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HARNESS RACING; Herve Filion Arraigned In Race-Fixing Case
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
Published: August 12, 1995
Herve Filion, described by his lawyer as the Babe Ruth of harness racing, turned himself in to the authorities here today amid charges that he and two other harness drivers threw races at Yonkers Raceway earlier this summer.
Hours after his surrender, Filion, the most successful driver in the history of the sport, was arraigned in Yonkers Criminal Court where he arrived in handcuffs and pleaded not guilty to charges that he had taken part in a scheme to fix the sixth race at the track on June 26.
"This is a 55-year-old man who is world-renowned," his lawyer, Thomas Mason, said during a 15-minute hearing before Judge Joseph Nocca. "He is, in effect, the Babe Ruth of the harness track."
Filion is 1 of 23 people charged with taking part in an illegal betting ring that placed wagers on professional baseball, hockey and basketball games, as well as harness racing. He was released on $5,000 bail and faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.
WILKES-BARRE ? It was 10 a.m. on a day this month, and a scruffy collection of drivers had gathered in a paddock area that was as grimy as the blue-sky morning was pure.
They were there to qualify some mediocre trotters and pacers for a lackluster Saturday night card at Pocono Downs, a harness-racing track that, like the sport itself, has gone to seed in recent years.
And even if he was the greatest harness driver in history, Herve Filion, 62 now and nearly toothless, seemed perfectly content to be back in this dusty, dung-scented patch of northeast Pennsylvania.
Clutching a long whip beneath one arm, Filion chatted incessantly with grooms, trainers and fellow drivers, pausing only for an occasional gulp of coffee or a drag from the cigarettes that, like the victories in his heyday, came one after another.
So what if this Hall of Fame driver was about to qualify a 2-year-old filly for a $3,200 race? So what if he and two of his sons had just driven 2 1/2 hours from their home outside New York City? The potential winnings weren't bad for a guy who had made next to nothing for the last seven years. And the journey had been a snap compared to the road that had led him back here.
Since 1995, the man admirers call "the Babe Ruth of Harness Racing" had been more like its Pete Rose, an unhappy exile from a sport he had loved and dominated.
Filion had won nearly 15,000 races - 4,000 more than his closest competitor, Walter Case - and 10 Harness Tracks of America driver-of-the-year awards when his alleged involvement in a race-fixing scandal at Yonkers Raceway, near New York City, abruptly turned his world upside down.
Stripped of the only job he had ever known, Filion retreated into a deep depression. Broke, this proud, aging legend had taken a job as a groom at a friend's Long Island farm, mucking stables, carrying water, cleaning horses.
"You do what you can," said Filion, who, in the still-thick accent of his native Quebec, punctuates most sentences with "Ya know what I mean?"
"I had zero income for those seven years," he said. "I was very depressed. I was embarrassed about the whole situation. I didn't feel like talking to anybody. Ya know what I mean?"
All the time, Filion had dreamed of mornings like this. They became possible in 2000, when authorities dropped the charges in exchange for his acknowledgement that he had failed to file a New York state tax return in 1996 - for which he was sentenced to a year's probation and fined $90.
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