Authorities in New York and California recently achieved three of the biggest dogfighting busts on record––but in New Orleans, more than 50 reports of dogfighting collected by the New Orleans Anti-Dogfighting Task Force over the past 18 months reportedly haven’t brought so much as one arrest.
Task force founder and League In Support of Animals executive director Jeff Dorson on February 9, 1999 formally complained about the inaction to police superintendent Richard Pennington.
Local high school teacher Anne B. Churchill supported Dorson’s complaint with pages of transcripts of classroom conversations about dogfighting, to show how the nonenforcement of anti-dogfighting laws affects the attitudes of young people.
Said Dorson, “LISA has taken this investigation as far as we can without more active police assistance and direct intervention.”
Raid and theft
The first of the big California busts came on December 17, 1998, when Galt police and Sacramento County Animal Control seized 55 pit bull terriers, dogfighting souvenirs and training equipment, a stolen handgun, and what they termed “a sophisticated marijuana cultivation operation” from veterinary technician Cesar Cerda, 26, and his wife Mercedes Ruiz Monterrubio, 25.
Eighteen of the pit bulls were stolen from the county animal shelter on Christmas Day, in a raid police attributed to operatives of American Pit Enforcers, APE for short, a clandestine organization of alleged weapons experts and martial arts experts who apparently travel the U.S. making a living stealing back fighting dogs who have been seized by police and/or humane investigators.
But only two and a half hours after the shelter break-in, police in Manteca, California, stopped Cody Eugene Grimes, 21, of Natomas, California, on suspicion of drunk driving––and found the stolen pit bulls in the back of his van.
Back to the shelter the dogs went, where shelter director Patricia Wilcox admitted her facilities were severely strained by having to keep them all indefinitely as evidence.
The big New York bust came on January 7 in Allegany County, where 46 pit bulls were seized from William Reaves, 30, of Clarksville, and Charles Felton Jr., 40, of Rochester. Police about two weeks earlier seized approximately a dozen pit bulls from a site in Orleans County, but whether the raids were related was not clear. There were indications in local media coverage that the alleged Reaves/Felton operation was the same one that local police were reportedly set to raid in 1997, when suddenly all the dogs disappeared.