In court filing, investigators cite probable cause for Servis wiretaps

Government investigators had probable cause to believe that communication devices used by a number of individuals indicted last year on charges related to the alleged administration of illegal substances to racehorses would reveal evidence of illegal activity, U.S. prosecutors argued in a filing on Thursday.

The filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was issued in response to motions filed last month seeking to suppress evidence collected during the wiretaps. Among the individuals seeking to suppress the evidence is Jason Servis, the trainer of the 2019 Horse of the Year Maximum Security.

In the filing, prosecutors pushed back on the assertion that affidavits issued in pursuit of the wiretap authorizations contained “materially misleading” statements and “deliberately or recklessly false statements,” contending that evidence collected prior to the authorizations had revealed a broad network of potential co-conspirators in the scheme, which led to the indictments of 27 individuals in March of last year.

The filing lays out the steps investigators pursued after first wiretapping the phone of the Standardbred trainer Nick Surick, who was recorded discussing his alleged attempts to administer illegal substances to several racehorses, including a drug purported to be a blood-doping agent. The filing also reveals that investigators surreptitiously searched Surick’s barn and took blood samples from several of his horses.

According to the filing, Surick discussed during the conversations that the substances were “untestable,” which led investigators to seek the additional wiretaps. The authorization to wiretap Servis’s phone was first obtained in the spring of 2019 and extended three times.

“By December 20, 2018, when a second extension of the Surick wiretap was sought, these themes of ‘untestability,’ secrecy surrounding doping operations, collaboration with other known dopers regarding means and methods, and the subjects’ clear intent to evade regulatory scrutiny in an effort to obtain money under false pretenses were each firmly established,” the filing states.

At this time, the government was also tapping the phone of Jorge Navarro, the Thoroughbred trainer who pleaded guilty to one federal crime of conspiracy to commit drug adulteration and misbranding three weeks ago. Navarro is facing up to five years in prison on the charge when he is sentenced on Dec. 17.

Those wiretaps indicated that “Servis was actively assisting Navarro to conceal Navarro’s doping practices by ‘tipping off’ Navarro to the presence of racetrack officials” and that Navarro “was willing to confide in Servis regarding his own doping practices and about his own corrupt relationship with an unnamed racetrack security official.”

This is the first time that a filing from the prosecution has mentioned a “racetrack security official.” Separately in the filing, Navarro says that the official “is a good friend of mine” on one wiretapped conversation.

Attorneys for Servis and other indicted individuals said in their motions challenging the bases for the wiretaps that an FBI agent misstated the efficacy of a substance, SGF-1000, when seeking the authorization for the wiretaps. SGF-1000 is among a class of substances marketed by compounding pharmacies that routinely employ dubious claims of potency, and the filing states that racing regulators tested the substance on multiple occasions from 2014 to 2019 and found that it contained nothing more than “ovine [sheep] collagen.”

The filing from the indicted individuals also stated that the government misled the court about state regulations regarding the use of clenbuterol, a bronchial dilator that can have steroid-like effects when administered regularly to horses. Clenbuterol is tightly regulated in racing, but the drug is approved by the FDA to treat chronic pulmonary disease.

The prosecution argued in its own filing that case law has established that proving probable cause is a “relatively low threshold,” and that any objections to omissions in the affidavits seeking wiretap authorizations were not valid.

“Allegations of omissions open officers to endless conjecture about investigative leads, fragments of information, or other matter that might, if included, have redounded to defendant’s benefit,” the filing states, citing precedent.

The filing also contains new snippets of wiretapped conversations between Servis and Khristian Rhein, a veterinarian who has also entered a guilty plea and will be sentenced late this year. Several of those conversations revolve around the use of clenbuterol. The filing suggests that both Servis and Navarro were using an “irregular” version of the drug.

The conversations also suggest that Rhein did not believe that SGF-1000 had any illegal drugs in it.

“It has no drug in it. It is literally just a purified protein from a sheep’s placenta,” Rhein said on one of the wiretapped discussions.

The government has already said that it intends to treat the use of SGF-1000 as a “performance-enhancing substance” even if it was, in their words, a “dud.”

According to the filing, Servis’s motion to suppress ignores “the ample evidence, reported in each wiretap application, reflecting that SGF-1000 was promoted as containing some purportedly potent drug capable of increasing a horse’s performance and that Servis’s abuse of clenbuterol (or more precisely, an ‘[ir]regular’ clenbuterol and unprescribed clenbuterol) was similarly intended as an illegal performance enhancer, regardless of whether a laboratory could successfully detect the use of those drugs on Servis’s racehorses or discern the components of SGF-1000.”