Dan Rodricks

I mentioned Halsey Minor in my column the other day. He’s the wealthy investor with eyes on taking ownership of Pimlico and Laurel. On Oct. 17, he made a public overture to the directors of of MI Developments, the parent of Magna Entertainment Corp., which owns the Maryland tracks. Minor is willing to take on more than $220 million in loans Magna owes MID. He is opposed to the legalization of slots here and thinks he knows how to generate new business and revenue for the tracks without them. He seems to have big ideas and a genuine vision for a revival of the tracks. And he has the biz cred. “I have a deep personal interest in the horse racing industry and a long history of creating profitable business ventures,” he told MID. “I founded CNET, one of the Internet’s first companies to achieve profitability and a NASDAQ 100 designation, and also developed two other CNET spin-off ventures which became successful, publicly-traded entities. CNET was sold to CBS on June 30, 2008. I was also the founding and largest investor in salesforce.com, one of the most successful technology companies over the past eight years.”

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But bloggers called the Bug Boys flushed Minor out a bit last week.

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Alan Heitner, one of the bloggers on that site, says: “Mr. Minor found us. We put up a post saying, ‘If not slots, what is your plan?’ And he actually gave us an answer. This is the beauty of the Internet and blogging. Two dopey bloggers can be involved in generating real news.”

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5. Slots at BWI?