds to make its payment to first city bancorporation and staved off foreclosure for a few more months.for tomala, there was only one person who could have had alydar killed: jt lundy. and she was determined to prove it. (read more at the texas monthly)


kentucky derby week is always a wonderful time to remember this great horse and the joy and beauty he gave to the sport. it's also a time to remember the greedy texan behind his death and the complete destruction of one of the sports historic legacies...calumet farms.
posted by Cookie Jill at 5:53 PM |

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