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Max Prison Sentence for Vet Rhein

Kristian Rhein, a suspended veterinarian formerly based at Belmont Park who was caught on a wiretap bragging that he sold “assloads” of SGF-1000 to racehorse trainers, was sentenced to three years imprisonment Wednesday after pleading guilty to one felony charge within the federal government's sprawling prosecution of an allegedly years-long conspiracy to dope racehorses.

Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil imposed the maximum-allowable prison term under federal sentencing guidelines Jan. 5 in United States District Court (Southern District of New York).

According to the court order filed in conjunction with his sentencing, Rhein is to report to a to-be-determined prison

Mar. 7. Vyskocil recommended that he serve his term in the medium-security Otisville, New York, facility about 60 miles north of his Long Island residence.

As part of his plea agreement, Rhein also must forfeit to the U.S. the criminally gained proceeds that are directly traceable to his offense, which he agreed totaled $1,021,800. He had previously been ordered to pay at least $671,800 of that amount before or on his sentencing date.

Rhein also must pay $729,716 in restitution to an undisclosed list of victims, the names of whom were filed under seal and thus inaccessible to the general public.

When Rhein spoke in open court back in August to change his plea to “guilty” on one count of drug adulteration and misbranding, he directly implicated five others, most notably co-defendant Jason Servis, the now-barred trainer who was his regular client and allegedly administered purportedly performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) like SGF-1000 to practically every Thoroughbred under his control.

Rhein, 49, began his veterinary career in 2002 and soon specialized in racehorse treatment. He started a practice at Belmont Park in 2015. In 2017, he partnered to form a bloodstock services company, Empire Thoroughbreds.

Five of 27 defendants named in the original indictment have now been sentenced after pleading guilty to charges in the federal government's prosecution of an alleged “corrupt scheme” to manufacture, mislabel, rebrand, distribute, and administer PEDs to racehorses all across America and in international races. Trials for the remaining defendants, including Servis, are scheduled to commence in 2022, possibly as early as this month.

Scott Robinson, a former veterinarian, was the first to be sentenced in March 2021. In addition to his 18 months in prison, he had to forfeit $3.8 million in profits.

In June, Sarah Izhaki was sentenced to time already served plus three years of supervised release for selling misbranded versions of Epogen.

In September, Scott Mangini, a former pharmacist who had pled guilty to one felony count related to creating custom drugs for racehorses, got sentenced to 18 months in prison. As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors also demanded a forfeiture order from Mangini in the amount of $8.1 million.

In December, the barred trainer Jorge Navarro wept in court after Vyskocil handed down a maximum-allowable sentence of five years imprisonment. Navarro had pled guilty to one count of conspiring with others to administer non-FDA-approved, misbranded and adulterated drugs, including PEDs that Navarro believed would be untestable and undetectable.

Navarro has also been ordered to pay $25.8 million in restitution to the owners, trainers and jockeys he defeated from 2016 to when he was arrested in March 2020. That money–if Navarro ever has the resources to pay it–is to be deposited into an escrow fund that theoretically would get disbursed to racetracks to use in the form of compensatory purses.

Michael Kegley Jr., the former sales director for MediVet Equine, the Kentucky-based company that marketed and sold SGF-1000, will be the next guilty-pleading defendant to be sentenced by Vyskocil, on Jan. 6.

According to court document field by federal prosecutors, Rhein and Kegley worked in tandem to extoll “the performance-enhancing benefits of [SGF-1000] to racehorse trainers.” Like Rhein, Kegley's maximum possible sentence has been calculated to be three years in prison.

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At Long Last, We Know (Kind Of) What Was In Those Products Sold By The Indicted Pharmacist

For years, testing experts and regulators had looked at websites like RacehorseMeds and HorsePreRace and wondered about some of their most dramatically named products. Blood Building Explosion; White Lightning; Ice Explosion; Purple Pain – items with marketing as bright and attention-catching as the vibrant colors of the liquid inside the bottles had been a source of fascination for some time. Products that promised to “light one up” and that they “will not test” had no ingredients list, let alone a breakdown showing strengths of their active ingredients.

In her time at the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, Dr. Mary Scollay said she had acquired bottles of these and other products from the two sites that later became part of the focus of FBI investigators. Rigorous testing had yielded mostly inactive ingredients, sugars, or harmless amino acids. Still, she had always wondered whether the makers of the substances were including some new, sinister form of performance enhancer that simply evaded even top-shelf testing.

Now, we know more about the instructions given to staff mixing up products at the direction of former pharmacist Scott Mangini, who had business involvement with both websites at various times. (Mangini was one of more than two dozen people indicted in March 2020 on drug adulteration and misbranding charges stemming from an alleged series of illegal doping rings in Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing.)

One of the final items filed by prosecutors just before Mangini's sentencing on Sept. 10 included a cache of documents seized in FBI searches related to the investigation of RacehorseMeds and HorsePreRace. Included in the public filing was a series of formulas for some of the products sold by RacehorseMeds, as well as a series of invoices for orders of product ingredients sent from a supplier based in Wuhan, China. (There was also a set of billing records for RacehorseMeds, but that was filed under seal so is inaccessible to media or the public.)

We asked Scollay and former HFL Sport Science laboratory director Dr. Rick Sams to take a look at those records and help us understand what they mean about the products sold on these sites.

Harmless, or not?

Many of the substances listed on these (and other, similar websites) were clearly intended to appear as cheaper, knock-off versions of prescription drugs already in FDA-approved mass manufacture. Usually, those shared the same names as the prescription products (clenbuterol, omeprazole, flunixin, etc.) but were offered to lay people with no requirement they be licensed veterinarians. Those substances had their own problems, but it was at least clear what was supposed to be in them.

The mysterious substances with proprietary names had been more intriguing for regulators. Formulas revealed that many of them contained nothing different from more innocuously-named oral supplements – vitamins like pyridoxine (B6) and thiamine (B1), minerals like iron and copper salts, and amino acids like L-tryptophan. Many of these things can be found naturally in feed or hay, and Scollay says there's no evidence that feeding extra of many of those ingredients produces any appreciable effect in a horse's health, let alone performance. A product named Horse Power turns out to contain ATP, vitamins, amino acids, and di-isopropylamine dihydrochloride. It's true that they would not test, but it wouldn't be because they were magically hidden by masking agents; rather, they aren't usually tested for post-race because those substances are probably present in most horses being fed balanced diets.

Under the cloak of “proprietary formulas,” the websites managed to charge much more for those pedestrian ingredients than what they would have cost horsemen who knew what they were buying. Red Explosion Blood Builder, for example, is still listed for sale online for $35 for a 10-milliliter bottle, but according to its formulation it only contained .002 grams of B12, water, and a couple of stabilizers. The B12, according to shipping records, was purchased for $8 per gram. A mark-up is just good business of course, but injectable B12 is available from legitimate, FDA-approved mass manufacturers for less than $6 for a 100-milliliter bottle.

Besides being expensive, some of the products may not have actually been capable of being absorbed by horses' bodies, according to the formulas in the court filing. A product called TQ Explosion contained calcium levulinate, thiamine, tryptophan, and GABA.

“Calcium levulinate is a source of calcium,” said Sams. “Thiamine is a vitamin. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid. GABA is gamma aminobutyric acid and is prohibited. This product is made up in sterile water for injection instead of 0.9% sodium chloride so it may not be isotonic.”

The inclusion of salts is usually made in injectable formulas to ensure the solution is appropriately passed through the bloodstream. Blood cells are isotonic, meaning they naturally contain some salts. Pure water is naturally drawn in by salty solution, so exposure to pure water could make red blood cells swell and burst – that's why most IVs are run with saline and not sterile water. Leaving out any kind of salt probably didn't make the product risky to the horse, according to Sams, but it does mean it probably didn't get delivered throughout the body in any sort of useful way.

Sometimes, the proprietary formulas left our expert sources scratching their heads as to what the makers thought they were accomplishing. The frighteningly-named Allergy Explosion turns out to contain only formic acid.

“Formic acid is the substance that causes the stinging sensation in ant bites,” said Sams. “I don't think that injecting it in a horse is inhumane, but may lead the trainer to believe that it is doing something to excite the horse.”

Another product called Ozone contained nothing but food grade hydrogen peroxide in water. The “food grade” designation is unsettling to laboratory experts because it means the ingredient has not been created with sufficient purity to be safe for use in medication, let alone an injectable formula.

“Although hydrogen peroxide injections of people have been reported, it is not an approved therapy,” said Sams. “I wondered about the source of the hydrogen peroxide and its strength and purity as well as its stability in the injection vial and whether the peroxide interacted with the vial septum. All of these need to be addressed and answered before the product can be assumed to be safe for administration to horses. Mangini's company did not report conducting any of these studies.”

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A few of the proprietary products may have kicked up a few interesting results on Google had their ingredient lists been made available at the time of purchase, but were probably still bunk.

“As I recall, the Purple Pain was to be administered intravenously, so while there is evidence that ammonium sulfate will interrupt nerve conduction—when injected adjacent to a nerve—there's nothing to suggest that systemic administration would have any effect on pain,” said Scollay. “There is some speculative stuff about L-isoleucine and d-phenylalanine [both found in a formula called Adrenal Cortex] exerting analgesic effects, most of the credible sites said there was no legitimate evidence for that claim.”

Just because it seems like a lot of this stuff didn't work didn't mean it was a harmless waste of money for the trainers who may have been buying it. While it's not uncommon for legitimate pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies to import ingredients from China and elsewhere, there are varying standards to which those products can be held. Shipping receipts seized from Mangini showed that many of the ingredients he purchased were lacking a USP designation after their names. USP stands for United States Pharmacopeia, which is an organization that sets quality, purity, strength, and identity standards for raw ingredients. Imported ingredients with this designation have been verified to meet USP standards.

Several products were listed on shipping receipts as being less than 100% in purity – a no-no for reputable compounders to put in injectable products.

“The 98% pure claims make my skin crawl. That other 2% can be a killer—literally,” said Scollay.

Not only were many ingredients lacking this seal of approval, Scollay and Sams point out there were a few which contained dyes or colorings to make them appear an appealing color that would match the marketing name given to them. Blast Off Yellow contained yellow food coloring which, of course, isn't intended to be injected into the veins of an animal. It remains unknown what, if any, side effects this could have.

There also isn't a lot of detail provided in the instruction sheets on filtration, which would be a key step in making an injectable formula, though it's possible there were additional instructions on filtration provided in documentation not attached to prosecutors' exhibits. We do know that sanitary conditions in Mangini's facility were lacking – state health inspectors discovered his pharmacy had no working sink for people to wash their hands before compounding drugs and the areas where drugs were made were filthy. They also found that there were no quality assurance tests taking place to check for sterility or endotoxin contamination of products like this one.

Read more about Mangini's pharmacy in this 2016 report.

Then there were the instructions to make ITTP, which is supposed to be expensive to produce, even for much more technically advanced laboratories than Scott Mangini's. Scollay couldn't decide whether the instructions for making that product were more “hilarious or horrifying.”

“Take a bottle of water under the hood, open it,” read the single page of instructions. “Pour 100 ml into one beaker, 100 ml into another. Put 10 g of calcium ball things in one beaker, put 37.5 ittp in the other. Ph the ittp to 7.5. Pour them back into the bottle that has remained under the hood. Shake, it's great. No filter. Yay we are done.”

“I'll say 'c'—all of the above,” said Scollay when considering how she viewed those instructions. “In case there would be any question about the credibility of the laboratory, or how seriously it undertook its tasks—this certainly doesn't read like the business model of a good guy just trying to make good medicine more affordable. Unless the good guys were the writers at the National Lampoon.”

The heavy hitters

There were substances in the shipping receipts that gave Sams pause. There were some that were intended to be knockoffs of legitimate drugs, and others that were more sinister.

“The products containing dexamethasone, omeprazole, clenbuterol, flunixin, phenylbutazone, and toltrazuril are all generic knockoffs of prescription products,” Sams said. “The FDA requires generic products to be manufactured in FDA-approved facilities according to Good Manufacturing Practices standards. Mangini's operation could not have met these standards. Furthermore, the preparation of knockoff products in bulk as he was doing does not meet the definition of “compounding”.

“The remaining products contain clearly prohibited and performance-enhancing substances such as selective androgen receptor modulating drugs (SARMs) and others. I include injectable clenbuterol in this group because it is not an approved drug in the U.S. Although all of these substances are prohibited in horse racing, they are not DEA controlled substances so no DEA violations occurred.”

Given the manufacturing conditions in Mangini's lab, Sams said veterinarians and trainers could not have relied on the labeled concentrations to be accurate enough to comply with testing thresholds established by state commissions – because those thresholds were created based on the FDA approved versions of the drugs.

The SARMs that attracted the most attention from prosecutors went into a product called Ostarine MK-2866 Oral Solution. Its label promised “Ostarine MK-2866 is in the class of Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators or SARMs. SARMs offer the benefits of traditional anabolic adrogenic steroids such as testosterone, including increased muscle mass, fat loss, and bone density.”

The label also indicated the drug had a 24-hour half life, which would give a user information about how to evade testing.
“Ostarine is extensively metabolized so administration studies had to be performed in order to identify metabolites to facilitate its detection in blood and urine because orally administered ostarine is subject to substantial first-pass effects,” said Sams. “This is a drug of ongoing concern in racing and, in my opinion, is one of the more egregious violations in the Mangini document.”

Other invoices include “Cardanine,” which appears to be a misspelled version of cardarine and Antibolicum LGD4033, which is also a type of SARMs drug. They also reveal the shipment of ITPP, a prohibited substance believed to increase the oxygen-carrying ability of red blood cells. Di-isopropyl diacetate, or pangamic acid, is also among the orders and is also a prohibited substance.

Scollay thought it notable that several products – both knockoffs and proprietary formulas seemed to be reliant on the inclusion of a common thyroid drug.

“Interesting that the Light Explosion and Green Speed contain levothyroxine as their primary ingredient—just in case anyone didn't think it was being used to impact performance,” she said.

L-thyroxine is sold under various trade names, including Thyro-L and Levo-Powder, and was the subject of much concern several years ago, when California regulators discovered that trainer Bob Baffert was giving the substance to all his horses as a feed additive, whether or not they'd been diagnosed with thyroid problems. It remained a topic of concern due to its association with cobalt administration.

Read previous reporting about l-thyroxine here.

Mangini's response

To the extent Mangini responded to some of these issues in court, he maintained that the majority of his sales came from knockoffs of existing drugs like omeprazole (which he was warned by the FDA to stop mass manufacturing). Ostarine, he said, accounted for .5% of his overall sales. Blood Building Explosion, which contained cobalt, was .4% of sales, while Horse Power was .65% of sales.

At sentencing, prosecutors pointed out that the only reference they have to verify Mangini's account of his sales are the records he kept.

“This is not a company that has produced anything remotely like a wholesome breakdown of its finances,” remarked U.S. Attorney Andrew Adams.

Regardless of Mangini's assertion that he didn't actually sell many of the problematic products on offer, Adams pointed out that each bottle of Blood Building Explosion contained many doses, so even the sale of dozens of bottles really resulted in hundreds of doses going into horses pre-race.

For his part, Mangini and his attorney said the former pharmacist was mostly “hurt” by the suggestion that his products were intended to corrupt the industry he loved so much.

“It was wrong to have this internet site and run the pharmacy the way he ran it,” said Mangini's attorney, William Harrington. “He's pled guilty to that. But to suggest that what he's really been doing was to create dozens of products to abuse animals, I just don't support that.”

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Week in Review: Debate Over ‘PED’ Devolves Into Theater of the Absurd

When former pharmacist Scott Mangini was sentenced to 18 months in prison last Friday for his admitted role in the federal doping case, it provided another piece to the puzzle in terms of how other offenders might later get sentenced for their roles in the same alleged conspiracy.

Specifically, almost everyone in the Thoroughbred industry wants to know what will happen to the highest-profile defendants at the very end of the supply chain: The barred trainer Jorge Navarro, who has already pled guilty to one felony count in the conspiracy and faces a maximum prison term of five years; plus the similarly ruled-off trainer Jason Servis, who is still fighting his charges even though the feds allegedly have him recorded on wiretapped phone conversations repeatedly discussing his administration of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to horses.

Theoretically, the end-user defendants who put needles into horseflesh should be the ones who get penalized the harshest.

Here's the sentencing hierarchy so far: Mangini's 1 1/2 years behind bars matched the sentence handed down in March by the same judge to Scott Robinson, who pled guilty to charges related to marketing and selling the illicit pharmaceuticals that Mangini (and others) created.

Sarah Izhaki, considered a bit player for selling misbranded versions of Epogen on a much smaller scale, has already been sentenced to the time she had served plus three years of supervised release. But Izhaki had extenuating health circumstances that affected her relatively lenient penalty, which was described by the judge as a “one-off” sentence that other defendants should not expect to receive.

The sentencing stakes could be raised a little bit higher for the next two defendants on the court calendar. One is Michael Kegley Jr., an independent contractor for the Kentucky-based company MediVet Equine, who pled guilty to one count of drug adulteration and misbranding. Kristian Rhein, a suspended veterinarian formerly based at Belmont Park, pled guilty to a similar felony charge “for use in the covert doping of Thoroughbreds.”

But beyond the issue of jail time, the back-and-forth sparring between federal prosecutors and the defense at Mangini's

Sept. 10 sentencing hearing revealed another bizarre aspect of the alleged conspiracy: Even after pleading guilty back in April, Mangini still claimed–right up until the moments before his sentencing–that he had neither created nor sold PEDs.

United States District Judge J. Paul Oetken at one point termed those contentions “semantic issues” that were not really material to Mangini's sentencing. But as federal prosecutors put it when filing pre-sentencing documents that addressed this issue, Mangini's “continued refusal to contend with the basic facts of his offense speaks poorly of this defendant's character and to the continued danger posed by a man who refuses to acknowledge the core of his wrongdoing.”

Mangini's reasoning went something like this: Yes, he committed a felony by conspiring to distribute adulterated and misbranded drugs. But allegedly, the overwhelming portion of the online businesses that he was involved in simply sold knock-off versions of therapeutic products that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Mangini had argued that many of the buyers of the drugs he created were pet owners and veterinary clinics that just wanted cheaper versions of regulated pharmaceuticals, like omeprazole paste to reduce gastric acid, which he claimed was the primary focus of his e-commerce websites.

Mangini's attorney, Bill Harrington, argued on Friday that out of the 27,600+ product sales that the prosecution had presented as evidence, only a “tiny sliver” under 1% could possibly be considered PEDs, and even then only under very narrow circumstances.

Harrington said it was important for the court documentation in his client's case to reflect that Mangini did not “flood the supply side of the market” with PEDs as prosecutors have written in some press releases, because such allegedly false assertions will harm Mangini's reputation forever and “make the case sound more grave than it is.”

Harrington told the judge that “the U.S. Attorney's office is trying to say this is a crime where Mr. Mangini was corrupting the horse racing industry. And they don't have the evidence of that. The drugs don't support that.”

United States Attorney Andrew Adams begged to differ, and he confidently swatted aside any attempts to characterize Mangini's conduct as not involving the doping of racehorses.

“Mr. Mangini's position that none of these drugs were designed, marketed, intended to be PEDs is just ludicrous,” Adams said in court. “It's belied by the marketing materials. It's belied by the materials that were components of the drugs themselves. And it's belied by the methods by which these drugs were being sold, and the people to whom they were being marketed.”

The feds came armed with plenty of evidence. First, consider the names of the two chief websites Mangini was involved with: One was called racehorsemeds.com. The other was named horseprerace.com.

Next check out the names of some of the products peddled openly on those sites: Blood Building Explosion. Pre-Race Explosion. Growth Factor 5000. Horse Power! Equine Growth Hormone. Numb It Purple Pain Injection. Plug It Bleeder Injection. Blast Off Breather Injection.

One product called White Lightning was described as something that would “increase stamina and performance in racehorses, greyhounds, and camels.”

Another named Ice Explosion–described on the website as “one of our top selling products”–was advertised as a substance that “works to improve both sprint and endurance performance and reduce the perception of pain.”

Many of these products were stamped “WILL NOT TEST.” And some were instructed to be administered “4-6 hours prior to event,” according to the inventory list provided by the feds.

“The point of this operation was to assist people in getting an illegal edge in horse racing,” Adams said. “To find otherwise would ask the court to ignore essentially everything that was ever written, both in the [product] formulas and in the marketing materials for both websites that Mr. Mangini was a part of.”

The prosecutor continued: “The recommended dosages on [the websites], they're all aimed at horses. If you were to take what is on the website as the recommended dosage and applied it to a dog, you'd be seriously endangering the dog. The idea that this is therapeutic, [that] it could be for your house pet, is again, completely absurd. These were aimed at horses, aimed at racing horses, and aimed to do exactly what the marketing materials said they were aimed to do: To make your racehorse run faster.”

Mangini's contention, according to one pre-sentencing court filing, was that such products were allegedly “dietary supplements that contain different combinations of vitamins, amino acids, electrolytes, and minerals. Some dietary supplements say they 'will not test' because their ingredients are not prohibited by varied racing rules.”

With specific reference to the blood builders, Harrington held his ground in Mangini's defense.

“We dispute that any of those are PEDs,” Harrington said. “The only basis for saying that they're PEDs is the way they were advertised.”

So essentially, Mangini's attorney was saying that the websites were only engaging in hyperbole that is reflective of a society in which consumers aren't supposed to take claims of alleged performance enhancement at face value. Harrington made the analogy that human athletes who go to the mall to purchase gaudily advertised dietary supplements at a store like GNC know there's really nothing illicit in them.

“My argument is that even those non-injectable dietary supplements sold to people by GNC are advertised the same way,” Harrington said. “We all agree those are not PEDs. Yet they use the same language–'explode,' 'enhancement.'”

Adams didn't buy that line of reasoning.

“There's no dietary supplement that comes with a syringe,” Adams said, noting that many of Mangini's products did.

“The court should not accept the facile argument that dietary supplements at GNC…or a box of Wheaties, none of which are sold with a syringe included, is the same thing as what Mr. Mangini was doing,” Adams said.

Yet in the end, Oetken did end up making a concession to Mangini's semantics argument.

The judge ordered that Mangini's sentencing documentation be amended to strike references to PEDs, instead replacing that descriptor with the phrase, “animal drugs, including drugs that may enhance animals' performance or horses' performance.”

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Mangini Gets 18 Months in Prison

Even up until the final tense moments before a federal judge handed down Scott Mangini's sentence Friday for his role as a licensed pharmacist who created custom drugs for racehorses in an alleged international doping conspiracy, the defense and prosecution sparred over two main issues: 1) How many of those drugs were actually “performance-enhancing,” and 2) What should Mangini's sentencing be relative to that of Scott Robinson, who got 18 months in prison for marketing and selling those same pharmaceuticals?

Saying that he wanted to “send a message” that would be as much of a deterrent to others as a specific punishment for Mangini's pleading guilty to one felony count of conspiring to distribute adulterated and misbranded drugs, United States District Judge J. Paul Oetken sentenced the 56-year-old to the same term as Robinson-18 months in prison.

“At the end of the day, I find that resolving how much of it was performance-enhancing, or had one of the potential uses of enhancing the performances of animals, including horses, is not essential to my sentencing decision,” Oetken said Sept. 10 in U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York).

“The drugs were not tested or approved by the [Food and Drug Administration]. They were not properly labelled and distributed pursuant to prescriptions. And, in fact, [the business was] organized to avoid detection by the FDA and other regulators, including the use of false prescriptions and false return addresses,” Oetken said.

The maximum sentence that Mangini faced under federal guidelines was five years imprisonment, which is what prosecutors had recommended. Defense attorneys had lobbied for a period of home confinement.

As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors also demanded a forfeiture order from Mangini in the amount of $8,108,141.

In pre-sentencing court documents, Mangini's attorneys had argued that amount was “far more than he has earned in his lifetime,” and that “the forfeiture is plainly disproportionate for Mr. Mangini as it guarantees he will remain forever impoverished.”

Just prior to the 18-month sentence being handed down, Mangini was granted the opportunity to address the court. He began speaking slowly, in a level, pensive voice. But by the time he finished what he wanted to say, his diction had cracked under the strain of emotion.

“When I got into the business, I had the idea that I could help all kinds of horses and make it affordable for owners and trainers,” Mangini said. “I started selling cheaper versions of animal drugs and supplements. I really didn't know it was illegal. I had an obligation to follow the rules and I failed to do so. Now when I look back, I destroyed my life. And I have no one to blame but myself…

“I have lost my career as a pharmacist. And I can't work with horses again,” Mangini continued. “What is especially hard is how I [inaudible] my wife and my stepson. They are totally dependent upon me financially. I tried to protect them. Because of this crime, they will suffer. And it is my fault. This has haunted me since my arrest…

“Even though I may be absent from their daily lives, they know that I am financially ruined. My wife cries [inaudible] and I don't know what to say to her. I know I am to blame for doing this to them…

“My parents, in their 70s, they moved to [where Mangini lives in] Florida so that I could help them as they grow old, so I could be there for them. I have let them down as well,” Mangini said. “Since my arrest, I have tried to do better. I admitted that I violated the FDA rules. I met with the government every time that they wanted. I told them the truth. I admitted that I broke the law. Now I am filled with regret and remorse, and I'm sorry.”

On March 9, 2020, Mangini was arrested as part of the nationwide sweep that netted 27 others alleged to be involved all through the supply chain of an international doping ring. He was charged with two counts of participating in conspiracies related to his distribution in interstate commerce of adulterated and misbranded drugs with the intent to defraud and mislead.

The charges were based on Mangini supplying custom-made drugs to resellers (such as Robinson) and, later, to customers directly through several businesses and websites dedicated to the marketing and sale of performance-enhancing drugs to those in the horse racing industry.

The prosecution had alleged that Mangini often obscured his involvement by “hiding behind other people” and that he “sold a wide variety of drugs, including blood builders, used to increase red blood cell counts and/or oxygenation to stimulate a horse's race performance and recovery; analgesics, designed to block pain, which can mask physical injuries; and red acid, similarly used to reduce inflammation in joints and reduce pain.”

On April 23, 2021, weeks before he was to stand trial, Mangini pled guilty after negotiating a plea agreement that charged him with just a single, encompassing count of participating in a drug adulteration and misbranding conspiracy.

“In some cases the drugs were manufactured in facilities that were not as sanitary as they should have been, under circumstances where they created increased risk of harm to the animals that they were intended for,” Oetken said prior to the sentencing. “The defendant was a licensed pharmacist, and in that role he knew what he was doing, and he knew that he was acting to evade the law and regulatory authorities.”

Oetken also noted that before his arrest, authorities had already once restricted Mangini's pharmacist's license and had suspended the business license of the pharmaceuticals firm he was involved with.

“So he was aware several years ago that authorities were taking a closer look at the business, and for at least some period of time he went back to operating it,” Oetken said.

The judge then noted that Mangini has no prior criminal history, and that he had provided numerous character-reference letters that Oetken took into consideration.

But then Oetken said, “Balancing those positive considerations with the nature of the crime, this is a sufficiently serious crime that punishment is warranted. Among the purposes of sentencing that must be considered-and I think [what] is relevant here is promoting respect for the law and also deterrence, particularly general deterrence-those are important considerations given that the business scheme here was designed to evade the law.

“I also treated similarly situated defendants with comparable punishment as a necessary consideration,” Oetken continued. “Mr. Robinson was sentenced to 18 months. I found that significantly below [mandatory sentencing guidelines] was appropriate. I think the fact of imprisonment is more important than a lengthy imprisonment. I don't think it's likely that the defendant needs to be [incarcerated] because he's a danger or something like that. But I do think that sending a message that this form of crime will be taken seriously is important.”

Six of 28 defendants named in the original indictment have now pled guilty to charges in the federal government's prosecution of an alleged “corrupt scheme” to manufacture, mislabel, rebrand, distribute, and administer PEDs to racehorses all across America and in international races.

Robinson was the first to be sentenced in March 2021. In addition to his 18 months in prison, he had to forfeit $3.8 million in profits.

In June, Sarah Izhaki was sentenced to time already served plus three years of supervised release for selling misbranded versions of Epogen.

Michael Kegley, Jr., an independent contractor for the Kentucky-based company MediVet Equine, pled guilty July 23 to one count of drug adulteration and misbranding. He is to be sentenced Nov. 22.

Kristian Rhein, a suspended veterinarian formerly based at Belmont Park, on Aug. 3 pled guilty to one count of drug adulteration and misbranding for use in the covert doping of Thoroughbreds. As part of a plea bargain, Rhein has agreed forfeit $1.02 million in profits directly traceable to his offense, plus pay $729,716 in restitution. He is to be sentenced Dec. 2.

The barred trainer Jorge Navarro cut a deal with federal prosecutors Aug. 11 in which he pled guilty to one count of conspiring with others to administer non-FDA-approved, misbranded and adulterated drugs, including PEDs that Navarro believed would be untestable and undetectable. In exchange, a similar second count against him was dropped.

Navarro faces a maximum prison term of five years when he gets sentenced Dec. 17. Navarro's plea deal also stipulates that he pay $25.8 million to a list of victims that has not yet been made public.

A number of others still have their cases winding through the federal court system. Among them are the barred trainer Jason Servis, whom the feds allegedly recorded in wiretapped phone conversations discussing the doping of Maximum Security, the former $16,000 maiden-claimer who crossed the wire first in the 2019 GI Kentucky Derby but was disqualified for interference.

Oetken told Mangini to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons (specific location to be determined) Oct. 25.

His attorney, however, requested that the judge set a January surrender date, “so Mr. Mangini can have the holidays” with his family.

Oetken concurred, and reset Mangini's prison reporting date to Jan. 10, 2022.

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