WARNING: this story contains descriptions of cruelty towards animals that some readers may find distressing.
If anyone had walked past, they would have seen three blokes in gloves massaging hair dye into the hair of a full-grown racehorse.
The ground was littered with the empty tubes of Clairol the men had poured out and mixed in buckets.
Months of scheming, and their con had come to this: giving a horse a makeover.
With their makeshift hair salon, they were trying to salvage one of the most difficult scams in horse racing: a "ring-in".
The premise of a ring-in is simple: enter a known slow horse in a race, making sure the odds are high so there's plenty of money to be won, and then at the last minute, swap it for a faster horse and hope nobody notices.
But pulling it off is much harder.
The plan was to swap eight-year-old picnic racer Fine Cotton out for a younger, much faster horse named Bold Personality.
The idea was to fleece bookmakers around Australia out of millions of dollars.
Instead, it ended with everyone losing their money and three men in jail.
That's because there was one fairly major problem: Bold Personality looked nothing like Fine Cotton.
The horse was a lighter bay colour, while Fine Cotton was a rich, dark brown with white socks on its legs.
And so one of the men had spent the night driving to chemists throughout suburban Brisbane buying boxes of dye until they had enough to transform Bold Personality into its slower counterpart.
They woke up the next morning, the day of the big race, expecting to see the impostor horse transformed.
Instead, the dodgy overnight dye-job had left Bold Personality fire-engine red.
For their plan to work, spectators would have had to overlook a majestic animal — a full-grown racehorse — thundering along the track like a galloping stop sign.
This is just a taste of one of the stupidest, and most infamous, scams in Australian racing history — and now the subject of a new ABC podcast, Dig: The Ring In.
While the farce has seen it go down in folklore, those caught up in the scam are still living with the consequences today.
"It was a race that probably went for a minute and a half, and the ramifications lasted 25-plus years," says journalist Simon White, who interviewed some of the main players in the years after the race.
Three of the men at the centre of the scam finished their jail terms long ago.
But someone on the periphery lost her horse-racing career over it.
Wendy Smith is in her late 70s now, and of all the characters in the Fine Cotton story, she's the real horse lover.
In her youth she was one of Australia's few female jockeys, before making headway as a horse trainer. But she's had to give all that up.
This is the first time she's spoken publicly about how she got tangled up in the Fine Cotton debacle.
Wendy and the mysterious blood-stock agent
It's 1982, two years before the Fine Cotton ring-in, and Wendy Smith is making a name for herself as a horse trainer in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales.
"I had a lovely block of 12 stables between the racecourse at Coffs Harbour and the beach," she recalls.
"I could train horses through the bush, then gallop up and down the beach, which was just ideal for horses.
"They would say I was unconventional, but I got results."
She soon comes to the attention of a blood-stock agent named John Chandler, who's buying and selling horses in the area. Chandler's just charming enough to get a dinner date.
"He asked me out and I thought, 'He's alright ... a bit podgy ...' but I remember he had nice blue eyes," she says.
"[He was] not my type, but the food was my type. A free feed was always good."
Wendy and John Chandler become friendly, and in September she agrees to train a horse called Captain Cadet for a race in Sydney.
"I think he chose me because I didn't drink, I didn't smoke. I didn't go to the pubs or clubs and I didn't bet," she says.
"I was probably the perfect person to have a horse for him because I wouldn't go talking about it."
Captain Cadet costs $20,000 — enough to buy a quarter of a house in Sydney. Wendy doesn't have to pay for the horse, but Chandler won't cough up any money for its feed. So, she gives him an ultimatum.
"I don't want anything to do with it unless it's leased to me, then I'll feed it," Wendy says.
The horse is signed over to Wendy, and Chandler disappears.
Then, Wendy says, the strange calls begin. The men on the phone say that she'll be told when and where she can race the horse.
"And I said: 'I won't do what I'm told. I'm going to race him where I want to race him.'"
A few months later at the races in Grafton, Wendy says a big bloke approaches as she is loading Captain Cadet onto a float.
He asks where she's taking the horse, and says he paid a man named "John Gillespie" for it.
Wendy doesn't know anyone named John Gillespie. But the guy keeps at her and tries to stop her driving off, she says.
Wendy is so worried she contacts the police.
By this point, Wendy has given up on John Chandler.
Then, in 1984, a few months before the Fine Cotton ring-in race, he turns up out of nowhere and asks Wendy out for dinner again.
He has a new name, and a new offer.
Meeting John Gillespie
"He was a pretty good talker. and he wanted to get friendly again and take me out to dinner. I said, 'I'm not interested,'" Wendy recalls.
But that doesn't stop John from talking business, or Wendy from listening.
He comes clean about his name — John Chandler is, in fact, the mysterious "John Gillespie".
He tells her the reason he disappeared and gave her a fake name is he was working undercover for the Queensland police.
What Wendy doesn't know is that, in reality, his address during that time was 21 Boggo Road — the infamous Boggo Road Jail.
And it wasn't his first time behind bars.
Gillespie — the bloodstock agent, used-car salesman and police informer — had over 300 convictions.
"He'd been more in jail than out and always for some sort of fraud, some sort of con," says Roger Crofts, who's worked in and around the racing industry for almost 40 years.
During this most recent spell in Boggo Road, he'd been scheming the Fine Cotton ring-in.
He'd almost pulled off another one on a Brisbane racetrack two years earlier. The problem was he'd broken the number one rule of a ring-in: the horse has to actually win.
But it had given him a reputation as someone who could ring in a horse and get away with it (though the trainer he roped in was banned from racetracks for life).
This time, the horse must win. Which is where Wendy, the promising trainer, comes back into the picture.
Gillespie asks her to train another horse, this one a solid racer named Dashing Solitaire.
Of course, Gillespie fails to mention the important bit, according to Wendy: Dashing Solitaire is going to be the ring-in replacement for Fine Cotton.
Dashing Solitaire is dark chocolate brown, like Fine Cotton, and about the same height.
Unlike Fine Cotton, it has no white markings on its legs. But it looks close enough.
It arrives at Wendy's stables in early July, and she does what she can with the difficult horse, working him hard along the beach for a month.
When she gets a call from Gillespie saying that Dashing Solitaire is ready to head off to race in South Australia, her reaction is mostly relief.
But a couple of days after the horse is taken away, her phone rings. To her surprise, Dashing Solitaire is not in South Australia but at a property nearby.
Dashing Solitaire gets scratched
"I got my float and my car and went down to where he was. I sang out, and the horse knew who I was," says Wendy.
The horse's condition shocks her.
"He had galloped into a barbed wire fence and had his leg torn open," Wendy says.
The leg injury is bad. And Wendy is furious.
It turns out the place is being used by another trainer named Hayden Haitana, the man working the other side of the ring-in scheme. Haitana has been tasked with training the slower Fine Cotton to lose as many races as possible to increase its odds by the day of the ring-in.
Haitana's a knockabout Kiwi who's moved to Australia to live out his teenage fantasy, a vision of the bare-breasted Gold Coast girls from Pix, the only skimpy magazine he could get growing up in New Zealand.
He's already spent some time behind bars in New Zealand for stealing chainsaws.
Although he once dreamed of becoming "James Bond on the Gold Coast", by early 1984, he's living a quiet life training horses on a bush block in northern NSW.
He lives with his brother, Pat, a jockey who's just come out of a short stint in Boggo Road, where he served time with John Gillespie — giving Gillespie the idea to recruit Hayden for his ambitious scheme.
And he's not the only conscript. Gillespie's also roped in flashy businessman Robert North as his lieutenant.
Rounding out the gang are salesman John Dixon, and electrical technician Tommaso Di Luzio, both tasked with odd jobs.
But the plan has, quite literally, hit a snag.
After assessing the horse's injuries, Wendy takes Dashing Solitaire home to be looked after.
His career as the ring-in for Fine Cotton is over.
For the crew, it's an absolute disaster — the race is just a few days away, and they have no faster horse to replace Fine Cotton.
"The Dashing Solitaire injury should have been a red light to all of them to say this is crazy and let's just walk away," says racing author Peter Hoysted.
A very bad dye job
With the scam rapidly failing, Gillespie springs into action.
Scouring his address book, he finds another horse, Bold Personality, stabled down at Ballina.
"It was too late to find a horse that matched the appearance of Fine Cotton. So they just got any good horse," Roger Crofts says.
The gang convinces its owner, well-regarded trainer, Bill Naoum, that they are good for $20,000. The plan is to race the horse on Saturday before the cheque clears on Monday.
Dixon moves Bold Personality to stables on the outskirts of town where it's to stay the night before the race.
He throws a heavy winter blanket over the horse before driving off in the Queensland heat.
In the metal float, the horse quickly starts to overheat. It arrives at the stables severely dehydrated, covered in sweat and on the verge of passing out. Haitana volunteers to rehydrate the horse with a saline drench, a job for a veterinarian.
"Something went wrong when they were pulling the tube out of the horse at the end. They ruptured a blood vessel and there was a huge outpouring of blood from this horse," Roger Crofts says.
Haitana decides to strap the horse's head to the rafters, tilting its head back and hoping for the bleeding to stop, which, eventually, it does.
But Bold Personality's ordeal is only just beginning.
This is where the boxes of hair dye come into the story, with terrible results: after the dye is washed off, Bold Personality is practically glowing fire-engine red.
The race is the next day, and their situation is desperate.
"Already they're thinking about jail terms," Peter Hoysted says.
"And that is really relevant here because it should have said to them all, 'Stop, do not proceed.'"
The next morning, the bright red horse is at Robert North's place, in suburban Brisbane.
But there's no turning back. The race is just hours away and the money's ready to go on.
So, they shampoo and scrub the horse down until Bold Personality returns to its original colour.
They're left staring at their original problem: the horse still looks nothing like Fine Cotton, which has distinctive white socks on its rear legs.
Gillespie, self-appointed master of disguising horses, decides the solution is white spray paint, which soon starts dripping onto Bold Personality's hooves.
They try to hose this off and then, in a desperate measure, Haitana wraps each of Bold Personality's lower legs in bandages.
The gang are now pinning their hopes on a horse that has suffered immensely over the last 24 hours.
Bold Personality has been dehydrated, then rehydrated. Bled profusely and had its head tied to rafters. It has been dyed, then shampooed and spray-painted, and finally, had its legs bandaged.
Meanwhile, the real Fine Cotton has spent the whole morning in a hot metal float parked on the street. Haitana's been darting out to give the horse some of his beer stubby — and something else.
See, Haitana's got a Plan B: if they get busted early with Bold Personality, he'll run the real Fine Cotton (or at least, that's what he said in the book he later co-wrote).
And even though it's a slower runner, he thinks the horse could still win, with the help of a "Haitana bomb" — a concoction of chemicals that earned him a winning streak with another horse a few years back.
By the time the horses and men leave for Eagle Farm racecourse, the dope starts to kick in.
Haitana can hear the drugged-up Fine Cotton neighing loudly in the float behind the car. Haitana is about seven beers in at this point, and they're late.
Across town at Eagle Farm racecourse in the posh Brisbane suburb of Ascot, the gates are open and officials are starting to arrive.
The day of the race
For those working trackside at Eagle Farm, like racing official Lester Grimmett, it started off as a regular Saturday of racing. Lester still has his race book from that day. He's held onto it as a memento.
"My job on the day was to observe the races and take notes of each horse, and also to compile a stewards' report on the day," Grimmett says.
When Gillespie and the rest of the ring-in crew arrive at the track, Haitana goes back to check on the horses.
He takes the imposter, Bold Personality, by the reins and leads him out, leaving the real Fine Cotton to deal with the effects of his "Haitana Bomb".
He's due to run in race four, a novice class for emerging racers or older horses of limited ability. On the morning of August 18, Fine Cotton's odds are holding steady at a generous 33-1.
And then, as Grimmett and pretty much everyone else at the track watches on, the high odds on Fine Cotton start to move. Over the course of the morning, they drop from 33-1 to 20-1, a sure sign money is coming in from elsewhere.
Then, about 25 minutes before the race, when betting on the track officially opens, the odds on Fine Cotton start to free fall, from 20-1, to 15-1 and stopping at 7-2.
Lester Grimmett says he yelled out in an attempt to alert the stewards that something was up.
Grimmet was familiar with unexplained plunges on Brisbane horses with no form. And bookmakers down south had become very wary of the sudden successes of horses with high odds up north.
Money is coming in on Fine Cotton from places as far away as Fiji and New Guinea.
At Southport, a pregnant woman is seen handing over piles of cash for the horse.
Outside Sydney at the Appin Dogs, a Catholic priest is madly running between bookies, trying to get everything he has on Fine Cotton.
And at Sydney's Warwick Farm, a merchant banker is going back, again and again, to bet large sums on Fine Cotton.
What unites this motley crew, spread across the eastern seaboard, is they're putting bets on with active encouragement from Robbie Waterhouse, son of legendary bookmaker "Big Bill" Waterhouse.
The name Fine Cotton is by now the worst kept secret in Australian racing, and the picnic scrubber with remarkable new form is heading into the race as the favourite.
Haitana's anxious to see if Bold Personality with its identification papers forged by Gillespie will get past the all-important stewards' checks.
Some of the racing officials present have seen the real Fine Cotton race recently, so there's a chance they might spot the impostor.
But the horse passes without notice.
"It wasn't a normal practice [to check papers] with a horse that ran the last week or so, because the horse would have been well known," Lester Grimmett says of the protocol in Queensland at the time.
Despite everything Bold Personality has been through in the past 24 hours, when the race starts, the horse guns to the front of the pack.
The race is tight all the way, and ends in a photo finish, with "Fine Cotton" nudging out the runner-up, Harbour Gold, by a short half head.
The gang can't believe it — their beleaguered con has come off, after all.
"That moment of triumph would have lasted for about two minutes, because then there's a clamour, a lot of noise, and there are people at the rails," Peter Hoysted says.
Lester Grimmett grows even more suspicious about Fine Cotton, and insists racing officials look into it.
Spray paint is beginning to run down Bold Personality's sweating legs, just visible below the bandages. People trackside start to shout out "Ring-in!"
Courier-Mail journalist Bruce Clarke recalls that the press room disbanded in an instant, with reporters going downstairs to the betting ring, up to the horse stalls, down to the mounting yard, trying to find out what the hell was going on with Fine Cotton.
"It was just surreal. No one knew at the time what actually happened."
As the clamour grows, the stewards shift into action. They stop proceedings before the bookies have to pay out winnings, and demand Haitana go and get Fine Cotton's identity papers, which he doesn't have.
Bold Personality's former owner — the man they tried to dud out of $20,000 — happens to be at the track that day and sees the horse being checked over by the stewards. He instantly recognises it as his own.
"That's Perse!" he says. It's the breakthrough the stewards need.
When they fetch Bold Personality's identification card, the brands match, confirming that "Fine Cotton" is a ring-in.
Another call goes out over the PA: Fine Cotton is disqualified.
And with that, a helluva lot of punters have officially done their dough.
Jail terms and racing bans
After the mayhem of race day came the inquiries.
The media couldn't get enough, especially when they started digging into who'd placed bets on Fine Cotton, and what they knew.
Robbie and Bill Waterhouse were interrogated by the Australian Jockey Club, which found they "knew of the substitution" of the horse and "connived at the betting" by their associates.
Regarding those bets, Robbie's judgment read: "The Committee is left with the overwhelming inference that such central organisation and direction either came from or involved R.W. Waterhouse."
Both Bill and Robbie were "warned off" racecourses worldwide with their bookmaking licences revoked, putting a handbrake on their legendary careers.
Robbie Waterhouse would later be sentenced to eight months periodic detention in Long Bay jail for "making a false statement" to the Racing Appeals Tribunal about his role in the betting.
During a spectacular falling out with his family over a family trust, David Waterhouse would testify in a NSW racing authority hearing that his brother and father bet around $800,000 on Fine Cotton off the books — significantly more than the $66,000 of legal betting that Robbie had admitted to.
David testified that Bill said to him a few days after the race, "What a way to make money! We would have made millions if it had come off."
Robbie Waterhouse declined to be interviewed for Dig: The Ring In, but told the ABC through his lawyer that he denies all allegations made by his brother David and that he hasn't engaged in any unlawful conduct.
Bill Waterhouse died in 2019, but always maintained he had nothing to do with the scam.
As for the gang, they all went into hiding straight after the race, with Haitana only emerging for an interview with 60 Minutes where he claimed his life was being threatened.
Within a month he was arrested at the Truro Motel in South Australia and extradited to Queensland under intense media scrutiny. He was jailed for six months and banned from Australian racecourses for life.
The other members of the crew — John Gillespie, Robert North, John Dixon and Tom Di Luzio — also faced criminal charges.
Both Dixon and Di Luzio were acquitted, but North served six months alongside Haitana.
Before his trial could finish, Gillespie went on the run, but was eventually caught hiding in his sister's cupboard. As the gang's leader, he received the longest sentence, serving four years.
But his scams didn't end there. After skipping off to run bars in Asia, in 1998 Gillespie was named in reports as the ringleader of fraudsters captured in the Philippines selling fake passports for the micronation Dominion of Melchizedek. The scam netted an estimated $US1 million from hundreds of individuals.
In the 2000s, Gillespie was investigated for scams allegedly involving racehorses, anti-wrinkle cream and a multi-million-dollar artwork collection which allegedly left investors high and dry.
In 2016, Gillespie's name appeared again in the Panama Papers — the massive leak of documents from shell company giant Mossack Fonseca, which exposed a global system of shadowy finances, including crime and corruption hidden in secretive offshore companies.
The documents revealed that after Gillespie was released from jail, in the early 90s, he became a founding director of two companies incorporated in the Bahamas: the International Millionaire's Club, and the International Horseowners Club. Both were struck off the registries by 1995.
Robbie Waterhouse managed to have his racing ban overturned in 1998, and both he and his father regained their bookmaking licences a few years later. Haitana was allowed back trackside in 2013.
But not everyone has been so successful in having their sanctions lifted.
After the plot was uncovered, Wendy was grilled by the Queensland racing authorities about what she knew.
Under cross-examination, she said she didn't know the men who collected the horse Dashing Soltaire from her property.
Actually, Wendy knew one of the men was Gillespie's son, but has said she didn't name him as she felt sorry for him.
She lost her right to enter horses into races which meant her career as a professional trainer was over.
"I thought, all I've done all my life is help people and love horses ... it literally broke my heart.
"I cried and cried because I knew in my heart I hadn't done anything."
Wendy tried to appeal to the High Court to have the decision overturned but did not succeed.
So, she pivoted.
"I thought, 'Well, I've loved plenty of things. I've done musical comedy. I've been on stage everywhere. OK, I'll do musicals.'"
Wendy left Coffs Harbour, and got into musical theatre.
She's even written a show called Pirates of Tweed Heads — helped along with a generous nod to Gilbert and Sullivan.
All these years on, she doesn't seem to have too many regrets about the direction her life took.
"I don't need those people in racing that are crooked, or planning all these crooked things. I don't need those people at all."
But there is one thing she does pine for.
"I miss the actual horses," she says.
As for the horses, Fine Cotton lived to the ripe old age of 32.
He was bought by a movie producer who's been trying to get a film up about this story for years.
At one point, the whole gang was apparently roped into a deal.
But just like the ring-in, it didn't come off.
Maybe one day it will.
Meanwhile, after that gob-smacking win as Fine Cotton, Bold Personality never raced again.
The poor horse never got over the sound of spray paint.
Hear more of the wild story of Fine Cotton in the ABC's new history podcast, Dig: The Ring In. Listen and subscribe on the ABC Listen app, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts or your favourite podcast app.
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