by Jim Gorant
Whatever Brinkman’s past dealings with the local officials might have led him to believe about their intentions or abilities, Gill had no reason to think they wouldn’t advance and succeed with the case at the state level. And the state charges were serious, carrying penalties of up to five years in prison and a $2,500 fine. But that didn’t mean Gill was walking away completely. At the end of the meeting he summarized the situation: “We have to give them a chance to do their job,” he said. “And if they don’t, then we will.”
Surry County is a quiet place. In the county seat, Surry, there’s one light, and even that one is a blinker. There are short stretches of houses lined up next to one another, but it’s far more common to drive on Surry’s curving roads without another car in sight, widespread farms moving past like islands seen through a porthole. There are only seven thousand people in the entire county and everyone knows everyone, or at least seems to. There hasn’t been a felony murder case in forty years, and commonwealth attorney is a part-time position.
Gerald Poindexter, one of only two practicing attorneys in Surry, became county attorney in 1972, while his wife, Gammiel, was elected the commonwealth attorney, the person charged with prosecuting cases in the area on behalf of the state. But in 1995, Gammiel was appointed the general district court judge for the Sixth Judicial Circuit in Hopewell. Poindexter rushed into the void left by his wife, winning election as commonwealth attorney, and holding both positions for a number of years before giving up the county job.
When he entered the small conference room in the Surry County municipal building at 10:00 A.M. on May 21, he was wearing a light-colored suit and tie. His wiry gray and black hair was brushed back from a wide, freckled face dominated by a bushy mustache. According to Knorr’s memo recounting the meeting, Pointdexter opened with a question: “Does anyone have evidence that Michael Vick is involved in dogfighting?” he asked in a smooth baritone. Assembled before him to review the investigation were the county administrator, Tyrone Franklin; three representatives of the Virginia State Police; Sheriff Brown; animal control officer Jamie Smith; Brinkman and Knorr; and Poindexter’s assistant, Robin Ely.
Brinkman spoke first, reviewing the details of what they had so far. In addition to the evidence seized, they had Brownie and at least two people in federal prison that could place Vick at dogfights on the property. Poindexter listened but responded by changing the subject. He may not have been in the best of moods, as the day before an animal control officer from another town had called him out in the media for not bringing charges yet. He made it clear he was unhappy about what had been printed and said it angered him when people suggested he would never charge Vick.
And yet, in the next breath, he contended that all the evidence they’d assembled so far was obtained illegally. He didn’t think it was legal to have dogs sniff cars in a public place, thus invalidating the Boddie arrest that led to the search at 1915 Moonlight Road, and he didn’t think it was legal to have the animal control officer along on a drug search, so Officer Smith’s testimony, which led to the warrant to search for dogfighting evidence, was invalid.
The Virginia State Police officers in the room offered that dog sniffing in public places had been challenged and ruled legal and others present testified that having an animal control officer along on a drug bust was standard procedure. Still, Poindexter said he would submit both warrants to the Virginia Attorney General’s office for review.
When Knorr finally got a chance to speak, he quickly established his identity and explained that he would be able to assist Brinkman with the witness interviews and have the blood analyzed, although he’d been told that any such analysis would be better if the lab could have a piece of the actual stained wood instead of only the swabs.
He went on to explain that according to Brownie, two days before the initial raid, Vick, Peace, Phillips, and Oscar Allen, another member of the crew, had been testing dogs in the big shed. When they were done they identified about eight or nine dogs that did not pass muster. The Bad Newz crew killed the dogs. Afterward, Vick paid Brownie $100 to dig two holes and bury the dogs. Brownie dug the holes but he refused to do the burials. Phillips and Peace did it instead.
They literally knew where the bodies were buried, Knorr argued. Through Brownie they also had very specific details about how the dogs were killed. If they could obtain another search warrant, then go back and find the carcasses, it would provide them with more evidence against Vick’s operation and establish Brownie as a credible witness, especially if the dogs showed injuries that matched the ways in which he said they were killed.
Based on all of this, Knorr proposed a second search of the property. Combined with the physical evidence they’d already collected—the paperwork, treadmills, food, supplements, bloodstained carpets, and the dogs themselves—it could be enough to seal the case. Dogfighting convictions had been won in Virginia recently with far less backup. Just not in Surry County, where the biggest dogfighting case they’d ever brought—the Benny Butts case—ended in disaster because of an illegal search.
Poindexter considered the information, and there was general consensus that a second search should proceed, but the conversation moved on without a firm decision. Poindexter wondered aloud if a press release should be issued following the meeting, and one was drafted so that everyone could approve it. It had been two hours since the meeting started, and everyone began to gather their belongings and prepare to leave. Knorr wasn’t satisfied.
“Excuse me,” he said, “does everyone agree we should go forward with the second search?” Brinkman said yes. The Virginia State Police said yes. Everyone looked to Poindexter.
“What do you think, Sheriff?” Poindexter responded.
“I agree with the others,” Brown said.
“Okay,” said Poindexter, “you’re the investigators.”
9
JIM KNORR STOOD NEAR a boat launch at the Hog Island Wildlife Management Area. He strapped on his bulletproof vest and checked his weapon. It was a Wednesday afternoon, two days after the meeting in which he had convinced Poindexter that a second search was needed to dig up the bodies of the recently killed dogs.
Straight out Route 650 on the James River, this state park was the local police’s favorite staging area, and it was where Brinkman had assembled before the initial raid. The appeal of this spot was its seclusion, and as Knorr stood there he could see only blacktop, reeds, and water. That, and twenty or thirty other law enforcement officials gathered to prep for the second raid on 1915 Moonlight Road. The group included Bill Brinkman and Virginia State Police officers, including a SWAT team and a forensics team. The plan was the same as last time: SWAT would go in first to secure the property, then everyone else would move in to finish the business at hand.
Among the vehicles and equipment gathered were shovels, nose plugs, and body bags. The VSP forensics unit would do most of the heavy lifting on the exhumations, but what they would do once they unearthed the dogs remained an open question. Ideally the bodies would go into some sort of cold storage to preserve them as evidence, but Knorr had called around to a few such places and none were thrilled by the idea of stockpiling dead dogs for an indeterminate amount of time.
Normally, Knorr wouldn’t have forged on with such an important question unanswered, but he was particularly eager to get back on the property and dig. Sometime between May 7 and May 18 the house had been broken into and burglarized. On the one hand this seemed neither outrageous nor alarming. The house was now both notorious and unoccupied, so there was a chance criminals and souvenir seekers had come to clean out whatever they could find. The missing items included three plasma TVs—sixty-two, forty-two, and thirty-two inches—two floor buffers, a vacuum, a leather sofa, and an upright washer and dryer, all valued at a total of $17,550.
On the other hand, Knorr knew there was a possibility the Bad Newz crew had taken the stuff themselves to keep it from being confiscated and had reported it stolen to cover their tracks. Even mor
e frightening, Knorr wondered if they were removing evidence from the house, and using burglary claims to give them an out in case investigators noticed anything missing.
He suspected the worst, which was all the more reason why he was happy Brinkman had secured a warrant, a team had been assembled, and they were less than an hour away from executing the search. As the group huddled for one last run-through of the plan, Brinkman’s phone rang. He walked off as he spoke, then closed the phone and turned around.
“We’re done,” he said. “We’re shut down.”
“What?” Knorr said.
“That was Brown. He and Poindexter said we can’t go forward with the warrant, said there was something wrong with it. Also said Vick has sold the house.”
Knorr exhaled through tight lips. “Is that normal?”
“In ten years,” Brinkman said, “he hasn’t questioned one of my warrants.”
Knorr pulled out his own phone. “Mike Gill, please,” he said, then waited in silence. “Mike,” he said at last, “it’s Jim Knorr. We have a situation.”
The next night Knorr was driving to Baltimore’s Camden Yards. The Orioles were hosting the Toronto Blue Jays and Knorr was going to the game with his son and his son’s friend. Knorr’s phone rang. It was Mike Gill, and he wanted to talk about obtaining a federal warrant in the next few days to go after the missing evidence.
Knorr was on board. After the search was canceled, Brinkman assumed Poindexter would make his objections known. Once those were addressed, Brinkman would be able to obtain a new warrant and move forward. That sounded good on paper, but Knorr was too amped up and pissed off to sit around and wait, so he drove to Virginia Beach to see Brownie. For all of the time he and Brinkman had spent talking to Brownie, neither had ever put anything down on paper. Knorr spent the day typing out Brownie’s entire story and grilling him for specific details about where the dogs were buried. If Mike Gill wanted to get a federal warrant and go after the dead dogs, Knorr was more ready than ever.
His only concerns were organizational. He needed to assemble a new team that would include USDA agents, Virginia State Police, and SWAT. He wasn’t certain of everyone’s availability and how fast he could pull everything together. Not only that, but two more federal inmates had come forward to offer potential evidence against Vick, and he and Brinkman were scheduled to interview those men the following week.
By the time the call was over, Gill had decided they should wait a week. The jailhouse interviews, if they proved productive, would only bolster the warrant request, and it would give Knorr time to muster the troops. When Knorr finally hung up, his car was approaching Camden Yards. He looked at his son and the friend, who had listened to only half of the wide-ranging discussion about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of a confidential case. They stared back, awaiting explanation. “You didn’t hear a thing,” Knorr said. “Got it?”
On Tuesday, May 29, Jim Knorr was preparing for his meeting with the first of the three prisoners that was to take place the next day, when another storm hit the news. The Surry County Sheriff’s office issued a press release. It read:
A Search warrant issued on May 23, 2007 for 1915 Moonlight Road has not been executed at this time at the request of the Surry County Sheriff’s Office and the Commonwealth’s Attorney.
The investigation continues.
The text of the message gave no reason why the search had been halted and Sheriff Brown remained silent, but Poindexter later told reporters that he and Brown “didn’t like the wording.”
Although he had said at the outset that he wasn’t going to try the case in the media, the commonwealth attorney had been frequently quoted in the press and the accumulated impact of his statements was confounding.
“Much of the confusion over the Vick case and many of the questions center on Poindexter’s comments about the evidence he has found in the month since the raid on Vick’s property,” George Dohrmann wrote on SI.com. “At various times, Poindexter has said there is no evidence Vick was involved, that he saw clear evidence of dogfighting, that there were no witnesses to dogfighting on the property, that there were witnesses who claimed Vick fought dogs. And then, on Thursday, when a reporter from WAVY-TV in Virginia asked if Poindexter had evidence that put Vick at dogfights, Poindexter replied: ‘Yes. We have informants. We have people who are volunteering to make those allegations.’ ”
Part of the problem seems to have been a simple lack of clarity. At times the prosecutor appeared to be saying what he believed based on what he’d seen and been told. At other moments he apparently addressed what he could prove based on the evidence he had in hand. At one point he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I don’t to date have one investigative report. I have nothing on my desk. But I’m in touch with people who assure me they can provide me the stuff.” In other words, what he knew and what he could use in court were two different things.
Taken individually and carefully parsed in this way, most of Poindexter’s statements did make sense within a particular frame of reference, but in their totality, they appeared conflicting to some. As the investigation moved into its second month without any charges filed and no sign that any would be coming soon, reporters, animal rights groups, and even some other people in law enforcement were beginning to question Poindexter.
“He [Poindexter] was at the home and saw the equipment that we seized,” Kathy Strouse, an animal control officer who had been on-site for the initial search told Yahoo! on May 15. “When we were there, he said he had enough right there to issue an indictment. He didn’t say who he would indict, but he said he had enough. Now, with what he has said, it makes you think, ‘What in the world is going on in Surry County?’ This certainly doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about the Surry County attorney.”
Mark Kumpf, a former animal control officer in Norfolk and Newport News who had moved on to become a dogfighting specialist, told The Virginian-Pilot, “There is more evidence [in the Vick case] than has been used to convict several other people in Virginia.”
“The overwhelming majority of dogfighting cases are based on circumstantial evidence. Most often, they could probably get a conviction off much less than [Poindexter’s] already got,” Ethan Eddy, an attorney at the Humane Society told the New York Daily News. “It is fair to say that this process has taken longer than usual.” Poindexter did nothing to ease the anxiety when he peppered his interviews with statements like “If people on that property committed a crime, and I believe they did, it will be a crime tomorrow, it will be a crime in six months, it was a crime yesterday,” and “I have several cases with greater priority.”
In defending his reasons for not executing the warrant, Poindexter said he’d been told there was already a wealth of forensic evidence, so he felt no reason to rush back for more. He also contended that if there was something wrong with the new warrant—if the wording wasn’t right as he had said—that there could have been something wrong with the previous ones as well. This seemed especially odd to Knorr since as far as he was concerned those questions had been raised and answered during the May 21 meeting.
Throughout it all, Poindexter invoked the failed Benny Butts prosecution as a reason for his caution. He didn’t want to rush into something that would jeopardize the case down the road and consistently pointed out that the goal was success, not speed. “We would like to bring the strongest case possible, rather than react to knee-jerk pressures,” he told USA Today. And “You’ve got to nail things down before you accuse people of felonies.”
Behind the scenes, Knorr bristled. Personally, he found Poindexter profane and vulgar, often punctuating his speech with curses. None of that bothered him much—he’d dealt with tougher characters. But he was troubled by all the talk because he felt public statements hurt investigations: Comments about who was or was not a suspect, what sort of evidence had been collected or was sought, and in which direction the investigation was moving, gave suspects an advantage.
Now, the media ha
d gotten its hands on the unexecuted warrant and the investigation was dealing with a new reality: The entire world was suddenly aware that one of the objects of a proposed search at 1915 Moonlight Road was to exhume as many as thirty dog carcasses. Like Knorr, Mike Gill worried that the suspects would use this latest intelligence to go back and remove evidence. Digging up the dogs and burning down the sheds were serious measures, but they were easy to execute, especially since Brownie had said the graves were fairly shallow. Even more, the main suspect had plenty of motivation—there were literally hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings at stake.
The U.S. attorney’s office of the Eastern District of Virginia may well have been motivated by current events, too. The Duke lacrosse scandal was rattling to a close in the headlines and taking a little of the honor and integrity of government prosecutors with it. That case exploded into the national consciousness in March 2006, when a dancer hired to perform at a party hosted by the Duke team later claimed that she was raped by three of the team members. The Durham, North Carolina, district attorney, Michael Nifong, bungled the case by violating numerous procedural rules, presuming the guilt of the accused by saying in public that Durham would not become known for “a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl,” and calling the team “a bunch of hooligans.” Just over a year later, in April 2007, the North Carolina attorney general dismissed all the charges, and Nifong was disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation” and convicted on contempt of court charges.
The case was a black eye for government lawyers, and Durham was only 166 miles from Surry County. The lawyers of the Eastern District of Virginia surely didn’t want to see history repeat itself. They wanted to prove that the job could be done right—fairly, quickly, efficiently and without a media circus trailing behind.
