Veterinarian Kristian Rhein sentenced to prison, fined for medication crimes

Kristian Rhein, an equine veterinarian based in New York who was indicted in March of 2020 with more than two dozen other people connected to horse racing, was sentenced on Wednesday to three years in prison and ordered to pay more than $700,000 in penalties and forfeit an additional $1 million in criminal proceeds, according to court documents.

Rhein, 49, received the maximum sentence for a single felony count of conspiracy to commit drug adulteration and misbranding. He received the sentence from Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in a hearing on Wednesday.

Rhein, like others in the case, initially entered a plea of not guilty, but he changed that plea to guilty in August. During the hearing in which he changed his plea, he admitted to administering the highly regulated drug clenbuterol without prescriptions and hiding the administrations on veterinary bills. Clenbuterol is a bronchial dilator that can have steroid-like properties when administered regularly.

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Rhein also said that he distributed the compounded product SGF-1000 to a number of trainers, including Jason Servis, who was also indicted in 2020.

SGF-1000 is a manufactured substance that was promoted as having a wide variety of performance-enhancing effects though those claims were highly dubious. On wiretaps, Rhein was recorded saying that he was selling “assloads” of the product to trainers, at a cost of “several hundred dollars for multiple shots,” according to prosecutors.

Servis has entered a not-guilty plea and his trial expected to begin early in the spring.

Rhein was ordered to begin his prison sentence on March 7, according to court documents. The court recommended that he serve the sentence at a federal prison in Otisville, New York, “or as close to New York as possible.”

Following his release from prison, Rhein will be under court-ordered supervision for a year, the documents said.