Richard Papiese dies; owned Work All Week, The Pizza Man
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Richard Papiese, principal in Midwest Thoroughbreds, North America’s leading owner by wins from 2010 through 2015, died on Dec. 4 in northwest Indiana.
Papiese, 65, for several years had been afflicted with multiple systems atrophy, MSA, a rare and fatal degenerative neurologic condition.
Papiese and his wife, Karen, founded, owned, and ran Midwest Custom Case, a successful store-fixture manufacturing company based in University Park, Il.
Papiese, in a 2014 interview with Daily Racing Form, said that as a child in Chicago he attended races with his mother, experiences that brought Papiese into horse ownership in 2006. The operation first campaigned runners with Richard and Karen Papiese listed as owners before the Papieses adopted the Midwest Thoroughbreds moniker in 2008.
Midwest went full steam into the claiming game in the late aughts and by 2010 was turning out massive annual win totals, topping out at 542, a North American season’s record, in 2012. Midwest at its peak employed several trainers, including Jamie Ness, Tom Amoss, and, in early days, Brad Cox, before downsizing in 2014 and putting most of their stock under the care of trainer Roger Brueggemann, a former auto mechanic who’d started his training career at Fairmount Park outside St. Louis before moving to Chicago.
The Papieses also built a significant broodmare band and owned a farm with a training track in Florida. Midwest’s two best-known horses, both trained by the late Brueggemann, were homebreds: Work All Week won the 2014 Breeders’ Cup Sprint and was champion sprinter that season, while The Pizza Man captured the 2015 Arlington Million.
Midwest Thoroughbreds had their last starters in 2021, when they sent out four winners, the frenetic seasons of claiming left far behind. The Papieses, too, donated to racing charities, going so far as to build a barn at a Texas re-homing facility. Papiese’s obituary posted on the website of the Elmwood Funeral Home and Crematory asks, in lieu of flowers, for donations to Old Friends Thoroughbred Retirement Home in Kentucky and the New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program in Ocala, Fl.
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