Laddie Dwayne McMillian, Dog Fighting, North Carolina 2024

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Table of Contents

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – Two Men Sentenced for Dog Fighting and Related Crimes

Two North Carolina men, Laddie Dwayne McMillian, 47, and Derrick Twitty, 48, were sentenced to federal prison for their involvement in a dogfighting operation. McMillian will serve 16 months in prison, while Twitty will serve six months.

According to court documents, McMillian conspired to breed, train, and fight dogs for nearly 15 years. He openly boasted of owning and operating "mass destruction kennels," a fighting dog breeding operation. McMillian shared videos of his dogs engaged in fights, including one video showing two dogs fighting in a typical fighting pit, with the dogs’ faces and ears bleeding and raw.

Twitty joined the fighting and breeding operations in early 2020 and worked with McMillian to train and breed dogs for dog fights. The two men also tended to their dogs’ injuries and scheduled "roll" fights, which are short fights testing the dogs’ fighting abilities.

The men’s prize fighter, "Slick Rick," was born in January 2018 and was trained and subjected to multiple fights by McMillian. Slick Rick died in January 2022, a few weeks after McMillian sponsored him in a dog fight.

"The life and death of this dog reflects the defendants’ extraordinary cruelty, abuse, and mistreatment of animals for entertainment – criminal conduct that our division has and will continue to aggressively prosecute," said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.

"The defendants in this case treated dogs like a commodity, bred and trained to fight, often to death, for the amusement of spectators taking part in this cruel activity," said U.S. Attorney Dena J. King. "Dogfighting is an illegal blood sport that subjects animals to incredible pain and suffering. It is also a federal crime and one that has the full attention of my office and our law enforcement counterparts."

The USDA-OIG and North Carolina’s Polk County Sheriff’s Office investigated the case. Senior Trial Attorney Banumathi Rangarajan and Trial Attorney William J. Shapiro of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Environmental Crimes Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Gast of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Asheville prosecuted the case.