He was a master, at 38, of the various measures a man could take to bend the odds at the track. He knew, for example, just how much heroin to shoot into a horse’s neck to make him “think he was Pegasus,” as the Daily News put it in 1932 (about 30 milligrams by hypodermic needle, or 160 milligrams down the throat).
But it was Barrie’s fingernails that told the story of his particular genius: They were nearly gone, eaten away by the bleach and ammonia he rubbed into the hides of thoroughbred horses so that racetrack stewards, detectives, jockeys, and even the horse’s own trainers mistook them for entirely different creatures.
The horse bleaching was in the service of an elegant scam that the gamblers called “ringing.” You take two horses, one slow and one fast. The very slow one doesn’t actually need to exist, but it’s convenient if it does. You enter the slow horse in a race for slow horses, but on the day of the race, run the fast one instead. No one but you and the gangsters staking you know that the slow horse is really the fast one, so the horse goes off at long odds, and when he wins, you clean up.
The art of the con is in making the track stewards and the bettors believe the winner really was the slow horse having an inexplicably good day. That’s where Barrie came in. He was a horse painter, perhaps the best in the world. His tools were simple: bleach, ammonia, bandages, silver nitrate, and henna in shades from blood to chocolate. He could turn a bay with a white star on its face into a dappled gray, and he could do it so convincingly that the gray’s last trainer would swear it was his horse.
If the painter was really good — and Barrie was the best — it was hard to go wrong. But that Labor Day in 1926, when dawn broke over a muddy track at Lincoln Fields, Barrie realized he had a problem.
With $2,500 fronted by the two gamblers, who came from Minneapolis, Barrie had bought a quick horse named Kalakaua and a hundred-dollar stinker named Bobby Dean. He shipped both of them to Washington Park Race Track, a brand new track just outside Chicago, where he got to work. One of the Minneapolis gamblers sat outside the stable, whittling a stick and whistling. Inside, Barrie laid out his tools.