The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Puppy Kingpin | 1. Follow the Puppies

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

When Mindi Callison finds out a local pet shop might be selling puppies from a puppy mill, she takes action. Soon, she’s tracking dogs being transported from state to state and stumbles onto a company that hides the source of puppies. A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production.  Unlock all episodes of Smoke Screen, ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. The worst part of the story I'm about to tell you

is that even the things that give us the most joy can be used to deceive us. We love our dogs, but even that love can be used against us. I first really started seeing this on a large scale during the pandemic. We were forced to stay at home, and a lot of us decided to get a pet. But the surge in buyers led to a surge in scammers. Sometimes people would order a dog online, and it never showed up. Or people would pay in full, go to pick up their new puppy, only to discover the dog was never real. People's money was just gone.

A new Better Business Bureau report on pet scams shows complaints this year have more than doubled from last year. Here's a question. How scuzzy do you have to be to scam lonely people with puppies? Pretty scuzzy, right? But that scam ended up being just one of many. Using somebody's love of puppies to defraud them didn't start when the world shut down.

We are used to worrying about preventing cruelty to animals. But what we're talking about is different. This is a scam. One that seemed designed to keep pet owners from ever figuring out where their puppy came from. A lot of law enforcement has ignored animal rights groups asking them to do something. Could activists be over-exaggerating? or was this something much more serious? And there is a person accused of being at the center of this scam. She is now facing multiple lawsuits. She's this kind of Oz, behind the curtain, pulling the strings, trafficking in puppies. The more I investigated, the more I started to discover the layers of deception

and misdirection a consumer can face when they just want to make sure they bring home a healthy puppy. The person who first introduced me to the depths of this fraud was Mindy Callison. She got her first dog about 12 years ago when she was just 19. It wasn't until I was in college where I went to a local Petland store. I was homesick and I wanted to see the animals. And some friends and I would go visit the puppies, like, just to play with. Now she's in her early 30s with the temperament of a former preschool teacher. Warm and friendly, but backed by steel.

We're in a coffee shop in Iowa, and she's telling me the story of how she bought her first dog. I'm meeting with Mindy because she played a key part in unraveling a nationwide puppy scheme. But that may never have happened if not for that day years ago she walked into a pet store and bought a Siberian husky puppy named Ozzie. I was putting myself through college so I was an assistant manager at a gas station. I was a cheerleader. I was in the education club. I was very very busy and then I walked into a pet land and they sold me the highest energy dog that you could possibly have. Mindy remembered Ozzie costing $1,500. And being a poor college student, I couldn't afford a $1,500 puppy on top of everything

else he needed. So they gave me their Petland credit card and that had a 30% interest rate. So that day I walked out with the puppy, the toys, the treats, the kennels, everything he needed. She didn't think to ask about interest rates. They said you're walking out with a credit card and there's no money down today. So that's really all they say. And that's the same story you hear in pet stores now. Two weeks after she got Ozzie, she saw a story on the local news about the pet shop where she just bought him. The local news station did a story on puppy mills and that specific Petland store, and I

learned where my puppy was born. And at the time being, you know, 19, you can't see past your own toes. I was very worried about my dog and if he was going to be sick. She thought she'd been tricked. Mindy thought she bought Ozzie from a place that raised dogs to safely come into people's homes. That's not what she saw on the news. There's a lot of debate about what makes a puppy mill a puppy mill. But typically, they're businesses that put profit ahead of the health of the animal. These puppies can grow up in filth, fed through the bars of a cage smeared with feces. They can be terrified of humans because they've hardly ever played with one. Mindy saw this story and got upset. She realized she had given money to a place that was mistreating dogs.

You don't have to be an animal lover to get all the emotions you go through when you feel like you accidentally did something wrong. Ozzie was with her, and he'd be okay. But part of Mindy couldn't stop thinking about all the dogs still at that facility. It was the kind of thought that gnawed at her for years. So when she moved to a new city and happened to see this pet store called Divex Pet Shop, she was reminded again of that news story.

I started my career in Ames, Iowa as a preschool teacher. And I, at the time, my now husband, he and I were in this new town. We were walking around to visit and we saw a puppy selling store. And all of those memories came flooding back of what puppy mills were. Mindy wondered if the dogs in this pet shop could be coming from a puppy mill too. What she couldn't have known then was that asking such a simple question would totally change her life. Seeing that store put her on a collision course with a secretive businesswoman, one accused of being at the center of a national scheme, who's delivered

thousands of puppies into Americans' homes, even though most people don't know her name. From Neon Hub Media and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Alex Schumann, and this is Smokescreen, Puppy Kingpin, an investigation into the mastermind trafficking puppies nationwide and the scheme to Hide the Truth. Mindy and I have both spent most of our lives in Iowa, a state in the Midwest. I've lived all over the country though, working as an investigative reporter. I don't usually look into stories about animals. My background is covering politics and crime,

but I'd find there is a lot of politics and crime in the puppy business. And interviews can turn tense pretty quick. You'd think I was asking people about abortion or the 2020 election, not about puppies. I met Mindy last summer, about 10 years after her confrontation with Dale. We settled into that coffee shop in Des Moines, Iowa. She had driven that morning from Ames, the same city where she found Diveg's Pet Shop. The pet shop was a brick, single-story building painted a dark teal. The store's logo is the name DIVIGS in bright red

italic letters. They're located in downtown Ames, Iowa, an area that has the feel of vintage Main Street. Mindy decided to ask the owner a few questions. But I went in and they had a lot of puppies in their window and I just asked them, where do you get your dogs? And they were like, oh, it's a breeder in Grundy Center. Here's the business card if you want to go visit, if you want to make an appointment. So at this time, the store had never been protested. No one had spoken about where the puppies came from. It just wasn't exposed. So the pet store is very confident in giving us that information. Mindy then went home and turned on her computer. She wanted to look this breeder up online.

She had figured out you can see a bunch of information about licensed breeders by going to the website for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What Mindy learned about this specific breeder didn't necessarily look promising. Well, I went to the USDA website and saw that they had hundreds of adult breeding dogs. They had some violations like dirty kennels, cobwebs, things like that. So I made an appointment to go visit and I went as a potential customer. Mindy was now worried all over again, but for a whole new group of dogs. Mindy drove with her friend a little over an hour from where she lived to visit the breeder. I actually went with an older friend and she pretended to be my

mom. Mindy told me she was still very young then and it made more sense to tell the breeder it was her mom instead of an animal advocate friend. As she remembers it, they got taken into a showroom. And they had about 20 bichons, like white fluffy dogs, in cages. Like they were still like outdoor cages, elevated off the ground, standing on hard wire, but they were all clean. And being, I was 21-ish at the time, I went up and went to pet the dogs because that's what you do when you love animals. And I remember the breeder stopped me and was like, no, no, no, no, don't put your fingers in the cage. We feed the dogs hot dogs. They might bite your finger off. And I was floored.

I've pet thousands of dogs in my life and never has someone said, watch your fingers. The dog might think it's a hot dog and bite you. You know, there are times when stories take paths I don't expect. This was one of them. Mindy wondered what people who could be buying one of these puppies at a store would think. Did they know their puppy might think their finger is a hot dog? And these were not the only dogs on the property. Mindy told me she spotted barns and other buildings that could

house even more dogs. I asked, oh, what's in that building right there? And the breeder was like, oh, honey, those are the honeymoon speeds. It's too romantic in there for And the breeder was like, oh honey, those are the honeymoon sweets. It's too romantic in there for you. And I was like, oh, the honeymoon sweets? What do you mean? And they were like, well, that's where the moms and the dads are making the puppies. So you can't touch the puppies because they might bite, and you can't see that other barn because it's a love shack? And they would not let me in the building. But they did bring out puppies for her to choose from. The puppies on top looked fluffy and clean,

but their paws were filthy and they smelled because, of course, they're still living in filth. And even the mothers that I saw, they were terrified of humans. They weren't, like, excited to see me. They're just, you could tell that they weren't handled on a daily basis like a pet would be. It was unsettling. Mindy left that day empty-handed. But I ran straight back to the pet store and I was like, did you know? Did you know that this facility you're buying from has this many dogs? I had my binder there. I was showing him, you know, all of these USDA reports.

Mindy thought Dale, the owner of Divex Pet Shop, would want to know. He had given her the breeder's business card and didn't act like he was trying to keep anything a secret. So she showed him all of her evidence, the violations, her story about the hot dogs and the honeymoon sweets. And I'll never forget this man who was three times my age going, you silly little girl. I have partnered with this breeder for 20 plus years. Get out of my store. And so I did. I'm not about being arrested.

I walked out of the store, but my heart never left. And I knew I had to do something. That wouldn't be the last time she carried a bunch of paperwork to confront someone and ask questions. She's taken this much further. So I saved every single commercial breeder across the country into my own database. Mindy's kind of become a valuable source of information. Not just for me, I mean nationally. For dog buyers, for investigators, and prosecutors too.

And the day I met her, she brought what's become her trademark. They are these big binders filled with documents, tabs sticking out in a rainbow of colors marking certain pieces of paper. This was her evidence. Mindy's version of one of those boards people in TV use to solve crimes. They pin up photos of the suspects, key documents, and connect everything with strings as they piece together the mystery. Mindy just made hers portable.

Everyone's going to laugh, but I am literally like the Leslie Knope of the puppy mill world, puppy mill advocacy. Like, I have binders on binders, and so people laugh at me because I always come prepared with a binder. Leslie Knope is actually a great way to describe Mindy. Knope is a character from the NBC show Parks and Rec. I've spent the last few months brainstorming, and I have some really great ideas, and I put them in my idea binders. Like the character, Mindy is persistent, detailed, and passionate.

They're both petite and blonde, and at times use the fact they can be underestimated to their advantage. Leslie fights to build a park or restart a local festival. Mindy fights for animals. But I knew if I didn't know about puppy mills, that someone else out there didn't know. And if I didn't know all these red flags, someone else didn't know. Mindy had gone from seeing that one TV news story

to wanting anyone thinking about getting a dog to hear about puppy mills. So, I think a lot of us know about puppy mills. I don't think anyone watching TV after one in the morning in the late 2000s, could ever forget. You're in the arms of the angel where you fly. That song and that sad-eyed puppy turning toward the camera to guilt us for all eternity. Hi, I'm Sarah McLachlan. Will you be an angel for a helpless animal? But Mindy didn't want to talk about that old commercial. She told me that while this is ultimately about helping and protecting dogs, this isn't just about cruelty. It's about fraud, too. There are scams and manipulative tactics using dogs to trick us. These companies know that we

see dogs as our family, friends, and protectors. I discover that even in terms of animal cruelty, there are some horrible conditions that are perfectly legal. This is hard to hear, but these are some of the conditions that weren't enough to get a breeder shut down. Dogs with broken jaws, dead mice floating in drinking water, and a skinny puppy in so much pain they cry out when they're touched. A USDA inspector saw these exact conditions and wrote them down in a report. These breeders are putting profit ahead of the puppies, and they're allowed to stay in business. So how is that possible? What does the law allow?

So let's think of a beagle. Everyone can kind of picture a beagle. According to the USDA, a beagle, depending on the size, could live in a cage the size of your oven its entire life. Or a smaller beagle could potentially live in the size of your microwave its entire life. As long as, according to the USDA, as long as the dog can sit down, turn around, and lay down, that's all it needs its entire life. You can hear in the way Mindy says, according to the USDA, she doesn't agree that that should be the standard.

So she is arguing for laws to be changed. But for Mindy, this issue goes beyond the way we're used to talking about animal rights. Everyone writes animal advocates off as crazy, right? Like we're radical activists. We only care about dogs, all that stuff. But really, at the heart of it, this is a consumer protection issue. Mindy mentioned one store that charges customers 188% interest to finance a puppy. That's a punitive number. But as Mindy points out, the public doesn't know better. Mindy and all advocates rely on that notion. If we all only knew better, maybe we'd change our ways. Mindy thought Dale Diveg would change after she talked to him. The cages, the secrecy,

the hot dog fingers thing. But he'd called her a silly little girl. He didn't think Mindy knew what she was talking about. I decided that day that I left the store that I needed to do something, and I hosted my first ever peaceful protest. I was terrified. I didn't think that I would ever be that person, and it turns out I protested that pet store every single Saturday for six and a half years. Six and a half years. Six and a half years.

Every Saturday. She would stand outside, sometimes alone, sometimes with a crowd. But there'd she be, part of some people's Saturday morning drive, standing in front of Dyvig's Pet Shop holding a handmade sign. I looked at some photos of her protests. One protester's sign read, Show me the mommy. And another said,

This store sells puppy mail puppies, with an arrow pointing toward Diveg's. At the same time she started protesting, Mindy started a blog. She called it Bailing Out Benji. The goal was to show consumers where their dogs were coming from by publishing publicly available breeder records. We file all these FOIA requests all the time. I want to know exactly where pet stores are getting their puppies so I can tell the public.

You know, going back to Diveg's, no one had told the people in our city that this is where he was getting his dogs until I started talking about it. Telling people is what Mindy considers her best weapon. So when I put all of this stuff on our website, I don't just put the worst breeders that these stores are using. If they're using a breeder that has eight adult breeding dogs, I note that. I want the customers to have as much transparency as possible before they buy. Mindy was, and is, betting that if she gives customers a way to see where their dogs come from, that that transparency will lead to a huge change. She's hoping people won't want to buy from breeders whose businesses mistreat dogs.

And if demand for their puppies slow, well, those breeders go out of business. She's trying to get people to think before they buy, like a lot of us do with food now. After all, people buy single-origin coffee to support specific farmers who are sometimes pictured smiling on a bag of beans. And now, Purdue claims no antibiotics are ever used on its chicken, all to appeal to customers. There are the people who care deeply about where their food is sourced, but there are those who think getting to the bottom of those questions is overkill, or those who simply don't think of them at all. As much as I love dogs and they are little heartbeats, this is a supply and demand issue.

If you don't like a pair of jeans and you don't buy them, the store is not going to continue putting them on their shelf, and it's the same for these animals. Dale did not want to do an interview, but he didn't change where he sourced puppies after Mindy confronted him. His store was going to sell puppies like it always had. To him, Mindy just didn't like how the business worked. He said as much in a city

council meeting. We do have some people here that would like to address this. I do have a card from Dale Divek and if there are others in the audience, they could follow him. Dale stepped up to the microphone, tall with gray hair and glasses. He had on a black shirt with Divek's red logo across the front. He seemed subdued, exhausted by what he saw as an undeserving problem. My name is Dale Diveg. I own the pet shop in downtown Ames. I've had protesters in front of my store trying to discourage customers from coming in. For those who may not know why they are there, it's because they don't want us to sell puppies. More than four years into Mindy's protest, Dale tried to get the city council to pass an ordinance that'd make it nearly impossible for Mindy to keep protesting outside his business.

Still, if you look at it from Dale's perspective, he wasn't technically doing anything wrong. We are licensed to sell puppies. We buy it from two great kennels that are state inspected. He wasn't charged with breaking any laws and had run pet stores for decades. Nothing state inspectors found had led them to shut down his breeders. I think the protest mainly started over a personal issue of one of the protesters. And it's kind of a vendetta now to put us down for selling puppies, you know. And people want puppies, but they just, instead of going to the shelter, you know, it's a great place to go if you need a dog. But no, it's not for everybody. But they just don't want us to sell puppies.

It's their way or no way. At times, Dale was reading straight from some papers he brought along. He'd flash a knowing grin, as if to say, can you believe what I'm dealing with? Dale's proposal to the council would have made it harder for anyone to protest in town. He wanted to make it so protesters would be required to be moving at all times. No standing still. We fully understand and respect the right freedom of speech. However, we feel that the city, which a business is part of, should adopt some ordinances to protect all businesses. Dale thought Mindy was being unreasonable.

Business owners have been saying that about advocates for decades. What's changed is that Mindy and other advocates have now essentially said, OK, if the law treats the dog as a product, then these businesses are knowingly selling faulty products. Sick puppies. The city council decided that Mindy was allowed to keep at it. Dale lost. And Mindy kept protesting. Every Saturday.

When I first went into the store that first day, he had dozens of dogs in his window, available to pay, you know, to buy. And the very last month, two months, three months, he had two dogs a month he was selling. The puppies were sitting longer, they were getting older, they had to go on sale, and he was losing more money. Diveg's pet shop shut down in 2017. His very last day, one of my volunteers made me a cake that said,

you silly little girl, because that's the first thing he ever said to me. In those six and a half years, Mindy turned her blog, Bailing Out Benji, into a nonprofit. They are dedicated to ending puppy mills and now have 200 volunteers all over the country. They claim to have the largest puppy mill database in the world. We're still really small in the grand scheme of things. Most people are shocked to learn that we just hired our second employee. And I just started doing this full time three years ago. Mindy is filling a gap she sees left by regulators.

At the core of it, Bailing Out Benji is a watchdog group. She and her volunteers hunt down and document both unlicensed breeders and those with violations who are still allowed to operate. We have spreadsheets that we keep so we know exactly how many animals are going into different states, who's transporting them, who bred them or brokered them. We have so many spreadsheets you would probably laugh. Mindy is literally tracking puppies going across state lines, like a detective with no jurisdiction. She's piecing together clues and building an

amateur intelligence agency to get a full picture of a puppy's journey from a breeder to someone's home. As she's doing this, she's learning about the industry and the people in charge, the people ensuring the entire system and supply chain continues. One name in particular keeps coming up, Jolin Nothi. From here on out, you'll hear Jolin's name a lot. Mindy doesn't know Jolin, but she knows that Jolin's signature is at the bottom of paperwork for thousands of dogs. She's a central part of how people get purebred puppies in this country. What Mindy couldn't have known when she first saw Jolin's name was that those signatures would be evidence of an alleged fraud in plain sight, a crime that we're not supposed to know about, a system that benefits some and keeps people like you and me, potential dog owners, in the dark. So who is Jolin Nothi? I'd find that while Jolin is everywhere on paper, she tries to seem

non-existent everywhere else. We're going to spend the rest of this series not just uncovering what Jolin's business is and how it operates, but also how it is at the center of a national scheme that relies on government agencies looking the other way. You see, Mindy wasn't the only person who would catch on to JoLynn. I knew instantly that this is a front. This is not legit. I don't think that they felt they were going to be held accountable. They spent $5,000 on a dog, and then they were out another $5,000 to help it be healthy. That's ahead on Smokescreen Puppy Kingpin. He runs a transportation company that specializes in shipping puppies. Mindy can tell from the paperwork what kinds of dogs Larry is transporting when he crosses state lines.

Larry also happens to be JoLynn's brother-in-law. Back in 2012, two Chicago police officers spotted a white van in a store's parking lot after hours. They thought things looked suspicious. The officers wrote in the report that they heard barking from inside the van. They could see two men sleeping in the front seats. One man was Larry Subject, and the other guy was 22-year-old Travis Wester. When officers opened the back of the van, they found 43 puppies crammed into 10 crates. Court documents note they did not have sufficient food or water. The two men were both charged with 43 counts of animal cruelty. This all happened back in February of 2012. Using these types of vans to transport puppies is fairly common in the breeding industry. Mindy is still tracking

how Jolynn's brother-in-law and colleague Larry Subject transport puppies today. Essentially, the puppies all go into the backs of a van and they're organized by size because you want to fit as many dogs in the van as possible. So they have to also provide six inches of extra space to these puppies. So some of them are in like a shoebox looking cage. Mindy and I are still talking at the coffee shop in Des Moines. She tracks shipments like those by using what are called CVIs. CVI means Certificate of Veterinary Inspection. They are the key to figuring out where a puppy really comes from.

Mindy reads them to unwind. Most of the time, that's all I do. It's kind of what I do to relax at night, which sounds really weird, but I sit and watch Netflix or whatever, listen to podcasts, and I just go through CVIs. You're supposed to fill out a CVI any time you transport a dog over state lines. It's like a temporary passport that allows the dog to travel. It lasts 30 days. This is a USDA requirement. If you're an animal, even our personal pets, if we cross state lines with our personal pets, technically you need a CVI. Most individuals do not do that, right? Like if you're on a road trip or you're moving, you often don't get a CVI. But commercial breeders

know they have to. What Mindy discovered while looking at CVIs is that the dogs often do not go straight from a breeder to the pet store. They make a pit stop on the way. The stop is a business called a puppy broker. Think of them as middlemen. They buy puppies from breeders and then resell them to pet stores and private buyers across the United States. Sounds pretty straightforward, but crucially, they're doing something more consequential than that.

Brokers exist to continue this lack of transparency in the industry. Brokers are at the center of the pet store puppy business. They go from breeder to breeder to get puppies, take them all to a central location, get them new health certificates, and then send them off to buyers. The broker that got most of Mindy's attention is based just 90 miles north of her. The warehouse where they keep their puppies is surrounded by nothing but miles

of farm fields and wind turbines. It's from here puppies start their trek in vans to New Jersey, Florida, and Washington. This broker is called Jack's Puppies. That's J-A-K-S. The letters stand for Jolin and Kimberly's Puppies. Jolin Nothi is the co-president of Jack's Puppies. She keeps a low profile. Very low.

So low that I even had a hard time figuring out how to pronounce her last name correctly. I noticed each person I talked to pronounced it differently. It's spelled N-O-E-T-H-E. And it's Noth? Not Noth-y? I think it's Noth.

Noth? Noth. Jillian Noth. I think that's how her name is pronounced. I've never actually heard her last name pronounced. It's Nothy. I do want to ask, because you've served as her spokesperson, how do you pronounce Jolene's last name? Nothy. There's not much online about her either, besides some mentions on her college's honor roll. The only interview I can find that she's ever given was in 2019. It was with a local Iowa TV station after donating money and gifts to a charity that

benefits children. From grandparents to grandkids, Joel and Nothi's entire family foregoed their gifts to give back. The things we go through are nothing compared to what these families go through. And the fact that we were able to put ourselves aside and help other people so that they didn't have to worry about things. That was JoLynn talking. She said the family had just decided 2019 was their year to give back. According to the report, at least one of the kids' gifts included a trip to Disney World. JoLynn has brown hair down to her shoulders and is seen hugging different people in the news stories video. The rest of what I've figured out about JoLynn so far comes from lawsuits where she's had to testify on the record. JoLynn has estimated she does between $10 to $15

million of business a year. That's gross revenue, not necessarily how much JoLynn has estimated she does between $10 to $15 million of business a year. That's gross revenue, not necessarily how much JoLynn makes herself. JoLynn doesn't have children and isn't married. But a constant part of her life has been working with dogs. Mindy is able to track where JoLynn is shipping puppies by looking at those CVIs. She flips to one. This is the East Coast delivery for August 26, 2019. You can see exactly how many pet stores they're making deliveries to in this, and it's about 40.

So in one day, Jack's Puppies is selling hundreds of puppies on one day, and they are going to pet stores in Florida, in Washington, in Texas, in California. So they are going all over the place. People buying puppies at a pet store on the East or West Coast may assume the dog comes from just up the road, or at least from the same state. That's often not true if you're buying from a pet store or some rescues, too.

Just like other animals and food, dogs are primarily bred in agricultural states. Mindy sees brokers as a tool to make that harder for consumers to figure out where their puppy was bred, a way to hide their true origin. The brokering world exists. So when Petland says we're only buying from breeders without violations, most of the puppies going into pet stores are coming through brokers. Brokers claim that these puppies come from humane breeders, but the documents a customer usually sees to check that information are created by the broker. Those certificates of veterinary inspection, or CVIs. And in the case of those dogs, the latest CVI will hide the breeder and only show the dog came from Jack's puppies.

That's their source. Mindy turned to another page in her binder. One day, all of the puppies being picked up by Jack's going to pet stores in California. And so as you can see, I've got notes like my notes on this side. Several of them are from horrible 100 puppy mills. These are breeders with violations. And so by filtering their puppies through a broker, no one knows where those puppies were actually born. A horrible hundred puppy mill is a reference to this list done by the Humane Society of the United States. The nonprofit puts out a list every year of facilities

that rack up violations but are able to keep their license to breed or sell dogs. Violations that lead to dogs dealing with coccidia, worms, and the small living spaces we talked about. But the problems get worse. There's a highly contagious disease called parvo that can be fatal and expensive for an owner to treat. Some animal rights activists go undercover with cameras to show what's happening at puppy mills. The female dogs can be required to start having puppies as young as six months and as often as it's physically possible. When older female and

male dogs can no longer be used to breed, they can be abandoned or killed. This is the kind of behavior Mindy thinks brokers can hide from consumers. One of these undercover videos, from a group called Caps, goes around to pet stores asking staff where they get their puppies. I get these guys from a place called Jack's. What Jack's does is they go through and they get puppies from breeders. So do all your puppies come through Jack's? Is that like your distributor? Jack's Puppies is actually the puppy broker that we use to help us find the puppies. Y'all got it from Jack's? Y'all got it from Jack's? Okay.

They cut between hidden cameras at pet stores where staff say they buy from Jack's Puppies and then visits to puppy mills where the person giving the tour tells them they sell to Jack's Puppies. There's a broker from Iowa that buys from Jack's. Okay. So if you connect the dots, pet store owners and accused puppy mills are working together through Jack's Puppies. Mindy does not do undercover videos. Instead, she solves mysteries with

spreadsheets, and she tracked the same connections with Jax. To her, Jax does two important things for pet stores and breeders. They handle the delivery of the puppies, ensuring a steady supply, and they also add another layer of paperwork, making it harder to figure out the original breeder. So brokers exist to take away that level of transparency. That's why if there has to be some kind of compromise language, advocates are saying pet stores need to buy from breeders. Pet stores need to say the breeder name on the cage, not the broker name. Because in Washington state, there is a pet store called Puppyland.

They now have stores in Idaho and stores in Texas. They source 100% of their puppies from Jack's Puppies. The specific pet store Mindy's talking about, Puppyland, just had to fight to stay open. Lawmakers in the state of Washington were looking to pass a bill that would ban pet stores from selling dogs from commercial breeding operations. That means Puppyland could no longer have any puppies. I've got a little more than half of our committee here. The owners testified in a committee hearing debating the ban. They met on February 15, 2021.

The meeting was held on Zoom because of the pandemic. You can hear one of the owners of Puppyland, Kayla Kerr, play down this idea that JoLynn is a broker. Kayla is one of JoLynn's customers. She's addressing the committee from home and talks about having met with the committee members for years. She relies on Jack's puppies to keep her stores supplied, and if brokers are seen in a bad light, so are Kayla's pet stores. We very much want to show people that our breeders love their dogs, and they only want to breed healthy puppies. So before we get our puppies in-house,

they're all taken to one central location at this holding facility. You can call it a broker if you want. They are microchipped. They're checked by a vet, and their paperwork is entered into a computer so that we have a digital copy of their files. She's saying there's nothing to see here. Brokering isn't necessarily a problem. JoLynn never showed up at the committee hearing. She submitted testimony in an email. A couple others did vouch for her in the hearing, though, including Ben Heller. He's with a company that makes vaccines for dogs. Ben is talking to the committee from what looks like an office. And I believe one term I've heard over and over again is the term broker. And given the idea that the broker is some type of peddler of unhealthy

puppies from the breeder to the pet store. And I'd just like to mention that that is the wrong image of the broker. The brokers realize there's no value in selling a sick puppy to the pet store. There was even a veterinarian who'd worked with Joe Lynn. His camera didn't work, but he still wanted to add his two cents. None of my breeders are selling puppies with congenital abnormalities that we can find.

In her email to the committee, Joe Lynn called the accusations from people like Mindy and other animal rights advocates outright lies. She wrote, quote, But here's the thing. Jax calls themselves a breeder online and has the phrase, quote, breeding to the standard of excellence on their website. But JoLynn herself makes it clear when she testified under oath that she was a wholesale distributor. The attorney even specifically asked,

quote, you're not a breeder, correct? And she responded, correct. She also referred to herself as a licensed wholesaler in her email to state lawmakers. That's what makes Jack's website confusing. The site literally says, Jack's Puppies of Britt, Iowa, dash professional breeder, dash dog show handler. says, Jack's Puppies of Brit Iowa-Professional Breeder-Dog Show Handler. But when you say that your job is raising puppies with love and care, she doesn't raise puppies. She doesn't have adult

breeding dogs on her property. She has a windowless outbuilding that she warehouses puppies in for a week, six days at a time sometimes, in order to get them on her own CVIs to go to pet stores. There are real reasons someone would want to be known as a breeder. Well, Jax puppies has to be licensed with the USDA, and Jax has no violations. They have a spotless record. If you were a breeder with several violations, you might prefer your sketchy record doesn't come up when somebody traces their new puppy. Each puppy that goes through JoLynn's warehouse gets new paperwork. Mindy thinks that ends up hiding critical information from customers. If a new dog owner were to Google Jax or look them up, they could get the impression Jax was their dog's breeder. A customer might not think to look much further

beyond that. They were told their dog came from Jax Puppies, the website says they're a breeder, and they might not realize the dog wasn't bred by Jax Puppies. It could have come from somewhere worse. Historically speaking, puppy mills in the Midwest, that's where we see all of the puppy mills. This is the puppy mill belt. So dogs were seen as farm dogs. And that's why, you know, if we're looking at the trend of these humane ordinances, they really started on the coasts where people tend to be a little further removed from farm life. And so when someone has a, say, $4,000 dog that walks around with her in her purse and she goes to brunch with her and,

you know, it is a very spoiled family member. It is abhorrent for that person to think that that dog's mom is in a puppy mill in the Midwest suffering. Lawmakers in Washington state decided to grandfather in pet stores already selling puppies, but banned any new store from the practice. Mindy and JoLynn were on opposite sides of a legislative battle over whether lawmakers should ban pet stores from selling commercially bred puppies. And that battle is playing out all across the country. More than 300 ordinances have passed in the last couple decades banning pet stores from continuing to sell puppies. Many of these laws

specifically told pet stores that they could only keep selling dogs from rescues and shelters. One such place is Chicago, Illinois. In 2014, they passed a law banning pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits from commercial breeders. The decision forced the remaining pet stores to change their whole business model. The model of our business was probably a good 85% to 90% of my income came from selling of healthy puppies, healthy kittens, and healthy rabbits. Jim Sparks Jr. is talking to me over the phone from his pet store in Chicago. He feels that his business, wrongly, gets treated like a villain. I am one of 32,000, more than 32,000 businesses in the city of Chicago.

I would tend to think by statistic alone, you would find that I am not a villain. You would find that you've had decades worth of inspections and decades worth of licenses being issued and tens of thousands of families coming through our doors over the last 54 years. Jim's situation is an example of the kind of pressures these bans are putting on people's livelihoods. The business Jim's family has used to survive for five decades is now illegal. But pet stores, dog breeders, and people like JoLynn aren't just going to let themselves get shut down. They claim to be victims of a propaganda machine, part of this much bigger battle that's playing out in America, a fight that's getting so fierce,

it caused this brand new kind of fraud to spring up. JoLynn wasn't gonna walk away. Her family would manage to get their 43 puppies back from the city of Chicago. Their two employees would get out of jail, and JoLynn would keep sending puppies to Chicago for years. One of her customers happened to be pet store owner Jim Sparks Jr. Jack's Puppies has always been a friend of the pet industry favorably in the fact that they are always on top of their game,

making sure that these animals are healthy and beautiful, that their inspection reports are what they need to be. Yeah, you've never had a bad experience with JoLynn. I have not, but that doesn't mean that some people have or have not. Again, I believe she works hard. Is she perfect? No. Am I perfect? No. My question is, how imperfect are we talking? If we're going to shut down someone's business because they support something called a puppy mill,

it's important to understand what a puppy mill is actually like. What are the kinds of inhumane conditions JoLynn is accused of supporting? In order to get why these bans are happening, we have to see a puppy mill and hear from a breeder unfiltered. So we have a search warrant. You're not going to take them, are you? The same person who'd show me a puppy mill would be one of the first people to see firsthand

that JoLynn could be running a new kind of scam. I just always want to believe the best in people. Like, people want to help animals. But that's not the case. That's just not the truth. We'll get to that and how this nationwide operation worked. She's not doing anything illegal, immoral. She's, there is a demand for puppies out there.

They're just in it to churn out puppies and make a dollar. They're being transported under fake circumstances in the nighttime. It's just the whole thing. It's a sleazy operation. That's on this season of Smokescreen Puppy Kingpin. I'm going to go. Smoke Screen Puppy Kingpin is a production of Neon Hum Media. It is reported, hosted, and written by me, Alex Schumann. Lead producer is Natalie Rinn. Our editor is Catherine St. Louis.

Chloe Chobol is our associate producer. Managing producer is Samantha Allison. Executive producer at Neon Hum is Jonathan Hirsch. Fact-checking by Sarah Ivry. Asha Ivanovich composed the theme song and music heard throughout this series. Additional tracks by Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Sound design and mixing by Hansdale Shi. Special thanks to Odelia Rubin, Kate Mishkin, Crystal Genesis, Muna Danish, and Joanna Clay.