Trainer Jorge Navarro pleaded guilty Wednesday, admitting his guilt to felony charges that he participated in a drug adulteration and misbranding conspiracy. Navarro will face a sentence of up to five years in prison.
The trainer also will have to pay restitution of more than $25.8 million to the victims of the conspiracy.
The government dropped all other charges related to the trainer’s alleged involvement in a horse-doping scheme that also allegedly involved fellow trainer Jason Servis.
“I administered drugs that were misbranded and/or adulterated, as they were new drugs without FDA approval,” Navarro said at the hearing. “They were administered to horses without a valid prescription and/or were manufactured in facilities without FDA registration.”
Specifically, Navarro admitted as part of the plea agreement to giving illegal performance-enhancing drugs to X Y Jet before the Dubai Golden Shaheen at Meydan in March 2019. X Y Jet later died of what Navarro called a heart attack.
The indictment of Navarro quotes him as referring to the substance administered as “monkey” and saying he gave the drug to the horse “through 50 injections.”
Navarro also admitted to shipping illegal drugs to Servis.
The plea-change hearing was held remotely through the U.S. District Court for Southern New York, before judge Mary Kay Vyskocil.
Vyskocil spent much of the hearing, which took nearly an hour and a half, informing Navarro of his rights and making sure he understood the plea agreement fully. The judge eventually accepted the guilty plea and scheduled sentencing for Dec. 17, to be held in person barring any further pandemic-related issues.
“I find that your plea is entered knowingly and voluntarily and is supported by an independent basis in fact, containing each of the essential elements of the offense,” Vyskocil said. “I therefore accept your guilty plea.”
Navarro, Servis and more than a dozen other alleged co-conspirators were indicted in March 2020, with the superceding indictment, which included the count Navarro pled guilty to Wednesday, coming in November of that year.
Navarro joins several of the co-defendants in the case who also have pled guilty, most recently Kristian Rhein, a suspended veterinarian who entered a guilty plea on Aug. 3.
“As he admitted today, Navarro, a licensed trainer and the purported ‘winner’ of major races across the world, was in fact a reckless fraudster whose veneer of success relied on the systematic abuse of the animals under his control,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Justice after the hearing on Wednesday.
