LEGENDARY GAMBLER BARNEY Curley has spoken for the first time about the four-horse betting coup that cost bookmakers an estimated £2 million.

Curley had connections to the heavily-backed runners who won last January on a big payday for racing punters.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Curley said at John Mullholland’s Cheltenham preview night in Galway.

It’s over now. We’ve done it. It was very satisfying and let’s hope that it does a bit of good.

Curley, who still owns a few young horses, said he received two letters that he described as “a great privilege.”

“One was from Ian Balding, who probably was one of the greatest sportsmen in England in this last 30 or 40 years. That’d be Clare and Andrew Balding’s father. It was a great privilege to get a letter from him because he knows all about the horses.

The other was a letter that arrived through the post one day. There was a photograph of me on the front of the paper and these people had cut off the photograph and stuck it on the front of this letter and it read Barney Curley, Genius, Newmarket, England.

“I was going to throw it in the bin because all those things are rubbish, but I looked and there was a first class stamp on it.

“It was probably from one of the greatest training organisations of the last 40 or 50 years. One side was signed, Martin Pipe, and the other was signed David Pipe, on a postcard. So I’ll die happy enough with that.”

– Additional reporting from GallopsLive.

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