Stadium-style cockfighting pit busted in Georgia, feds say. Take a look inside
Makeshift bleachers and a Georgia Bulldogs stadium chair are all that’s left of a cockfighting arena in southeast Georgia after federal officials arrested the owner — 66-year-old Wendell Allan Strickland — early Thursday.
Strickland was charged in a federal indictment on five felony counts and one misdemeanor relating to owning and operating a cockfighting venue in Swainsboro, Georgia, known as “The Red Barn,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia said in a news release.
Swainsboro, a city of roughly 7,500 residents, is about an hour and a half south of Augusta.
“Animal fighting operations are concentrated arenas of animal cruelty, and our office will aggressively pursue prosecution of anyone who seeks recreational thrills from such activities,” U.S. Attorney Bobby L. Christine said in the release.
Strickland was arrested during what federal investigators dubbed “Operation Sunset,” prosecutors said. Law enforcement arrived as the fighting pit was being “dismantled,” according to the release.
Photos shared by the U.S. Attorney’s Office show the arena was comprised of a hollowed-out dirt pit surrounded by wooden bleachers in what appears to be an insulated barn or out-building.
Metal ventilation pipes run across the length of the ceiling with fluorescent lights to illuminate the arena, the photos show. A few stadium chairs are still propped up on the bleachers.
Multiple law enforcement agencies were on scene during the arrest and seized a “box of cockfighting gear” in the process, prosecutors said.
A second photograph shows what appears to be Strickland’s office with a large whiteboard for “tallying the results” of different fights, according to federal prosecutors. A cash box and printer sit on the desk.
“The Red Barn” is one of what prosecutors believe are the three largest animal fighting arenas in Georgia. Two other men, 48-year-old William Shannon Scott and 64-year-old Lanier Augustus Hightower Jr., have already been arrested.
“In coordination with our law enforcement partners, we have shut down three of these reprehensible operations and seized more than $220,000 in cash suspected to be illegal gambling proceeds,” Christine said in Thursday’s news release.
Strickland is accused of working with Scott, who ran a larger cockfighting pit known as “Little Sunset” in nearby Midville, to coordinate alternating weekend cockfighting contests. The gambling business net at least $2,000 in gross revenue, sometimes more, on any given day, according to the indictment.
Scott was arrested in June during a raid of a cockfighting tournament on his property, prosecutors said.
Hightower was arrested last month after a federal raid on his farm during a cockfighting tournament in December 2019, according to Thursday’s news release. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office on the Georgia-South Carolina border busted an underground cockfighting pit around the same time, scattering roughly 200 attendees in the woods while more than two dozen others were arrested, McClatchy News previously reported. It wasn’t immediately clear Thursday if the two raids were connected.
Strickland has been charged with:
Two felony counts of sponsoring and exhibiting an animal in an animal fighting venue
Two felony counts of conducting an illegal gambling business
One felony count of possession and transport of an animal in an animal fighting venture
One misdemeanor charge of attending an animal fighting venture
He faces up to five years in prison and “substantial fines and asset forfeiture” if proven guilty, prosecutors said.
