The grainy footage shows two snarling pit bulls in a dimly lit barn, staring each other down through a haze of cigarette smoke. Walled in by a makeshift ring of three-foot-high plywood planks, the collarless dogs twitch and wag their tails, expending nervous energy like prizefighters shadowboxing in the ring in the moments before the opening bell.
Brian Stauffer
Keegan Hamilton
John Bacon, sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for dogfighting, says of the investigators who locked him up: "It's like they broke the law to get what they wanted."
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Both dogs are males and have a tan coat and a white belly, which makes it difficult to tell them apart. They're about 10 months old—young for fighters. This is their first taste of combat.
Each dog has a handler who grips it by the scruff of the neck and positions it opposite its foe in the corner of the 16-by-16-foot ring. When they're released, the pit bulls collide with a dull thud. One dog lands on its back and the other pounces, grabbing hold with its jaws. The two animals spend the next several minutes growling and panting, locked in a ferocious struggle.
John Bacon, who owns the dog that's on top, bends at the waist and rests his hands on the knees of his baggy overalls, hovering close to the tangle of fur and flesh. He cajoles his pit bull to release its bite and improve its position. The dogs tumble over one another and Bacon jumps out of the way. "There you go!" he shouts. "That's where you want to be!"
The other dog is getting mauled. It emits a piercing squeal, followed by a whimper. Laughter ripples through the crowd. Joseph Addison, a spectator who wears his hair in a jumble of chin-length braids, suggests it's time to stop the match.
"This motherfucker through, man," he says to Bacon. "He's done."
Using a small, wedge-shaped piece of wood called a break stick, Bacon pries open his dog's jaws, releasing its opponent. The animals are separated and taken back to their respective corners to "scratch." If they charge again, the fight continues. If one dog refuses, it will be branded a "cur"—an almost certain death sentence.
At the moment of truth, the vanquished dog cowers while Bacon's dog attacks without hesitation, biting down and thrashing its powerful neck in order to inflict maximum damage. Again the handlers separate the dogs. The fight is over.
Someone in the crowd asks the losing dog's owners what they plan to do with it.
"I'll take 'im home," one says.
"Take him home?" comes the incredulous reply. "Look at this shit! You'll take him home?"
"Yeah," the man repeats, declining the offer to use an impromptu electric chair: an extension cord rigged with alligator clips attached to one end. "I'll take 'im home."
A year and a half later, Bacon describes the scrap in the East St. Louis barn as "just a little wrasslin' match." In dogfighting parlance, it's known as a "roll"—a brief sparring session used to gauge whether a pup has the fighting spirit known simply as "game."
"A contract fight is something you prepare for," Bacon explains. "A roll is just 10, maybe 15 minutes. The dogs ain't gettin' hurt too much."
He's a carpenter by trade, but Bacon knows a lot about dogfighting. Still, there was one thing he didn't know on March 22, 2009.
He was unaware that his dog's opponent, Hammer, was the property of the United States government.
The dog was purchased, trained, and brought to the fight by Terry Mills and Jeff Heath, veteran Missouri State Highway Patrol officers who were conducting an extensive undercover investigation into the secretive and brutal world of organized pit bull fighting and breeding. Both men wore video- and audio-recording equipment concealed in their clothes.
Four months after the fight in the barn, a multi-agency task force conducted a series of raids in eight states. Agents arrested 26 dogfighters, including Bacon, and seized more than 500 pit bulls—the largest dogfighting bust in American history. In order to make their case, investigators had spent a year and a half taking part in the same gruesome activities for which they would later make the arrests.
In early 2008, Terry Mills was working on a domestic-terrorism task force headed by the FBI. The unit had received a tip that a "known domestic terror group" was standing guard at dogfights in rural Missouri.
Mills cultivated a source with ties to Bob Hackman, a renowned breeder of fighting pit bulls. The confidential informant worked as a "yard boy," feeding and watering the dogs and "shaping" them for upcoming fights with a variety of training exercises.
Mills and an FBI agent outfitted their snitch with a wire and eavesdropped as he attended a series of dogfights in northeast Missouri. But after three months of sleuthing, they'd made no headway in the domestic-terrorism probe.
"The FBI said, 'OK, we're done. We're pulling out completely,'" Mills recalls.
Where the FBI saw a dead end, Mills and fellow Missouri State Highway Patrol officer Jeff Heath sensed an opportunity.
The Michael Vick case had concluded less than a year earlier, when the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback pleaded guilty to a felony animal-fighting conspiracy charge and was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison. Vick's high-profile indictment—complete with grisly descriptions of how he and his associates hanged, drowned, electrocuted, and shot several dogs—thrust dogfighting into the national consciousness. Congress passed a new law, the Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act, which took effect in May 2007 and made dogfighting a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.
