Former harness racing trainer turned veterinary supply distributor Donato Poliseno is the latest of the defendants in the 2020 federal doping indictment to enter a plea of guilty, reports bloodhorse.com.
Poliseno entered a guilty plea to a charge of entering into interstate commerce misbranded and adulterated drugs.
According to bloodhorse.com, Poliseno “admitted to forfeiture of $2,264,849.13 and agreed that a money judgment shall be entered against him in that amount as part of his sentence and judgment of conviction.”
A sentencing date has not yet been revealed.
Poliseno is part of the lesser-reported federal case of Louis Grasso, Donato Poliseno, Thomas Guido III, Richard Banca, and Rene Allard. That case is before a different judge than the monster indictment that includes high-profile Thoroughbred trainers Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis.
Poliseno, who in the past has owned, trained or driven standardbreds, including in some of the sport's biggest events, was described in the 2020 indictment as the owner of a veterinary supply business in Delaware that purchased performance-enhancing drugs from Grasso and “recruited Grasso for the purpose of using Grasso's veterinary license” to obtain PEDs.
“Often, the co-conspirators submitted or directed others to submit prescriptions to pharmacies under the names and patient files of canine patients, in order to disguise the fact that the PEDs, including Epogen and other prescription blood builders, were in fact being obtained for illicit administration to racehorses,” the indictment states.
Poliseno, the prosecutors claim, was an animal drug dealer who created and distributed performance-enhancing substances for racehorses outside the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration. Attached to one of the prosecution's earlier motions in the case was a batch of transcripts from intercepted phone calls between Poliseno and co-defendant Louis Grasso.
Grasso, while trained as a veterinarian, was not (according to the government) actively practicing, but rather focused on drug distribution and compounding.
The disclosed transcripts are all from phone calls between Poliseno and Grasso, who appeared to be in contact regularly in the fall of 2019. Over a series of calls, Poliseno grew increasingly worried about the death of a man in the woods in Delaware, who appears to have been veterinarian Dr. Edward Conner.
(Read more here: Documents Show Veterinarian's Untimely Death Panicked Doping Defendants)
Read more at bloodhorse.com.
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