Disgraced EPO cheat Malcolm Locke is a disqualified person.
Early last week he was put out of the harness racing game for almost 20 years for injecting his horses with synthetic EPO.
Locke is a known friend and associate of trainer/drivers Jack ‘Turbo’ Trainer and ‘Cool Hand’ Luke McCarthy.
Trainer Peter Russo is a current harness racing licensee.
He has recently returned to the game after serving a 5 year and 3 months disqualification for doping horses, drug cheating and giving false evidence to the NSW Stewards during the ‘Green Light Affair’, a corruption scandal involving criminal activity in which two Stewards were receiving bribes from trainers and drivers to allow their pacers to compete after being administered with unlawful performance enhancing drugs.
Russo is also closely associated with Jack ‘Turbo’ Trainer and ‘Cool Hand’ Luke McCarthy.
McCarthy provided Russo with stables to work from at his Cobbitty Equine Farm licensed training premises when he returned to the sport after his long period of disqualification.
Last month Harness Racing NSW, the employer of the NSW Stewards and the regulatory body in charge of the sport, celebrated Peter Russo’s return to Menangle in a story published on its website.
The story contained no reference to his racing rule breaches, his involvement in the Green Light Affair, his disqualification, or the reason for his extended period of absence from harness racing.
Late last week Malcolm Locke and Peter Russo were observed meeting by the side of the road in the Western Sydney suburb of Cambelltown, near Menangle Park.
Russo and Locke were observed clearly exchanging a wad of cash for a package.
The person who observed them is themselves involved in harness racing, and knows both Russo and Locke. They are certain that these two men were the people they observed exchanging the cash for the package.
The meeting and exchange occurred AFTER Malcolm Locke’s two decade disqualification for grievous breaches of the racing rules had been handed down.
That is, it occurred while he was disqualified.
This revelation raises a number of serious issues that must be fully and properly investigated by the HRNSW Integrity Unit, and raises questions that must be answered.
- Why was the licensed person Peter Russo meeting with the disqualified person Malcolm Locke?
- Why were the pair meeting off premises?
- Why was cash being passed between the pair.
- What was it for?
- What was in the package that was passed between Russo and Locke?
- Was it drugs?
- Will the Integrity Unit use its coercive powers to seize and examine the phones – note the plural, for there are more than one each – of Peter Russo and Malcolm Locke?
- Will it use its powers to seize and examine the phones – again note the plural – of Luke and Belinda McCarthy, Craig Cross, Jack Trainor and his close friend and associate Jason Grimson?
- Will HRNSW use its powers to request details of all phones registered in the names of these people from Australian telecommunications companies?
- Will the Integrity Unit avail itself of the expertise of other special investigators – for example, the NSW or Australian Federal Police – to assist them to crack the encrypted communication apps on these phones, and retrieve and decode deleted messages?
- Will what they find rock the sport to its very foundations?
These are extremely serious matters.
To preserve public confidence in the integrity of harness racing in NSW, they must be investigated as a matter of urgency.
Editor’s note – The author and publishers of this website make no allegation that licensees Trainor, Grimson, L. McCarthy, B. McCarthy or Cross were involved in, or have any knowledge of, the meeting between Russo and Locke, or of the exchange made between the pair. We do however believe that the questions posed in this story must be answered, and that the conduct of a full investigation of all matters raised is the only means by which this can be properly done.