Horse racing is generally perceived as a genteel and civilized pursuit. It is, after all, "the sport of kings." It is a world of flower-filled winners' circles and white-fenced meadows. That is the world that will be on display when the Kentucky Derby is run this Saturday.
But horse racing has an underside, and it is shadowy and horrifying. It is in this world that Dan Chansky and Pete Strautman and others lived. They are horsemen of a different sort:
They killed their horses for money.
An eight-week investigation by the Daily News discovered 57 cases in four states of horses being killed for the purpose of defrauding insurance companies of millions of dollars. The investigation found that horses are routinely sold in phony transactions and then insured for inflated values; it found an equine insurance industry ill-equipped to confront the problem and reluctant to expend the money it would require to pursue litigation in most cases.
But most startling, the investigation disclosed unspeakable cruelties inflicted on horses: suffocations, electrocutions, shootings with shotguns and hunting arrows, poisonings.
Dan Chansky and Pete Strautman were two New Jersey horsemen who were convicted of animal cruelty. This is a story about them, and people like them.
Ford sedan with New Jersey plates and a horse trailer hitched to the rear pulled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike into a dark and deserted rest area. Behind the wheel sat Dan Chansky, the owner of both a standardbred stable and a rap sheet that included a jail stretch for assaulting a cop. Seated on the passenger side was Pete Strautman, who was cradling a can of beer and who still could hear his wife scold: "Pete, do you know what will happen if this ever gets out?" Strautman had told her: "Naaa. Nobody will ever know."
Chansky and Strautman had departed Pocono Downs in Wilkes-Barre with the standardbred race horse Sonic Lord at 2 a.m. Sonic Lord had been entered there three weeks before and Chansky had been neither shocked nor disappointed when, at 7-1 odds, the animal broke stride and hobbled in eighth. Sonic Lord had a dropped suspensory, a sore ankle and earnings in 1981 of only $1,135. Chansky had purchased the horse at a sale in New York for $2,000 in June 1981, had him fraudulently insured for $12,500 in July, and now - 34 days after he had acquired Sonic Lord - Dan Chansky and Pete Strautman planned to kill the horse and collect the insurance.
