Bringing Down the Dogmen

How a pair of undercover cops infiltrated the secret world of Houston dogfighting.

by Skip Hollandsworth

August 2009

(Page 4 of 4)

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.

Manning and Davis persuaded Rogers to let them watch the show. Also coming along in another vehicle were two black bodyguards from Houston who had presumably been hired by Townsend to make sure nothing happened to Bisexual. The caravan headed toward the town of Jasper. But when they reached the show’s location, the dogman handling the Louisiana dog said the kennel owners, perhaps realizing their dog would be no match for Bisexual, wanted to back out of the fight.

According to Manning, one of the Mexicans then called Townsend in Mexico. He put the call on speakerphone, and Manning was able to eavesdrop on the entire conversation. He heard the Mexican ask if he should shoot the gringo dogman from the Louisiana kennel. Townsend told him to instead arrange a deal with the kennel owners to obtain the dog that was supposed to fight—or else suffer the consequences. A deal was indeed struck, and the Mexicans disappeared back into Mexico with Bisexual and the Louisiana dog.

“They’ll be back to get Bisexual that grand championship,” Rogers told Manning and Davis. “I promise they’ll be back.”

In fact, the Mexican brothers were rumored to be coming back with Bisexual for a show on December 6, and Manning and Davis proposed that on that night teams of DPS and local police officers sweep into three spots, including their own, where several shows would be taking place. Maybe they’d get lucky and nab Bisexual, the Mexican brothers, and Townsend too. At the least, the officers declared, the roundup could bring down close to two hundred dogmen and spectators.

But the DPS commanders ordered the officers to close their investigation and arrest those they already had on videotape. At dawn on a Friday morning in November, more than one hundred peace officers stormed some of the dogmen’s homes and various properties where Manning and Davis knew that large numbers of fighting dogs were being kept.

Over the next several days, more suspects were arrested. When it was all over, 85 men, including White Boy Rob and Fat Don, were indicted for either dogfighting (a state felony with a maximum punishment of two years in jail) or being spectators at a dogfight (a class A misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of one year in jail). Animal control officers also confiscated 185 fighting dogs. When Rogers’s dogs and their puppies were carried off, his wife and children burst into tears. The dogs were the family pets. Every night, they would curl up on the couch and lie on their backs to be rubbed on their stomachs. “It’s not fair,” one of the children cried out.

Because dogmen have been known to break into animal shelters to steal confiscated pit bulls, Harris County stationed constables around the facility where the dogs had been taken. But there was no way, Belinda Smith told reporters, to rehabilitate dogs that had been bred to be so wildly aggressive toward other dogs. It was also important, she noted, to keep those dogs, especially the champion dogs belonging to Fat Don and Rogers, from passing on their fighting bloodlines. So the decision was made to euthanize all of them, including the pit bulls that Manning and Davis had used. Before they were put down, the officers showed up to say goodbye. “I’m not much of an emotional guy, and I knew it was the right thing to put those dogs down,” said Manning. “But when I was saying, ‘Good girl,’ to one of my dogs, petting her on the head, she started wagging her tail. It was not easy to walk away from that.”

The bust was trumpeted in the news as one of the biggest in the nation, and predictably, most citizens were outraged. Someone commented on the Houston Chronicle Web site that dogmen should be tied down, covered with pork chop grease, and mauled by “20 hungry pit bulls.” As it turned out, the animal rights organizations were not angry at all that Manning and Davis had fought dogs: They were thrilled that someone had finally gone after the dogmen.

But the writers on the dogfighting Web sites were furious that the informant, one of their own, had become a snitch. (Manning and Davis refuse to comment on whether the informant had struck a deal regarding any previous charges in return for his cooperation.) One described the cops as “scumbags” who’d entrapped the dogmen. On the Chronicle Web site, someone who said he wasn’t a dogman wrote, “It’s laughable that so-called mistreatment of animals gets more attention than many of the horrendous things that happen to humans every day.”

Nevertheless, the criminal cases were open-and-shut. By June of this year, almost all the defendants had worked out deals, including Fat Don, who, according to Smith, quietly agreed to a two-year felony sentence. To just about everyone’s surprise, however, one of the few dogmen who initially refused to cop a plea was White Boy Rob.

When I talked to Rogers, in early June, he and his family had left their Channelview trailer after receiving death threats and moved into a nearby apartment. Instead of working with dogs, Rogers was spending his evenings taming feral cats, getting them to drink milk out of a saucer he kept right outside the front door. “Maybe I’ll get them tame enough that the kids can adopt them,” he said.

I asked Rogers what he thought of Manning and Davis, who had just been named officers of the year by a Houston law enforcement organization. His voice almost softened—almost. “It never occurred to me, not once, that those boys were cops. I thought they wanted to be real dogmen, so I taught them how to fight the right way—with dignity and honor, not letting their dogs get chewed up. And I know, deep down, they started loving it as much as I did. I could tell they had the blood for it. But now they get to go free and get all kinds of publicity while I go off to prison.”

He paused. “It don’t matter. Locking me up ain’t nothing compared to what they’ve already done to my dogs. They even took away our two boxers and killed them. Do you think that’s right? Do you think any of those dogs really wanted to be rescued so they could have a needle stuck in their ass? Come on, now, you tell me who the monster is. All of you people who call yourselves civilized go to boxing matches. You watch wrestling, and you watch those Ultimate Fighting Championships on television. What’s really the difference here?”

After viewing the DPS videotapes of Rogers standing in the box at the Dog House, exhorting his dogs to keep fighting, Rogers’s attorney, Rick Detoto, a respected young Houston criminal defense attorney, knew it would be an uphill battle to get an acquittal. “But I agree with my client. Morally, a juror should have a problem with cops deliberately subjecting all these dogs to abuse in order to arrest someone else,” Detoto said. “Would those cops stick a child in a house where a suspected child abuser lives in order to catch him? I don’t think so. And I have to say, when you see the undercover officers in those videotapes, they look like they’re having a really good time.”

Manning and Davis insist they were just playacting and that they were never seduced by Rogers or the other dogmen. But they do admit that their experience taught them about the dogmen’s fierce devotion to what they do. “We definitely forced dogfighting around here to go more underground,” Manning said. “We’ve noticed the talk on the dogfighting Web sites has gotten a lot more coded. But we’ll never get dogfighting to go away. There will always be a show every weekend night.”

Though Rogers believed he could have taken the stand and convinced a jury that dogfighting was a legitimate sport and not a crime, he finally decided in late June to accept an offer from the district attorney’s office: He agreed to plead guilty and will serve a one-year felony sentence in county jail, which means he could be out in six months—not bad compared with the two-year sentence he could have received. Smith said she decided to offer him the deal because he had no prior criminal record, which would have allowed a jury to give him probation. But, she added, if he is caught dogfighting again, he can be sent away to prison for two to ten years.

When I asked Rogers if he would ever go back to dogfighting, he said, “I don’t know, to be honest with you. But I will tell you that every night, I dream about my dogs making their moves, feinting to the left and then attacking to the right. My dogs were great dogs. They were beautiful, strong dogs. Oh, man, they were beautiful.”

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