Jim Gorant: The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

Inside the house investigators uncovered some damning paraphernalia: a small amount of marijuana, a bong, a rolling-paper machine, a semi-automatic.45 caliber pistol, a.24 caliber pistol and assorted ammo, and several stun guns.

Outside, the officers encountered an older man. As Brinkman arrived to question him, dogs barked from the back of the property. Brinkman asked the man what was going on. His name was Brownie [2]and he was paid to take care of the yard. He was a dog lover and he hated to see what was going on. In 2004 or 2005 he’d reported what the Bad Newz crew was doing to the Virginia Beach Police and then the Virginia State Police, but for reasons he didn’t know those complaints never led to an investigation. Still, he’d told Vick and the others more than once that “someday they would pay for what they did to the dogs.” This was his chance to make those words reality and he was going to take it. He led the officers through the black fence and into the trees, revealing the secrets of 1915 Moonlight Road.

The officers stood in the middle of the compound and took in the scene: the black sheds behind them, kennels off to the right, pens on the left. The dogs were riled and barking, jumping up against the fencing as though it was feeding time. There were maybe thirty-five dogs spread through the compound and probably twenty of those were pit bulls. The remainder included a pack of purebred hunting beagles, a handful of Rottweilers and a few presa canarios, massive hunting and farming dogs that derive from the Canary Islands and have been used for dogfighting over the years. Many of the pit bulls bore scars, but they were generally healthy. They were skinny, but not starving, which is typical of fighting dogs because it is easier to bulk a dog up to get to fight weight than it is to slim one down.

The sheds were locked, but Brownie had a key and he let the officers inside. It looked like a dogfighting operation, and Brinkman sent Officer Smith back to the magistrate’s office to get a second warrant authorizing a search for dogfighting evidence. As Smith set off, Brownie spoke up. There were more. He led the officers down a path to a clearing. They stopped when they saw the dogs chained to the axles, barking and lunging forward so that their collars pulled at their necks. Brownie continued down the path and through the trees. Another clearing, more dogs.

These dogs, left to the elements far more than the others, were scrappier and possessed an almost feral air. They too were skinny but not malnourished. When the officers approached, the dogs rushed toward them, barking and wagging as if they wanted to be petted, but when the people got close, the dogs tucked their tails and retreated. Some of the cops who were more comfortable with animals went up and put their hands on the dogs. None snapped or growled or showed signs of aggression, but a few, when they saw hands coming at them, ducked their heads and crouched low, as if they were expecting to be struck.

The job of removing the dogs had just doubled, as the total count pushed to sixty-six. Additional animal control units were called in from neighboring precincts, and when Smith returned with the warrant, well after 9:00 P.M., Brinkman and some of the others began their search. In the house they found a black three-ring binder full of contracts and paperwork pertaining to dog breeding and lineage.

The officers also began to figure out what to do with the dogs. Surry County’s shelter couldn’t take more than fourteen, so the team would have to find space at other local shelters for the rest of the dogs, figure out transportation, gather enough portable crates to accommodate them all for the trip, and make sure each facility had enough staff and food to take on a sudden influx of dogs that they could only assume to be hostile.

Who would pay for all the food and care the dogs would require was another question altogether. It was possible that the expense would be too great and that the dogs would be quickly catalogued as evidence and then put down. Some of the animal control officers began seeing to the arrangements and the dogs. A few had open wounds and all needed to be fed.

Out in the clearing, the brown dog did not know what to make of all that was happening. She didn’t know if it was good or bad but it was different. These people looked different, smelled different, spoke differently and much more than the ones she knew. She paced back and forth, watching the men come and go. They walked out through the trees and past the kennels. Past the sheds, too. Places that she’d had only an inkling of back in the clearing but that she somehow knew. They walked out beyond the house and the trucks with their flashing lights, into a world she knew nothing of but was soon to meet.

Even as the dogs were being seen to, Brinkman and the others approached the sheds. Although Brinkman had already taken an initial tour through them earlier in the day, it was time for a thorough search.

They opened the first shed, a small one on the left. The door creaked back and light rushed in. An array of training equipment filled the space-weight-pull harnesses, a treadmill, three slat mills and a Jenny wheel, a sort of pole and tether that’s used for exercising. Brinkman looked a little closer. He recognized some of the equipment: It was the same stuff he had confiscated from Benny Butts seven years earlier.

The next shed was immaculate inside, as close to sterile as you could get for a makeshift backwoods infirmary. A long counter covered with syringes and medical supplies stretched along one wall, and stainless steel pens sat on the ground. Assorted medicines and painkillers, bandages, and splints were among the items. The third shed was something of a recovery room, a place with lined stalls where dogs could stay while they were healing after a fight or recuperating from giving birth. A female who had recently borne a litter lay in one stall, panting, but there were no puppies anywhere.

They moved on to the biggest shed, the two-story one, and stepped inside. Bags and bags of Black Gold Premium Dog Food lay stacked against the wall. The sheer amount of it was disturbing-the crew bought it eighty bags at a time from Sam’s Club-but the two words below the name stood out, Performance Blend. Buckets of protein powder, hemoglobin, and other performance-enhancing materials stood nearby as well. A scale hung from one of the beams, and there were break sticks, used to pry open a dog’s mouth, and a rape stand, a device used to hold unwilling females in place during breeding. Outside one officer had found a partially burned carpet in a fifty-gallon drum, and inside the shed more carpet remnants stood rolled up and waiting.

Brownie pointed them toward a rope that hung down from the ceiling. They pulled it and a staircase descended. They started to climb. The steps were much too steep for a dog to walk up, but one could be carried. At the top, they emerged into an open room. One officer found a light switch and flipped it. Light filled in every corner. As their eyes adjusted they felt as though they had stepped into a different world, a surreal sensation that unnerved them slightly and manifested itself in an eerie silence.

Along one wall stood stacks of milk crates and another corner held a pile of empty shipping palettes. There was an air conditioner in one window, a radio, and a few chairs. The walls of the pit, they would later learn, were portable, and the crew would remove them and store them off the property between fights in order to give them plausible deniability if they were ever questioned. Where those walls went when they were in use was easy to see. The outline of a roughly sixteen-by-sixteen-foot square was visible on the floor. Seemingly everywhere-the floor, the walls-dark stains and little discolored parabolas spread across the black paint. They didn’t need lab results to tell them what they knew in their guts. The stains were made by blood.