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Horse-Doping Trial: Former Fishman Employee Cites Non-Testable Products

A New York jury heard a full day of testimony Jan. 21 in the federal horse doping trial of Dr. Seth Fishman and Lisa Giannelli.

The entire morning and most of the afternoon featured a second day of testimony from a woman who worked for Fishman at his Florida business Equestology for five years.

Courtney Adams, 34, testifying from Florida via video conference, told jurors that Fishman and Equestology were all about “testability.” That meant creating “product” that couldn't be detected in post-race testing by horse racing authorities, she said.

During her testimony in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, prosecutors showed an email in which a veterinarian who was a client of Equestology asked about one of the products, equine growth hormone, and whether it was testable.

“That was our biggest selling point, that he specialized in making product that wasn't testable,” Adams testified, referring to Fishman.

The witness, who had been an Equestology office manager and then a sales rep, said that Fishman told her there was a risk of regulators coming up with a test to detect the substance. If that happened, Fishman said he would have to create another product that would be undetectable, she said.

“That was the whole point of that product to be not testable,” Adams testified.

Fishman and Giannelli face conspiracy charges in a wide-ranging scheme to dope horses with performance-enhancing drugs to boost the treated horses' chances of winning races. Those charged include prominent trainer Jason Servis, who has maintained a not guilty plea and is awaiting trial. Others, such as trainer Jorge Navarro, have pled guilty and been sentenced.

Prosecutors say the accused were motivated by greed to win races and acted without regard to the welfare and safety of horses.

While on the stand, Adams admitted helping to mislabel products that Fishman created for clients around the country and in the United Arab Emirates. She said she also shipped vials of product without any labels.

Under questioning by prosecutor Andrew Adams, the witness said that she knew “in general terms” that some of those who purchased Fishman's drugs were horse trainers.

“He would discuss why they wanted them and why they were being used by them,” she testified.

“And did he say why they were being used by trainers?” the prosecutor asked.

“He said they were being used because they were untestable,” Adams replied.

The jury also heard the witness cite the names of some of the drugs Equestology sold.

Those products included Endurance, Bleeder, Hormone Therapy Pack, HP Bleeder Plus, and PSDS.

Adams testified that PSDS stood for Pain Shot Double Strength, describing it as a “double strength product for pain.”

She indicated she didn't know what the other substances were for.

Adams said she stopped working for Equestology in 2017.

“I was over it to be honest,” Adams testified. “I didn't want to do it anymore.”

As she left, Fishman asked her not to discuss their business with anyone, Adams noted.

“I said okay,” she said.

She said in 2018 investigators with the Food and Drug Administration approached her to ask about Fishman. She said she wasn't comfortable talking to them without a lawyer.

After Fishman, Giannelli, Servis, and about two dozen others connected to horse racing were indicted in March 2020 in the doping case, Adams said a friend sent her a link with a story about the arrests.

She said after reading it she contacted law enforcement.

“I read the story, and I realized they didn't have the whole story, and I felt obliged to give it to them,” Adams told the jury.

She said as a result of the information she provided, government lawyers offered her a non-prosecution agreement.

During cross-examination, Fishman's attorney Maurice Sercarz sought to suggest that Adams was motivated to contact law enforcement out of personal animosity against Fishman.

She admitted that before she left Equestology, Fishman had accused her of theft and using Equestology funds to purchase personal items.

She told Sercarz she was upset about those accusations “because they were false.”

During his cross-examination, Giannelli's attorney, Louis Fasulo, questioned Adams about whether she would work at a place that put horses in danger.

No was her response.

Adams also said she didn't think she was breaking the law when labeling products she said were mislabeled.

Toward the end of the day, Long Island retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Angela Jett took the stand to read from notes of an interview she conducted with Fishman in 2010.

Jett said she had interviewed Fishman as a potential government witness in a $190 million securities fraud case. That case involved a magnate named David Brooks and a body-armor company he owned on Long Island. Fishman worked for Brooks, an owner of Standardbred racehorses that competed in New York and elsewhere.

According to the notes, Fishman told Jett that he had supplied performance-enhancing drugs to Brooks, who administered them to horses before racing.

Brooks was found guilty in 2010 of charges connected to the fraud and died in prison while serving a 17-year prison sentence.

Under cross-examination by Sercarz, Jett acknowledged that her notes don't say whether Fishman learned of the doping at the time it occurred or “after the fact.”

He also pointed out that Jett's notes show that when Brooks asked Fishman to dope a horse, Fishman refused.

Fishman's admissions to Jett never led to charges.

The trial resumes Jan. 24.

The Thoroughbred industry's leading publications are working together to cover this key trial.

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Irwin: What Satisfaction Is There For Owners Who Employ Cheating Trainers?

In this Olympic year, when athletes and officials braved the scourge of COVID against difficult odds to conduct the Summer Games in Japan, I think a lot about what drives these individuals to achieve excellence and from where their satisfaction is derived.

I love and have loved the Olympics since childhood, reveling in the stories of such greats as Jesse Owens, Bob Mathias and Jim Thorpe. Their drive, their talent and their stories live within me and have done so since I was a little kid.

While Track and Field is my favorite sport, horse racing is a close second. I participated in T&F in high school and college, as did my father and brother. The gratification and excitement I felt from competing in athletics, however, pales in comparison to the thrills and satisfaction I have experienced in horse racing.

Watching a steed you are involved with roaring down the stretch on the lead generates a high that beats the short pants off of Athletics.

Satisfaction, however, is more difficult to achieve in horse racing compared with almost any other sporting enterprise, because so many people are involved in racing a horse and the animal itself cannot communicate in the traditional sense with its human caretakers.

On the other hand, when a horse does win a race, the satisfaction is greater because it is so difficult to achieve, especially at the highest levels of the game.

As I have been involved in racing, one way or another, for more than half a century and now am in my seventh decade, I have been struck by a change among owners that is not only profoundly disturbing but possibly a sign that the game may not survive as we have known it.

What I have noticed is not peculiar to horse racing, but to many other aspects of modern society as well, particularly it seems in Western Civilization.

Today we live in a society that cares less for rules and more for winning at all costs. We see this trend not only in sports, but in the financial and pharmaceutical communities where ethics have been stretched to the limits. And the crossover from members of these businesses into racing and their great impact on the track, in the sales ring and at the windows has been something only a blind person could have missed.

I question where the satisfaction comes from in winning races for these owners in this modern era. I question where the good vibes are derived.

I know exactly where it comes from for me. When I am involved in a winner, especially one that achieves a great victory as a result of developing a horse and following a game plan that was months in the making, the satisfaction comes from a job well done with a horse in which I believe.

When our homebred Animal Kingdom won the Kentucky Derby a decade ago, the satisfaction was even greater than that of a usual winner of the Run for the Roses, as his victory was not diminished by connections of the also-rans complaining about troubles in the race.

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To achieve complete satisfaction in winning an important race is very, very difficult. I will never stop thanking my lucky stars it happened in the race we all want to win the most. For me it was a miracle, a blessing and a moment of sheer satisfaction.

In today's environment I wonder where the satisfaction comes from for those owners who have chosen to be involved with trainers that cheat. It seems obvious to me that certain owners gravitate to certain trainers because they share the same “win at all costs” attitude. They share the same disdain for the rules. And they look at themselves as “sharps” in a world of “chumps.”

In this regard, I am a true chump. A chump is a poor bastard that follows the rules, even knowing that if you take an edge your chances of success will increase dramatically.

Today's “enlightened” owner, as a now deceased ex-trainer referred to trainers who cheat using modern methods that include Performance Enhancing Drugs, either knows that the trainer he chooses is a cheater, strongly suspects he is a cheater or is an outright enabler of the cheating trainer.

The satisfaction for these owners comes from a) having pulled off a stroke against horses trained and owned by chumps, b) cashing bets based on information that their steeds are juiced to the gills, c) knowing that the improved form of their horses will translate to big prices at public auction or d) the cherry on top of the cake, a lucrative stallion syndication deal.

The normal, garden-variety satisfaction that Little League parents and coaches feel when their team wins or their kid safely runs out a bunt is not what motivates today's modern owner, who relies on trainers that cheat to win.

I fear that the modern dilemma will lead to the demise of the sport for a few reasons. First, owners that do not cheat are fed up with losing to owners that do and could leave the sport. Secondly, until HISA is up and running, I see absolutely no prospect of positive change, because there is no major racetrack or regulatory agency in any locale that is actively investigating cheating on their grounds.

Racetracks want the horses that cheaters train so they can fill their races. Regulators are like politicians in that their only motivation in life is to keep their jobs.

With no racing press to speak of, save a couple of online outfits, there are precious few journalists remaining to keep the cheaters' feet to the fire.

If my fellow chumps continue to be robbed by owners that employ, sponsor or enable cheating trainers, we chumps may just come to the sad conclusion that not enough satisfaction remains to be had in order to continue to underwrite the sport of horse racing in North America.

And I write this as an owner who has been winning most of the year at a 25 percent clip in major races around the globe. I am not complaining as a loser, I am complaining as a winner.

Barry Irwin is the founder and CEO of Team Valor International

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Irish Government Committee To Conduct Hearings On Racehorse Doping Allegations

An Irish parliamentary committee will be conducting the first of three hearings on Thursday, July 8, looking into the allegations of racehorse doping made by leading trainer Jim Bolger, who said in a June interview with Paul Kimmage of the Irish Independent, “There will be a Lance Armstrong in Irish racing.”

Representatives of Horse Racing Ireland, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board and the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association are expected to testify during the hearings, which continued on July 13, with two separate sessions.

Bolger was invited to testify but declined on the advice of his lawyer. The trainer, whose recent successes include Poetic Flare's victory in the Group 1 St. James's Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot, also declined to state who in Irish racing he believes are doping their horses. “They can rest assured I know who they are,” Bolger told the Independent. “Like, if I had responsibility for rooting out cheats, I've have them rooted out in six months.”

In the wake of Bolger's inflammatory interview, Denis Egan, the longtime chief executive of the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board – the organization that felt the brunt of the trainer's criticism – announced that he his leaving his post in September at the age of 60. Egan has said his decision to take an early retirement has nothing to do with Bolger's comments. He has been with the regulatory board (previously known as the Irish Turf Club) for 26 years, 20 of them as its chief executive.

Bolger's concerns with doping trace back to the 2012 seizure by Irish customs officers of Nitrotain, a steroid manufactured in Australia. The packages were addressed to veterinarian John Hughes, who was found to have imported more than 500 pounds of Nitrotain over 10 years. Hughes received a five-year ban from racing. Bolger contends the regulatory board didn't fully investigate where the Nitrotain was going or follow up on a list of trainers they discovered when they searched Hughes' residence.

Jackie Cahill, who chairs the Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, stated: “The Committee has agreed to a series of meetings to discuss the concerning commentary around the integrity of the horseracing industry in Ireland and possible drug use in the sport. We have taken the opportunity to invite the relevant individuals, bodies and organizations in to discuss the recent, very concerning, commentary on the matter and giving them the time and place to debate the issues and highlight their own concerns.

“We are global leaders in the horse racing industry, and any question around its integrity or the possibility of drug use could be extremely damaging,” Cahill added. “Breeders, jockeys, owners, and trainers are dependent on the viability of the sport in Ireland and the good name of the industry around the world. The Committee hopes that these meetings will bring clarity to the situation.”

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Waiting For New Defendants In Federal Case? You Could Be Waiting A While

Not for the first time, prosecutors hinted Tuesday that there could be additional indictments or additional co-defendants coming in the bombshell federal drug misbranding case from earlier this year — but again, they declined to commit to a timeframe about when any additional action could be coming.

The case focuses on an alleged horse doping ring that prosecutors say included trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro, among others. A superseding indictment released earlier this month revised charges slightly, adding a wire/mail fraud charge against one subgroup of defendants and leaving out several defendants who had been named in the original documents unsealed in March. It remains unclear whether the defendants not named in the new indictment plan to enter guilty pleas. All defendants, either through Tuesday's telephonic conference or through their attorneys, entered pleas of not guilty to the charges in the new indictment.

Read more about the superseding indictment here.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. Adams had emphasized in previous conferences that the government's investigation is ongoing and he does not know what new information could still come to light. Defense counsel for Jason Servis and Dr. Seth Fishman expressed frustration with the open-ended nature of Adams' summary of the case, asking U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil to set deadlines for the government to produce any further superseding indictments. Vyskocil declined to do so. Adams emphasized that his office did not anticipate any new indictments or new defendants would serve to slow down the existing case.

Adams also took a moment to highlight one distinction he said the government made in its superseding indictment about the types of substances described in the charges. Adams pointed out that it will not be up to the government to show whether or not the drugs named were effective at manipulating a race outcome.

“A drug that is promoted and intended to be a performance enhancer, but is a dud, is nevertheless a misbranded/adulterated drug for the purposes of this indictment and the intent remains the same for the creation and administration of those drugs,” said Adams.

Much of the discussion Tuesday focused on the difficulty of the enormous volume of evidence defense counsel must sort through as they prepare their various pre-trial motions. Adams said his office is making every effort to turn over as much information as possible well ahead of the timeframes normally required of prosecutors in this type of case, specifically so there will be as few large caches of data to go through as possible later on. Adams said his office is still in possession of nine electronic devices seized at the time of the defendants' arrest in March which experts are struggling to unlock and access and he does not know when or whether that information will become available to him.

There are a number of requirements in place for the government to provide evidence in its possession to the defense ahead of trial. That evidence is going through an expert whose job it is to identify any disclosure issues with the evidence, help to organize it, and provide it to the many defense attorneys involved — which avoids technical issues with the evidence, but also slows the process.

By all accounts, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, transcripts, records, receipts, emails, and other evidence already disclosed in this case — terabytes of digital information. Fishman's attorney also revealed there were a number of drug test results and communications with the Hong Kong Jockey Club's drug testing lab as part of that evidence, though he did not expand further on what those results were.

Partially as a result of that volume of evidence, the timeline for the case was laid out only in part by Vyskocil Tuesday. Attorneys were asked to provide their first round of motions by Feb. 5; that first round is likely to include motions from defense attorneys to dismiss all or parts of the superseding indictment. The first round of motions is likely to be considered by the court at some point in April, with May as a possible target for a second round of attorney motions. Those dates could be revised further, depending on how much new evidence surfaces in the meantime.

Last week, a status conference for drug maker Scott Mangini set tentative deadlines for attorney motions and a trial date of May 10. Mangini's case also had a superseding indictment filed which did not substantially change the charges against him but which removed previous co-defendant Scott Robinson from his case. Robinson entered a plea in the case earlier this fall.

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