The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (30 page)

But Smith wasn’t having any of it. He went inside and called the police, who quickly showed up. Weigman didn’t run. He told the cops he had done things that were “not so nice.” When the officers asked what he meant, he said, “swatting.” But after a lifetime of being teased and abused, Weigman was unable to see himself as anything but a victim. He was just a young blind kid, and here he was getting bullied again. Smith, he told the officers, had a “vendetta” against him.

Less than two weeks after he showed up at Smith’s house, the police knocked on Weigman’s door outside Boston and arrested him. Weigman soon found himself being interrogated by an FBI agent. He listened in darkness as the agent dialed a number on his phone. Thirty minutes later, he spouted back the number by heart—and even knew what it was. “That’s the main number of the FBI office here in Boston,” Weigman told the astonished agent.

But now that Weigman was 18, his powers couldn’t save him anymore. Last January, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and intimidate a federal witness. In June, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

These days, sitting in a small holding cell in a Dallas prison, Weigman bears no resemblance to the hulking psycho he portrayed on the party lines. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he’s slim and soft-spoken, his head shifting as he talks. “I’m not a monster or a terrorist,” he says. “I’m just a guy who likes computers and telephones. I used my ability to do certain things in the wrong way. That’s it.” As Weigman recounts his story, he slips effortlessly into the voices of the people he met along the way. Every ambient noise—a guard’s chatter, a bag unzipping, a computer disc whirring—draws a tic of his attention.

“Let me tell you something, man,” he says, his voice a bit like that of a young Elvis. “If I would have been just a little more mature, if I could just rationalize better, I think I would have been all set. If, when I was young, I had a full-time male father figure in my life….” He stammers a bit, then recovers. “Not having my dad didn’t really bother me,” he says, “but inside, it kind of messed me up a bit.”

Above all, though, Weigman is still a teenager. While he expresses remorse over his swatting attacks, he takes giddy pleasure in recounting his other exploits—whether punking celebrities or playing the phone companies like an Xbox. “The phone system and infrastructure is just weak,” he says. “I had access to the entire AT&T and Verizon networks at times. I could have shut down an entire area.” Then he segues into an earnest pitch for a future job. “I’d love to work for a phone company, just doing what I do legally,” he says. “It’s not about power. I know the phone and telecommunication systems and can be a crucial part of any company.”

In the meantime, he’s free to brush up on his skills. Though he’s restricted from calling party lines, he has phone access in prison. For a self-described telephone addict, it seems almost cruel, like imprisoning a crackhead with a pipe and a rock. Could he use the prison phone the same way he used his home phone? Could he hack his way, from his prison cell, beyond the guard towers and the razor wire, into the world outside?

Weigman bobs his head and kneads his hands. “I’m sure I could,” he says.

D
AVID
K
USHNER
is a contributing editor of
Rolling Stone
and
Wired,
and the digital culture commentator for National Public Radio’s
Weekend Edition Sunday.
His books include
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
(2003);
Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas
(2005); and
Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb
(2009). He is an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. His work has also appeared in publications including
The New York Times Magazine, New York, Details,
and
Discover.

Coda

Writing about a recent crime requires, among other things, persistence and patience. Until the case is over, it can be tough—if not impossible—to get key people to talk. Defendants and attorneys often don’t want to risk a heavier sentence on a magazine story. This is what happened with Matt Weigman. His sentencing kept getting delayed, and so did my shot at an interview. Badgering Weigman’s attorney, Carlo D’Angelo, became a full-time job. I spent months doing what journalists call a “write around”—reporting around Weigman, talking with whomever I could, poring over court files and transcripts, immersing myself in the phone phreak underworld, but still—no Matt. We could have run the article without Weigman’s participation, of course, but we were willing to wait.

Eight months after getting my assignment, Weigman got sentenced, and I made one more call to his attorney. OK, D’Angelo told me, Matt’s ready to talk. I flew down to Dallas to meet Weigman. After so much anticipation, I had no idea what to expect. Maybe he wouldn’t want to go into much detail. Maybe he’d have some immovable chip on his shoulder. Maybe he could care less about sharing his story with a magazine. But as I sat down across from this kid in an orange jumpsuit, the first thing he did was apologize for the delay. Then he said, “I used to read
Rolling Stone
in Braille!” He’s still in jail now.

FROM
Texas Monthly

T
HE
“
SHOW
”
WAS SCHEDULED
to take place on Friday night in a field behind a rundown gas plant about forty miles west of Houston. Chris, a young dogman from the coastal town of Matagorda, was driving up to take on Rob Rogers—or, as he was known in the dogfighting world, White Boy Rob. Chris was a cocky, fast-talking black guy, maybe 25 years old. He had a beauty of a pit bull named BJ, a newcomer to the game but one that had already developed a reputation as a “leg dog.” At his last show, BJ had locked his teeth onto his opponent’s front left leg, ripped out a chunk of cartilage, and then immediately torn into the right leg, nearly snapping a bone. “Nobody can beat BJ,” said Chris. “White Boy Rob ain’t going to do nothing to my BJ.”

Rogers was one of the best dogmen in Texas, renowned for his ability to work fighting pit bulls—“bull dogs,” he called them. He kept thirty dogs at a property in Baytown and at his two-bedroom trailer in Channelview, a blue-collar suburb of Houston, where he lived with his wife and three children. As a fight approached, he would select one dog and put him “on the keep.” He would run him for an hour through a cemetery with a thirty-pound chain attached to his collar. He’d make him swim for another hour in an aboveground pool in his backyard, then put him on a treadmill to run some more. Rogers would give the dog vitamins and amino acids and inject him with anti-inflammatory drugs. He’d give the dog very little water in order to lessen bleeding during a fight and make the skin tighter and harder to bite. To keep the animal relaxed, he’d let it stay inside the trailer and sleep at the foot of his bed. “You treat your bull dog with respect and you’ll be amazed at what he does for you,” Rogers liked to say. “You can tell him where to hit another dog, and he’ll hit it.”

For this particular show, Rogers had chosen Dozer, a 36-pound male with a coat the color of fried chicken. Dozer was young, just nineteen months old. Usually Rogers didn’t bring out one of his dogs until it had reached at least the age of two. But Dozer had what dogfighting aficionados describe as a “hard mouth”: He was a vicious biter. Like almost all of Rogers’s dogs, Dozer was also known for his “gameness”: Once he was ordered to fight, he refused to quit. When Rogers showed up in his old gray Ford van and pulled Dozer from his large crate, a couple of men who had been invited to the show let out low whistles. Dozer looked around, proud as a Thoroughbred, his muscles rippling under his short hair.

One by one, Dozer and BJ were weighed in, each suspended from a scale with a thin cord running under his front legs and around his chest. A member of Chris’s team washed Dozer with water, baking soda, warm milk, and vinegar to make sure his coat was not treated with some foreign substance that would inhibit BJ from biting. According to the rules, Rogers had the right to wash BJ, but he was so confident in Dozer that he shrugged his shoulders and told the referee to get the show going.

A wooden box—twelve feet by twelve feet, the walls two feet high—had been constructed in the middle of the field, with a couple of portable industrial lights set up around it. Inside the box, a carpet had been laid down over the grass. The invitation-only crowd of about thirty men stood just outside the box, most of them making bets. Chris and Rogers had each put up $750 for the fight, winner take all. The two men stepped into the box, cradling their dogs in their arms, and quickly turned toward their separate corners so that the dogs could not see each other. “Face your dogs,” said the referee.

The dogs were set down on the carpet and turned toward the center of the box. When they finally got a glimpse of each other, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Their heads slunk below their shoulders, and their paws strained against the carpet. The referee shouted, “Release your dogs,” and they came flying toward the center of the box with a vengeance, two projectiles colliding in midair.

Dozer immediately buried his teeth in BJ’s chest, and just as immediately spit him out. Rogers cursed. BJ obviously had some sort of solution on him—a flea dip, maybe—that was bothering Dozer. Rogers watched as BJ took advantage of the opportunity, driving himself underneath Dozer’s jaws and tearing at his front leg.

Rogers snapped his fingers, pointed to BJ’s face—the one place where he figured there would be no flea dip—and shouted, “Get it! Get after it!” Dozer responded, his teeth gnashing at BJ’s muzzle. BJ pawed backward, blood spurting from his mouth. Blood and urine drenched the carpet. Dozer was so wounded in his front leg that he had trouble standing. But as spectators around the box bellowed, he held onto BJ’s chest, his teeth like clamps.

Chris called for a break, and the two dogs were briefly separated. Rogers’s and Chris’s assistants gave them quick sponge baths and blew on them to cool them off. “Release your dogs!” the referee again called out, but BJ was having no more of it. He refused to walk over the scratch line that had been drawn on the carpet. The referee slowly counted from one to ten. BJ stayed where he was, and Dozer was declared the victor.

Rogers loaded Dozer up in his crate and drove away from the gas plant. It had been a good night. His reputation in the dogfighting world remained untarnished. He knew that within hours other dogmen would be on the phone swapping tales about his victory, talking up Dozer as White Boy Rob’s next great bull dog. He turned onto the highway and headed contentedly back to Channelview, never noticing the black pickup parked behind the trees or the two undercover officers sitting inside watching him.

A
FEW MONTHS EARLIER
, in the summer of 2007, Stephen Davis and Gary Manning, two officers assigned to the Department of Public Safety’s criminal intelligence division in Houston, had been sitting behind their desks when a lieutenant walked in and said that a player in the Houston-area dogfighting game was ready to talk. The two men sighed. They were veteran agents, beefy guys with the kind of oversized biceps and surly expressions you’d expect from bouncers at cheap strip joints. They’d worked undercover for years, usually going by their first names (for this article, their first names have been changed). They had posed as drug dealers, motorcycle gang members, white supremacists, and gun runners. “We didn’t want to mess with dogfighting,” recalls Manning, who spent six years in the Marines before joining the DPS, in 1994. “We just figured it was piddly shit, something for the local animal-control officers.”

Then they started Googling. They learned that the Humane Society of the United States estimates that as many as 40,000 people around the country are involved in dogfighting. On dogfighting Web sites they read message boards filled with comments about everything from the best way to train fighting dogs to tips for treating them when they are injured. They got hold of underground dogfighting magazines and studied ads from pit bull kennels promoting litters of puppies that were the off spring of retired champion dogs.

When they met with the informant, he told them that there were dogmen all over southeast Texas, some raising fighting pit bulls out in the country just as their fathers and grandfathers once had. Other dogmen, the informant said, kept their dogs in their backyards, behind their homes, at the edges of cities. A new generation of inner-city black dogmen had also emerged, holding their shows in abandoned buildings or in the back parking lots of apartment complexes. Brash young gangbangers or wannabe gangsters were even getting into the game, the informant added, sometimes spontaneously staging their shows on street corners, in full view of anyone passing by.

The informant kept going, telling Manning and Davis about unscrupulous dogmen putting cocaine on their dogs’ gums, shooting them up with steroids, and then abandoning or unabashedly killing their “curs” (the worst-performing dogs). He brought up the 2006 murder of 27-year-old Thomas Weigner, a prosperous young pit bull breeder and handler, well-known in dogfighting circles around the country, who kept more than 250 fighting pit bulls on a twenty-acre spread in Liberty County, northeast of Houston. At least two gunmen had broken into his home, tied up his family, and then shot him, letting him bleed to death. The Liberty County Sheriff’s Department named a rival dogman, 34-year-old William David Townsend, of Montgomery County, as its lead suspect, speculating that he wanted either Weigner’s money (Weigner had reportedly won $50,000 in a recent show) or Weigner’s best dogs for his own kennel. Townsend was arrested on an unrelated drug charge, then released on bond, at which point he reportedly fled to Mexico, taking some of his best dogs (and maybe some of Weigner’s).
Nevertheless, the informant told Manning and Davis, Townsend was still in the game, sometimes slipping back into Texas with one of his dogs for a show.

“Nothing is slowing these guys down, absolutely nothing,” the informant said. “They make Michael Vick look like a pussy.”

Manning and Davis drove out to have a look at some of the dogmen’s homes, including White Boy Rob Rogers’s trailer, in Channelview. But the cops quickly realized that their investigation faced one major problem: They had almost no chance of getting close to a dogfight, at least not one involving the better players. Dogmen were like members of a secret society; their shows were invitation-only. And those spectators who got invited were not informed of the show’s location until an hour or so before it was to begin—sometimes less. They almost always drove to the shows in cars or trucks with the license plates removed to avoid being identified. Usually, someone would do a “heat run” on the way to a show, doubling back on the route he had just taken to see if any cops were following in an unmarked vehicle.

The cops thought they had caught a break when the informant told them about the Friday-night show between Rogers and Chris. They set up down the street from Rogers’s trailer, watched him load a dog into his van, and discreetly followed him. But when he turned down a dirt road and headed behind the gas plant, they came to a stop. Lookouts, no doubt, had been stationed around the field, and Manning and Davis had no idea when the show was actually going to begin. Considering that the only way to make a felony case on a dogfighter is to catch him in the act of dogfighting, they figured they were out of luck.

But they couldn’t get the dogmen out of their minds. “There’s got to be a way to bring them down,” Manning kept saying to his partner. A few days later, they walked into their lieutenant’s office and told him that they wanted to do something that had never before been tried in the history of American law enforcement. They wanted to become dogmen themselves.

F
OR CENTURIES
, dogfighting was perfectly legal. In Rome’s Colosseum, gladiator dogs were pitted against one another or against other animals, including wild elephants. One of the more popular forms of entertainment in twelfth-century England was “baiting,” in which fighting dogs would be released into a ring with chained bulls and bears. In the colonial United States dogfights were common, and they continued well into the nineteenth century, with formal rules and sanctioned referees. As recently as 1881, the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad advertised special fares to a dogfight in Louisville, Kentucky.

Eventually, because of protests by such groups as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, states began passing legislation that banned dogfights. By the thirties, dogfighting had been driven almost completely underground. Nevertheless, it remained a culturally ingrained phenomenon that simply refused to go away—a fact that became all too clear when Michael Vick, the quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, was indicted by a grand jury in July 2007 for operating a dogfighting ring on his Virginia farm and later sentenced to two years in prison. The vast majority of Americans were stunned. Why, they wanted to know, would a young multimillionaire celebrity risk everything to engage in what they regarded as a barbaric practice?

Pit bulls are fast, agile animals with bulging chests, bricklike snouts, jaws that have ten times the crushing power of other dogs’, and incredibly strong back legs that allow them to shoot forward like blitzing linebackers. If properly socialized, they can be among the most people-friendly, face-licking pets on the planet: Think of Petey in
The Little Rascals.
But when raised by a dogman, they can be terrifying, capable of brawling for hours at a time, ripping the flesh off their opponents, even disemboweling them if they get the chance.

Dogmen view their fighting pit bulls as nothing less than spectacularly trained athletes. On dogfighting Web sites, dogmen constantly swap stories about famous pit bulls. (“The best pound for pound match dog I have ever seen was ‘CH. HOLLY,’” one dogman recently blogged. “She was the K-9 equivalent of Sugar Ray Robinson.”) They know the bloodlines of the pit bulls the way horse racing fans know the lineage of Triple Crown contenders. “Let me tell you,” Rogers said when I met him recently, “they are beautiful animals. It’s amazing to watch two of them face off in the box, studying one another, making a move, then changing strategies and making another move. These dogs think. They’re smart. And they get a real joy out of fighting. They’re born and bred to fight. I’m telling you, keeping one of these dogs from fighting is just as cruel as keeping a retriever inside the house and not letting him fetch.”

Rogers, who is 38, is hardly an unpleasant man. Stocky, with closely cropped dark hair and crooked teeth, he usually dresses in a sleeveless T-shirt, blue jean shorts, and sandals or rubber flip-flops. He has a regular day job, selling salvaged cars to junkyards. His wife is a friendly, outgoing woman, and he proudly describes his three children as “honor roll students.” The family attends a small Baptist church in Channelview, just down the road from their trailer, and on birthdays and other special occasions they like to go to Casa Olé, an inexpensive Mexican restaurant. One of Rogers’s neighbors describes him as “a nice enough guy who always waves when he sees you driving by.”

Raised by a single mother in a blue-collar neighborhood in Houston, Rogers told me that he was “just your average redneck kid who loved to hunt and fish.” He loved dogs, he said—“all kinds of dogs, big and little, rottweilers and dachshunds.” Except for a few fistfights, he rarely got in trouble as a boy. (His only criminal conviction to date is a misdemeanor charge for an illegal inspection sticker.)