Navarro to change 'not guilty' plea in federal doping case
Jorge Navarro, one of two prominent Thoroughbred trainers indicted with 25 other individuals in March 2020 on charges related to administering illegal substances to racehorses, will change his plea of “not guilty” in the case in a hearing scheduled for Aug. 11, according to a court document filed late Friday.
Navarro, a leading trainer on the Eastern seaboard for the past decade until he was banned when the indictments were unsealed last year, is one of a handful of defendants in the case who have changed their pleas over the past several weeks. Navarro has been alleged to have procured and administered illegal substances to racehorses from 2016 to 2020, based largely on intercepted phone calls and text messages arising out of a wide-ranging investigation of manufacturers, distributors, and administrators of compounded substances of dubious provenance.
Navarro had previously entered a not guilty plea in the case.
Specifically, Navarro was accused in the indictment of procuring substances marketed as pain blockers and performance enhancers from several sources, including Medivet Equine in Kentucky. Two of the people involved in Medivet have entered or plan to enter guilty pleas in the case, according to court records.
The indictment of Navarro and another top trainer, Jason Servis, focused heavily on the alleged administration of a substance marketed under the name SGF-1000, although Navarro also was accused of buying and administering a drug described by its sellers as an “EPO mimetic,” a reference to an analogue of the notorious blood-doping drug erythropoietin, which is difficult to manufacture.
Navarro was allegedly recorded in an intercepted phone call speaking with Servis about SGF-1000 in which Servis said that he administered the substance to “almost everything” in his barn, with Navarro answering that he administered the substance to approximately 12 horses in his barn. Navarro then closed the conversation by saying, “Jay, we’ll sit down and talk about this [expletive]. I don’t want to talk about this [expletive] on the phone.”
Navarro allegedly said in recorded conversations that he specifically administered the substance to the horse X Y Jet, a stakes-winning horse that later died while in Navarro’s care. The cause of death, Navarro told reporters, was cardiac arrest.
Prosecutors in the case have told U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil that they intend to treat any substance thought to be a “performance-enhancing” substance by any of the indicted individuals as an illegal drug regardless of the efficacy of the substance.
“A drug that is promoted and intended to be a performance-enhancing drug but is a dud is nevertheless a misbranded and adulterated drug for the purposes of the indictment,” Andrew Adams, the lead prosecutor in the case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, told Vyskocil late in 2020.
All of the indicted individuals have been banned from working with horses as a result of the indictment, and it is unlikely, given the gravity of the charges, that any would be licensed by a racing commission in the near future.
Trials in the case are expected to begin later this year. The case has been complicated by a voluminous amount of discovery based on the seizure of a large number of computer devices and cell phones from the indicted individuals.