Rene Allard, a top harness trainer before his arrest and indictment in 2020, has changed his plea to “guilty” on one felony count of drug adulteration and misbranding conspiracy, reports the Thoroughbred Daily News. Allard was charged for his role in what prosecutors say was a scheme to “manufacture, distribute, and receive adulterated and misbranded performance enhancing-drugs (PEDs) and to secretly administer those PEDs to racehorses under scheme participants' control.”
Allard was named in indictments early in 2020 as well as a superseding indictment in December, 2020.
The allegations in the Dec. 3 indictment were nearly identical to those in the indictment filed against Louis Grasso, Donato Poliseno, Thomas Guido III, and Richard Banca in February and March of 2020. The timing of the indictments and arrests earlier in the year coincided with a larger case also from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York into alleged doping schemes utilized by Thoroughbred trainers Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis.
The earlier complaint against Allard includes bits of a conversation intercepted by federal agents between Ross Cohen (named in the original indictment alongside Navarro and Servis but absent from a later indictment in that case) and Grasso about Allard's barn. According to the transcript of the phone call from fall 2019, Cohen referred to Allard's operation as “the Allard death camp,” referring to two or three horses that died after receiving what Grasso said was an amino acid supplement from Weatherford, Texas, compounding pharmacy NexGen.
A search of an office at a Middletown, N.Y., training center where Allard kept horses revealed empty syringes, bottles of injectable products labeled “for research purposes only,” and bottles with labels the agent suspected did not match the content.
Due to be sentenced on Sept. 13, 2022, Allard faces as many as five years in prison. His plea deal with the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, also includes a judgement of $628,553.
Read more at the Thoroughbred Daily News.
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