Finally Free (13 page)

I grew up loving animals and had a passion for them. As a boy, I had two parakeets, a few gerbils, and a pet dog named Midnight.

Midnight had a really pretty black coat with brown dots above her eyes. She was a beautiful dog; I fell in love with her. I would go to the local grocery store to help people with their bags, and they'd give me fifteen or twenty cents. At the end of the day, if I could leave with two dollars, I'd have enough to buy two cans of dog food for Midnight. It was like my summer job as a little kid. It let me provide for her.

Midnight was my companion, so I didn't want to do with her what I heard the other guys were doing with their dogs because I was emotionally attached to her.

I saw my first dogfight when I was eight.

One day, a friend and I stepped outside the building where I lived in the Ridley Circle housing project and saw kids and their bicycles surrounding a grassy area where we usually played football. But instead of a football game, about eight pit bull terriers were gathered. Most people don't know this, but back then, just as is the case now, I am scared to death of dogs I don't know. So my friend and I jumped on top of a mailbox to give us spectator seats at a safe distance from what was happening.

We saw guys putting their dogs' faces right in front of one another. The dogs would grab and fight. I remember two of them were fighting when a third, smaller dog jumped on the back of one of the larger dogs to make it two-on-one.

I didn't know what to think of it all. In a way, it captured my attention. But it also seemed mean, even cruel.

The bottom line, however, is that right there, on that very day, my fascination with dogfighting began. It's something I wish had never, ever happened.

I cringe at the brutality of it all now. I didn't realize how wrong dogfighting was at the time. It's the one thing about growing up in the area that I wish I could change. It was just a way of life in the neighborhood. It wasn't out of the norm to walk up and see two guys fighting with their dogs, or to hear a dog in the bushes barking. You knew it was somebody's dog that was being kept to fight. There was no other place to keep them.

It was going on almost every day. Either you would see guys
fighting their dogs against one another, or against dogs belonging to guys from other neighborhoods.

Jamel, my childhood friend, recalls that informal dogfights would happen randomly in the neighborhood. The fascination, he says, would be comparable to lions fighting. It captivates you.

Over the next two years, my friends and I sometimes hid dogs in the bushes around our neighborhood, and we'd let them fight one another.

An older boy, Tony, was one of the first people to teach me about dogfighting. He was about ten years older than me. My friends and I would play basketball with Tony and other older boys. I guess I had impressed them with my athleticism because when I would go to the court, Tony used to pick me to be on his team. He would come to the basketball court with a nice pit bull—always. He was around a lot of the older guys and dope dealers in the neighborhood who had dogs as well.

By the time I was ten, I stopped hanging out with him because I was spending so much time playing sports, fishing, and hanging out at the local Boys & Girls Club. However, I returned to his company nearly a dozen years later and got myself into the first situation that I couldn't lie, manipulate, or buy my way out of.

I didn't fight dogs again until after I got out of college.

Sometimes when I came home from Virginia Tech, I would run into Tony and talk to him about pit bulls. Tony always told me, “Just let me know when you want a real dog.”

I would ask, “What is that supposed to mean?”

One time he said, “Meet me tomorrow at eight o'clock.”

So my friend, Quanis Phillips, and I met him, and he took us over to Smithfield, Virginia, to a dogfight. It was the first organized dogfight I had ever seen.

My reaction was, “Man, y'all be doing this?!” The dogs were really fighting; I could tell they were really out to kill each other. I had seen dogfights where dogs snapped at each other, but these dogs actually were locked together, engaged, using strategies to try to hurt one another.

I was looking at it like,
Man, this is crazy
. I hadn't ever seen anything like it—to the point that it scared me. This was nothing compared to what I had seen as a kid.

On one hand, I was intrigued by it. On the other hand, I had never seen anything so furious, so ferocious, and so violent.

That's the backdrop to the day I made the worst decision of my life: the day when I stopped being a spectator of dogfighting and instead began participating in it with vigor.

It was March 2001, about a month before I was selected by Atlanta in the NFL draft. I was with Quanis at the Esquire Barbershop in Newport News. It was an area of town where there was plenty of trouble. Dope dealers and other questionable characters were usually outside the shop. I turned around and was surprised to see Tony walking past. I said, “Quanis, that's Tony. Let's see if he has some dogs.”

By that time I no longer had Midnight; I had a new dog, Champagne, that I had bred. She had some puppies, and I was thinking about selling them, or training and fighting them and getting myself into the lifestyle; but I didn't know how to do it and didn't know where Tony was until that day.

We ran out of the barbershop and I told Tony, “I want some of those dogs like you had last year.” He and I arranged to meet the next afternoon and, at that moment, I jumped into the dogfighting world.

I met Tony the next day at two o'clock, and he was in my life every day after that until 2004.

We went and bought two dogs that day, two dogs the next week, and another dog the next week. Tony told me he had a little place to house them. Someone he knew had some land, and we would house them there. They'd be safe.

Tony immediately started giving me lessons, picking up where he'd left off when I was ten. He taught me what to look for in a fighting dog.

He started teaching me the game of schooling and how to find a dog that likes to shoot for the legs—to the point where I got so good at it that I knew more than everyone in the crew. I was good at looking at a dog and knowing its weight, seeing its fighting style, matching up breeding pairs, and getting young dogs that were hot and ready to go. I received intensive training from Tony from April through June of 2001.

As my stable of dogs grew, so did the need to find a new place to house them. I went from having fifteen dogs on some land to buying a piece of property, which was 1915 Moonlight Road in Surry County. I sent Tony on a mission to find that land, and we transported our dogs to our new property. From that point until federal agents shut down the operation six years later, the Moonlight Road location was the home of Bad Newz Kennels.

I built a large house there for many of my friends to live in. I stopped by at least once a week on my Tuesday off-days from the NFL. Behind the house were black buildings where the dogfighting operation was centered—barns, kennels, an infirmary, and an upstairs area where fights took place.

After my imprisonment, I was nauseated by a visit back to the location to shoot a segment for
The Michael Vick Project
documentary, which aired on Black Entertainment Television (BET). But back when I was involved in those activities, I may have become more dedicated to the deep study of dogs than I was to my Falcons playbook. I became better at reading dogs than reading defenses.

That's just so sad to say right now, because I put more time and effort into trying to master that pursuit than my own profession … which was my livelihood … which put food on the table for my family. It was that love and that passion for my wrongdoings that led me to lose everything I worked so hard for.

Over the course of the next six years, Bad Newz Kennels participated in dogfights in various locations in the Carolinas, Virginia,
Maryland, and elsewhere. It was a wild time. I was living life like I was a street guy—we were always around some very rough and intense individuals. I had a separate persona. You never would have known I was a Pro Bowl quarterback.

The fights generally took place in locations far out in the countryside, where there was virtually no population base. We'd conduct them in a desolate area no one knew anything about—where it was hidden and where no one outside the business would know something illegal was going on. However, it seemed like there were usually spectators.

I could go into more detail, but I don't want to teach people how to run a dogfight. I don't want to glorify it. But I will tell you that I know too much about it, and it's something I wish I'd never learned.

When I was young, I witnessed dogfighting so much that I didn't think it was wrong. But as I grew older, I knew it wasn't right. We would hear about dogfighting operations getting busted. For instance, there was a dogfighting ring that was busted in Chesapeake, Virginia. But I also heard it was mainly a drug-related bust. A lot of guys in the dogfighting game were drug dealers—it was the way they were able to afford their dogs. So, when they were raided for drugs, the authorities found dogs, or vice versa, and either way it seemed like the drug bust routinely made bigger news and received more attention.