Trot takes a look behind the scenes of Ontario Racing Commission investigator Charlie Beirnes as he attempts to keep the sport clean. By Ronnie Shuker
Today, Charlie and I are heading to Mohawk for veterinarian searches before visiting Flamboro Downs for another set of gate inspections. Eventually, we plan to end up at the laboratory of Maxxam Analytics, which holds an exclusive drug-testing contract with the ORC.
I meet Charlie at a Toronto subway station at 8:30 a.m., which seems a luxury after yesterday’s five o’clock start. He greets me with the same spryness I’ve become accustomed to since we met just 24 hours before (okay, more like 27 hours). A heavyset man in beige slacks, a scuffed up black denim jacket and a blue and yellow ORC cap, he crowds behind the wheel of his black Ford 150; we exchange morning pleasantries and talk the whole way to the track. The same giddy, all-cheeks smile he wore yesterday is evident again today. With Charlie, I’ve learned, there’s never nothing to talk about.
At Mohawk, he takes me around the backstretch, explaining the strict rules of retention as we walk and introducing me to some of the locals. In between barns, we run into Desmond Waithe, an investigator with the Medication Control Task Force. Formed in 2006, it works to enforce out-of-competition testing and break the cycle of illegal substances circulating within the industry between distributors and consumers. Desmond eyes that ORC cap, so Charlie goes and gets another from his truck and gives it to him. “You see how much he looks after me?” Desmond says to me in his thick Caribbean accent. He turns to Charlie. “Thank you, brother.”
Like Charlie, Desmond is a retired police constable. He joined the task force immediately after retiring from the Toronto police force right around the time of the recent United States primaries. “When the U.S. election was getting going,” recalls Charlie, “Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were going at it. I said to Desmond, ‘He’s going to win the election; he’s going to be President.’ Desmond said, ‘There’s no way they’re going to elect him.’ I bet him dinner at the best restaurant around.”
“I was glad to pay,” beams Desmond. “That was the best bet I’ve ever lost.”
It’s rare these two investigators cross paths, and rarer still that they do so on back-to-back days like they have on my two-day ride-along with Charlie. Yesterday I joined the pair of them at that ungodly hour for early-morning gate inspections at Woodbine. Along with a handful of other investigators – including two OPP officers on the task force – they searched cars, trucks, and trailers for needles, injectables and syringes containing banned substances. A few people looked impatient, annoyed or nervous with the searches, but most were friendly, and some even bantered with the guys as they went about their business. “We’re like a family,” says Charlie. “The whole industry came together and decided that if we’re going to make our industry viable for people to come bet their money, watch and participate, bring new people into the industry and invest their money, then we have to make sure that we clean our own doorstep. You don’t see a lot of confrontation, because these people support us and we support them, and those are the kind of relationships we try to foster with the industry.”
...
The blue plastic wedged between my cheeks and my teeth feels like a pair of toothbrushes without bristles. It tastes as though I’ve sucked on a salt-lick. On the contrary, I’m being tested this afternoon for marijuana, cocaine, PCP, opiates (including heroin), amphetamines, and the two prescription medications Oxycontin and Percocet. Unlike urine testing, saliva emphasizes a short detection window, so that it will show if I recently inhaled, ingested or injected a banned substance.
I knew going in that the gate inspections I observed this morning were just one part of the ORC’s drug-testing mandate to keep racing clean, for both humans and horses. Now I’m getting a taste (really... a taste) of the human side of the game at the ORC headquarters.
Charlie has passed me off to fellow investigator Pam Bray for the saliva drug test — a form of detection the ORC has used since 2008. Pam tells me it’s a simple, non-invasive, gender-friendly procedure that uses saliva to mimic blood work. She grins and assures me it’s a mock test today, and I believe her.
“We’re not the lifestyle police,” says Pam as she hands me a consent form. “We’re not concerned with what people do on their own time, but with what people do at the racetrack. We’re not concerned with what somebody did on their day off but on that day at the racetrack, we’re making sure they’re fit for duty, because it’s all about safety.”
I consent.
...
One after another, Charlie lifts thick black case binders onto the table in front of me, every one reminding me more of a doctoral dissertation than the last, filled three to four inches thick with paperwork. They include the individual statements, interview transcripts, phone records, financial records, drug test results, and court rulings of the high profile cases he’s worked on over his eight years with the ORC. Although the investigator spends most of his time on the road making rounds of the 18 racetracks scattered throughout the province, the amount of paperwork required for a single case can tie him to his desk for up to a week at a time.
“It’s not like sitting down, watching an hour of CSI and by the end of an hour you got it all solved,” jokes Charlie. “Our conclusions aren’t based on what we think happened. They’re based on good hard evidence and good hard science, because that’s the only way that people are going to have confidence in our system.”
I’m awed with information overload as Charlie walks me through the sophisticated minutia of various cases, many of which can’t be mentioned here for security and privacy reasons. There was one of a former trainer that duped a naïve new investor to the industry into buying several horses but instead put himself down as the owner. There was another of a long-time industry man who dealt illegal therapeutic and performance-enhancing drugs out of his home for more than 30 years before being caught. And then there was the case in which a sudden change in performance at a stable led investigators to a trainer injecting EPO (erythropoietin) into his horses. “That was detrimental to the welfare of the horses, and it was out and out cheating,” says Charlie. “When you go to the races, you want to make sure you’re betting on a clean product. It’s great to watch Mark McGwire hit home run No. 62, but it would be better if we knew he did it clean.”
By now, I badly need a drink and a break for my brain, which up until today I’d considered quite resilient. Charlie brings me a bottle of water and leads me through a few more cases before taking me to visit the commission courtroom and then back to Woodbine for an impromptu behind-the-scenes tour of the track. By the time we wrap up our day around three o’clock, I am exhausted. My guide takes me back to the subway station, chatting happily along the way about the similarities and differences between investigating for the ORC and policing.
When I arrive home an hour later, I fall straight into bed and sleep those 14 hours straight.
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The next morning, after finishing his rounds at Mohawk, Charlie takes me to Flamboro Downs for another gate inspection. This time it’s race day. After we stop for a quick takeout breakfast, he gets a phone call from another investigator working on a current case that Charlie had begun investigating. He painstakingly walks through every piece of the case with his co-worker, without a need for notes, describing every detail and analyzing every possible angle, just as he did many times with me the day before. When he hangs up, he turns to face me. “Some people drink the Kool-Aid and some people don’t,” he says. “But it’s the minority that’s always going to be there. I guess if it weren’t like that, we’d have a perfect world, but we don’t. I wouldn’t have a job and you and I wouldn’t be here together today.”
When we get to Flamboro, we meet up with Pam and two other investigators, Troy Moffatt and Tyler Durand. They’re set for another round of gate inspections, which prove more eventful than yesterday’s. Troy and Tyler each make a seizure from participants, one of a bronchial dilator and the other a mysterious white, crystalline powder in an un-labelled blue container. In both cases, their horses were allowed to race with an investigation pending to determine any possible consequences. The team carries out their seizures as inconspicuously as possible.
“If we burn a bridge today, it’s not beneficial down the road,” says Troy, a former groom himself whose dad was a former driver. “We have to do our jobs, but we’re not here to parade around with a bottle and embarrass these guys.”
“We have to do our jobs and go after this stuff. We’re trying to root out the bad, but we care about them. It’s about correcting our problems and moving on together.”
Charlie gives me a tour of the paddock and we share lunch before heading out to our final stop at Mississauga’s Maxxam laboratory, where the ORC’s human drug testing takes place. (Equine test analysis is done at the company’s British Columbia facility.) There the director, Wayne Murray, and Joshua Dias, an account manager, greet us with open arms. They take me through both the human and horse drug testing the company does for the ORC and Dias makes an incredibly insightful comment that I scramble to make note of lest I forget this moment come tomorrow morning.
“In Canada, everything about drug testing is for safety,” he points out. “Safety is first and foremost. In the U.S. it’s all about catching that 1 out of 10; in Canada it’s about protecting that 9 out of 10.”
(See? Worth scrambling for.)
Joshua takes me on a tour of the lab, walking me through a layperson’s layout of the two-fold process of human drug testing. The lab technicians receive the samples (which are usually hand-delivered), separate the saliva from the urine tests, and check to ensure the integrity of every sample. They then give each one an identity number so the scientists carrying out the tests don’t know whose sample it is. When the samples are ready to be tested, they go through two steps: screening and confirmation. Using a machine called an LC/MS/MS, the first step determines if a drug is present; the second determines the quantity by using a beam to smash a molecule, leaving a distinct pattern to measure.
Imagine a room full of glass bottles. In the screening process, scientists look for the presence of particular bottles, grouping Coke, Pepsi and Sprite bottles separately. For the confirmation process, they then take a bottle and throw it against a wall. Because a Coke bottle smashes differently than a Pepsi bottle or Sprite bottle, the way each bottle breaks apart determines how many bottles there are of that type in the sample. “A cocaine molecule will shatter differently than an opiate molecule,” Joshua explains. “What this machine does is quantify how much drug there is based on how the molecule shatters.”
As Joshua and I return to the lobby, we find Charlie exchanging investigation stories with Dr. Murray, who used to work as a forensic biologist at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. After we shake hands with the pair, we exit the laboratory and head back to Charlie’s truck. It’s then that I realize my two-day journey with him is over. I quickly take stock of what I’ve collected over the last 48 hours... more than 16 hours of tape, a briefcase full of scribblings and handouts, and many more mental notes. I know I’ve gotten barely a glimpse of the work he does every day.
We chat throughout our final quarter of an hour together before he drops me off, yet again, at the Kipling station. I’m easily as exhausted as I was yesterday, truly out-energized again by a man 16 years my senior. But when I get home, I don’t fall back into bed. Instead, I spread my notes on the floor around me, throw on my headphones, and relive my two days with the zealous Charlie Beirnes.