Bringing Down the Dogmen
How a pair of undercover cops infiltrated the secret world of Houston dogfighting.
Rob Rogers (a.k.a. White Boy Rob), photographed on June 28 with a pit bull from a Houston kennel. Rogers, whose fighting pit bulls were euthanized last December, began serving a prison sentence on July 29.
Photograph by Jeff Wilson
DANTE says: DOG FIGHTING STILL IS GOING ON AN VICK WILL BE ON TOP AGAIN AND PEOPLE JUST HAVE TO GET OVER ALL OF THIS (August 19th, 2009 at 9:52am)
The “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 above-ground 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 offspring 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.”
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