Robert Gearty of the Blood-Horse first broke the Feb. 24 story from United States District Court (Southern District of New York).

Gearty reported that the former trainer's trial will take place in the first quarter of 2023 along with that of veterinarian Alexander Chan.

Previously, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil had been aiming for a mid-2022 trial for Servis, the most prominent name among the remaining defendants asserting innocence.

“Vyskocil blamed the postponement on the courthouse's coronavirus restrictions that have made it more difficult to schedule trials in a timely manner,” Gearty wrote. “When scheduling criminal trials preference goes to defendants awaiting trial behind bars. Servis and Chan are free on bond.”

Servis amassed gaudily high win percentages during the 2010s decade prior to getting arrested on three felony drug misbranding and conspiracy to commit fraud charges in March 2020.

According to a trove of wiretaps the government has produced as evidence against him (and other defendants), Servis allegedly doped almost all the horses under his control in early 2019, including MGISW Maximum Security, who crossed the wire first in the GI Kentucky Derby but was DQ'd for in-race interference.

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The opinion and order filed Dec. 8 by Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil in United States District Court (Southern District of New York) follows a verbal ruling she made Nov. 4 during a status conference that denied all of the related motions made during the late summer by Jason Servis, Seth Fishman, Lisa Giannelli, Erica Garcia, Michael Tannuzzo, Alexander Chan and Rick Dane, Jr.

“The Court has considered all of the arguments raised in all of the suppression motions filed in this case and has concluded that none warrants the suppression of evidence or a hearing,” Vyskocil wrote. “To the contrary, based on the Court's careful review of the application for each challenged wiretap order and search warrant, there is no question that the issuing judicial officer in each instance had a substantial basis for the finding of probable cause.”

Some of the challenged evidence included conversations recorded off the phone of now-barred trainer Jorge Navarro, who has since pleaded guilty to one count in the years-long Thoroughbred drugging conspiracy.

Intercepted calls included statements about Navarro obtaining and/or using purported performance-enhancing equine drugs, such as an unregulated version of clenbuterol, “trays of red acid,” and “24 bottles” of a substance. Other evidence included Navarro discussing the “doping and hiding” of a horse, the use of a “shock machine,” and even the now-infamous Monmouth Park video recorded by a bar patron in which Navarro celebrated a 2017 win by boasting about “juicing” horses.

“In challenging the Navarro wiretaps, the defendants unpersuasively attempt to 'dissect' the affidavits and argue that individual pieces of evidence did not establish probable cause,” Vyskocil wrote. “Garcia, joined by Tannuzzo and Servis, argues that the government did not establish that the aforementioned '24 bottles' were a prohibited substance. The government was not required to prove, in an application for a wiretap, that when Navarro said, 'Grab me…24 bottles,' he conspired to purchase and use a prohibited substance. Rather, it was required to offer evidence that, in a 'totality-of-circumstances' analysis, there was a 'fair probability' that Navarro was involved in a horse doping fraud scheme.”

Vyskocil also noted the extensive review process that was required before numerous other judges originally signed off on those wiretaps, which occurred over the course of 18 months prior to the March 2020 arrests of several dozen alleged conspirators.

“At least 13 judges independently found probable cause to authorize 15 different applications to begin or renew wiretaps,” Vyskocil wrote. “At least 10 magistrate judges found probable cause for search warrants.”

The order continued: “The defendants also challenge the Navarro wiretaps and other wiretaps that incriminated them on the ground that the government had failed to exhaust alternative investigative techniques. Their arguments are wholly unpersuasive…. The law in this Circuit is clear that wiretapping is appropriate to investigate conspiracies where 'the clandestine nature of alleged conspiracies makes them relatively less susceptible to normal investigative techniques'…

“Moreover, the government explained, none of the confidential sources had gotten close to Navarro and approaching him at that point was more likely to raise his suspicions than yield information. Affidavits in support of other wiretap applications cited this and additional evidence that the conspirators were cognizant of the need to maintain secrecy.”

Vyskocil summed up: “Certain defendants insist that the government should have been required to do more drug testing or more extensively investigate financial records. However, the government is not required to exhaust any particular avenue of investigation before seeking a wiretap. Moreover, as various affidavits made clear, the conspirators were using drugs that were designed to be undetectable by racing industry drug tests and went to great lengths to avoid creating financial or other records.”

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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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The defendants are trying to have evidence compiled from intercepted phone conversations thrown out, saying the FBI didn't exhaust other investigatory practices before seeking approval for such surveillance. Prosecutors point out why the wiretaps were necessary and that traditional methods would not have worked.

A judge in the case has yet to decide whether to permit the evidence obtained through the wiretaps.

In this week's edition of the Friday Show, publisher Ray Paulick and editor in chief Natalie Voss review some of the conversations held among various defendants – including Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro – that were intercepted by the FBI. They reveal that the trainers had no idea what was in some of the substances they were injecting into horses in their care.

Voss also provides some details on Scott Mangini, a peddler of non-FDA approved substances who has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.

Joe Nevills then joins Paulick to talk about this week's Woodbine Star of the Week.

Watch this week's show, presented by Monmouth Park, below:

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The Servis legal team argues that the wire taps evidence should be thrown out because using it represents a violation of Servis's Fourth Amendment rights. The Fourth Amendment reads, in part: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Servis has been charged with a long-running history of using performance-enhancing drugs on his horses, including the drug SGF-1000. The bulk of the evidence obtained against Servis comes from taps of his phone and the phones of others. The charges levied against him would be much more difficult to prove without the evidence from the tapped phones.

In an intercepted conversation with trainer Jorge Navarro, who is also under indictment, Servis said that he used SGF-1000 on “everything almost.”

Glavin and Considine are also seeking to have evidence obtained from wiretaps of the phones of Navarro, veterinarian Kristian Rhein and Alexander Chan, a veterinarian who worked with Rhein, suppressed.

“Mr. Servis's communications were unlawfully obtained as a result of those wiretaps, and he is an aggrieved party with standing to bring this motion,” his lawyers wrote. According to the original indictments release last year, Navarro is also heard admitting he used SGF-1000. On another intercepted call of note, Rhein tells Servis that, when it comes to SGF-1000, “They don't even have a test for it.”

The story was first reported by the Bloodhorse.

Servis's attorneys also charge that the government made “material misrepresentations” to the court about SGF-1000, stating that it is a performance-enhancing drug that contained “growth factors,” purposefully exaggerating the performance-enhancing qualities of SGF-1000 to obtain permission to tap the phone. The Servis lawyers write that SGF-1000 is not, in fact, a performance-enhancing drug. The filing reads: “SGF-1000 was tested on numerous occasions by independent laboratories and found to contain no growth factors. Instead, SGF-1000 tested as ovine (sheep) collagen, a substance which was unlikely to have any effect on a horse's performance at all.”

The motion also states that “SGF-1000 was repeatedly tested prior to the wiretap and found to contain no performance-enhancing substances.”

Whether or not SGF-1000 is a performance-enhancing drug could be a moot point. Throughout the case, the government has argued that even if a drug is not a performance-enhancer, it is illegal for a trainer to use it when their intent is to dope or “juice” a horse.

Despite the notoriety SGF-1000 has received because of the Servis-Navarro case, it is not hard to find it. It is available from the website vetpharmacystore.com, which is peddling a box of SGF-1000 for €170. The company describes SGF-1000 as an innovative formulation that includes “potent growth factors.”

The lawyers also charge that the government misled the courts about the urgency to use wiretaps at a time when it had not exhausted normal investigative procedures. “The Government failed to take even the most basic of investigative steps with respect to Mr. Servis, and instead ran to the district court for a wiretap as essentially its first investigative step,” they wrote.

In another attempt to bolster their case, the lawyers point out that Servis is “a trainer whose horses did not fail any post-race drug tests since the FBI's investigation in this case began in 2017 and through the date of the Mar. 9, 2020 Indictment.”

In Glavin, Servis has hired one of the top defense lawyers in the Northeast. It has been a busy few days for the attorney, who also represents New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. On Tuesday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James released a report alleging that Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women, including current and former government workers.

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Attorneys Rita Glavin and Michael Considine said in court filings that the FBI in seeking the wiretaps made “material misstatements and omissions” that were “deliberate or reckless” in seeking the wiretap on Servis authorized on April 30, 2019, and extended three times. The attorneys said the wiretap resulted in the “interception of thousands of communications” of Servis, one of several trainers indicted in the federal investigation that began in 2017.

First, the attorneys state, the FBI chose not to inform the court that no horses under Servis' care failed any post-race drug tests during the span of the investigation. “By contrast,” they wrote, “horses trained by Thoroughbred horse trainer Bob Baffert (who has never been criminally charged) have failed numerous post-race drug tests in the last several years, most recently failing a post-race drug test for the 2021 disqualified Kentucky Derby winner, 'Medina Spirit.'” (Editor's Note: A hearing has yet to be conducted on Medina Spirit's positive drug test and he has not been disqualified from the Derby.)

Secondly, the attorneys allege, FBI agents consistently misstated the nature of two drugs mentioned in connection with Servis: SGF-1000, a product marketed by Kentucky-based Medivet Equine, and the bronchodilator clenbuterol.

“SGF-1000 was repeatedly tested prior to the wiretap and found to contain no performance enhancing substances,” the attorneys claim, citing a number of emails between different parties and the Hong Kong Jockey Club, whose lab apparently tested the substance that is said to contain sheep collagen as a primary ingredient. Despite that, the attorneys wrote, an FBI agent seeking the original wiretap or extensions “repeatedly described SGF-1000 to the court as a 'growth factor' and 'performance enhancing substance.'”

The attorneys' memorandum in support of the motion to suppress also quotes from intercepted comments by Rhein (a part owner of Medivet) that SGF-1000 does not contain any illegal substances.  “Everything we've done is by the letter of the law,” Rhein told Servis in one conversation.

On Tuesday, Rhein pleaded guilty in federal court to administering and distributing adulterated and misbranded drugs and faces three years in prison.

“In its zeal to secure and maintain the wiretap,” the attorneys claim, “the government also misled the issuing courts about clenbuterol, wrongfully characterizing it as a performance-enhancing drug that was banned by various state regulators. In fact, clenbuterol was expressly permitted in the jurisdictions Mr. Servis' horses raced. “Although local rules of the relevant jurisdictions provide that a horse cannot race when clenbuterol is present within their system above a certain threshold at the time of a race, none of Mr. Servis' horses failed a single post-race test during the period of the government's investigation. The government withheld this fact from the issuing courts as well,” the attorneys wrote.

Their final argument claims that the FBI “misled the court about the necessity for a wiretap of Mr. Servis' phone in its requirement to explain that 'normal investigative procedures have been tried and have failed or reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous.' … The government failed to take even the most basic of investigative steps with respect to Mr. Servis, and instead ran to the District Court for a wiretap as essentially its first investigative step.”

The motion also seeks suppression of evidence from wiretaps on the phones of Rhein and Navarro, the latter of whom has asked the court for a hearing to change his “not guilty” plea.

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