Jason Servis

The government has recommended a three-year prison sentence for Kristian Rhein, the veterinarian embroiled in the MediVet Equine practice that marketed and sold "an adulterated and misbranded performance-enhancing drug," they revealed in papers filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court. Rhein was one of 27 people charged in a widespread doping scheme of Thoroughbred racehorses on Mar. 9, 2020 that included trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro. United States Attorney Damian Williams, in papers filed with Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil in her court in the Southern District of New York, wrote,...

This past summer, Michael Kegley Jr. and Kristian Rhein both pled guilty to felony drug adulteration and misbranding charges in the alleged international Thoroughbred doping conspiracy case. That means they'll avoid trials prior to their sentencings. But it doesn't mean that the voluminous cache of evidence that prosecutors would have used against them won't ever see the light of day. In fact, just last week, the feds disclosed intriguing documentation about SGF-1000, the adulterated and misbranded purportedly performance-enhancing drug (PED) that was an elixir of choice for now-barred trainer Jorge...

We heard from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), its CEO Travis Tygart and the Director of Equine Science Dr. Tessa Muir last week when USADA released its anti-doping guidelines, rules and protocols. Once again, we saw that these are no-nonsense, dedicated people with a track record of cleaning up other sports. The release of the guidelines was an important step toward what will be a welcome change for racing--competent, dedicated policing from an outside entity replacing the current system, which just doesn't work. (Quotes from this story were taken...

In the wake of nine defendants in the alleged nationwide horse-doping conspiracy case having changed their pleas to "guilty" in recent months, a Nov. 4 status hearing reset the trial groupings for the remaining defendants, with those trials all now anticipated to commence in the first half of 2022. Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil of United States District Court (Southern District of New York) also ordered that all remaining motions to suppress evidence that are pending on the docket are to be considered denied, noting that her written opinion on that...

Marcos Zulueta, the now-barred Thoroughbred trainer facing two felony charges in the alleged nationwide horse-doping conspiracy case, appears on the verge of joining the growing list of defendants flipping their initial "not guilty" pleas to "guilty." On Thursday, Zulueta, formerly based in the mid-Atlantic region, was granted an Oct. 15 change-of-plea hearing in United States District Court (Southern District of New York). If Zulueta does indeed end up pleading guilty, his flip will be the eighth in the wide-ranging case that initially included 28 defendants listed in the original indictment...

The doping conspiracy case that has been winding through the federal court system since March 2020 netted its seventh guilty plea Wednesday when a 63-year-old Massachusetts man with a doctoral degree in cancer-related toxicology admitted to a judge that he mixed formulas that sometimes included steroids and shipped them in unlabeled vials to a Florida veterinarian who allegedly sold them to racetrack clients. By pleading guilty Oct.6 to one count of drug adulteration and the misbranding of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), Jordan Fishman now faces three years in prison and a...

Revolutionary handicapper and racing writer Steve Crist has been out of a public eye after retiring five years ago, but still has as much passion and enthusiasm for racing as he's ever had, and Wednesday morning, he joined the TDN Writers' Room presented by Keeneland for an expansive discussion on a variety of industry issues. Calling in via Zoom as the Green Group Guest of the Week, Crist discussed his increasing involvement in the game from an ownership standpoint, racing's progress on detecting and punishing cheaters, the Bob Baffert saga...

Back in May, United States District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil was emphatic about wanting to begin trials in the fourth quarter of 2021 for the first of four groupings of 14 defendants in the alleged federal doping conspiracy case. In late August, she even set a Nov. 15 start date for the trial of Seth Fishman, Lisa Giannelli and Jordan Fishman. But during a Sept. 15 status conference, that schedule got reset to January 2022, meaning that for a number of defendants in the latter groupings, their trials could...

When former pharmacist Scott Mangini was sentenced to 18 months in prison last Friday for his admitted role in the federal doping case, it provided another piece to the puzzle in terms of how other offenders might later get sentenced for their roles in the same alleged conspiracy. Specifically, almost everyone in the Thoroughbred industry wants to know what will happen to the highest-profile defendants at the very end of the supply chain: The barred trainer Jorge Navarro, who has already pled guilty to one felony count in the conspiracy...

Even up until the final tense moments before a federal judge handed down Scott Mangini's sentence Friday for his role as a licensed pharmacist who created custom drugs for racehorses in an alleged international doping conspiracy, the defense and prosecution sparred over two main issues: 1) How many of those drugs were actually "performance-enhancing," and 2) What should Mangini's sentencing be relative to that of Scott Robinson, who got 18 months in prison for marketing and selling those same pharmaceuticals? Saying that he wanted to "send a message" that would...

On his drive from Saratoga to Kentucky Downs Tuesday, Steve Asmussen stopped in every state he drove through and bought lottery tickets. Shocking that he didn't win. Coming off one of the greatest week-and-a-half stretches in racing history, during which he won five Grade I races in Saratoga over nine days, Asmussen was this week's Green Group Guest of the Week on the TDN Writer's Room, presented by Keeneland. If that wasn't enough, two of his wins, Gunite in the GI Hopeful S. and Echo Zulu in the GI Spinaway...

Newly disclosed transcripts of intercepted phone conversations involving alleged doping co-conspirators Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro reveal both an initial brazenness against getting caught and an utter ignorance about some of the substances the two now-barred trainers were purportedly injecting into their racehorses. According to a previously unreleased collection wiretapped calls made public last week by federal prosecutors, Servis and Navarro didn't always know the names of some the illegal pharmaceuticals they purportedly administered to their horses. Nor were they always clear on exactly what those substances were or what...