There Once Was a Man Called Curley

title: There Once Was a Man Called Curley
author: Damn Interesting
contenttype: podcast
publication: Damn Interesting
published: 2025-09-06T15:34:50
sourceurl: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2165468064-damn-interesting-there-once-was-a-man-called-curley.mp3

word_count: 6309

Hello, damn interesting listeners. Just a quick note. This episode is coming out on the 6th of September, 2025. 20 years ago, today, we published our first damn interesting writing. We'd be tickled if you could go find this article on DamageResting.com and leave us a nice birthday message in the comments. Anyway, here's the show. This is damn interesting. In the village of Belius Town, about 15 miles north of Dublin, Ireland, they still talk about what Barney Curley did back in 1975. It all happened during a horse race on the hill of Crocafuta. It was just an amateur jockey race on a lazy summer day in a sleepy remote town. It wasn't meant to be anything special. The last thing anyone expected was to witness the making of history. The race in question occurred on the 26th of June 1975. Barney Curley, our protagonist, if you could call him that, owned one of the horses running later that day. But at the race course, as preparations are being made, Curley was nowhere to be seen. And not because he wasn't in attendance, it was because he was taking great pains to stay out of sight. If the trackside bookmakers caught wind that he was at Belius Town that day, or if they discovered that he was the owner of one of the horses, they would be on full alert and take precautions with the wagers and odds. Curley learned a reputation in horse racing circles. He was known to engage in some gambling shenanigans from time to time. But the shenanigan he was planning that day was his most ambitious to date, hands down. As the spectators placed their wagers and settled in around the edge of the track for a pleasant afternoon of laid back horse racing, Curley was concealed in the thicket of gorse shrubs in the center section of the oval shaped track. This particular infield wasn't ideal for human occupation. It was all dust and thorns. Nevertheless, he stood in his trademark felt fedora shrouded by tall shrubbery, far from the other spectators, a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes. In the distance, the loudspeaker announced they're off. Curley tugged his hat down tight over his bald head as if he could hide inside of it. He peered to his field glasses towards the rumble of horse hooves. In the next five minutes, if everything went according to plan, all of Barney Curley's considerable money troubles would be over. The plan went sideways. If his animal was not up to the task or there was one inopportune stumble, he would be utterly ruined. His full name was Bernard Joseph Curley, but everyone just called him Barney. Born in 1939, he was one of six children born to Kathleen and Charlie Curley in Northern Ireland. Even as a lad, he was a bit of a gambler. He got his first taste when his grandmother started slipping him two shillings to take to the bookmakers in town. He was always instructed to place a wager on Bill Rickerby, Granny's favorite horse jockey. Placing bets with bookies was not strictly legal at the time, but there was a long tradition of looking the other way. Barney's father Charlie was also a gambler, though his preferred creature of speed was the Greyhound. The elder Curley raised and trained his own dogs, and he entered them into various racing circuits around Ireland. Old man Charlie Curley came to be known by his contemporaries as Yellow Sam. Some said that yellow referred to his dad's shallow complexion, but unbeknownst to Barney, it probably had more to do with his dad's inclination for cheating. The elder Curley had learned of a pharmaceutical tablet that could be fed to a dog shortly before a race to induce a bout of sluggishness, a practice disapprovingly known in the business as stopping. Yellow Sam put genuine effort into raising swift Greyhounds, but whenever one of them earned fair odds to win an upcoming match, he'd adulterate the dog's food with a stopping tablet and quietly place a big bed against his own animal. He was almost as lucrative as an honest living for a time. Eventually, Yellow Sam produced a legitimately impressive Greyhound, one he christened with an unfortunate name. It was a word that was and continues to be regional slang for a cigarette. He was called the Fag. In a race in 1955, the Greyhound performed so well that he became a clear favourite for another race coming up in Belfast. The day of the race, the bleachers were crowded with thousands of spectators, many of them with morning riding on that fine dog. The bell rang, the hounds poured out, but the crowd favourite was the tharge of, failing to approach his previously observed velocity. He was among the last to cross the finish line. It was a clear case of animal tampering. Thousands of disgruntled spectators began stomping on the bleachers and a chant of out, out filled the arena. Unprepared for the magnitude of the indignation, when it was time to collect the animal, Yellow Sam said to 15-year-old Barney, you go up and get the dog. When Barney entered the race office, they told him, send your father up, waving away his claim that his father's whereabouts were unknown. Barney returned after a time with Yellow Sam and the race official told him, as long as your name is what it is, you'll never run a dog here again. The curl is collected, the adulterated animal, and departed with their metaphorical tails between their legs. On another occasion, Yellow Sam gave Barney a small parcel of meat. He instructed his son to visit the canals and feed it to a particular dog, one who happened to be a well-performing animal that they would be racing later in the day. Wised to his father's underhanded ways, Barney took the parcel, went to the canals, and fed the morsel to a waste basket. He then went to the bookmaker and put down a wager for that dog to win. Barney Curly went home 12 pound richer that day, equivalent to about 500 US dollars these days. Old Yellow Sam was furious that the drug hadn't properly stopped the dog, and he stormed out of the house and down the road to the pharmacist to give him hell for the faulty formulation. Young Barney never told his father that he'd pull the fast one. Bad luck and bad choices eventually drove Yellow Sam deep into debt. He was desperate for cash. He owned a greyhound that he had been slowing with his tablets for months, with plans to stop the stopping once the animal's grade was sufficiently low. Now was the time. He secured the dog a place in an upcoming race and bet big on his freshly sober greyhound. When the race began, the animal pulled ahead of the pack, soaring, then stumbling, tumbling, and collapsing into a motionless heap. The fall had broken the dog's spine. Curly's father trudged down the track to gather the lifeless dog tears in his eyes. The party's over Barney, he said. I've played my joker and lost. In 1956, to earn money to settle the family debts, Yellow Sam and 16-year-old Barney journeyed to England to find work. They took on jobs at a plastic factory, the petrochemicals industrial estate in Ernstown. They took 18 months of grueling double shifts to earn enough to break even. It was strangely fulfilling, Curly later said. It made me realise how much I'd been pampered. Upon returning home from England, Barney Curly declared his intention to enlist in the seminary. This was a sensible career path for a young man at the time and preferable to more manual labour. He began the 13-year commitment to become an ordained Jesuit priest, but his career in the cloth was cut short when he collapsed on a soccer field. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, priests sent him to the Catholic section of the local sanatorium. Nurses placed him in a horizontal orientation and injected him with massive daily doses of the newfangled antibacterial streptomycin. Nine months later, he was deemed well enough to go home. There was another two years before he could function normally again. It was around that time, aged 22, that he went bald as a cout. But he didn't seem to mind. He just started wearing a fedore everywhere he went. There's a saying in Ireland, wisdom is the comb given to a man after he has lost his hair. The Irish are known for their fondness of folks he sayings. Having survived his brush with death, Curly attempted to resume his professional religious training. But he found the program too taxing. He had not regained his mental and physical endurance. When he dropped out of the program, no one faulted him. As a gift to himself for surviving tuberculosis, Curly bought a shiny new luxury car, a Ford Zephyr. The payments turned out to be more than he could afford. So he went to the supermarket and bought a great quantity of Gillette razor blades. The razors available in Curly's region, Northern Ireland, were higher quality and less expensive than their counterparts in the Republic of Ireland, to the south. The Zephyr was a big car with big doors, and he found that if he pulled off the interior door panels, he could hide a lot of razor blade packets in those cavities. He was shrewd enough to avoid visiting the same border crossings too often, and he timed his visits with major pretext events such as football matches. After passing a cursory customs inspection, he drive to local shops, pop off the door curves, and sell the blades for pounds on the shilling. He then tried to multiply his smuggling profits by visiting the bookmakers and betting on the races, who had mixed results. At that point in his gambling career, Curly had always been a punter, the person placing the wagers. He decided to try his hand at being a layer or a bookmaker. The profession had been legalised in recent years. With his smuggling and gambling profits, he opened up some betting shops, and took up a position alongside other small-time layers at Celtic Park Race Course. He erected his large bookmaker board on a stretch known as Murder Mile, so named for the expected financial fate of anyone brave enough to place a wager there. As Curly himself put it, it was reckoned every hudleyman in the country was there making a book, and any unsuspecting punter would get murdered. Metaphorically, of course. Curly learned a lot in the bookmaking business, the foremost the fact that he himself was not caught out for it. After running at a loss, most days for six months, he concluded that no one man could be both a punter and a layer. It was a fool's errand. He sold the shops and retired his bookmaker board. Soon thereafter, for reasons even Curly himself didn't understand, a local show band called The Clackston implored him to be their manager. Show bands were an Irish phenomenon in the 1950s and 60s. Large bands playing modern music for slow dancing. Curly declined, but they couldn't seem to let the idea go. They kept asking him to take the reins. He thought the band members must be a penny short of a full shilling to pursue a man with no experience in the music business to be their manager, but eventually he relented. The Clackston was moderately successful, touring dance halls around Ireland, but Curly felt that there was untapped potential. He called and cultivated members to reshape the Clackston into a smaller and tighter show band, and the newly formed group was called The Poca Dots. The remodeled band soon started filling dance halls to capacity, and in 1967 they hit the British Top 20 singles chart with the song Five Little Fingers. Money was pouring in, and Curly's nights filled up with parties and drugs, quite a pivot for the seminary a few years earlier. The band's equipment bands also provided an excellent hiding place for Michelin brand automobile tires. Owing to certain economic forces, one could purchase new Michelin tires for £4 a piece in the north and sell them for £10 in the republic. But as the band flirted with fame, they started demanding larger and larger percentages of the profits from venues. The dance halls had little choice but to pay the share they couldn't afford, and over time they succumbed to neglect and disrepair, eventually becoming insolvent. The gravy train ground to a halt. It was a classic case of slaying the golden goose, Curly would later recall. Looking at the wreckage of his brief career and band management, Curly decided to quit all of that irresponsible silliness and become a professional gambler. His father was against the idea, but as an Irish person might tell you, you've got to do your own growing no matter how tall your father was. By this time, Curly was married with a child on the way, so it was a risky pivot. His father's pharmacist, the same man who produced the stopping tablets for yellow Sam's greyhounds, told him, Fierney, please, don't be mad, don't be a fool, you're crazy, nobody has done it, and you're not going to be the first. Forget about it. Never mind the naysayers, Curly was intent to make a career out of punting. He still had connections in the bookie business. He had also purchased a pub which gave him access to Tongues loosened by drink. He learned to pay attention to rumours and routines. He'd show up at race courses and place big bets, winning slightly more often than losing. By the early 1970s, Curly was regularly travelling to the Republic to bet on the greyhounds and horses. On one occasion, he left with 700 pound in his pocket, and after three days of wagers, he returned with more than 50,000 pounds. Between the gambling and the smuggling, it was a lucrative, yet turbulent scheme. One night, on his way home from the races, as Curly stopped at the border crossing station, the officer posted there warned him not to go back into Northern Ireland. He told Curly, if you do, it's at your own peril. They're expecting trouble. The trouble the officer alluded to was the troubles, a long-simmering political disagreement in Ireland that frequently boiled over into violence. That's an oversimplification, but anything would be. As Curly considered the officer's advice, gunshots rang out. The officer hissed Curly to turn off his car headlights and to keep his head down. He crouched in his car as bullets occasionally ricocheted around him. He credited the officer with saving his life that day. When a small bomb exploded in his neighborhood, Curly decided to retire from the smuggling business and move south to a safer part of Ireland, further from the front lines of the troubles. He resettled his family in the quieter countryside in the Republic and began a new pursuit, raising and training his own terabred race horses. He acquired a stable and secured the assistance of a seasoned horse trainer named Liam Brennan. As Curly acquired horses, Brennan prepared the creatures for a life of racing, while also preparing Curly for a life of race horse ownership. One of the most important lessons he thought Curly was to say tight-lipped regarding his horses. Keep his business to his business. Information is advantage. With this new venture raising race horses and his previous experience in the bookish shops, Curly made connections on both sides of the racing business. His informational age gradually sharpened and he used it as often as he could. In bookmaking, there is a term for when someone wins based on insider insights are maneuvering. It was referred to as a coup. Despite some big losses mixed in with the big wins, Curly spent years earning a reputation as one who flirted with horse gambling coups, and trackside bookmakers began to get nervous whenever he appeared in person and an event in his felt fedora. It became rational to presuppose that something was a foot if Barney Curly was at the track, and eyes were a scance at any horse saddled with a Curly wager. Despite his better than average betting record by the summer of 1975, a succession of missteps left Barney Curly £30,000 in outstanding debt to the bookies. About 380,000 in modern US dollars. This wasn't a particularly large sum among his usual wagers, but as Curly put it, 30,000 pounds was a considerable amount when you couldn't get your hands on it. His debts were about double his net worth. He knew that if he failed to pay in full within a few months, black marks from bookish shops would spell the death of his gambling career. Curly consulted with his horse trainer Liam Brennan about the predicament. What they needed was an extraordinary animal that could dominate a race, but they knew that none of their animals met that description. Well then, if they couldn't bring the horse to the race, they'd have to bring the race to the horse. Together, Curly and Brennan scrutinized upcoming race listings, looking at variables such as location, time of year, turf firmness, hurdles versus flat, race course infrastructure, and jockey availability. They cross-reference this information with their roster of horses, looking at past performance, handicaps and unusual traits. Slowly, a potential plan began to materialise. It would require a crew of about half a dozen, with another 12 generals scattered around Ireland, organising hundreds of isolated foot soldiers. The race they ultimately identified as the ideal venue was the amateur rider's handicap in the remote village of Bellustown. A low stakes race on a lazy summer's day filled with Guinness and family activities. For their jockey, Curly and Brennan enlisted the appropriately named Michael Furlong, one of the most skilled amateur jockeys in the region. And the horse they selected, upon which the entire plan hinged, was an under-marked wool middle of the pack brown-guelding. In the few races the horse had run so far, he had never placed better than 8th. In all honesty, Curly later recalled, he was one of the worst horses I've ever owned. The horse happened to be called Yellow Sam. Curly arranged for Yellow Sam to race in Bellustown. Back at his house at Wicklow, Curly sequestered himself in his office. He began writing down the names of every person in Ireland he thought he could trust. He hung paper maps on his office walls and marked each name's corresponding location, Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick. I was like a recluse as I sat in my little room at the Boswell stood with my maps and my lists. Curly said later, I spent hour upon hour over many weeks pouring over my lists and maps, striking names out if I wasn't sure about them to make sure I had the best possible team. It was not that I feared that there would be traitors, just that too many men cannot be charged with keeping a secret. It was vital that no one broke the line. He chipped away at the list until just a dozen well connected and trustworthy names remained. These would be his field generals. Curly withdrew everything from all of his bank accounts, scraping up every shilling to his name. He called in a few debts owed to him by friends and neighbors and presumably upturned the couch cushions. Another of those Irish sayings, if it's drowning your after, don't torment yourself with shallow water. All told, he put together 15,300 pounds. He met with each of his generals one on one, handed each a stack of cash and conveyed the part of the plan he needed them to understand. Reach out to about 25 people you can trust, give each man 50 pounds to 300 pounds plus a little more for their trouble and tell them to be ready to visit a betting shop to make a wager on Wednesday the 26th of June. And don't mention Barney Curly. A week and a half before the Belleuse 10 race, Curly walked into a bookish shop owned by a fellow called Sean Graham, one of the largest and most influential bookmakers in all of Ireland. Despite being rivals in many ways, Curly and Graham had a friendly history and mutual respect. Curly described Graham as the greatest bookmaker that I have seen in my career. A mixed complement of ever there was one. In any case, Curly knew that if Graham caught wind of his plans, the whole caper would be banjaxed. I've hit a brick wall Sean, he told Graham. I'm going to do something in about 10 days time and I want you not to interfere. You'll have to give me your word, you'll not tell a soul. Listen Graham said, if you do any of my betting shops, I'll hang you. On the hot summer morning of race day 26th of June 1975, Barney Curly climbed into his red jaguar and began the 50 mile drive to Belleuse town. On the way and about an hour before the race was scheduled to start, he stopped at a phone booth and dialed each of his generals. He said to them, right, the name of the horse is yellow sand, on you go. The men have been instructed to call specific people in their networks, who in turn would call others to get word to the 300 or so foot soldiers in the streets. The foot soldiers responsibility was to go to the bookmaker shops in the major cities and put inconspicuous wagers on yellow sand. Sean Graham's betting shops were not to be among those visited. Meanwhile, Curly drove to the house of a friend who lived somewhat closer to Belleuse town, a woman called Anne Brogan. He accepted a cup of tea and asked her if she could drive him to the Belleuse town track in her motorcar. He didn't want anyone to recognize his big flashy red jaguar. She was happy to oblige. As they approached the venue, rather than joining the crowd, he asked Brogan to drive him to the seldom-visited fireside of the track. Being a good sport, she packed around the back and they snuck into the infield to view the race surreptitiously. The Belleuse town track was a left-handed course oval-shaped with 13 flights of hurdles. It was about two and a quarter miles of turf, our 3.6 kilometers. It was one of the oldest horse racing tracks in Ireland, with records dating back to 1726. King George III had sponsored a race there in 1780. His majesty's plate valued at a hundred pounds. In amateur races, it was typical for the jockey to get his first look at his horse just before riding it. When Yellow Sam's jockey Michael Furlong entered the staging area, his first impression of Yellow Sam was one of disappointment. The five-year-old Gelding was not very muscular, on the large side, but not in a good way. Horse racing uses a handicap system to try to even the odds. Lead weights are added to the horse's saddles, with the most weight on the fastest horse. Race officials had given Yellow Sam a very light handicap based on the past performance. This horse couldn't win a dog race Furlong taught to himself. Curly's horse trainer Liam Brennan helped Furlong into the saddle. Look Brennan told him, don't be too far back, but if you're happy with the pace, you can increase it. Furlong was deeply skeptical. The animal was clearly nothing special. Nevertheless, as they walked side-by-side on their way to the racing start point, Brennan told Furlong this fellow will win. He can't, Furlong said, looking at the horse's bulky build and slight handicap. He's not good enough. He will, Brennan said. Curly and Brennan's plan to make a slow horse win a real race was based upon an intersection of five unlikely circumstances. Number one, in all of his races to date, conditions had been stacked against Yellow Sam. When races require horses to jump over obstacles such as hurdles, most horses perform best in what is known as heavy ground, where the soil underneath the turf is moist and springy. But during training, Curly and Brennan had observed that Yellow Sam was an exception. He was faster with hurdles when the ground was dry and hard. And notoriously moist Ireland happened to be having a rare dry spell. Number two, many of Yellow Sam's previous races had been at high profile race courses where the best performing horses tended to compete. This created a contrast that made the gilding seem slower than he really was. His best performance to date, eighth place out of 17, had been in a major track against serious competition on heavy ground. Number three, Yellow Sam's light handicap would contribute to a more favorable starting price our SP from the bookies. The amount a wager is money would be multiplied in the event of a win. If the winning horse had a starting price of 4 to 1, for example, a £10 wager would become £40. The larger the gap, the bigger the potential payoff. Owing to Yellow Sam's previous performance, Curly was hoping for an SP of 12 to 1, which would win him a cool £183,600 if Yellow Sam placed first. If the animal failed, either by underperforming or taking a fall, Barney Curly would be destitute. His wife Marie never asked about his gambling, so she was unaware of the perilous wager. Number four, the summer race at Belius Town was a low-key event. Many of the attendees were just there for the fresh air, a pint, and family activities. As a consequence, the horses sent to race at Belius Town tended not to be top tier specimens. The best horses stayed home to rest. And lastly, number five, Belius Town Race Track was remote and seldom used, and the only working communication with the rest of the world was a single public telephone booth. The usual routine was for the bookie shops in town to exchange phone calls with their trackside counterparts to report all betting activity. Based on the risk indicated by incoming wagers, trackside bookies could adjust horses starting prices right up until the moment the race began. The moment was known as the off. About half an hour before the race was to begin, a strapping fellow called Benio Hanlon entered the phone booth, picked up the handset and inserted a coin. Soon Passerby could hear him loudly lamenting his dear aunt. She was evidently on her hospital deathbed at the other end of the line. The line of people began to form outside the phone booth door. Oh dear, the growing queue of would-be phone users heard him say. She's taken a turn for the worse again. The waiting bookmakers sympathized with Hanlon's plight at first. As the phone called dragged on for ten, fifteen minutes, and Hanlon fed coins into the insatiable machine, his aunt internally wavered near the mortal precipice, on the mend one moment and then setting a foot in the grave on the next. The bookies became increasingly exasperated, ailing and be damned. At twenty minutes, Oh Hanlon and the booth were surrounded by testy gesticulations. Without the data from the shops, the bookmakers would be unable to maximize their own profits at the expense of the betting public. It ticked along the twenty-five minutes. In cities across Ireland, bookmakers attempted to relay their liabilities to Belius Town, including an unexpected last minute uptick in wagers on a whole home horse called Yellow Sam. But all they got was an earful of busy signal, are the engaged tone in the regional dialect. Back at Belius Town, at three o'clock, the loudspeaker crackled in the distance and the enhancers voice they're off. Nine horses galloped from the starting line with their jockeys astride, the hoofbeats like distant thunder. While Hanlon hung up the phone, opened the book door and walked away, job done, God rest her soul. The phone began ringing immediately. Curly and Brogan watched with binoculars from their vantage point in the gorse shrubs, the announcer's voice attenuated by distance. Yellow Sam and Furlong were near the middle of the pack as well as the horses have it. After jumping several hurdles, Furlong evidently decided to push the button because Yellow Sam began to surge ahead. As Curly contemplated the fate of his 15,300 pounds, his boyhood memory of his father stumbling Greyhound was likely in the forefront of his mind. Curly watched the initial acceleration, but as the pack of horses rumble past his hiding spot and he peered through his binoculars, he realized there was a flaw on his plan to hide in the infield. Once the horse has passed, he was unable to see which horse was in the lead. The view was eclipsed by the horse's trailing behind and a cloud of dust. On the track amid the hoofbeats and panting horsebrets, Furlong was surprised by his newly awakened Yellow Sam. The animal sailed over the hurdles with horse-like majesty. The steed landed each hurdle without missing a beat. Furlong pressed his advantage and the veil of mediocrity slipped, revealing an almost competent thoroughbred, unencumbered by lead and weights, moist soil or a guilty conscience. Grassy clouds churned behind them as they approached a velocity that would have been respectable at a mainstream racing event. Yellow Sam didn't need to be phenomenal, he just needed to be slightly better in the middling horses that he was starting to leave behind. Horses called things like silver road, high and mighty, and Gertie's beauty. At five minutes and 51 seconds, curly and broken could see that the race was over, but it was impossible to see which horse had claimed victory. I wasn't absolutely sure, curly later recalled, so he dashed back across the racetrack, back into the car and drove around to the entrance. In the spectator area, the dispersing crowd was gobsbacked, one fellow recognised curly and said to him knowingly, well done, Barney. Yellow Sam had cleared the 13th and final flight of hurdles with a lead of two and a half lengths, much to the bewilderment of spectators and bookmakers. Yellow Sam and Michael Furlong had done it, and it wasn't even a close one. Yellow Sam's starting price hung there on the bookmaker's boards. They hadn't been given odds of 12 to 1 as curly had originally hoped. It was 20 to 1, almost double the hope for payoff. As is the custom, Furlong trotted the winning horse to the parade ring alongside the track, but there was a burgeoning commotion. The shops in town had finally gotten through on the phone and the scale of what had just unfolded was beginning to be understood. In Dignan bookmakers pressed their way into the parade ring, airing slobbery grievances. Ordinarily, jokies would return to the locker room with their saddles for the way in to ensure there had been no tampering with the handicap weights. Then they would shower, change into street clothing and head out. Brennan had made his way through the crowd to Furlong and suggested conspiratorially. You just weigh in now, don't bother changing, and go. Furlong was mystified, but did as he was told. Anne Brog and Drove curly back to her house where they had another cup of tea. She lent him 5 pound for gas money. He was dead broke until he collected his winnings and he went on his way home for supper. Curly was not the type to celebrate, so he had a bite and went to bed. He said to his wife Maureen, we've had a touch. He slept like a baby. The following day, Furlong saw a photo of himself riding Yellow Sam on the front page of the sporting life newspaper with the headline, biggest SP job ever landed in Ireland. Yellow Sam at twenty to one. This was how he discovered he'd been drafted in Curly's coup. A few bookmakers barked at paying out the winnings, but Curly hadn't broken any laws, and no individual shop was on the hook for more than a few thousand pounds, so they begrudgingly complied. The spiteful proprietors handed over the winnings in large sacks filled with crumpled one pound notes. A friend advised Curly not to take the cash home, his caper had been too high profile. There were people there who would cut your throat for a thousand pounds, Curly later recalled. Never mind the money we had. So Curly rented a hotel room, assembled his generals, and the crew spent several days flattening, sorting, counting, and stacking tens of thousands of banknotes. When it was all accounted for, they had about 300,000 pounds, equivalent to about 3.6 million in modern US dollars. For Curly's generals, he paid them about 1,200 pounds each. For Michael Furleng, an amateur jockey who was not eligible to be paid in cash, Curly handed over the keys to a new white BMW, one that would handily win a dog race. To his friend and former betting shop employee Benio Hanlon, for his one-time, one-man dramatic performance at the Belius Time phone booth theater, an undisclosed cash sum. With the money that remained, Curly paid off his debts and had plenty to spare. He would later recall, I had no qualms whatsoever about it. I wish I could do it again. It was there to be done, and it worked. It also worked out well for the bookmaker Sean Graham, who knew what part of a gift horse won most in inspect, and used Curly's loose slips as intelligence in his own lucrative wages. A few days after the race, Curly received a phone call. It was his father. He'd read about what happened with his nickname's sake in the newspaper. I see you had a touch. His father said, I did. Did you get paid? I did. That's what matters. They never spoke of Belius Time race again. Racing officials increased Yellow Sam's handicapped for subsequent races, and bookmakers adjusted their starting prices. The animal finally met his true destiny. He became a hundrum, mediocre, middle of the pack horse. He remained so for the rest of his racing days. As the details of Curly's caper spread through the local media, made gambling circles. The events of 26th June 1975 in Belius Town became known as the Yellow Sam Betting Co. Barney Curly became something of a folk hero in Ireland for getting the best of the bookies. Yet this was not the last noteworthy shenanigan in Barney Curly's story life. On one occasion, when he was moving to a new home, rather than selling his sprawling Georgian mansion, he set up a raffle where it was the grand prize. This earned him several times the estate value in ticket sales. Unfortunately, he had failed to acquire a license for the sweep stake. He was arrested, then released on probation after agreeing to donate £5,000 of his ill-gotten gains to a local charity. He was also suspected to be the architect of several other major gambling coos over the years, though he mostly stayed out of the spotlight, and none of his subsequent undertakings was as spectacular as the Yellow Sam flim flam. In his later years, Curly developed a more philanthropic philosophy. In 1995, after his son died in an automobile accident, Curly honored his son's memory by founding Direct Aid for Africa, D-A-F-A, an organisation that fund schools and hospitals in Zambia. Curly later chronographed his life of haps and mishaps in an autobiography titled Giving a Little Back. On the 29th of June 2005, race officials at Belius Town hosted the Seamus Murphy Yellow Sam hurdle, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the coup. Curly, then 65 years old, was in attendance, wearing his trademark felt fedora, along with Liam Brennan. Curly was in the spectator area rather than hiding in the gorse shrubs. He had no horse in this race. The crowd greased the folk heroes with warm applause. Sadly, Benio Hanlon was not available to a price his role as grieving telephony nephew. He had passed away some years earlier. As they say in Ireland, do not resent growing old, many are denied the privilege. Speaking of sayings, there is another one that goes, may misfortune fall you to a rest of your life and never catch up. It never did quite catch up to Bernie Curly. He lived a life of tumult, but mostly prosperity, right up to his passing on the 23rd of May 2021, at a ripe age of 81, passing peacefully in his home near Newmarket. He is survived by direct aid for Africa, which continues to support underprivileged people of Zambia. The telephone booth at Belius X Racecourse still stands to this day, one of the few phone booths remaining in the western world. Inside is a plaque memorialising the Yellow Sam Betting Coo. It reads in part, Yellow Sam, the greatest gamble in racing history. This episode was titled, but there once was a man called Curly. It was written, scored, and sound designed by me, Alan Bellos, and narrated by Dahi O'Droni. This was Damager State. There once was a man called Curly, whose phone friend was loyal and burly. His slow horse went runny, he made lots of money, and the bookies were understandably surly.