The sport of horse-racing still attracts more than its fair share of the flamboyant rich. But it's a safe bet that none of the runners in today's Epsom Derby represents as colourful a character as the owner of the first Irish-trained winner of the famous race.
Richard "Boss" Croker was a man who could show our current crop of corrupt politicians a thing or two. As head of Tammany Hall - the organisation that controlled the Democratic Party in New York - he amassed a vast fortune, taking at one time 27 different salaries from the city.
He was born in Clonakilty, Co Cork, in 1841. When he was seven, at the height of the Great Famine, his parents brought him to America. The young Croker became, successively, barman, blacksmith, machinist, professional boxer and, finally, boss of Tammany Hall.
Paving the streets
Once, when there was a multi-million collar contract to re-pave the streets, he decided to become a contractor. His tender - about half that of bona fide operators - was so low it had to be accepted. The specification called for "an even surface on the streets and pavements". Boss Croker achieved this by simply turning the existing slabs upside down.
In the early 1900s, the US government set up a commission headed by Theodore Roosevelt to enquire into allegations of corruption in Tammany Hall. Croker always denied that his departure from the States had anything to do with what the commission might find, but depart he did - abruptly - in 1903 and set up a horse-training establishment in Berkshire, England. In any case, he avoided the fate of his predecessor, the notorious "Boss" William Tweed, whose gigantic frauds were uncovered and who ended his days in a jail the building of which had, in its time, made him a wealthy man.
When the Jockey Club, headed by a Col Baird, refused Croker permission to train at Newmarket, he upped stumps and returned to the land of his birth, bringing with him the equivalent of about £25 million. He bought Glencairn Estate near Leopardstown, now the residence of the British Ambassador.
Derby sensation
In 1907, his horse Orby won the English Derby at Epsom by two lengths. The price was 100 to 6. In order to appreciate what a sensation this caused, here is what was written in The Sportsman just the year before: "The turf in Ireland has no spring in it, the climate is too depressing and no Irish trainer knows enough to even dare compete for the greatest race in the world."
To make the victory sweeter for Croker, the runner-up was owned by one Col E.W. Baird, the same Jockey Club steward who had barred him from training at Newmarket a few years before.
Nearly 50 years was to elapse before another Irish horse won the Epsom Derby - Joe McGrath's Arctic Prince in 1951.
Orby's win raised the spirits of the entire country. There were bonfires and cheering crowds everywhere. The horse was paraded through the streets of Dublin, where one old lady was heard to exclaim: "Thank God we have lived to see a Catholic horse win the Derby!" It would have been churlish, as well as irrelevant, to point out that the horse's owner was, in fact, a Protestant.
Boss Croker was made a Freeman of the City, an honour denied to the poet W.B. Yeats. Orby, incidentally, went on to win the Irish Derby the same year.
Cherokee princess
When Croker's wife died in 1914 he married a Cherokee Indian princess called Bewlah Benton Edmundson, about 60 years his junior. His family tried to have him committed as insane and his last years were embittered by litigation with them about property. He died in 1922, aged 81, and was buried near the lake at Glencairn. Among the pallbearers were Oliver St John Gogarty, Arthur Griffith and Alfie Byrne.
Years after, his remains were removed to a nearby graveyard because the new owners wanted "vacant possession". But the ghost of Boss Croker haunts the place still and there have been many reported sightings of the burly, frock-coated figure in the house and grounds.
Even without his famous victory at Epsom, Richard Croker, boss of Tammany Hall, would have deserved a footnote in history for his definition of an honest politician: "A man who, when he's bought, stays bought".