Sports

Rodriguez lawyer: NYRA partly to blame for positive

An unwelcome whiff of scandal hangs over tomorrow’s Wood Memorial at Aqueduct, a battle of unbeatens between top Kentucky Derby candidates Vyjack and Verrazano. Vyjack’s trainer, Rudy Rodriguez, who today comes off a 20-day suspension for two medication positives dating from last year, has another positive for the same drug — Banamine, a commonly used anti-inflammatory — hanging over his head.

But what’s really scandalous, claims Rodriguez’s attorney, Karen Murphy, is that horse involved in the new positive, a filly named Majestic Marquet, was obviously tampered with in her barn by an outside intruder hours before she won the eighth race at Aqueduct on March 10, and that the New York Racing Association is partly at fault for failing to provide adequate safeguards.

“[A] serious lapse on the part of NYRA has contributed to a security breach in one of Mr. Rodriguez’ barns,” Murphy wrote in an Apri1 letter to Kenneth Handal, NYRA’s general counsel. “For some six weeks now NYRA has failed, after repeated requests, to install the electrical box necessary to hook up surveillance cameras in Barn 10 at Aqueduct. As a result of this failure, on or about March 10th an individual [unknown at this time] entered this barn and tampered with a filly that was in to race that day.

“Had the cameras been operational, as they should have been, this intrusion would never have happened, or if it had, there would be concrete exculpatory evidence available to Mr. Rodriguez.”

Murphy, a noted equine lawyer who serves as an advisor to NYRA chairman David Skorton, is “100 percent certain” that someone got to the filly for several reasons, chief among them the excessive amount of Banamine found in the sample: 405 nanograms, 20 times the permissible level.

“Someone went up to the filly’s stall and put a tube down her throat,” Murphy surmised. “That’s the only conclusion we can reach.”

Two of Rodriguez’s owners, Michael Imperio and David Wilkenfeld (who campaigns Vyjack), have put up $20,000 each in reward money for information leading to the apprehension of the unknown intruder.

“This is not a drug positive, it’s a crime,” Murphy said. “Tampering with a sporting event.”

Murphy noted that Rodriguez has security cameras, which can only be installed by union workers, in his main stable at the Big A, Barn 6, but that he shares Barn 10 with another trainer who disconnected the cameras that were originally there. She singled out Juan Dominguez, a longtime NYRA security staffer, and NYRA vice president and director of racing P.J. Campo for failing to follow up on Rodriguez’ request for new cameras.

“This failure by NYRA’s staff [which is but one example of regular and serious security lapses throughout NYRA’s backstretch areas] should be readdressed at the highest level,” she wrote to Handal.

NYRA responded that, although one of Rodriguez’s assistants first requested the cameras for Barn 10 on Feb. 18, he failed to provide a detailed layout that is needed to execute a work order.