Len Ragozin, thoroughbred handicapper extraordinaire, hates to be interrupted when he is working. This puts him on a collision course with the horseplayers who trudge up to his cramped office on the fourth floor of an elevatorless building in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. While his visitors shoot the breeze in one of the office's two rooms, Ragozin sometimes retreats to the other. A lean, bookish figure in wire-rimmed glasses, he usually has barely settled in at his drafting table, an eye-shade on his head and a calculator at his fingertips, when somebody intrudes.
Ragozin's diligence is a fearsome thing, and it has helped lift him, at last, out of obscurity. For two lonely decades Ragozin, a Harvard graduate who estimates his IQ at somewhat more than 170, toiled in the certain, but largely unshared, knowledge that he was the king of the speed handicappers, a breed that tries to beat the horses without knowing a fetlock from a bag of oats. Ignoring conformation and backstretch gossip as well as such factors as breeding and the reputation of jockeys and trainers, speed handicappers rely instead on elaborate mathematical calculations known as "numbers." "figures" or, more formally, "speed ratings." They believe that their numbers, which are based on horses' past performances, accurately indicate what those horses will do when they race again. But while Ragozin knew his numbers were the best, he had trouble proving it.
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As he tells it, he would make cool and brilliant calculations at sundown only to lose his shirt at daybreak. "Jitters at the ticket window," sighs Ragozin. More recently, he enjoyed some lucrative results by using his numbers as guidance in operating his own claiming stable, but the pressures of being a horse owner apparently got to him, too. At any rate, it is with ill-concealed relief that he has lately been phasing out the stable. "The figures can be perfect but they still have to be interpreted," Ragozin explains. "My style is to sweat out decisions. I just don't handle myself well at the track."
Maybe Ragozin doesn't do well at the track, but a couple of years ago he started supplying numbers to people who do. It was a masterstroke, and at 49 he now finds himself doing a thriving business advising horse owners and bettors. The nice part is that he doesn't have to bet or claim horses himself, or even go to the accursed track. He simply waits in his office as the customers climb the three flights to beg, borrow and buy his numbers.
The uses that Ragozin's followers find for his numbers vary. Dennis Heard, a bearded Brooklyn businessman, has taken Ragozin's cue and is using the numbers as the guiding factor in the operation of a stable he started in 1976. In his second year Heard finished 17th in the nation with $448,029 in purses, and he raves, "Len's figures are terrific. I wouldn't dream of buying horses without them." Another satisfied customer is Constantine Merjos, a onetime symphony bassoonist who uses Ragozin's figures in preparing a tout sheet he peddles at New York tracks under the name "The Beard." "Len's numbers are the best," Merjos gushes. "They're tremendous." And finally, the numbers have become golden to some two dozen horseplayers, who complain of being brazenly set upon at the track by other wagerers anxious to learn how Ragozin's customers are beting, and worse, of being robbed of their winnings on the way home. This makes them reluctant to be identified, but it also demonstrates, they say, how nicely they're doing. And one of them, a chain-smoking fellow named Lou, rhapsodizes, "There can't be any better numbers than Len's. He's the only person who could put out such numbers."
Ragozin readily concurs. Delighted that his speed ratings have won such enthusiastic, if belated, acceptance, he estimates that bettors using them wagered upward of $10 million last year. And he shows visitors tax receipts attesting to some huge scores, notably a $59,710 trifecta payoff on the now-infamous race last Sept. 23 at Belmont won by Lebn, the 57-to-1 shot who apparently was not Lebn at all. Ragozin's customers also have suffered some spectacular tap-outs, but Ragozin counters that Lockheed and Penn Central have lost more. "We do all right. What can I say?" he says. "In fact, we do better than all right."
That Ragozin manages to run any kind of a business out of his office is a wonder. The place is not only inconvenient but also hopelessly cluttered. It is piled high with Daily Racing Forms, overburdened with filing cabinets and littered with unwashed dishes. Over here is somebody's bundle of dirty laundry, over there is a lone sneaker pining for its mate. The place also bears the marks of Ragozin's penchant for puttering and tinkering. "I like to fix things," he says, which may or may not explain the lamp held together by a huge wad of Scotch tape. When Ragozin turns 50 in September, some well-wishers might be tempted to buy him a new lamp. Those who know him better will buy him more tape.
Then there are the bettors who congregate in the place. Drawn in large part from Manhattan haunts like the Chess & Checker Club, the Mayfair Bridge & Backgammon Club and other gaming parlors, Ragozin's customers sometimes seem more interested in swapping palindromes, puns and puzzles than in winning at the races. One insider insists that each of them secretly yearns to claim a horse named Vengeance that runs on the New York circuit. Then the new owner would have the satisfaction of climbing the steps to Ragozin's office, flinging open the door and announcing triumphantly, "Vengeance is mine!"
Ragozin is obviously at ease in these surroundings. In fact, he also lived on the premises until a year ago, when he rented a nearby studio apartment, conceding that the office was a touch too crowded for sleeping and working. There is a leak in the ceiling of the new apartment above the place Ragozin chose for his bed. He diverted the water by running some rubber tubing from the ceiling to the window. As a result, he says, "When I'm in bed, it looks as if I'm being fed intravenously."
The job starts with the collection of relevant information on each race. This includes wind direction and other weather data. Because racetracks are often located near airports, Ragozin has an airline-weather Teletype machine in his office, where the hourly weather readings are rolled onto spools that he fashions out of Tinkertoys ("He's the only businessman I know who writes Tinkertoys off his income tax," says one office regular). Ragozin also has a network of correspondents who phone in daily reports on track conditions and how much ground each horse saved or lost. His informants include the tout-sheet man, Constantine Merjos, who times New York races. Ragozin is particularly glad to have Merjos' clockings, because official track times are not always accurate.
Ragozin has a formula to reduce what he calls the "snowstorm of data" to a speed rating. His calculations are painstakingly done, as evidenced both by his annoyance at being interrupted and by signs on his office wall reminding him of the tricky twists and turns to be heeded at tracks around the country. The computations result, magically, in a number. In Ragozin's rating system, the lower the number, the better the horse. Numbers range from zero for a Forego or a Secretariat to the high 20s or even 30s for a plug. "The figure is the ultimate distillation," Ragozin says with a flourish. "It's my E = mc[2], my Picasso sketch."
The sheets are Ragozin's stock in trade. If a bettor wants to play Aqueduct, Ragozin pulls from his files sheets on all horses entered at the track that day and runs off copies on the Xerox 3100 he has somehow found room for in the kitchen, near the weather Teletype. Off to the Big A goes the happy horse-player, presumably to rake in the dough. Of course, it is at this point that Ragozin came to grief as a horseplayer, and it is at this point, too, that four bettors using the sheets can come up with four different horses in the same race. They deliberate in what, to them, is horse talk. "That horse has been running 20s, but I think it'll take an 18 to win this one," one will say. Or: "Do you think that WA took too much out of him?" Or: "Looks to me like he's ready to run a 16 today."
Despite their differences in interpreting the numbers, devotees of Ragozin's sheets insist they enjoy an edge over other bettors. It is in setting his fees that the otherwise efficient Ragozin suddenly loses his firm grasp of numbers. Discussing prices on the phone recently with one of his problem clients, Ragozin said dolefully, "Listen, I know you're not doing well right now, but I think I should be getting more. I ain't going to take you to court but think about it, will you?"
Long before Len enrolled at Harvard, he had enthusiastically embraced his aunt Rachel's politics. Known around the yard as "Rags," he spent most of his time playing poker and working for various Marxist causes. After graduation in 1949, he became a researcher at Newsweek, but it was the McCarthy era and FBI agents kept stopping by to chat. Concluding that his political views foreclosed a successful career in Establishment journalism, Ragozin quit Newsweek and plunged, even more incongruously, into the Sport of Kings. His father, a weekend horseplayer, had devised innovative speed ratings, and Harry offered to pay Len a small sum to maintain the numbers for him.
Len got hooked and soon was visiting tracks all over the East, refining his dad's numbers and trying vainly to beat the horses. He fleshed out his income playing poker (at which, by all accounts, he did win) and with odd jobs, including, briefly, an editorship at a medical publishing house. He tried writing a handicapping column ("Rag's Pickings") in the Boston Traveler and peddling tips through the mail, but neither project got anywhere.
It was not until 1972 that Ragozin's perseverance began to pay off big. Going over the numbers on a claimer named Sunny and Mild, he saw something he liked. At his son's urging, Harry Ragozin claimed the horse for $15,000. Winning stakes races with claiming horses is unusual, but Sunny and Mild won the Queens County Handicap that year at Aqueduct in what was then track record time. Harry gave his son $22,000, one third of the stable's profits, and Len began claiming horses for himself. He did it strictly by the numbers, without bothering to look at the horses. Trainers existed simply to carry out his orders. 152ee80cbc
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