Dan Wolken

USA TODAY Sports

LOUISVILLE — To hear Anthony Bonomo tell it, he and his racing partner “Vinnie” are just two boys from Brooklyn living out their sports fantasy. As underage kids, they’d sneak into Aqueduct with $6 between them and persuade someone to place their bets.

Now, despite being relative newcomers to horse ownership, they have one of the leading contenders for the Kentucky Derby in Always Dreaming, who put in arguably the most impressive performance in any prep race with his 5-length romp in the Florida Derby.

“I don’t even think you can even imagine it, even now,” Bonomo said. “I pinched myself when we got here, because we're just walking around hugging each other all day. We can’t believe where we are.”

Of course, the partnership that owns Always Dreaming — known as “Brooklyn Boyz Stables” — isn't exactly a group of small-timers who made good. Nor is it entirely the kind of fairy tale Bonomo tried to portray on the Tuesday outside of trainer Todd Pletcher’s barn, where he was making small talk with Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin.

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Bonomo, a New York political mega-donor who ran one of the state’s largest medical malpractice insurance companies, was tied to the corruption scandal that brought down former state Senate majority leader Dean Skelos last year. (Bonomo testified that he gave Skelos’ son a no-show job out of fear of political retribution. Skelos is appealing a five-year prison sentence.) And when Bonomo talks about his partner “Vinnie,” he’s referring to Vincent Viola, his life-long friend who owns the Florida Panthers hockey team and was nominated by President Trump to be secretary of the Army before pulling his name from consideration in February.

These are connected, powerful and sometimes controversial men who have spent their careers making high-stakes business deals. But on the backstretch of Churchill Downs this week, they are simply wide-eyed owners going through the Derby pressure cooker for the first time and celebrating the good fortune that has brought them here.

“It’s magical,” said Bonomo, who stepped down as chairman of the New York Racing Association in 2015 when the Skelos story began to bubble, just two months after Gov. Andrew Cuomo named him to the position. “You stand around Aqueduct at 14 watching racing and saying, 'Oh, yeah, the Kentucky Derby.' And now all the sudden you’re standing here with a horse in the race, and a decent horse who has a decent shot, I don’t know. Even when you’re dreaming, you can’t dream it.”

He certainly didn’t 12 years ago when his wife, Mary Ellen, dragged him to Saratoga, a place he saw as “the end of the world” from Brooklyn. But by the second race on that day’s race card, he was hooked. By the end of the day, he had applied for an owner’s license. By the next week, he and his wife owned two Thoroughbreds.

The stable grew from there to as many as 60 horses at one point, though none achieved significant success in graded stakes until 2015 when Greenpointcrusader won the Champagne Stakes, one of the biggest races for 2-year-olds. That got Bonomo thinking Kentucky Derby until an injury knocked Greenpointcrusader off the trail the following spring.

More recently, Bonomo and Viola agreed to go into partnership on some horses and bought Always Dreaming for $350,000 as a yearling on the recommendation of bloodstock agents Chris Brothers, Steve Young and Jim Crupi, who had all put the son of 2012 Kentucky Derby runner-up Bodemeister on their watch list for the auction at Keeneland. Though the price went above Bonomo’s budget, his son, Anthony Jr., kept bidding anyway.

“On the day we bought him, I was really upset,” Bonomo said. “Now I can’t kiss him enough.”

On pure talent, Always Dreaming might be the best horse in the field. But he also has question marks with just five career starts. The Florida Derby, as impressive as it looked, was his first stakes race.

Always Dreaming has also been exceedingly eager on the track since arriving at Churchill Downs, which can cut one of two ways. While it shows he’s sharp and feeling good, Pletcher doesn’t want the horse to leave his race on the track in the mornings.

Pletcher has made some adjustments, sending Always Dreaming out for his morning gallops at the break of dawn before the large crowds arrive and changed exercise riders in hopes of controlling his energy better.

“For whatever reason, he's been more aggressive since we’ve been here at Churchill,” Pletcher said. “The gallop on Saturday was good and (Sunday’s) was too strong, so we had to make a change. Some horses in this field don’t want to train, some want to train too much, so it’s part of your job to make adjustments and make sure everything’s going as smoothly as possible.”

Bonomo said he isn’t concerned about Always Dreaming’s disposition. He said he lives by a simple phrase, “In Todd We Trust,” and tries to let all his friends back in Brooklyn pretend to call the shots.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “We have the whole neighborhood on our back. Everybody calls and tells you what we should be doing, what the horse should be doing, how he should eat. But that’s our neighborhood. It’s nothing bad. Everybody wants us to win. I hope we do.”



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