Another Update On The Albany, NY Signature Pharmacy Case
As noted on Thursday here on the site, the Signature Pharmacy case, which led to a free-for-all of WWE suspensions and forced them to clamp down on their drug testing procedure, was thrown out by Albany County Judge Stephen Herrrick, who faulted how prosecutors presented the case to the grand jury. Judge Herrrick threw out indictments against company owners Robert Loomis and Noami Loomis, pharmacist Michael Loomis and business managers Kirk Calvert and Anthony Palladino. The judge blamed the government's "amorphous quality of the evolving indictments" and inadequate instructions to the people on the grand jury. You can read an article on the situation at this USAToday.com or any of the local Albany, NY news stations. (WRGB.com, WNYT.com, WTEN.com, and CapitalNews9.com).
A number of WWE names emerged in the Signature Pharmacy doping scandal, including Randy Orton, Charles Haas, Adam "Edge" Copeland, Robert "Booker T" Huffman, Gregory Helms, Mike "Simon Dean" Bucci, Anthony "Santino Marella" Carelli, John "Johnny Nitro" Hennigan, Darren "William Regal" Matthews, Ken "Mr. Kennedy" Anderson, Eddie "Umaga" Fatu, Shoichi Funaki, Chris Mordetsky (Masters) and Chavo Guerrero. Three deceased wrestlers in Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero and Brian "Crush" Adams were also listed. They were all identified as clients of Signature Pharmacy in Orlando, the site raided by Albany County and Florida law enforcement agencies in February 2007 for distributing steroids and other prescription drugs to clients who had not been examined by doctors.
Bucci was let go and everyone else sans Randy Orton & Santino Marella were suspended as a result. It is unknown as to what happened with Marella, but Orton was definitely guilty. However, the feeling in WWE at the time was that he had already served his suspension (in August 2006 for failing a drug test for steroids and was only taken off of house shows for a month) and didn't need to serve one again. Although, it should be noted that WWE had a heavily hyped WWE Championship pay-per-view match to promote between Orton and John Cena at that year's Unforgiven a few weeks later. Although, it should also be noted that Orton continued receiving packages of drugs for six months after his initial drug test failure – until the company was finally shut down by authorities in February 2007 – so he should have been suspended again.