Over 70 arrested in New York cockfighting crackdown

Over 70 people were arrested after investigators raided a bloody late-night cockfight in the squalid basement of New York storefront where birds waiting for later rounds were kept in sacks hanging from the walls.

The raid, conducted on Saturday and led by investigators from the state attorney general’s office, smashed a cockfighting ring that held brutal fight nights in the basement twice a month, witnesses and officials said.

Investigators also arrested a Brooklyn pet shop owner who they said had taken birds to the fights in Woodhaven, Queens, near the Brooklyn border.

Yesterday, investigators stormed a farm in Plattekill, about 250km northwest of New York City in upstate Ulster County, where they said birds had been raised and trained. They said they found more than 3,000 birds in cages there. In all three places, they said, they found birds that had been altered to inflict maximum damage in the ring.

Court documents said that in the basement in Queens, 65 roosters were found with their natural spurs clipped off and with sharper metal spurs attached to their bodies. In all, nine of those arrested were charged with felonies. Officials said the raids opened a new window on the illicit subculture of cockfighting, which has persisted despite past crackdowns.

Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman said the investigation that led to the raids “illustrates the prevalence of cockfighting in America, its brutal nature and the link to other illegal activities”.

Officials say spectators often bet large sums on the fights.

Those arrested in Queens are facing felony charges of violating a state law prohibiting animal fighting, as well as conspiracy.

The raids were the culmination of Operation Angry Birds, as the investigation was called, a play on the name of a video game popular among smartphone users.

The raids began quietly. More than 70 officers in casual clothes waited on Jamaica Avenue in the shadow of the elevated tracks of the J line as the crowd arrived on Saturday night.

The officers watched as customers paid a $40 admission charge and went inside, taking places around a ring in the basement, where sacks on the wall held roosters waiting to fight. The spectators were cheering a fight that was going on when the officers, backed up by state police troopers and officers from the federal Department of Homeland Security, marched in.

They were trailed by experts from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who took the birds to safety.

“The brutality that’s associated with this is shocking,” said Matthew E Bershadker, the organisation’s president, who was on hand for the raid. “If you have a soul, if you have a conscience, you know very quickly that this is a vile, vile betrayal of what’s right. These animals suffer horrifically.”

New York Times