The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Puppy Kingpin | 4. A Kind of Identity Theft

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Multiple lawsuits now accuse Jolyn Noethe of creating rescues to sell commercially-bred puppies where they’ve been outlawed. Alex learns how the scheme reaches beyond the Midwest and meets Lizette Chanock. She claims her rescue’s name is being used to sell unhealthy 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. I was upset, and then people were calling us upset,

and I was trying to figure out what to do about it. This is Lisette Chanik. Clementine, come here, sweetheart. Come here, be a good girl and sit. There you go. Here she is in her backyard in Maryland, giving some treats to her four rescue dogs, Joy, Clementine, Johnny, and Minnie. Back in 2019, she started getting these phone calls from angry customers. When I first found out about it, it was because

we got a phone call. Somebody had bought a dog there, was very unhappy. The dog was sick. They wanted to return the dog. The pet store said, call Pet Connect Rescue. They called us and we had no idea what they were talking about. It wouldn't take her long to figure out what was going on. Lisette is a lifelong animal lover. She worked in animal welfare before taking a break to start a family. And then when my kids grew up to be age enough where I felt I could go back to work, I wanted to get re-involved. She had such a bad experience with a non-profit, she decided to start her own. That's why Lisette founded PetConnect Rescue. The way I was treated really upset me, and I thought this isn't the way it should be if someone wants to rescue an animal

as opposed to go and buy one. But now the tables had turned. Lisette was the one people were unhappy with. The customers calling all had a similar complaint. They'd bought a dog from a pet store in California, and they were told it came from PetConnect Rescue. These customers were mad because the puppy was not the pet they expected. It was almost all medical. Dogs dying, dogs not properly vaccinated before they were sold, dogs with underlying medical conditions that weren't disclosed. Some of the customers were out a lot of money. They spent $5,000 on a dog, and then they were out another $5,000 to help it be healthy.

Lisette felt for these upset customers. But there was one big problem. Her organization doesn't sell puppies. Wherever these customers had been buying from couldn't have been from her rescue. But they did have Lisette's name and number. So it was very quickly clear that someone was using our name. Lisette's rescue is focused on finding homes for dogs and cats

who live in what's called a kill shelter. That's a shelter where dogs and cats are put down if they don't get adopted quickly. Lisette tries to find them homes before the clock runs out. And now, someone was using her shelter's good name to sell unhealthy puppies. We very quickly also realized that these were not rescue animals because they were priced so high. I mean, rescues don't sell dogs for multiple thousands of dollars. Lisette had to figure out what was going on. When she started getting these

calls, her first impulse was to reach out to the pet store in California. Obviously, I picked up the phone and called early on, innocently saying, hey, what's going on? And, you know, the little shop girl there, shop guy was just like, oh, yeah, we thought they came from an organization called Pet Connect Rescue. The store employees were in the dark. Their bosses, though, seemed to know something. But when I tried to get a hold of the owners of the pet stores, and I did this several times, I got hung up on very quickly. And that's when it dawned on her. Her dog, Rescue, was a victim of a kind of identity theft.

Somewhere nearly halfway across the country was a different PetConnect rescue pretending to be Lisette's rescue. The whole thing is bogus. At this point, Lisette didn't know that this was all part of a larger scheme, an operation that's connected to Jack's puppies and the lawsuit filed to shut down their fake rescues. For her in this moment, this was about her rescue's reputation and stopping whoever was using her shelter to sell puppies. They're being transported under fake circumstances in the nighttime. It's just the whole thing. It's a sleazy operation. 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. In the last episode, Andrew Cederdahl, with the Iowa Attorney General's Office, had just filed a lawsuit. He was suing JoLynn Nothi, her business partners, and the two rescues he suspected were fake. The documents Andrew found showed that JoLynn and her associates took the time to fill out the paperwork to make two non-profits, but that their non-profits weren't doing what they claimed to be doing in their official paperwork. The dog rescues connected to JoLynn didn't seem to be rescuing puppies. Instead, the paperwork showed they arranged the

sale of dogs bred for the sole purpose of making money. That's what Andrew was alleging. After he sued, JoLynn didn't just give up and admit to wrongdoing. She fought back by using one of the oldest tricks in the book, stalling. When the facts and the law are on your side as a defense attorney, what is common is that, you know, you have to pivot to technicalities, you have to delay, you have to all sorts of things. In other words, if the facts aren't on your side, get petty. Argue the details. Andrew had filed the case in one county.

JoLynn's lawyers said it should be a different one. Then her defense attorneys went a step further. They argued Andrew shouldn't be allowed to file this lawsuit at all. After all, they said none of the people who'd bought dogs lived in Iowa. And that meant there were no Iowa victims. They argued the Iowa AG's office

shouldn't even have jurisdiction. Even though they are organized under the laws of the state of Iowa, present in the state of Iowa, essentially the hub of this national scam, in our view, in Iowa, that there was no Iowa victims of the fraud. So therefore, we didn't have jurisdiction over them. Andrew didn't think he needed an Iowa victim, but he did try to find the people who'd possibly been scammed. He started subpoenaing pet stores in Illinois. He wanted a list of all the customers who had bought dogs from Hobo Canine. There were hundreds of them.

We subpoenaed Pet Love Store. They provided documents between them and consumers who purchased over 760 pets from their store in Chicago. Another one of the stores Andrew subpoenaed was Park Pet Shop. It's run by Jim Sparks Jr. I asked him about the scheme and how animal rights advocates used Jim and JoLynn's paper trail to expose the pet stores in Chicago still getting dogs from JoLynn. Yeah, they caught you with the CVIs, the health certificates. Jim handed over customer information to Andrew. According to the court evidence, Jim sold multiple dogs that he got from Hobo Canine, including a Golden Doodle, for $3,599.

Jim told me that he didn't have a bad experience with the puppies he got from JoLynn, and he didn't believe they came from puppy mills. Here's what I do know. When I purchased an animal from that organization, it was guaranteed healthy, and the animals that were coming from there had breeders that were vetted properly. Okay. How do you go wrong there? To you, it was not deceitful.

You were saying that they were rescue dogs, but then, like, selling them as a rescue dog, but it's still coming from a commercial breeder. Jim never really elaborates. He admits to selling dogs from Hobo Canine, but not that customers were misled. But Andrew argues if you tell a customer they are getting a rescue dog and they don't, that's fraud.

And consumers deserve more. So that's part of our case of why it's a deceptive and unfair practice in our view, because no consumer is going to know where that dog came from. And in our view, it's deceptive to claim it's a rescue dog when it's just been brokered. It's not been rescued from anything. The lawsuit Andrew filed was a civil case. He'd looked at his options as an assistant attorney general. Under state law, he couldn't file a criminal case.

If it was criminal, Joe Lynn could go to prison. A civil case is when a victim is usually rewarded some kind of compensation. We typically, in consumer fraud cases, handle them civilly. The criminal burden is a much higher burden. It's beyond a reasonable doubt. In the civil, it's clear, convincing, and satisfactory. Was the case against JoLynn and the others clear, convincing, and satisfactory? Andrew thought so, but it was also unusual. As far as I'm aware, it's the first case by a state AG that has alleged puppy laundering in particular. And that made it risky. Puppy laundering, while similar to other kinds of laundering, was still new.

In a novel case, you have to be very careful with how you market the case, frankly, to the judge, because you're asking the judge to do something that has never been done before. And that has a lot of implications on the defendants of our case. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of, you know, the state has a lot of power. And so we want to exercise that responsibly. And when we ask the judge to do something that is unprecedented, you can get pushback. The key thing Andrew said there

was that this case would be unprecedented. American law is built on the idea of precedent. A decision relies on a previous decision. Judges aim to be consistent. They give more scrutiny when something is novel, and there's just more risk. You know, you just never know if the judge is going to go along with it or not. Andrew was asking the law to address a new kind of fraud. This case could have a lot of impact. Andrew was laying groundwork for any lawsuits about puppy laundering in the

future. Someone had to be the first. I think it takes some guts to do. The mere fact he filed the case sent a message. The Iowa AG's office is letting all of us know that they see what's happening here as fraud. It's not just animal rights advocates. Consumers do have the right to know where their dogs come from. The evidence was showing the scheme went well beyond Hobo Canine and Rescue Pets Iowa. It looked like there were more fake rescues. And that they were helping move puppies from Jack's Puppies warehouse to pet stores all over the country.

But Andrew could only legally focus on what was in Iowa. move puppies from Jack's Puppies Warehouse to pet stores all over the country. But Andrew could only legally focus on what was in Iowa. A different group would try to cast a wider net. But who would possibly want to take on JoLynn? Perhaps a former preschool teacher who once took on a pet store and won. All you have to do is lay this paperwork out side by side. The puppies are being laundered through several different organizations to try and throw people off the trail. That's next.

By 2019, multiple groups had JoLynn in their sights. Some working on their own, others together, were all trying to stop JoLynn in their sights. Some working on their own, others together were all trying to stop JoLynn. But at the time, none of them knew if Andrew or any of the law enforcement agencies they'd given evidence to would do anything at all. By now, Andrew had discovered JoLynn had opened two rescues that he suspected were fake. But he was about to discover that they weren't the only ones. Other people saw the advantage of pretending to be a virtuous rescue, but to actually sell commercially bred puppies. Federal paperwork showed one of the rescues JoLynn started had connections to other rescues that looked fake too. So many, it's safe to say that from here on out,

unless I tell you it's a real animal rescue, it's accused of being fake. But let's get back to one of JoLynn's rescues, Rescue Pets Iowa. They were accused of sending puppies to California. This year, California became the first state in the country to prohibit pet stores from selling dogs from breeders. Instead, the law only allows them to sell pets from rescues or shelters. One pet store chain in California was accused of selling puppies delivered from Jolin's warehouse in three of their stores. The Companion Animal Protection Society sent in an investigator undercover. I started my investigations for CAPS on January 15th, 2019. The YouTube video is a little shaky because the camera's hidden, and the faces

of the employees are blurred. But you hear the investigator get told time after time these puppies are from rescues. So are they from breeders or are they rescues? These are rescues. They keep from rescue groups or adoptions? All these dogs are from breeders. We don't have any dogs from breeders anymore. The investigator asks the price and she's told these rescue puppies go for thousands of dollars. You can hear in the video one employee says they get from quote quote, premium rescues. Well, we get them from a premium rescue, so it's not cheap getting them into our store.

Yeah, it's transportation costs, medicine costs. At one point, a store employee essentially admits to the undercover investigator what is happening. The audio is a little muddled, but you can hear her say, we're not allowed to use the term breeder anymore. We're no longer allowed to use the term breeder anymore. We're no longer allowed to use the term breeder anymore. But it's like you work with a rescue organization that like vets the breeders and stuff? Pretty much.

The investigator asked, you work with a rescue organization that vets the breeders? And the employee answered, pretty much. At the same time Caps is getting these videos, Mindy Callison is also on the case. She's the one who tracks puppies Jolin's shipping across state lines. And at this point in 2019, she'd tracked puppies going from one of Jolin's fake rescues to those same three stores in California. Mindy also had volunteers go into these pet stores to take photos of the so-called rescue's names.

Because in California, the way their state law was worded was that you had to write the name of the rescue on the cages. So it said Bark Adoptions, it had the birthday of the puppy, it had the city, and anything else about the breed of dog. The names on the cages were two totally new rescues, Bark Adoptions and Pet Connect Rescue. They both appeared to be fake, and the paperwork tied them back to JoLynn and Jack's puppies. There's even one email where they arranged to pick up puppies from Jack's headed to Bark Adoptions, even though the puppies are supposed to be coming from Rescue Pets Iowa. Mindy had found records showing how puppies were being moved from Iowa to Missouri and then to these pet stores in California. At the root of it, no member of the public wants to buy from a puppy mill. Like, no one wants to

know their dog was born in a puppy mill or that their parents are still suffering in a puppy mill. So these stores and these fake rescues are making the public feel like they're doing the right thing. Mindy felt like something needed to be done. Back in 2019, she'd talked to Andrew, but she didn't know the inner workings of the Iowa AG's office. Sometimes, prosecutors take a't know the inner workings of the Iowa AG's office. Sometimes, prosecutors take a look at the evidence and decide a different case might be a better use of their time. But Mindy didn't want to risk letting this stand. None of the animal rights groups did. So Mindy's organization, Bailing Out Binge, teamed up with the Animal Legal Defense Fund. One of their managing attorneys is a lawyer named Danny Waltz.

We really have a strong foundation for understanding how the scheme works. Danny is talking with me from his home in D.C., where his family has their own rescue dog named Tippy. Danny and his team at the Animal Legal Defense Fund spent a year and a half investigating JoLynn. It was only through discovery in that case that we learned the real sort of central figurehead through which this scheme really emanated was Jax. That's when Mindy and Danny's organizations decided to file a lawsuit together. They filed on March 5th, 2019, accusing multiple people and businesses

of working with JoLynn to mislead customers in California. They actually filed their case two weeks before Andrew filed his. Unlike Andrew's lawsuit, theirs directly accused JoLynn and her associates of getting dogs from puppy mills. California decided that it did not want to contribute to puppy mills anymore. The problem with making those laws work was that these fake rescues seemed to be popping up like weeds. Originally, it was thought there were just a few in the Midwest. Mindy was finding them throughout the U.S. And now there are more popping up across the country

who are also IRS charities. Danny and Mindy's teams included two of these new rescues in their lawsuit and the chain of pet stores selling puppies in California. One rescue they accused in their lawsuit was a new rescue I mentioned earlier, Bark Adoptions. They believed JoLynn was selling this fake rescue puppies. By filing their case, Danny and Mindy's legal teams

could demand information from Jolin. We were able to subpoena Jax as part of the unlawful scheme that we'd started to uncover in that case. Jolin's lawyers fought them on this. Interesting thing about that was that we actually had to fight that subpoena all the way up to the Iowa Supreme Court before Jax would actually produce documents to us. Some of the documents Danny got described in even more detail how the dogs would be taken to California. They were then trucked by Subject Enterprise, which again is run by the nephew of Jolene Noth, the several day trip from Iowa

to California, during which, just as the cost of doing business, puppies would die. And that would just sort of be marked as we lost another one. Can you imagine having to treat dead puppies as just another day on the job? The puppies Jolynn delivers start their trip from her warehouse near Britt, Iowa. Jolynn explained how it works in a deposition I got a hold of. She said every Sunday, vans of puppies head out on their routes. Once they're ready, they pull away from her gray, windowless warehouse down a driveway before turning onto a gravel road. The puppies are usually kept in cages in the back and probably can't see the endless waves

of corn they're driving past as they head all over the country. I've looked at maps of their delivery routes. They show a puppy could travel 1,800 miles from the warehouse to the pet store. The delivery company's own notes document how some of the puppies don't survive the trip. Their death wasn't just something Danny and Mindy uncovered. The transportation company itself acknowledged that at least three puppies have died en route. One puppy was dropped, another puppy died on a West Coast truck, and a pet store refused to pay for a different puppy that died in transit.

The company delivering these puppies was Subject Enterprise. Subject Enterprise would pick up the dogs from the puppy mills, bring them to the Jax site in Britt, Iowa. The evidence Danny collected suggested the puppies would leave that windowless warehouse, travel across the Great Plains, through the Rocky Mountains, and head toward California. But instead of going from the warehouse to a pet store,

the puppies would make a pit stop at someone's house in Manifee, California. More specifically, their garage. This garage was the address for bark adoptions. Danny's lawsuit describes the garage having 20 cages piled up where dogs were kept. At least, kept long enough to be cleaned up or given a break from the van. If they did, it was only for, you know, a 30-minute period, 30 minutes, a two-hour period, potentially to just give dogs some water on their trip from the puppy mills to the pet stores. But for JoLynn, the puppies were doing

something much more important than simply hydrating. It was during this stop the puppies got yet another health certificate, which meant when they arrived at the pet store, customers would think they came from a reputable animal rescue in California. There would be another sort of pro forma superficial inspection. Once that was done, he said the puppies were quickly taken to a pet store. It was only later that Danny realized that the delivery company also did more than transport puppies. Documents he subpoenaed showed that the delivery company

was also key to Joe Lynn getting paid. It had been a question his legal team struggled to answer. How could Jax receive this money for all the work that they'd done and continue to have this puppy mill and puppy brokering operations continue, yet do so in a way that avoids the look of being a for-profit model so that they can continue to sort of look like a rescue. Danny said it actually took them a while to figure out. But...

We looked at the agreements between Bark Adoptions and the pet stores, and there was this strange term in the agreements between the two that said that the pet stores were responsible for the transportation costs. Danny thought that seemed odd. Which just like didn't make any sense to me why you would have a contract between two parties that then says, but make sure you're also paying this third party. Danny and his team wanted a closer look at the transportation costs, but they had to subpoena Subject Enterprise.

Remember, Jolin's nephew runs that transportation company. Subject Enterprise appears to be intimately linked with Jax. For example, the company got their used vehicles from Jax weeks after they incorporated. But that wasn't what stuck out to Danny once he got the records. It actually showed transportation costs between invoices to Subject Enterprise, both before the ban went into effect on January 1st, 2019, and after. The numbers from before the ban showed the delivery company charged at most $60 per puppy to deliver. But then after the ban in California went into effect...

The transportation costs sent to subject enterprise jumped up to $900 per dog. That's a huge jump in price. From at most $60 to now $900. That big increase in the delivery price for a dog seemed suspicious to Danny. On paper, Bark Adoptions had been selling the puppies to pet stores at the price you'd expect to get a rescue dog. He found that in one short time period, Bark Adoptions, the rescue in a garage, was paid about $10,000 for around 140 puppies.

For those same puppies, the delivery company was paid more than $130,000 to transport them. Think about that. More than $130,000 for the transportation, only $10,000 for the puppies themselves. This was how Jack's puppies had still been getting paid. At least, that's what Danny suspected. I remember like the night that we figured this out and we're all, we all work remotely and we're like, you know, it felt like sort of like beautiful mind or I don't know what, like all the strings coming together. It was very exciting.

And we looked into it, the cost of gas did not, you know, jump up 20 times, you know, between the end of, between December 31st, 2018 and January 1st, 2019. When Danny and Mindy's teams filed the lawsuit, they caught the attention of a couple people who'd bought these dogs. He bought an Australian cattle dog from a pet store in California. They told him it was a rescue. That's Mindy again. But when our lawsuit was made public, he decided that he needed to contact us to learn more. The customer had thought his new dog came from PetConnect Rescue,

the real rescue you first heard about at the start of this episode. Lisette Chanik ran that rescue out of Maryland. But in reality, this customer's puppy had come from a PetConnect Rescue in Missouri. And I was able to go back to my records and find that his dog was sold to Animal Kingdom in California through Pet Connect Rescue in Missouri, but it was labeled as coming from Bark Adoptions in California. So this puppy was laundered from the pet store to Bark Adoptions to Pet Connect Rescue in Missouri, and then we found the microchip number popping up on Rescue Pets Iowa CVIs. Does your brain hurt yet? It's a lot to follow.

But while all the names can mess with your head, the scheme is straightforward. JoLynn and her associates were accused of funneling the puppies through multiple fake dog rescues. If you think of that Breaking Bad analogy again and how the car wash cleans the drug money, these fake rescues clean the puppies. And what these lawsuits laid out

was that the puppies were getting cleaned again and again and again. Court records show some puppies went through three different fake rescues before they arrived at a pet store. The puppies are being laundered through several different organizations to try and throw people off the trail. Their case, and what they gathered, would be included as evidence

in Andrew's case at the Iowa AG's office. JoLynn was facing two lawsuits, one in Iowa and one in California. But more would be on the way. The fact that people are trying to make a profit off of these animals and hiding behind pretending to be rescues just made me very, very, very angry. The undercover videos and court evidence showed that staff in some pet stores were telling customers that they got the puppies from two different rescues, Bark Adoptions and PetConnect Rescue. You mean the fake PetConnect Rescue, the sham PetConnect Rescue? I have lots of names for that other PetConnect Rescue. Lisette had become

angrier than the customers that had been calling her. She struggled with how to respond after realizing someone was using the name of her very real PetConnect rescue. So it took several months of just being upset, basically not knowing what to do. In the undercover video and in court evidence, the puppies for sale in California claim to be coming from a PetConnect rescue in Joplin, Missouri. Lisette is in Maryland. She thought her options to fight back were limited until she heard from an attorney. I just have never sued anybody in my life. But fortunately, one of a very wonderful, strong animal advocate in San Diego who saw what was going on reached

out to us and said, look, I'm going after these people and you're one of the organizations that's being misrepresented. Would you like me to represent you? The attorney who reached out was Brian Pease. He thought Lizette had a case and that customers clearly were under the impression they got their dog from her PetConnect rescue. I talked to Brian about Lizette's situation. They're getting calls all the time from people saying, I bought this puppy from a pet store and it's got all these health problems. What can you do? And we're saying, well, it's not us.

It's this other fake PetConnect rescue in Missouri. So we've got this federal trademark case now Lizette's behalf against the Missouri PetConnect rescue. They denied the accusations against them and claimed in a deposition that they did check to see if the name PetConnect was being used, but only with the state of Missouri. And they made the mistake of using our name, probably figured we were some small group and would never know. And they didn't know they were going to be dealing with me. Lisette's lawsuit is now the third to accuse rescues with connections to JoLynn of wrongdoing. As it turned out, the PetConnect rescue Lisette was suing seemed to have a direct connection to JoLynn. The Missouri Pet Connect had gotten puppies from one of JoLynn's rescues, Rescue Pets Iowa.

JoLynn had been signing health certificates for the dog rescue, even though on paper it was run by Russell Kirk, the brother of a man JoLynn dated. Every single person in this is a weird connected piece of this machine. Mindy saw this whole web of players, but none of them would go on the record to defend themselves. I realized I needed to head to Iowa, to the headquarters of Jack's Puppies. I wanted to talk to people who know Jolinene and hoped her relatives would change their mind and talk to me. But what I didn't realize was that one of the biggest reasons Jack's puppies exists is because Jolene couldn't get along with her sister. The fighting got so bad, Jolene left the family business. That's next time on Smokescreen Puppy Kingpin is a production of Neon Hum Media.

It is reported, hosted, and written by me, Alex Schumann. Lead producer is Natalie Wren. 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 Ivory. 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 Hans Dale Shee. Special thanks to Odelia Rubin, Kate Mishkin, Crystal Genesis, Muna Danish, and Joanna Clay.