Standardbred trainer Oakes pleads guilty in drug case

Chris Oakes, a Standardbred trainer based in Pennsylvania who was indicted with 26 others last year in a wide-ranging investigation of horse racing, entered a guilty plea to one felony count of drug misbranding and adulteration with intent to defraud and mislead on Wednesday.

Oakes, 57, is the ninth person indicted in the case to change an initial not guilty plea to guilty. He was scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 17 at the end of a change-of-plea hearing conducted via teleconference Wednesday afternoon in front of Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The maximum sentence for the charge is three years in prison. Oakes has agreed to forfeit $62,821 as part of his plea.

Oakes told Vyskocil during the hearing that he bought “medications” from several other indicted individuals and administered them to the horses in his care from a period beginning in 2019 until March 2020, when he was arrested. He said he administered the medications to “try to get an advantage and hopefully things, would, do better.”

“Did you know that what you were doing was wrong and illegal?” Vyskocil asked.

“I knew it was wrong, your honor, yes,” he responded.

In a superseding indictment, prosecutors had alleged that Oakes supplied a “blocker” to the Thoroughbred trainer Jorge Navarro, who also has entered a guilty plea and will be sentenced in December. The indictment also alleged that Navarro instructed Oakes to administer the same type of drug to X Y Jet, a stakes-winning sprinter trained by Navarro, on Feb. 13, 2019. X Y Jet died in early January 2020, and Navarro attributed the death to a heart attack.

The indictment also said that Oakes’s barn was searched “covertly” on March 14, 2019, and that law-enforcement officials at that time found “multiple adulterated and misbranded [performance-enhancing drugs] . . . as well as pre-filled, unlabeled syringes.”