The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (31 page)

When he was in his early twenties and living in Channelview, he saw his first show. What struck him immediately was not the violence of the dogfighting but the bond between the men and their dogs. “They worked with their dogs like they were teammates,” he told me. “And they never let their dogs get too hurt. I learned all that stuff about fighting your dog to the death was just a big lie. If their dogs were losing, they’d pick them up, take them home, get them healed, and let them live to fight another day.”

Rogers began reading about the training techniques of such legendary Texas dogmen as Maurice Carver, of San Antonio, the “Silver Fox,” who, according to one story on a dogfighting Web site, always arrived for his shows “in his cowboy boots, Stetson hat and usually dressed to kill.” Rogers bought some pit bulls and built their loyalty by occasionally giving them a pork bone from Kroger or a stuffed animal to rip apart. (“I bought up every stuffed teddy bear I could find at the Channelview garage sales,” he said.) He had the dogs swim with him and his children in the family’s plastic pool and in a nearby river. He bought a treadmill for him and his wife but soon started to use it to work a dog while he and the family ate dinner or watched television. Eventually he had a few of his dogs do some “rolls”—brief fights with other dogs, five to ten minutes in length. Then he started doing shows for money. One evening, he took his best dog, Little Punk, to a remote piece of property near Austin to challenge a well-known veteran dogman and his animal, Hogdog. According to the rules, dogmen can’t touch their dogs during a fight, but they can get right up beside them and exhort them to fight harder. In the middle of the action, Rogers stepped forward, snapped his fingers, pointed to Hogdog’s back legs, and said, “Right there.” Little Punk promptly attacked. Rogers then snapped his fingers and pointed at Hogdog’s head; Little Punk responded by pulling Hogdog’s head straight back, nearly ripping it off his neck. The spectators were amazed at the newcomer’s skill. Rogers was like some sort of pit bull whisperer. Hogdog’s owner pulled his dog from the fight after 42 minutes, and suddenly Rogers was famous.

In 2002 he began fighting a solid black pit bull named Dipstick. Dipstick was a defensive specialist. He’d wait until his opponent made the first move, then he’d deftly step to the right or left, lock his jaws onto the side of his opponent’s face or ears, and start clamping down. Within a couple years—Rogers always gave his dogs plenty of rest between fights—Dipstick became a “grand champion” (a pit bull that has won five matches in a row, an unusual feat in dogfighting).

Dogfighting fame seldom translates to wealth. Rogers rarely won more than $1,000 at a fight (though occasionally the purses went as high as $10,000), and he’d plow much of that money back into food and veterinary supplies for the dogs. Every now and then, he’d agree to train the pit bulls of other dogmen, usually charging between $500 and $1,500. “I didn’t mind helping out other guys who were devoted to the sport,” he told me. In early 2008 he got a call about two white guys who had opened a new “spot”—a place to hold dogfights—in a small, secluded ware house on the east side of Houston, just off Interstate 10. They were calling their spot the Dog House, and they wanted to meet the great White Boy Rob and perhaps do a few rolls with him, maybe even pick up some pointers.

“Yeah, I’ll talk to them,” Rogers said.

M
ANNING AND
D
AVIS’S PLAN
was to lure Rogers and other dogmen to the ware house to put on shows, which they would videotape with cameras hidden in the walls or within their clothing. But the informant told them that if they ever hoped to win the dogmen’s trust, they were going to have to get in their own box and fight their own dogs.

One afternoon in early 2008, Manning and Davis drove to the informant’s house to get their first taste of dogfighting. The informant led them into his garage, where he had set up a box. He brought out a female named Crunch and showed Manning, who was going to be the dogman, how to hold the dog before a fight, how to release it, and how to coach it when the fight began.

The informant then went back outside and returned a minute or two later with another female, named Mercedes. He stood in one corner of the garage with Mercedes and had Manning stand in another corner with Crunch. “Release,” said the informant, and just like that, without the slightest provocation, the two dogs came charging, their ears pinned back, their teeth ripping into each other’s skin.

Manning and Davis had seen their share of homicide victims and had been in a few bloody fights themselves, but they had never witnessed anything like this. They left as quickly as they could and drove to the nearest bar, dog blood still on their boots. “What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?” asked Manning.

Four days later, the informant called to say that Rogers had agreed to take a look at the Dog House. When he arrived with a couple of his associates, Manning and Davis were wearing motorcycle boots, blue jeans, and sleeveless T-shirts. They said they were members of a local motorcycle gang that stole ATMs for a living (they’d had a couple of busted ATMs put against the back wall). They offered their visitors something to drink, but Rogers simply stared at the newcomers and their dogs (which the informant had brought to the warehouse earlier). “Let’s do a roll,” he said.

A nervous Manning, already dripping with sweat, carried Crunch into the box. Rogers brought out a dog from his van, but he told one of his buddies to act as the dog’s handler. Rogers wanted only to observe. Manning and Davis looked at each other. If Rogers wasn’t on tape, they couldn’t pop him for a felony dogfighting charge. “Let’s go,” said Rogers. “What the hell are we waiting for?”

The dogs were released. Predictably, Rogers’s superior dog demolished Crunch, first attacking her front legs, then going for her neck. A desperate Manning, getting down on his hands and knees, kept yelling at Crunch to keep fighting. “Good, Mama!” he shouted, as the informant had taught him. “Kill that other bitch! You can do it!”

Rogers quickly ordered the roll to be stopped. “You don’t even have any idea what the hell you’re doing, do you?” he asked Manning. He then added, “You’re going to kill your dog, right? Your bitch is nothing but a cur.”

Manning knew that some dogmen immediately kill a dog that’s lost a fight, usually by shooting or electrocuting it. Was that what Rogers expected him to do to prove himself as a real dogman? He stared at Crunch, who was limping and gasping for breath, her tongue jutting from the side of her mouth. “No, man, I’m not killing her,” Manning finally said. “She’s new to the game. I just wanted to see if she would scratch out.”

Rogers nodded. “I’d do the same thing,” he said. Apparently Manning had passed the test.

T
HE NEWS BEGAN TO SPREAD
: Two new dogmen had built a spot inside a warehouse, and they were more than happy to let other dogmen hold their shows there for a $20 admission fee. They were also barbecuing wings and ribs on a grill out in the parking lot. Gradually, Manning and Davis built their reputations, mostly with minor dogfighters. In time, Rogers returned to the Dog House too, getting in the box to do some rolls and a couple of shows, dominating everyone who dared to take him on. The cops were smart; they knew that having White Boy Rob in attendance enhanced their legitimacy. To make sure he kept coming back, they lent him money and agreed to fund part of the purses for his shows. They also bought a couple dogs from him and paid for the dogs’ conditioning. It wasn’t long before Rogers was treating Manning and Davis as his apprentices.

In the world of dogfighting, Rogers was actually regarded as one of the more honorable dogmen. He didn’t shoot up his dogs with steroids. He didn’t hang “bait animals” (cats or small dogs) from a pole in a cage and have his pit bulls lunge after them in order to build their aggression. Nor was he a partier. When Manning and Davis once offered to buy him drinks at Hi-10 Cabaret, a topless club, he refused, saying he didn’t want to disrespect his wife.

Despite Rogers’s training, Manning and Davis’s dogs got pummeled in their initial shows. “You dumbass white boys,” their black opponents would gleefully yell, driving away at the end of the night, their stomachs full of barbecue and beer. The officers would bandage up their dogs and take them back to their homes in suburban Houston. Their children and neighbors would stare wide-eyed at the battered pit bulls sitting in their garages or chained to metal stakes in their backyards. Late one evening, one of Manning’s neighbors, who knew about his undercover work, saw him pull into the driveway and carry out an exhausted pit bull. “Don’t ask,” Manning said.

In April, only a couple months after opening the Dog House, they received an invitation to bring one of their dogs to a show with a top black dogfighter who lived an hour or so outside Houston. It was a huge break: Manning and Davis figured that if they could win over the crowd at that show, they might, in turn, be able to lure them to the Dog House for more fights—and in the end, make more arrests.

The show was held in a field surrounded by thick woods. Manning and Davis were the only white men in attendance. More than fifty black men, some likely armed with pistols and knives, crowded around the cops and their dog, Brutus, whom they had bought from another Houston dogman a few days earlier. The purse was set at $5,000—each side putting up $2,500. Manning and Davis knew nothing about Brutus, and they were worried the dog would quickly fold, which would enrage the spectators, who had come expecting to see a real fight. Instead, Brutus raced to the middle of the box, grabbed onto his opponent’s head, and threw him backward. The fight lasted an amazing two hours and twenty minutes. Toward the end, Brutus was fading, with lacerations all over his body. Manning stepped forward, picked Brutus up in his arms, and forfeited the fight, handing his opponent $2,500. The spectators started applauding, some of them saying it was one of the best shows they had ever seen. “You got a real bull dog in that Brutus,” one of them said, slapping Manning and Davis on the back. Though Brutus died a few days later, the two officers realized that they had been accepted as real dogmen.

Soon after, dogmen from around southeast Texas were calling Manning’s and Davis’s cell phones, wanting to come to the Dog House for a show. A group of dogmen from Louisiana, another hotbed of dogfighting, drove to Houston to check out the Dog House. One dogman brought his girlfriend to watch a show. “What the hell is next?” asked Davis. “A kid’s night?”

The dogmen Davis and Manning encountered had all kinds of day jobs: manager of a Jack in the Box, sales representative for an oil-field services company, mail room clerk for a community college, professional baseball player turned high school English teacher. But the person they really wanted to meet was Houston’s top black dogfighter, a 42-year-old man known as Fat Don. The rumor was that Fat Don, whose real name was Donald Wayne Woods, had 150 dogs spread out among various properties. At least two of those dogs were grand champions that had won shows with $100,000-plus purses. Fat Don arrived at every show in a Mercedes SUV. He also owned several classic cars and a couple dragsters, which he raced at local tracks. He had supposedly arranged for a pet company to send trucks out to his home, situated behind locked gates in northeast Houston, to deliver giant bags of dog food.

In the fall of 2008, Fat Don finally agreed to meet Manning and Davis at a Denny’s. He was short and squat and wore overalls. He had a four-man entourage with him, one of whom stood watch outside the restaurant. For a while, they talked about his grand champions Fat Boy and Cash. Manning and Davis mentioned that they were now “kennel partners” with White Boy Rob. They told Fat Don that they wanted to match one of their dogs against one of his.

Fat Don’s eyebrows raised. He had been out of the game for a while and liked the idea of making his comeback against White Boy Rob and his new partners. He agreed to do a show six weeks later.

Rogers put Gemini, a black-and-white pit bull, on the keep. Fat Don went with an all-black dog named Fred. But when they met at the Dog House, Rogers said Gemini was not rested—he had accidentally slipped off his chain in Rogers’s yard a few days earlier and gotten into a vicious fight with another dog—and that the show should be forfeited. Manning and Davis were insistent that the show go on: They needed videotape of Fat Don in the box.

The bout was totally anticlimactic. Fred got on top of Gemini, slammed his head to the carpet, and never let up. Gemini seemed disoriented, as if he had suffered a concussion. After a mere twelve minutes, a humiliated Rogers called a halt and had Gemini picked up. “Another day,” he said to Fat Don. Manning and Davis handed over their side of the purse—$10,000.

Though Manning and Davis were exhilarated to have nabbed another kingpin, they did have one problem: The top DPS commanders in Austin had been reviewing the dogfighting budget, and they were not happy that so much of their money was flowing into the hands of the dogmen. A couple commanders thought the whole operation was trivial compared with the major crimes that needed to be investigated. A couple others were concerned that animal rights organizations would erupt upon learning that DPS officers had actually been dogfighting themselves. Belinda Smith, the animal cruelty prosecutor for the Harris County district attorney’s office, and Stephen St. Martin, another of the DA’s top prosecutors, went to Austin to reassure the DPS commanders that Manning and Davis’s investigation was perfectly legal. They mentioned that the Dog House had become so well-known that dogmen from around the state and even as far away as Tennessee and Maryland were wanting to arrange shows there.

What’s more, Manning and Davis told their commanders that they were convinced they were getting close to William David Townsend, the lead suspect in the 2006 Thomas Weigner murder case. One day Rogers had called and told them that two Mexican brothers had transported Townsend’s dog Bisexual over the border. They’d driven her to Rogers’s yard to spend the night before a fight the next night in East Texas against a dog from a Louisiana pit bull kennel. Bisexual, so named for a vicious tendency to strike at her opponents’ genitals, was one of the most feared pit bulls in Texas dogfighting. If she won her fight against the Louisiana dog, as she was easily expected to do, she’d be a grand champion.