Killer race scam
27 charged in deadly drug scheme to speed up horses
The feds said “neigh” Monday to pumping racehorses full of illegal steroids.
More than two dozen veterinarians, trainers and performance-enhancing drug distributors were busted in a massive racehorse doping scheme, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman announced.
Among the 27 people charged was Jason Servis, the trainer of Maximum Security, which crossed the finish line first at the Kentucky Derby last year only to be disqualified for blocking other horses.
Prosecutors said Servis gave performance-enhancing drugs to “virtually all of the racehorses under his control.” From 2018 to this past February, Servis entered horses in 1,082 races.
Another high-profile trainer, Jorge Navarro, “orchestrated a widespread scheme of covertly obtaining and administering various adulterated and misbranded PEDs [performance-enhancing drugs] to the racehorses under his control,” prosecutors said.
Navarro has been a controversial figure in the horse racing world for years. One of his horses tested positive for cocaine in 2017.
Navarro allegedly used customized PEDs to avoid detection by race regulators. Navarro trained and doped the winner of the 2019 Golden Shaheen race in Dubai, XY Jet, prosecutors said. The horse won $1.5 million.
Berman said that Navarro’s preferred PEDs included “blood building” drugs, which can lead to heart attacks. An investigation was ongoing into XY Jet’s death in January of a heart attack.
Servis and Navarro both face charges of drug adulteration and misbranding that carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Emails to their attorneys were not returned. Both were released on bond after appearing in Miami Federal Court.
“These defendants engaged in this conduct not for the love of the sport, and certainly not out of concern for the horses, but for money. And it was the racehorses that paid the price for the defendants’ greed. The care and respect due to the animals competing, as well as the integrity of racing, are matters of deep concern to the people of this district and to this office,” Berman said.
The scheme, detailed in four separate indictments, involved elaborate efforts to juice horses and avoid detection by race regulators. The doped horses ran on racetracks in New York, New Jersey, Kentucky, Florida, Ohio and the United Arab Emirates, prosecutors say.
Drugs allegedly used in the scheme included “blood builders” used to stimulate equine endurance, “pain shots” and “nerve blocks” used to deaden a horse’s nerves, and “red acid” used to reduce inflammation in joints.
Crooked trainers even allegedly used a “shockwave machine” that blocked pain.
“You know how many f—-ing horses [Navarro] fu— ing killed and broke down that I made disappear … you know how much trouble he could get in … if they found out … the six horses we killed?” horse trainer Nicholas Surrick said in a Feb. 1, 2019, intercepted phone call, according to the indictment.