http://www.southeasttexaslive.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17087403&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512588&rfi=6
Homicide investigation veers into secret world of pit bull fighting
By: F.A. KRIFT, The Enterprise
08/20/2006
CLEVELAND - Thomas Weigner, shot above the right knee, bled to death Aug. 1 in rural Liberty County.
His tied-up family, including three children, witnessed it while the gun-wielding robbers searched for money and firearms.
Here - in a brick ranch-style home down County Road 2252, which eventually leads to the Trinity River bottom - is where at least three masked men raided Weigner's fenced-off property.
Weigner, 27, was awakened by his barking American pit bull terriers, about 300 of them on 24 acres about 60 miles west of Beaumont.
The crime could have been a common thug's smash-and-grab job gone wrong, but investigators also suspect Weigner's dogfighting ties and money might have been factors.
Weigner's death opened a small gateway into the dogfighting subculture that local authorities rarely glimpse, according to Southeast Texas investigators. The dogfighting society stretches throughout the region as well as across the nation and overseas, they said.
Lawmen believe Weigner was at or near the top tier of the dogfighting underground, and authorities from the FBI and Texas Department of Public Safety are investigating the case.
"It's all part of a larger dogfighting operation," said John Goodwin, a deputy manager of animal-fighting issues and investigator for the Humane Society of the United States. "It didn't end with Thomas Weigner being shot. ... He's in a network at the top of the (dogfighting) list."
The dogfighting network ties together men like Weigner and his Westpenn Kennels, his elite-bloodline breeding operation, and local amateurs and "hobbyists" entering the game with dogs not genetically altered to be the true pit fighting dogs that Weigner developed, Goodwin said in a telephone conversation from his Washington, D.C., office.
Southeast Texas authorities who investigate pit bull operations said the subculture is so closed and secretive that busts are rare.
In Jefferson County, authorities had 23 dogfighting cases in the last two years, Assistant District Attorney Ann Manes said, adding that one person could be charged with a count for each dog involved. Overall in the region since 2000, at least 52 people have been arrested and 25 dogs seized in connection with suspected dogfighting.
Nationally, hundreds of dogfights are busted each year and as many 20,000 people, mostly men, are involved, Goodwin said.
Goodwin said the traditionally rural activity has become more popular in urban areas such as Beaumont and Houston. However, the city operations are largely disorganized and difficult to bust, he said.
Manes, who prosecutes local cruelty cases, said dogfighters typically are charged with owning or training a dog with the intent to use it in a fighting exhibition - a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Rarely are they caught during dogfights, attended by screaming spectators throwing down bets.
"It's almost always circumstantial (evidence)," Manes said.
A difficult pursuit
Sgt. Mark Timmers, a Houston Humane Society and Harris County animal cruelty investigator, said a "blind man" could recognize a fight occurred with so much evidence spread over a crime scene. This includes evidence such as a pit, blood-smeared walls and scar-faced dogs.
Nevertheless, culpability is tough to prove, creating a frustrating and sometimes futile chase for investigators, Timmers said.
Beaumont police Detective Tina Lewallen, who investigates Beaumont's animal cruelty crimes, regularly sees fighting dogs with punctured necks, scarred snouts and torn-off ears when they are seized from owners suspected of animal cruelty.
But a significant dogfight hasn't been busted in Beaumont since November 2003, when police arrested eight people and animal control took 15 dogs.
When police arrived, spectators scattered like startled quail, Lewallen said. Money flew in the air while officers detained anyone they could grab.
Meanwhile, the dogs kept fighting, she said.
Beaumont Animal Control Supervisor Greg Parker, who arrived at the scene 20 minutes after police, remembered bloody, exhausted dogs on Idylwood Street.
Pit-bull handlers regularly train fighting dogs inside the city limits, Lewallen said, and then they take them to large fights in surrounding rural towns such as Cheek and China so the fighting dogs and rowdy bettors avoid attracting unwanted attention.
"They have secret codes to find out where the dogfights are," Lewallen said.
Sheriff's department officials in Hardin, Newton and Tyler counties believe dogfighting occurs within their jurisdictions, but there have been no busts in recent memory.
It takes surveillance, manpower and extensive intelligence to make a bust, Timmers said.
Often, it's just by accident or luck.
In 2000, for example, the Jasper County Sheriff's Department arrested 49 spectators who attended a dogfight. Attending a dogfight is a Class C misdemeanor carrying a maximum penalty of a $500 fine.
Jasper County Sheriff's Detective Aaron Tippett said officers just happened to be within 15 minutes of the fight's location just west of Kirbyville.
Like the Beaumont bust, money flew in the air, onlookers screamed and then dashed in every imaginable direction, Tippett said. Two men even ran through a barbed-wire fence, according to The Enterprise archives.
"The problem is most of the people that (attend) pit bull fights are thieves anyway," Tippett said. "Thieves stealing from thieves. It doesn't get reported that often."
Breeding operations such as Weigner's Westpenn Kennels are easier to find, but even in this case, it was not because of a complaint against dogfighting. It was Weigner's death that exposed the operation and led to the seizure of 285 dogs living in cruel conditions.
"Law enforcement, we're basically unaware of what is going on," Timmers said. "It's very organized. ... I'm not talking about the backyard stuff."
In fact, many Web sites associated with the guarded society require references to gain access. Only the highly trusted are invited.
A growing concern
In the fighting underground, the dogmen romanticize their "sport," claiming they return the breed to its 19th century English roots when fighting's popularity grew, Diane Jessup, a Washington-based pit bull breeder, authority and author, said in a telephone conversation. The dogfighters have made the breed a status symbol for machismo. They live through the breed and attract younger men by dramatizing the sport.
Bloodlines developed largely by venerable white men now are being promoted by a hip-hop culture, Jessup said. The bloodline history and the American pit bull terrier's gameness fascinate some common citizens.
"There are a whole bunch of people out there that are attracted by dogs with game pedigrees," she said.
The breed's keenly aggressive nature makes them the elite fighting dog, better than any other breed, Jessup said. So owning a pit bull is a statement of dominance, she said, and for some, hopefully, an invitation into the dogfighting world.
Goodwin said the pit bull breeding industry grows with it. And the fighting involves new players who are more aggressive and violent.
For lawful breeders, illegitimate practices have smeared the breed, pit bull enthusiasts say. The dogs are human-friendly, they say, but the over-breeding and the haphazard sale to anyone willing to buy has put the breed in the wrong hands.
"They're scumbags," said Jessup, who trains pit bulls for police work. "There's no mystique there in the dogfighting rings. When you're close to it, you see it's really a disturbed bunch of individuals that are living through their dogs. They talk about how much they respect them. ... No, they're idiots."
Secret world revealed
During the Aug. 7 pit bull seizure at Weigner's property, training equipment, including a treadmill and water tank, was discovered, said Liberty County Sheriff Greg Arthur, whose department is handling the homicide investigation.
However, investigators found no evidence on site of dogfighting, Arthur said.
But where the investigation could lead is what compels authorities.
"This is the first time when it's been such a high-level player," Goodwin said of Weigner's homicide and its connection to dogfighting. "This time it was somebody big."
Goodwin says Weigner was a professional dogfighter on whom Goodwin and the Humane Society have kept watch since he gained prominence in the fighting world two years ago - about the time he moved to Liberty County from Pennsylvania.
Dick Wheelan, the attorney for Weigner's wife, Julie Laban, said in a telephone interview from his Houston office that Laban denied all claims of dogfighting.
Arthur said the crime's link to suspected robberies of alleged dogmen in Michigan, Georgia and South Carolina is being investigated.
Goodwin believes the crimes are linked.
"When you have these high-end dogfights, you have violent men who come in for a violent blood sport," Goodwin said. "They gamble large sums of money on it. Of course, they all bring guns, because they don't want to be robbed and lose those hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"When you mix that sort of adrenaline and testosterone with a violent blood sport and all that money, you've got yourself a combustible situation and sometimes it erupts.
"We've heard about shootouts at fights, but now it's moving to a new level where they are following people to their homes and killing them."
For Liberty County's Arthur, the homicide is a top priority that uncovered a world he knew little about.
"I didn't realize dogfighting was as big an industry as it is," Arthur said in his office. "I've learned more about dogfighting than I wanted to know."
fakrift@beaumontenterprise.com
Homicide investigation veers into secret world of pit bull fighting
By: F.A. KRIFT, The Enterprise
08/20/2006
CLEVELAND - Thomas Weigner, shot above the right knee, bled to death Aug. 1 in rural Liberty County.
His tied-up family, including three children, witnessed it while the gun-wielding robbers searched for money and firearms.
Here - in a brick ranch-style home down County Road 2252, which eventually leads to the Trinity River bottom - is where at least three masked men raided Weigner's fenced-off property.
Weigner, 27, was awakened by his barking American pit bull terriers, about 300 of them on 24 acres about 60 miles west of Beaumont.
The crime could have been a common thug's smash-and-grab job gone wrong, but investigators also suspect Weigner's dogfighting ties and money might have been factors.
Weigner's death opened a small gateway into the dogfighting subculture that local authorities rarely glimpse, according to Southeast Texas investigators. The dogfighting society stretches throughout the region as well as across the nation and overseas, they said.
Lawmen believe Weigner was at or near the top tier of the dogfighting underground, and authorities from the FBI and Texas Department of Public Safety are investigating the case.
"It's all part of a larger dogfighting operation," said John Goodwin, a deputy manager of animal-fighting issues and investigator for the Humane Society of the United States. "It didn't end with Thomas Weigner being shot. ... He's in a network at the top of the (dogfighting) list."
The dogfighting network ties together men like Weigner and his Westpenn Kennels, his elite-bloodline breeding operation, and local amateurs and "hobbyists" entering the game with dogs not genetically altered to be the true pit fighting dogs that Weigner developed, Goodwin said in a telephone conversation from his Washington, D.C., office.
Southeast Texas authorities who investigate pit bull operations said the subculture is so closed and secretive that busts are rare.
In Jefferson County, authorities had 23 dogfighting cases in the last two years, Assistant District Attorney Ann Manes said, adding that one person could be charged with a count for each dog involved. Overall in the region since 2000, at least 52 people have been arrested and 25 dogs seized in connection with suspected dogfighting.
Nationally, hundreds of dogfights are busted each year and as many 20,000 people, mostly men, are involved, Goodwin said.
Goodwin said the traditionally rural activity has become more popular in urban areas such as Beaumont and Houston. However, the city operations are largely disorganized and difficult to bust, he said.
Manes, who prosecutes local cruelty cases, said dogfighters typically are charged with owning or training a dog with the intent to use it in a fighting exhibition - a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Rarely are they caught during dogfights, attended by screaming spectators throwing down bets.
"It's almost always circumstantial (evidence)," Manes said.
A difficult pursuit
Sgt. Mark Timmers, a Houston Humane Society and Harris County animal cruelty investigator, said a "blind man" could recognize a fight occurred with so much evidence spread over a crime scene. This includes evidence such as a pit, blood-smeared walls and scar-faced dogs.
Nevertheless, culpability is tough to prove, creating a frustrating and sometimes futile chase for investigators, Timmers said.
Beaumont police Detective Tina Lewallen, who investigates Beaumont's animal cruelty crimes, regularly sees fighting dogs with punctured necks, scarred snouts and torn-off ears when they are seized from owners suspected of animal cruelty.
But a significant dogfight hasn't been busted in Beaumont since November 2003, when police arrested eight people and animal control took 15 dogs.
When police arrived, spectators scattered like startled quail, Lewallen said. Money flew in the air while officers detained anyone they could grab.
Meanwhile, the dogs kept fighting, she said.
Beaumont Animal Control Supervisor Greg Parker, who arrived at the scene 20 minutes after police, remembered bloody, exhausted dogs on Idylwood Street.
Pit-bull handlers regularly train fighting dogs inside the city limits, Lewallen said, and then they take them to large fights in surrounding rural towns such as Cheek and China so the fighting dogs and rowdy bettors avoid attracting unwanted attention.
"They have secret codes to find out where the dogfights are," Lewallen said.
Sheriff's department officials in Hardin, Newton and Tyler counties believe dogfighting occurs within their jurisdictions, but there have been no busts in recent memory.
It takes surveillance, manpower and extensive intelligence to make a bust, Timmers said.
Often, it's just by accident or luck.
In 2000, for example, the Jasper County Sheriff's Department arrested 49 spectators who attended a dogfight. Attending a dogfight is a Class C misdemeanor carrying a maximum penalty of a $500 fine.
Jasper County Sheriff's Detective Aaron Tippett said officers just happened to be within 15 minutes of the fight's location just west of Kirbyville.
Like the Beaumont bust, money flew in the air, onlookers screamed and then dashed in every imaginable direction, Tippett said. Two men even ran through a barbed-wire fence, according to The Enterprise archives.
"The problem is most of the people that (attend) pit bull fights are thieves anyway," Tippett said. "Thieves stealing from thieves. It doesn't get reported that often."
Breeding operations such as Weigner's Westpenn Kennels are easier to find, but even in this case, it was not because of a complaint against dogfighting. It was Weigner's death that exposed the operation and led to the seizure of 285 dogs living in cruel conditions.
"Law enforcement, we're basically unaware of what is going on," Timmers said. "It's very organized. ... I'm not talking about the backyard stuff."
In fact, many Web sites associated with the guarded society require references to gain access. Only the highly trusted are invited.
A growing concern
In the fighting underground, the dogmen romanticize their "sport," claiming they return the breed to its 19th century English roots when fighting's popularity grew, Diane Jessup, a Washington-based pit bull breeder, authority and author, said in a telephone conversation. The dogfighters have made the breed a status symbol for machismo. They live through the breed and attract younger men by dramatizing the sport.
Bloodlines developed largely by venerable white men now are being promoted by a hip-hop culture, Jessup said. The bloodline history and the American pit bull terrier's gameness fascinate some common citizens.
"There are a whole bunch of people out there that are attracted by dogs with game pedigrees," she said.
The breed's keenly aggressive nature makes them the elite fighting dog, better than any other breed, Jessup said. So owning a pit bull is a statement of dominance, she said, and for some, hopefully, an invitation into the dogfighting world.
Goodwin said the pit bull breeding industry grows with it. And the fighting involves new players who are more aggressive and violent.
For lawful breeders, illegitimate practices have smeared the breed, pit bull enthusiasts say. The dogs are human-friendly, they say, but the over-breeding and the haphazard sale to anyone willing to buy has put the breed in the wrong hands.
"They're scumbags," said Jessup, who trains pit bulls for police work. "There's no mystique there in the dogfighting rings. When you're close to it, you see it's really a disturbed bunch of individuals that are living through their dogs. They talk about how much they respect them. ... No, they're idiots."
Secret world revealed
During the Aug. 7 pit bull seizure at Weigner's property, training equipment, including a treadmill and water tank, was discovered, said Liberty County Sheriff Greg Arthur, whose department is handling the homicide investigation.
However, investigators found no evidence on site of dogfighting, Arthur said.
But where the investigation could lead is what compels authorities.
"This is the first time when it's been such a high-level player," Goodwin said of Weigner's homicide and its connection to dogfighting. "This time it was somebody big."
Goodwin says Weigner was a professional dogfighter on whom Goodwin and the Humane Society have kept watch since he gained prominence in the fighting world two years ago - about the time he moved to Liberty County from Pennsylvania.
Dick Wheelan, the attorney for Weigner's wife, Julie Laban, said in a telephone interview from his Houston office that Laban denied all claims of dogfighting.
Arthur said the crime's link to suspected robberies of alleged dogmen in Michigan, Georgia and South Carolina is being investigated.
Goodwin believes the crimes are linked.
"When you have these high-end dogfights, you have violent men who come in for a violent blood sport," Goodwin said. "They gamble large sums of money on it. Of course, they all bring guns, because they don't want to be robbed and lose those hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"When you mix that sort of adrenaline and testosterone with a violent blood sport and all that money, you've got yourself a combustible situation and sometimes it erupts.
"We've heard about shootouts at fights, but now it's moving to a new level where they are following people to their homes and killing them."
For Liberty County's Arthur, the homicide is a top priority that uncovered a world he knew little about.
"I didn't realize dogfighting was as big an industry as it is," Arthur said in his office. "I've learned more about dogfighting than I wanted to know."
fakrift@beaumontenterprise.com
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