Saving Gracie (2 page)

Chapter 2: “Check Out That Place”

It started with a tip. On the afternoon of February 6, 2006, a woman phoned the Chester County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in Pennsylvania to report problems at a kennel in Lower Oxford, a small community twenty-three miles away. She had visited the kennel in hopes of buying a puppy, the caller said. To her horror, the breeder had emerged with a young dog covered in dried feces and stale urine. The puppy reeked, and the breeder didn’t even seem to notice.

Something about the kennel wasn’t right, the woman said. It was unsanitary and smelled atrocious. In a back room, she could hear lots of dogs barking. She declined the puppy, made some excuses, drove away, and promptly phoned the SPCA. “You guys need to check out that place,” she told the receptionist. If the breeder tried to sell her a filthy puppy, there was no telling what shape the rest of his dogs were in.

The caller didn’t leave her name, but she did have the name of the kennel: Mike-Mar. The name of the breeder was Michael Wolf.

The SPCA assigned the case to Cheryl Shaw, one of its humane society police officers. Shaw had inspected the kennel once, years ago, and hadn’t found anything. But this complaint definitely needed to be pursued.

She discussed the case with her supervisor, Becky Turnbull, and then phoned the state dog warden for Chester County, Maureen Siddons. Siddons agreed to accompany Shaw on an unannounced visit to Wolf’s compound.

Mike-Mar Kennel was located at 1746 Baltimore Pike, in a dip off a two-lane highway between Lincoln University and the Strike ’N Spare bowling alley. The property was protected by a row of bushes and trees so thick that the driveway was nearly invisible. Anyone who wasn’t looking for it carefully might miss it entirely. A breeding operation with lots of dogs to sell presumably would want to call attention to its wares, but there
was
no sign advertising Mike-Mar—no indication that beyond the foliage was a flourishing business.

Past the shrubbery, the driveway widened into the shape of an L, an area big enough to accommodate several vehicles. On the afternoon of February 8, Shaw and Siddons pulled in, parked their car and immediately saw Wolf on the porch of a house on the right side of the property. They were curious to see how he would react to their arrival. Wolf wasn’t required to allow Siddons onto his property without a warrant. Since he was no longer licensed by the state to breed dogs, he could argue that there was no kennel to inspect. He could have told both women to take a hike, and they would have had no choice but to do so.

Instead, Wolf came forward and, to their surprise, greeted them cordially. When Siddons explained why they were there—“We want to see the dogs,” she told him—he agreed to let them in.

Wolf knew Siddons. She’d inspected his kennel many times before. If he recognized Shaw, he didn’t say so. But nothing about her seemed threatening. The brown-haired mother of two had a self-effacing, easygoing manner about her.

Right away, Wolf acted sheepish. He knew he had too many dogs, he said. He asked Shaw and Siddons to wait a moment and then he stepped inside the kennel.

Outside in the cold, Shaw stood with a clipboard in one hand and the other hand plunged inside a pocket of her fleece-lined jacket. She glanced about. In the middle of the property, several dozen yards to the rear of Wolf’s house, was the kennel building. To the left of it sat a modular structure that appeared to be a second home. It had decks on the front and back. All three buildings were surrounded by a solidly built wooden fence, inside of which Shaw could see dogs trotting about. More dogs were in the side yard. Still more paced about in front of the modular home.

Minutes later, Wolf reappeared. He invited the inspectors inside the kennel. Shaw and Siddons stepped from bright sunlight into a dimly lit front room that smelled rank and felt like a furnace. The temperature outside was 33 degrees Fahrenheit, but inside it had to be 80 degrees, Shaw thought.

Michael Wolf, in the center with a pole in his hand, makes his way across a deck covered with feces as a couple dozen of his dogs mill about. (
Cheryl Shaw
)

Squinting her eyes, she could make out cages lining the walls in two rooms. The crates were stacked atop one another, three and four rows high, and they were full of dogs. Feces and urine littered the sides of the cages as well as the floor, and soiled newspaper overflowed from industrial-size garbage cans. Shaw could distinguish Havanese, English Bulldogs, and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, dozens of them, crammed five and six to a crate the size of a large television set. She was horrified, but kept her mouth shut.

From there, Wolf led the officers to his residence. There, too, crates stacked with dogs lined the perimeter of what should have been the living room, dining room, and kitchen. In one corner was a playpen filled with puppies.

Cavalier King Charles Spaniels stared silently from inside filthy crates at Michael Wolf’s kennel in southeastern Pennsylvania. (
Cheryl Shaw
)

The noise was deafening. Dogs barked constantly—hoarse, raspy yelps. Excited by the visitors, the animals rushed to the front of their cages, only to cringe with anxiety as Shaw and Siddons approached. “Hi, puppy puppy puppy,” Shaw called out, but she was standing too close. The dogs refused to come forward. The very presence of human beings unnerved them.

As bad as the noise was, the smell was worse. It was a festering odor, a bottomless stink that permeated the inspectors’ clothes and hair and stung their eyes. Wolf seemed oblivious to it. He walked the inspectors through the rooms, with Siddons following behind him and Shaw bringing up the rear. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The cages were lined with paper soggy with waste, and they were so cramped the dogs barely had room to turn around. Bowls of food sat in one corner alongside slimy water bowls, many of which were empty. The animals’ coats were stained with excrement.

Shaw had spent years doing criminal welfare work on behalf of animals. She thought she’d encountered every possible form of abuse. But she’d never seen this many suffering dogs in one place.

She peered inside the crates. Dozens of frightened eyes stared back. “I can’t leave these guys here,” she blurted out. Wolf was only a few feet ahead of her, but if he heard her, he didn’t act like it. Minutes later, Shaw pulled out her camera and announced, “I’m taking pictures.” Wolf turned to her and wanted to know why. She told him she needed to document the rooms for her report. To her surprise, he didn’t try to stop her.

While Shaw snapped photos, Siddons went from room to room counting the dogs out loud and jotting down a tally. Adding together the number of dogs she saw outside with the puppies in the playpen and the dozens and dozens of dogs confined to crates, she came up with 136 dogs in all. “That’s it,” Wolf agreed. He knew he was over the limit, he said, but he loved his dogs too much. He had such a hard time letting go of his older breeding dogs that he’d finally stopped trying. He just kept them.

“You’ve got to lower your numbers,” Siddons told him. Wolf didn’t argue. The dogs needed to be groomed, Shaw added. “We can do that,” Wolf replied. He showed the women how he would sit on his couch with the dogs and clip their nails.

In the warning she wrote up, Shaw focused on the lack of vaccinations: Wolf was unable to produce paperwork proving the dogs had had their shots. The squalid conditions were more disturbing, but Shaw played down her concern. The last thing she needed was for Wolf to panic and take matters into his own hands once she and Siddons left.

Wolf agreed to set up an appointment with his veterinarian, Tom Stevenson, who operated the Twin Valley Veterinary Clinic in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania. Stevenson’s name sounded familiar: Among local animal welfare advocates, he was infamous for being the veterinarian on record for some of the largest puppy mills in the state.

Before leaving, the inspectors got a glimpse of Wolf’s two partners. Gordon Trottier, a menacing-looking man with an unkempt beard, appeared briefly during the tour and then left just as quickly. Wolf’s other partner, Margaret Hills, a woman in her sixties, was in the kennel building, removing soiled newspaper and putting new paper down. At one point Shaw also spied a young boy she later learned was one of Wolf’s sons.

The visit lasted two and a half hours and ended on friendly enough terms. Just before the officers left, Wolf even turned over to them an English Bulldog who was visibly ill. The women crated the dog, put him in the back of the van, said goodbye, and pulled out onto the highway.

Shaw tried to act calm, but her pulse was racing.

She hadn’t started out to be a humane society police officer. She’d studied graphic design, but abandoned that idea and instead she underwent officer training in the early 1990s. For several years she worked at an animal shelter in Montgomery County. After that, she juggled a couple of part-time jobs. But she missed helping needy dogs and cats. Animal work was what she’d been put on Earth to do, apparently—she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

So she’d started over, this time one county to the south. In the beginning, she commuted thirty miles from her home in Schwenksville to West Chester on Sundays to handle stray animals. Eventually, she got promoted to humane society investigations officer. Now 35, she had worked for the SPCA for six years. Her days were filled with grim cases of abuse and neglect—everything from starving and mistreated dogs to cat hoarders to victims of ritual sacrifice. Despite the grim nature of her work, she savored every aspect of it, the happy endings most of all—the days when she could rescue dogs and cats who were helpless to save themselves. The good outweighed the bad. She honestly believed that.

Now, though, she was driving away from the largest case of animal cruelty she’d ever witnessed. If these dogs were to have any chance at better lives, she needed to act fast.

She and Siddons were barely out of the driveway when Shaw pulled out her cell phone and called her supervisor, Turnbull. Quickly, she described the rancid, unhealthy conditions she and Siddons had observed. Filthy dogs were crammed into tiny crates, so many they were hard to count. There was no question what had to be done, as far as Shaw was concerned.

“We can’t leave these guys there,” she told Turnbull over the phone. She turned to Siddons and asked, “Do you agree with that?”

Yes, Siddons replied, she did.

Chapter 3: A Breeder’s Rise and Fall

Conditions at michael wolf’s kennel had been out of control for some time, but the public had no idea. For decades, Wolf had been a fixture in the dog show world, a crown prince in a sometimes surreal galaxy where dogs bore long and whimsical names, were groomed to perfection, and were pampered like royalty. He’d built a reputation for walking off with Best in Show trophies at some of the most prestigious dog shows in the country. A dog owned and handled by Wolf was very nearly impossible to beat in the ring.

Wolf began showing dogs in the mid-1960s and quickly made a name for himself. A bachelor in his late twenties, he was believed to be independently wealthy. There was nothing to interfere with his obsession with top show dogs.

He dabbled with several breeds, first Italian Greyhounds and Maltese, later Afghan Hounds, Löwchen, Boston Terriers, Poodles, and Chihuahuas. By the early 1970s, he was hooked on Pekingese. The luxuriously long, thick coats and exotic, flat faces of the petulant-looking dogs captivated Wolf.

He kept an eye out for would-be champions, and when he discovered a Pekingese in California who showed particular promise, Wolf had to have him. He purchased the dog, brought him back east, and began entering him in all the major shows. In one single year alone, Champion Dan Lee Dragonseed won twenty-eight Toy Dog Group trophies. In 1969, he took Best in Show at the National Capital Kennel Club Show in Washington, D.C., and at the Boardwalk Kennel Club Show in Atlantic City.

Wolf had not just one prize-winning dog, but two. Champion High Swinger of Brown’s Dean captured the top prize at the Pekingese Club of America’s specialty show (a show just for Pekes). Wolf had also found Swinger in California; he’d acquired him after discovering that the dog had won five Group prizes. The day after Swinger claimed the Pekingese club title, the
New York Times
ran a photo of the little dog peering out of the cup of a huge silver trophy.

Kay Jeffords was equally passionate about dogs. Jeffords was a wealthy New Yorker. Her husband, Walter, was president of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company and a familiar figure in horse-racing circles. Walter Jeffords owned a number of race horses. He later acquired the first Thoroughbred foal sired by Secretariat, the magnificent Thoroughbred who captured the Triple Crown in 1973.

Walter Jeffords could have his horses; Kay Jeffords was head over heels about dogs. And, like Wolf, she had a habit of snapping up any contender who caught her eye. Buying up the competition was a surefire way to eliminate it. In 1972, Jeffords tried her best to acquire Wolf’s latest obsession, Champion Dagbury of Calartha, a red Pekingese he’d imported from Britain the year before. Dagbury had been in the United States only a month, and had already won the Toy Group at the Bronx County Kennel Club Show, the Kennel Club of Northern New Jersey, and the Queensboro Kennel Club Show.

Wolf had no intention of selling Dagbury, to a rival fancier. To avoid a stalemate, Wolf and Jeffords decided to form a partnership. They would co-own Dagbury, and Wolf would handle him in the ring.

Jeffords was wealthier by far, but Wolf brought his own cachet to the table. He was known for his excellent manners: The man with the muttonchop sideburns, brightly patterned plaid sports jackets, and thick, gold chain around his neck always stood for the ladies. More important, he knew dogs. He had a gift for spotting dogs who represented the best of their breed—specimens with just the right shape of nose, sweep of hindquarters, and ability to stand like a champion.

Wolf’s partnership with Jeffords lasted eight years. They collaborated so closely that, for a time, Wolf even moved into Jeffords’s home. By any measure, their joint venture was a glittering success. A year after Wolf and Jeffords joined forces, Dagbury won his fourth Best in Show at the Longshore-Southport Kennel Club Show—his thirty-sixth first-place showing. The little dog captured the title the same year Secretariat took the horse-racing world by storm. “He’s my Secretariat,” Jeffords crowed about Dagbury the night she hosted the Belmont Ball, the annual black-tie fund-raiser sponsored by the New York Racing Association.

Other Pekingese owned by Wolf and Jeffords swept their fields. Champion Dragon Hai Fanfare won three Bests in Show and nine Toy Groups. Champion Quilkin the Stringman racked up eleven Bests in Show, fifty-four Toy Groups, and three top prizes at the Pekingese Club of America specialty shows. Champion Masterpiece Zodiac of Dud Lee’s captured eight Bests in Show and fifty-three Groups.

Wolf had catapulted to the top of the dog show world. Together with Jeffords, he traveled annually to the prestigious Crufts dog show in England to search for up-and-coming Pekingese. On one trip alone they bought ten dogs who looked to be future show winners.

In the mid-1970s, Wolf immersed himself even further into the world of purebreds. He moved to Christiana, Pennsylvania, a rural village in the heart of Amish country, where two-lane roads connected one far-flung farm to another. His choice of location was no accident; the Jeffordses had a country retreat near Christiana. From his rural outpost, Wolf continued to import dogs. He also began to breed some of his own.

The dog show circuit took notice. “Mrs. Walter M. Jeffords Jr. of New York and Michael Wolf of Christiana, Pa., have owned some very good Pekingese over the last few years,” the
New York Times
reported on March 21, 1976. “Now they have another one. He is a 4-year-old Scottish import, Ch. Yang Kee Bernard.” Bernard had just won top prize out of 1,639 dogs at the Bronx County Kennel Club’s fifty-fourth show, where he was deemed “an exceptional specimen of the breed.” He went on to win seventeen Bests in Show and fifty-two Toy Groups, and walked off with the Pekingese Club of America specialty trophy. In 1976, he captured the Toy Group at Westminster, the pinnacle of dog shows.

Top show dogs are extremely healthy and well socialized. They cannot win a show if they have temperament problems, if they are underfed or underexercised, are poorly groomed, or walk in a way that suggests poor structure. His raft of awards demonstrated that at that point in his career, Wolf knew how to take proper care of his dogs.

Once his partnership with Jeffords ended, Wolf moved slightly closer to Philadelphia. He purchased three acres a few miles northeast of nearby Lower Oxford, a community on the fringes of the Brandywine Valley, where he continued to breed dogs. Wolf couldn’t have picked a more bucolic spot to establish Mike-Mar Kennel. Chester County was centrally located—forty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia—and drenched in history. Just over the border in Delaware was the site where the paper used to print the Declaration of Independence and the country’s first dollar bills was milled. A short drive away was the legendary Longwood Gardens, the landscaping extravaganza that attracted more than a million visitors a year.

Not only was the area historically prominent, it was prosperous—Chester County has the highest median income level in Pennsylvania—and influential. Less than a mile from Wolf’s property was Lincoln University, the nation’s first college for African Americans. Among its graduates were Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, poet Langston Hughes, and acclaimed actor Roscoe Lee Browne.

Yet in the picturesque hills that stretched for miles, agriculture still ruled. It wasn’t unusual—in fact, it was quite common—to see black-clothed Amish farmers clop-clopping down the two-lane roads in their horse-drawn buggies on their way to and from their immaculate farms.

Along with its other amenities, southeastern Pennsylvania offered Wolf a less tangible but equally important amenity: privacy. In the 1700s, the gently sloping landscape had attracted Quakers, German peasants, Welsh farmers, and the Pennsylvania Dutch—people who prided themselves on their ability to tolerate diversity. Likewise, the biggest ethnic group to settle around Lower Oxford, the Scotch-Irish, had come to America to escape religious persecution. Their descendants had no interest in delving into the business of others.

In dog show circles, though, stories began to circulate about the questionable conditions at Mike-Mar Kennel. Wolf himself acknowledged he had a problem. In a 1983 interview published in
Kennel Review
magazine, he said he was reluctant to let his dogs go. “My kennel is past 100 dogs now, because I’m not very sensible,” he told the magazine (which has since folded). “I have a lot of old friends in the kennel. They’ve given me a lot of joy as show dogs and breeding, so I keep them.”

He went on to say, “A lot of people discipline themselves and place their bitches at five years old, and I think that’s a great idea, but it’s very hard for me to do.”

By the late 1980s, Wolf’s dogs were still winning trophies but Wolf himself had lost his own personal panache. One breeder who got to know him around that time said that, unlike other handlers who donned tailor-made suits for their moment in the spotlight, Wolf “always looked like he just got out of bed. His big belly was hanging over his pants.” Not that it mattered. “At that time,” the breeder said, “given his reputation . . . he could have taken in a hamster and he’d win.”

Wolf entertained dog show judges with elaborate dinners at his home, but he began to step back from the rigors of the show circuit. By the 1990s, he was spending more time breeding dogs than showing them. He took on a new partner, Gordon Trottier, a reclusive man whose mother, Wendy, raised Papillons—small, graceful little spaniels best known for having enormous ears shaped like butterflies. Wendy Trottier had encountered problems of her own with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement. Inspectors noted problems with ventilation, unclean bedding, and excrement in the Donwen Kennel she operated in Christiana. Also working with Wolf—the “Mar” in Mike-Mar Kennel—was Margaret Hills, a woman who was believed to have a master’s degree in education but about whom little else was known.

In the early 1990s, Wolf adopted two young boys, Chad and Michael Jr. The boys reportedly were home schooled by Hills and were seldom seen publicly in town. The five of them—Wolf, Trottier, Hills, and the two boys—all lived at Wolf’s compound.

As the years passed, the once-dapper Wolf became overweight, reclusive, and depressed. He developed asthma and diabetes and wrestled with high blood pressure. As his health spiraled downward, his dog-breeding standards plummeted, too. By the mid-2000s, a breeder interested in working with Wolf spent the night at Mike-Mar Kennel, and in a phone call to her husband she described seeing huge numbers of dogs. “The man’s living in his kennel with his dogs because he can’t stand to be 200 feet away from them,” she reported in disbelief.

For most of this time, Mike-Mar Kennel managed to operate under the radar. Wolf wasn’t raising any official red flags. But by 2000, conditions had deteriorated so badly that people began to take notice. The Chester County SPCA received its first anonymous call about Wolf that year from a concerned party who reported seeing dogs suffering from mangy skin conditions milling about his property. Humane society police officer Cheryl Shaw drove to Oxford to investigate, but found no violations. She noticed several large breeds in the yard, but the dogs appeared to be in good shape. They had shelter, which was important, especially given Pennsylvania’s damp and freezing winters.

Many more dogs appeared to be housed inside, but Wolf refused to let Shaw in to see them. He was polite about it; he stood on the porch of his house and chatted at length with her. Even when Hills stepped outside and declared, in a loud voice, that Shaw didn’t need to see anything, Wolf waved his partner away and kept talking. He acted as though he had nothing to hide. Before Shaw left, he showed her some of his birds—large, colorfully feathered macaws.

Two years later, during a routine inspection, a warden for the state Dog Law Bureau cited Wolf with two counts of failure to maintain his kennel in a sanitary and humane manner. Wolf pleaded guilty and paid an $87.50 fine. The state revoked his kennel license.

Two more years passed. Then, in 2004, the American Kennel Club (AKC) stepped in.

Puppy mill dogs are able to fetch high prices, in part, because they are registered as purebreds with the AKC, the country’s preeminent dog registry. A certificate of registration looks impressive. It suggests that a puppy has achieved certain standards of the breed and is known to have come from good stock. The AKC itself, though, acknowledges that registration papers guarantee only a dog’s parentage and purebred status. The AKC website states that the registry “cannot guarantee the quality or health of dogs in its registry.”

When it comes to parentage, the AKC has long relied on an honor system. It takes breeders’ word for it that the puppies they’ve produced came from the parents listed on the registration certificate. In 2004, the year the Mike-Mar Kennel was inspected, the AKC registered 958,272 dogs born into 437,437 litters. Many of the registrations were done online. With that volume of registrations, critics say, the registry can’t begin to verify the genealogy of every litter. As a result, critics claim, AKC papers don’t really guarantee anything.

The organization currently charges breeders $25 to register each litter, plus an additional $2 for each puppy. The puppy’s eventual owner must then pay an additional $20 to register the individual dog. Registration fees keep the AKC afloat.

The AKC also operates an inspection program aimed at high-volume breeders who sell AKC-registered puppies. But in 2004—the same year Wolf lost his kennel license with the state—an AKC inspector reported finding no problems with conditions at his kennel. Wolf claimed to have just forty-five dogs and eight puppies on his property, and the inspector, apparently unaware that the state had revoked Wolf’s license, determined that living conditions were acceptable.