Lisa Lazarus, the top cop in US horse racing, woke up one morning this summer to find a flurry of missed overseas calls and e-mails. They were all from UK regulators and they all delivered the same urgent message: a series of large, unusual and suspiciously successful wagers on US races had been placed in London the day before, saddling some of the city’s famed betting parlors with hefty losses, and they needed her help.

By Sujata Rao The wagers were on all these longshots that a pair of little-known horsemen — Angel Quiroz and Ernesto Ochoa — had dispatched to run in races on the Jersey shore and in upstate New York. An occasional 50-1 winner is one thing, Lazarus, the CEO of the US Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, would later say in an interview, but this was just too much of a coincidence.

So she barred a pair of Quiroz horses from running that day, suspended his training license and, with the story drawing cross-Atlantic media attention and scrutiny, vowed to keep investigating the matter.

But months later, the case, at least publicly, has gone cold. Neither Lazarus’s agency, known as HISA, nor any other regulatory or law enforcement agency has reported any new breakthroughs. And with the eyes of the racing world now back on the US as it prepares for its richest day of the year on Saturday, the Breeders’ Cup, the unsolved betting coup looms in the background as yet another reminder of the shrinking industry’s myriad troubles.

Even Lazarus admits to being somewhat frustrated by the way it’s all played out. HISA was created a few years ago to give the sport a federal regulatory body, but that authority, she notes, doesn’t cover the gambling side of the business like it does in other countries. And she said she has no visibility into what, if anything, law-enforcement authorities are doing.

“I’ve definitely come out of this experience believing there needs to be an American regulatory body that oversees wagering on horse racing,” Lazarus said. “We don’t have one with any sort of governmental authority, and we don’t have one that is national in scope.”It’s a job, she said, that could be added to HISA’s responsibilities or handed to some other entity. Those particulars “may not be as important as being sure that we can actually get that kind of oversight,” she said. ‘No Speed’Lazarus said that HISA did at least have some impact during the episode. She pointed to the barring of the two horses and suggested those moves wouldn’t have happened when regulatory oversight was left exclusively to the states.

HISA then suspended Quiroz after three of his horses, including one of the longshot winners, tested positive for a banned substance that allows them to breath better. Ochoa’s horses came up clean in tests, and he continues to train. (He’s only entered two horses in races since then: One was beaten by almost 40 lengths and the other finished last in a field of five.) Quiroz could not be reached for comment. His lawyer did not respond to repeated calls and emailed requests for comment. Attempts to contact Ochoa were unsuccessful.

There was little about the four winners that Quiroz and Ochoa saddled on Aug. 9 at Monmouth Park and Saratoga Race Course that suggested they stood much of a chance. Until then, each had raced only a few times and had, invariably, finished toward the back of the pack. An earlier race summary for one of the fillies, The Great Amira, didn’t mince words: “No speed.”So when the horses charged into the winner’s circle, one after the other, it quickly caused a stir in racing circles. A fifth horse, Scootaloo, was only defeated after breaking poorly and getting shuffled back to last.

Just prior to their races that day, all five of the horses had been stabled at the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland. This quickly gave the betting coup a name in the press: The Fair Hill Five.

“They’d have gone five for five had that horse come out of the gate quickly,” said Jon Stettin, a professional gambler who runs a racing channel called Past the Wire. “It’s hard to sell that as a coincidence. It’s hard to sell that as luck.”The betting was just as unusual. The Daily Double, a wager on two of the horses winning back-to-back races, paid only $25.60 for each $2 bet.

That was far smaller than the return generated by simply rolling a $2 win bet from one race to the next — a sign that an abnormally large wager had been placed on that specific combination. The gambling anomalies spread to England, too, where local media reported that punters had walked into more than 10 gambling shops and plunked down bets that paid out some £800,000.

Lazarus said she didn’t know exactly how much had been wagered in the UK. The Gambling Commission, the body regulating commercial gambling in Britain, declined to comment. Flutter Entertainment Plc and Entain Plc — owners of several high-street betting franchises in the UK — also declined comment. A third gambling firm, Evoke Plc, didn’t respond to requests for comment. ‘The Sting’The history of horse-racing, of course, is replete with capers, coups, heists, bet-rigging, horse-switching and doping, all designed to give one group of gamblers an edge over the rest.

Even the prestigious Breeders’ Cup fell victim when, in 2002, three former fraternity brothers exploited a computer-security flaw to create a can’t-lose, multi-race wager that minted millions. That investigation proceeded quickly, though, and all three were ultimately sentenced to prison after prosecutors compared the scheme to a real-life version of the 1973 classic “The Sting.”