Servis, Navarro among 27 alleged by government to have administered illegal medications to horses
By Matt Hegarty
Federal prosecutors in New York on Monday unsealed indictments accusing 27 individuals, including the high-percentage trainers Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis, of administering illegal medications to racehorses. One of the racehorses named in the indictment as receiving an illegal medication is Maximum Security, the champion 3-year-old of 2019 and first under the line in last year’s Kentucky Derby.
The indictments, which were brought by the District Attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, accuse the individuals of participating in vast schemes to administer the substances and conceal the use of the compounds, which were obtained through internet pharmacies and veterinary practices, according to the indictments. The indictments specifically reference the administration of a substance similar to Epogen, a trade name for the blood-building drug erythropoietin, to harness horses trained by Nicholas Surick and other Standardbred trainers, as well as the use of several other manufactured substances in horses trained by Servis and Navarro.
“These customized drugs were designed to be undetectable to normal testing protocols,” said Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a press conference on Monday. He characterized the substances “as illegal and dangerous to horses.”
Both Navarro, 45, and Servis, 62, were arrested on Monday morning, law-enforcement officials said, as investigators from the FBI descended on their barns for exhaustive searches.
The arrests and release of the indictments shook the racing world to its foundation on Monday morning. Both Navarro and Servis have run up extraordinary win rates over their careers, and rumors about illegal drug use has dogged both trainers for years, in large part because both are remarkably skilled at turning claiming horses into stakes runners.
The accusations come at a time when the racing world is attempting to counter criticism that the sport is not doing enough to protect its athletes, based on a spate of deaths at Santa Anita last year. As such, the revelations in the indictment are likely to lead to renewed calls for stricter regulation of the sport.
The indictment states that Servis administered an “illegal” medication called SGF-1000 to Maximum Security in advance of the Pegasus Stakes on June 16 at Monmouth Park. According to the indictment, New Jersey regulators pulled an out-of-competition sample from the horse “on or about June 5” but did not detect the substance, which is available at some internet pharmacies and is currently marketed as a substance composed of amino acids “to promote rejuvenation and recovery from training.”
The indictment further states that Servis directed a veterinarian, who is not named, “to falsify records to make it appear as if the racehorse had received ‘Dex,’ rather than SGF-1000.” The shorthand is likely to refer to dexamethasone, a regulated corticosteroid that reduces inflammation.
Maximum Security on Feb. 29 won the inaugural Saudi Cup, a race with a purse of $20 million. Most famously, Maximum Security crossed the wire first in the 2019 Kentucky Derby but was disqualified from first for interference and placed 17th.
The indictment claims that the substance was obtained from Kristian Rhein, who has a veterinary practice at Belmont Park, and Alexander Chan. The indictment says that the two have “engaged in efforts to secretly distribute and administer adulterated and misbranded [performance-enhancing drugs] and to counsel racehorse trainers and/or owners on the use of such substances.”
In Navarro’s case, the indictment alleges the administration of illegal substances marketed as pain blockers to X Y Jet on several instances in 2019, including prior to the horse’s start in an allowance race on Feb. 13 at Gulfstream Park in Florida and again while in Dubai for the Golden Shaheen Stakes later that year. X Y Jet won both races. He died earlier this year of an apparent heart attack at the age of 8.
The indictment includes intercepted phone calls and texts from Navarro to various other individuals named in the indictment, including Servis. In one of the intercepted calls between Servis and Navarro, Servis is quoted as saying that he has been using SGF-1000 “on everything almost,” according to the indictment. Navarro then cuts Servis off and says “Jay, we’ll sit down and talk about this [expletive]. I don’t want to talk about this [expletive] on the phone.”
According to the indictment, both Servis and Navarro procured SGF-1000 from Medivet Equine in Kentucky, and it accuses the company’s co-founder Mike Kegley of conspiring with the trainers and veterinarians to mislabel shipments of the substance, which is not regulated by the FDA, across state lines.
SGF-1000 was analyzed by racing regulators in 2014 and found to contain no known performance-enhancing ingredients, according to Dr. Mary Scollay, the executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, which is funded by the racing industry. However, Scollay cautioned that the substance could have had its formula changed in the ensuing years. She also reiterated that many internet pharmacies make unsubstantiated claims routinely for substances that are not known to have any efficacy.
In the case of SGF-1000, the main ingredient was “I think, sheep collagen,” Scollay recollected. That substance and others like it that are ingredients in similar products would not trigger a positive in drug tests because the substances do not have a known pharmacological effect and are therefore left off drug screenings.
While Scollay said she was not commenting directly on the allegations in the indictment, she also said that regulation of substances that do not contain known performance-enhancing agents is still problematic.
“It’s clear that people are using it because they think it gives them an advantage, and if they used it with the goal of it being a performance enhancer, then that’s a problem, regardless of what the effects are,” Scollay said.
Dr. Scott Stanley, a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Kentucky’s Gluck Equine Research Center, performed the analysis of SGF-1000 while at the University of California-Davis. He said he could not comment on his characterization of the substance based on that analysis because he has already been contacted to provide testimony as part of the case.
Stanley did say that the formulation of the substance could have changed “multiple times” since the analysis was conducted six years ago.
“None of those things are regulated by the FDA,” Stanley said. “So because they are not approved products, there’s nothing stopping them from changing it frequently.”
The indictment also charges the New Jersey harness trainer Nicholas Surick with administering the blood-doping drug Epogen, and alleges that he concealed a horse that had been administered the drug from New Jersey regulators when they attempted to pull an out-of-competition sample from the horse in mid-2018. Surick, 31, is second in the nation in wins this year, as he was last year. Three other harness trainers were named in a separate indictment.
An indictment separate from both of those two indictments accuses the operators of the notorious internet pharmacy horseprerace.com of selling “millions of dollars’ worth of various misbranded and adulterated PEDs to customers across the United States and abroad.” The owners named in the indictment are Scott Robinson and Scott Mangini. As was the case with SGF-1000, racing regulators in the past have tested products offered for sale at the pharmacy and found that the claims for the products were deeply misleading.
The indictment states that the FBI and FDA conducted a “judicially authorized search of a PED manufacturing facility” operated by Robinson on Sept. 30, 2019, and that the agents conducting the search “seized misbranded and adulterated PEDs, chemicals, and electronic equipment.”
An additional indictment accuses Sarah Izhaki and her daughter Ashley Lebowitz of selling substances characterized as masking agents and an “adulterated and misbranded version of the drug erythropoietin” to undercover operatives posing as racehorse trainers and racehorse owners. The indictment quotes Izhaki as saying that one of the substances, referred to as “The Devil,” is “something very new, you put it in the horse, you can use coke: it will come back negative.”
At Palm Meadows in Boynton Beach, Fla., all was quiet by late morning in and around Navarro’s Barn 32 and Servis’s Barn 18 as stablehands caught up on their chores. That was in stark contrast to the wee hours of Monday, said several neighboring trainers and their assistants.
One assistant said she arrived for work at 4 a.m., and “I saw that already both barns were surrounded by five or six SUVs with the blue lights flashing and everything barricaded. It was pretty surreal.”
Training was not halted, however, for those not involved in the raids. One trainer said he was “riding in my golf cart on the path next to Navarro’s barn and asked if I could pass and train my horses, and they said go ahead.”
As of Monday afternoon, Servis had three horses entered for Friday’s card at Aqueduct in New York, but those horses are expected to be scratched. Owners of horses trained by Servis and another New York-based trainer named in the indictment, Mike Tannuzzo, are expected to have to make arrangements to move their horses to other trainers in the wake of the indictments, which will likely lead to summary suspensions from racing commissions. Servis’s assistant Henry Argueta is also named in one of the indictments.
NYRA, the operator of Aqueduct, indicated on Monday that all of those named in the indictment would be barred from the grounds regardless of any action taken by racing commission.
“There is absolutely no place in our sport for those who would administer illegal or banned substances to racehorse under their care,” said Pat McKenna, a spokesman for NYRA.
The Stronach Group, which owns Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Golden Gate Fields, Laurel and Pimlico, also said it would scratch any horses entered by those named in the indictment.
– additional reporting by David Grening, Marty McGee, Mike Welsch