The Lost Dogs (5 page)

He’d grown up in Yorktown, Virginia, about twenty miles east of Surry and spent four years in the air force after high school. From there he went to work at the York County Sherriff’s Department, but eventually gave up police work to go into construction. When that business slowed he became a correctional officer before moving to his current job in Surry County. A former Eagle Scout and a son of the South, Brinkman has been known to attest in his deep drawl that in everything he undertakes he’s guided by the words of his “grand-daddy,” who taught him: “If you’re going to do something, do it all the way or don’t do it at all.” During his nine years in Surry, he received two commendations from U.S. attorneys.

Brinkman focused his energies on illegal narcotics. If someone was using or selling drugs in Surry County, they were, he would contend, “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Six years earlier, on August 31, 2000, Brinkman had been involved in the arrest of a local drug dealer named Benny Butts. When police arrived at Butts’s five-and-a-half-acre spread, they found not only drugs but evidence of dogfighting—more than thirty pit bulls, treadmills, videos, medical supplies, and paperwork relating to dogfights. Brinkman headed back to court to get an additional warrant that would allow him to search for and act on the dogfighting evidence. But while he was processing the paperwork, Butts walked in and said it was all right if Brinkman did the search.

A week later Butts was charged with drug possession, dogfighting, and multiple counts of animal cruelty. On the same day he gave Brinkman a written confession:

When the case went to trial the following February, all the charges were dropped. The judge declared Brinkman’s return to the site without the second warrant, something known as a consent search, illegal. Although consent searches are common, they are legally questionable and the commonwealth attorney, Gerald Poindexter, who represented Virginia in the case, accepted the judge’s ruling. Brinkman was flabbergasted. Butts was sent home—with most of his dogs and training equipment.

Butts stayed out of trouble for a while, but Brinkman kept an eye on him. Before long there were rumors that Butts was back into dealing and dogfighting. On December 16, 2006, Butts was arrested again, this time with a stash of marijuana and hashish. He was released on bail, but Brinkman was closing in.

He had an informant who could get inside Butts’s operation, and he was looking to put together a case that would finally land Butts in jail, but he didn’t want to take any chances with the local authorities. He was looking for something bigger. He had heard from Virginia State Police officers and an FBI agent that he had worked with that there was a USDA agent who was always eager to help, especially when it came to animal abuse cases. The guy’s name was Jim Knorr.

The two men hit it off immediately and began working on an investigation. They had gathered a lot of information through the informant, and as winter progressed they were approaching a critical mass of incriminating material. They held out for one last bit of evidence, a coup de grâce; the informant would videotape a dogfight on Butts’s property.

But something happened that brought the investigation to an immediate close. On February 16, 2007, Butts was found dead of a drug overdose.

Just like that, their case was over, but Brinkman and Knorr had recognized a bit of themselves in each other. A bond formed. They stayed in touch, but they had no idea how soon they’d be working together again.

A DOG WALKS THROUGH
a parking lot searching for something. He’s a three-year-old Dutch shepherd named Troy. The night is cool and dark, and Troy makes his way through the rows of cars, sniffing the early spring air. The light of a nearby Walmart catches his black and sand-speckled coat. The lot itself belongs to Royal Suite, a two-story dance club on Cunningham Drive in Hampton, Virginia.

Troy stops next to a Dodge Intrepid. His ears perk up and he sniffs more intently. He begins to bark at the trunk. The police officers who accompany him step forward and begin to search the car. Within minutes they have found three ounces of marijuana. When the owner comes out to claim his ride, he too is searched and arrested and charged with possession with intent to sell. His name is Davon Boddie.

Boddie had accomplished little of note during his previous twenty-six years. He had but one claim to fame. His first cousin was Michael Vick. Davon and Michael had always been close. They were the same age and had grown up in close proximity to each other. They played high school football together. Boddie sometimes hung out with Michael and his best friend, Quanis Phillips, another neighborhood kid whom Vick had befriended in sixth grade.

Phillips, who was known as Q, grew up playing sports with Vick and was also on that same high school team. When Vick first went off to college, Q went along to help Vick settle in. After a few months, Phillips moved back to Newport News, but the two remained as close as ever.

In the ensuing years Phillips worked at odd jobs to make money and had run into some trouble, getting convicted of possession of stolen property in 1997 and pleading guilty to misdemeanor possession of marijuana with intent to distribute in 1999. In 2000 he was convicted of violating drug control laws and contempt of court, and in 2001 he was again convicted of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. But whatever struggles he went through, they were eased by the pleasure of watching his best buddy become a national football hero. By January 2001, just three years after he left, Vick was back in Newport News to await the NFL draft. He was on the verge of becoming a millionaire, and Q was once again by his side.

Individually and together, they’d been dreaming of these days since they were kids: when NFL money would provide the life of comfort and security and maybe even decadence that they could never approach growing up. Besides what he achieved on the gridiron, Vick planned to become a force off the field as well, taking care of numerous family members and old friends, including Q, who would be his right hand in as-yet-unforeseen business ventures.

One such venture walked into their lives on a cold winter morning in Newport News. The pair stopped at a local barbershop where they ran into Tony Taylor, who was six years older than Vick and Phillips. It was known around the neighborhood that Taylor was into dogfighting. Vick had bought a pit bull, a house pet named Champagne, when he went to college, and she was a sweet dog that Vick doted on. But he knew what pit bulls could be trained to do. He was seven the first time he saw dogs fight, an unorganized street clash, and it was the first of many such battles he witnessed in the courtyard next to his home and in an open lot across the street. It was just one of the many things that went on in the open spaces around his home, as common and unquestioned as selling drugs or playing baseball.

Vick was drawn to the fights, and by the time he was twelve or thirteen, he was an active participant. He’d missed the action while he was away at school, so when he saw Taylor he asked about getting back in. Taylor explained that he’d met a guy with a big piece of property up in Surry County who ran a real dogfighting ring and this man had shown Taylor the ropes—how to keep dogs, buy them, breed them, train them. That guy’s name was Benny Butts. With Taylor’s knowledge and Vick’s money there were great possibilities. What the three men discussed that day was one part business opportunity, one part gangsta adventure—a shadow world of underground networks, secret locations, and big-money prizefights.

The metaphorical leap that seduces so many into the world of dogfighting was a short one for guys like Vick, Phillips, and Taylor. They saw themselves in the dogs. In the exterior toughness and bravado, to a degree, but even more in the animals’ willingness to take on any challenge, to endure pain and injury, to never give up despite long odds and great difficulty. Viewed in such light, the dogs are noble and heroic, and that is how these men view their own struggle against the disadvantages they’ve had to contend with. Even more, there is a certain godlike feeling that comes with knowing that these creatures of superior toughness and strength and will are a product of their own making. The dog men have bred and selected and trained these animals, perfect symbols of their own triumph.

By the time they left the barbershop, Vick, Phillips, and Taylor were business partners.

The plan was that Vick would be the money man and Phillips would oversee the operation while Taylor took care of the dogs. Later, Taylor’s cousin Purnell Peace, a veteran dog man, would join the group. To provide a front for the dogfighting ring, they would obtain a kennel license, house other people’s dogs, and build a Web site promoting their breeding business.

Taylor and Peace may not have been the best guys for Vick to go into business with. Taylor had been busted for drug trafficking in New York City in 1992
¹
and had spent seven months in a New York State prison. He followed that up with a cocaine possession arrest in 1996 that was dismissed after he completed a substance abuse program and one year of good behavior.

Although Vick was already a national celebrity and about to become the face of some NFL franchise, he was undeterred by the association with Taylor. He authorized Taylor to start looking for a piece of property to house the operation, and Taylor began scouting for land in Surry County, a rural territory across the James River from Jamestown, the first permanent European settlement in North America. Located roughly halfway between Richmond and Norfolk, a Navy town that is also the world headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the area had come to be known for its peanut farms, hams, and Christmas trees—the Virginia pine.

By the middle of spring, Taylor had identified a 15.7-acre tree-filled tract that seemed perfect for the group’s purpose. In June, slightly more than a month after he officially signed his first NFL contract, Vick bought 1915 Moonlight Road for about $34,000.

In 2001 the place was nothing but trees. But Taylor had the area closest to the road cleared. He had a trailer put in the yard, where he lived while taking care of the dogs. He had brought eight pit bulls that he already owned and in 2002 the group went on a buying spree. They purchased four dogs in North Carolina; six more along with six puppies in Richmond; a male named Tiny in New York City, and a female named Jane from a guy in Williamsburg. That same year Taylor came up with the name, Bad Newz Kennels, a nod to the crew’s hometown. He printed up T-shirts and headbands with the name emblazoned on them.

As the operation grew, Taylor had the sheds built and painted black. He added a high-end kennel with twenty numbered stalls, concrete floors, chain-link walls, molded concrete water bowls, a drain that fed into a septic tank and a corrugated aluminum roof. He also altered one of the sheds. At first they were all one-story structures, but a second floor was added to the largest one. It was accessible only by a pull-down attic staircase. Taylor hoped that its limited accessibility would help keep the Bad Newz pit a secret.

In 2004, the trailer was removed and a large white brick house was built. Vick stayed over on many occasions but never actually lived in the house. Several different people had, with Vick’s permission, made it their home. One of them was Davon Boddie. In the early days of Vick’s career, Boddie would visit Atlanta to hang out with his cousin, and as with Phillips, Vick had done all that he could to help Boddie, but it had not amounted to much.

Boddie had worked for a bit as a cook and now harbored dreams of some sort of career as an entertainer, but he had been busted for marijuana possession once before in Newport News and seemed most interested in hanging around his cousin’s house, living the good life. The night he was arrested for the second time, outside Royal Suite in Hampton, the night a dog had sniffed out marijuana in the back of his car, he gave his address as 1915 Moonlight Road.

THE BROWN DOG WITH
the floppy ear lay down in the clearing to give her neck a rest from holding up the heavy chain. A few days earlier the men had taken some of the dogs away, including the little red dog that had been chained up next to the brown dog. None of those dogs had come back. Her bent ear hung in its state of eternal questioning, the brown dog lifted her head and sniffed the air. She picked up no trace of the little red dog or the others. The sun was not yet directly overhead and already it was hot. The dog panted and yawned.

A few miles away, Bill Brinkman was fighting the heat as well. As temperatures pushed into the high eighties with 86-percent humidity, Brinkman sweltered in long pants and a bulletproof vest. This type of weather was normal for Surry County in the summer, but it was a record high for April 25, nine days after Davon Boddie’s drug arrest in Hampton and only two days after the latest Bad Newz testing session ended in brutality and death.