When a 50-1 outsider named Giacomo won the 2005 Kentucky Derby, it was not the first time that the horse’s owner, the American record company executive Jerry Moss, had defied the odds.
Moss, who has died aged 88, began his working life as a teenager paid $75 a week for getting doo-wop records played on New York radio stations. Three decades later he and his business partner, the trumpeter Herb Alpert, would sell the record label and publishing company they had founded for a reported $900m.
