Dog Bites Man

Update: A local television news station reports that Stoney Greene turned himself in on April 29 on charges of assault on a female and domestic criminal trespass.

In the fall of 2001, police in New Jersey raided an Ocean County warehouse to break up an illegal dogfighting ring, acting on a tip from the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They seized more than $30,000 in cash and four pit bull terrier dogs, two of which had serious wounds and were later euthanized, according to police reports. 

More than 40 people were arrested in the bust and charged with crimes like criminal trespass, witness or paying admission to animal fighting, and gambling on the outcome of animal fighting—including Stoney Greene, a North Carolina Republican currently serving on the Wilkes County Board of Commissioners. 

Greene, who lost the GOP primary for N.C. House District 94, served as the chair of the county commission before stepping down from the position last month after revelations of his arrest surfaced on GoWilkes.net, an online community message board. In a letter to commissioners, Greene said he believed it would be in the best interests of the county and the commission if he were to step aside as chairman, the Wilkes Journal-Patriot reported, but he stopped short of leaving the board.  

That wasn’t enough to satisfy many in this rural Republican stronghold in northwestern North Carolina. 

A public Facebook group calling for his resignation from the board now has more than 600 members and has become a community hub where more allegations about Greene have surfaced, including claims of domestic violence. A 2014 police report obtained by The Assembly from the York County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina details an allegation of a physical assault involving Greene and his then-wife. 

People also use the Facebook group, which was created by local personal trainer Megan Barnett, to post more mundane things—like complaints about Greene wearing a cowboy hat indoors and video of him doing a keg stand at a 2017 dog show in New Jersey, where Greene participated as a judge. 

Others are more serious; in 2019, a judge with the American Dog Breeders Association accused Greene of sharing intimate photos of her with other judges. The group investigated but found no evidence corroborating the allegations. Greene also denied sharing the photos but agreed to delete them, according to a letter his attorney sent in response to a cease-and-desist order Greene received.

When asked about all the claims made against him, Greene told The Assembly in a text message that “people can make all kinds of allegations to fit their narrative at the time and the situation.”  

The Wilkes County commissioners, all fellow Republicans, recently voted to urge Greene to resign. The local Republican Party backed the motion.

“Politics is a very dirty and conniving thing to be a part of,” Greene said. “There are a lot of half truths that people that do not know me or my chapter are betraying as facts or who I am! This is why Good People do not get involved in serving the majority of the people, the minority only want to tear you down.” 

Barnett, a registered Democrat, told The Assembly the outcry has had at least one bright spot: Community members from both sides of the political divide are finally in agreement on an issue. Animal cruelty, even decades-old allegations about it, appears to be a red line no elected official can cross without suffering political repercussions. 

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Greene isn’t the only public figure caught up in dogfighting backlash. Last year, prosecutors charged a senior Pentagon official with running an illegal dogfighting ring in Maryland. And then there’s the well-known case of ex-NFL quarterback Michael Vick, who in 2007 pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony charge related to his involvement in a Virginia operation. 

Wilkes County, too, has a history of dogfighting. A year after Vick’s guilty plea, more than 125 pit bulls were seized from the property of Wildside Kennels’ owner Ed Faron, a breeder who is often referred to locally as the “godfather of dogfighting.” Faron pleaded guilty to 14 counts of felony dogfighting and a judge later ordered all the dogs to be euthanized. Greene has appeared in photos with Faron and described him as someone who had been “very influential in my knowledge” of American pit bull terriers, according to a bio for the 2017 Tri-State APBT Club event.

In an early March interview with the Wilkes Journal-Patriot, Greene said that he attended the dogfight in New Jersey in 2001 and that he participated in dog show competitions involving pit bulls during this period. But in this instance, Greene said that he was merely at the “wrong place at the wrong time.” 

Greene told a detective in an interview early on the morning after his arrest that he was in New Jersey to see a dog show, according to the police report. But when questioned further, Greene, who was in his mid-20s at the time, conceded that by dog show, he really meant dogfight.

Prosecutors in New Jersey charged Greene with one count each of criminal trespass, being present at a dogfight, and gambling on it. He entered a pretrial diversion program, according to local news reports at the time. (Pretrial diversion programs typically include drug screening and fines and other penalties, and charges could be dismissed once those are completed.) Punishment for others arrested at the event ranged from fines and community service to a four-year prison term. 

In February, Greene had his record in New Jersey expunged, he told the Wilkes Journal-Patriot. The Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed there were no records of charges filed against Greene.

Then he resigned as chair just before a March 19 county commission meeting. 

At the meeting, he voted in favor of a resolution urging Wilkes’s congressional delegation to pass bipartisan federal legislation that would strengthen laws against cockfighting and dogfighting. “It was the right move for Commissioner Stoney Greene to resign his chairmanship and to back the resolution urging Congress to upgrade enforcement tools to wipe out animal fighting in North Carolina and throughout the nation,” Wayne Pacelle, president of the animal rights group Animal Wellness Action, which is behind the legislation, said in a news release. Pacelle proposed the resolution after his group opposed Greene’s state House bid. The Surry County Board of Commissioners passed a similar resolution the night before. 

During public comment at that meeting, Barnett asked the board to censure Greene for violating the board’s code of ethics “from top to bottom,” predicting that Greene would remain the board’s “albatross” if they didn’t.

Other than harming a child, there’s nothing worse than animal cruelty, Barnett told The Assembly. Greene’s dogfighting has not only enraged people across the political spectrum in Wilkes County but brought them together to get him out of office, she said.

“I know at some point, when this is resolved, and things go back to normal, that everything will go back to baseline,” Barnett said. “And I wish it didn’t have to. There’s some dreamy little part of my brain that wishes people could learn that we’re all the same—you know, kind of a kumbaya message.”

A Motion. Amotion?

Outside the dogfighting concerns, the Wilkes County Commission has faced a string of complaints tied to Greene over the last five months. 

A Christian heritage proclamation that Greene championed, which we previously reported on, brought threats of lawsuits from national organizations like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Tensions also mounted about the potential purchase of property from Lowe’s Corporation to house the county’s health department and department of social services during Greene’s time as chair. The county didn’t pursue the purchase, which some believed would have been a cost-effective approach to addressing the county’s facility needs. 

At its April 16 meeting, the board first voted to rescind Greene’s Christian heritage proclamation and replace it with a religious heritage week proclamation, which passed 3-2. Then the commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of a motion calling for Greene’s immediate resignation. The motion came from Commissioner Greg Minton, who said the controversy surrounding Greene had been a distraction for the board and county staff and an “impediment to good government.” 

Greene was the lone vote against it. 

The motion carries no legal weight, Wilkes County attorney Tony Triplett told The Assembly after the meeting. He noted that in his more than 30 years with the county, this was the first time a motion has called for a sitting member’s resignation. The options for removing an elected official in North Carolina are limited, Robert Joyce, a professor of public law and government at the UNC School of Government, said in an email. “The chief one is for the voters to vote the person out at the next election,” Joyce said. 

Another option to remove Greene, who’s in his second year of a four-year term, would be through something known as amotion, an obscure procedure rooted in common law doctrine that allows a board to remove a member if there’s just cause for misconduct or unfitness for office. Joyce said he believes “there must be a clear, demonstrable connection between conduct and the duties of the office” for an amotion removal to stand. North Carolina law does not provide a recall option for elected members of county commissions.  

“If the entire GOP says you got to resign, that’s pretty damning,” Kathryn Charles, the chair of the Wilkes County Democratic Party, told The Assembly after the vote. Earlier, during public comment, she implored Greene to step down. “You can continue to hide under your cowboy hat and Bible verses, but at the end of the day, it is honesty, trustworthiness, moral uprightness, and human decency that matter,” she said.

Barnett told The Assembly shortly after the vote that she was surprised by the board’s motion. “I feel like people listened,” she said. “It just makes me feel really good about being a Wilkes County resident.” 

Outside the county office building, Republican Commissioner Keith Elmore, who has served on the board for more than 20 years, referred to Barnett as “my hero” as she passed him on her way to her car. Elmore said the controversy over Green has made running county government even more difficult. “Everybody’s done things they’re not proud of,” Elmore said. “But everybody’s not a county commissioner either.” 

He hopes Greene steps down, if not for the sake of the county, then for the sake of his family and himself personally. 

But Greene told The Assembly he won’t resign. “I’m not guilty of anything,” he said.

Jacob Biba is a freelance journalist in Asheville. His work has appeared in The News & Observer, The Intercept, The New Republic, and others.