In the cesspool of corruption that is Kentucky’s law enforcement community, there appears to be no agency that is interested in standing up to the cockfighting mafia. With a bar so low to begin with, you might think it would be hard to be worse than average. But Clay County Sheriff Patrick Robinson has found a way.
While most criminal cockfight operations operate in secrecy to one degree or another, the Laurel Creek pit operated in the open, right off a busy Kentucky road, for all to see, including of course Sheriff Robinson and his deputies.
SHARK investigators could openly observe cockfight thugs arriving at the pit hours before the cruelty started. We called Robinson’s office and informed sheriff’s personnel about what was going on. Of course they knew - had known for many years, and we knew we weren’t telling them anything new.
What was surprising was the outright lies they told us to avoid doing their job. First, they said they had no one available to respond, but we pushed them to act. The deputies didn’t know we were actually at the cockfight property, so they claimed they had responded to our call, and that there was nothing going on.
When SHARK’s president Steve Hindi told them that he was at the property and knew better, Deputy Wes Bromley admitted there was ongoing cockfighting, and falsely claimed that cockfighting is legal in the state of Kentucky.
In fact, cockfighting is illegal in all fifty states by individual state laws, and also via a federal ban. None of that matter to Deputy Bromley, or his boss Sheriff Patrick Robinson, or the uniformed sheriff’s deputies who were filmed by SHARK investigators inside the cockfight building.
Those deputies weren’t engaged in law enforcement. On the contrary, they were socializing with Melissa Sizemore, the manager of the illegal criminal operation.
When cornered by a reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper, Robinson flippantly remarked: “I’ve got more problems to deal with than two roosters fighting.”
Indeed, Sheriff Robinson does have more problems. For one, he just may be the most corrupt sheriff in the state, and given Kentucky is putrid with corruption, that’s really saying something. Robinson’s entire staff turns a blind eye to cruelty and corruption that extends beyond animals.
Cockfighting pits are hubs for all kinds of criminal behavior, including illegal drugs, weapons, organized crime, and human trafficking. Career criminals know that cockfight pits are a safe conduit for their criminal behavior precisely because corrupt sheriffs like Patrick Robinson either will not go in, or if they do, they become part just part of the criminal enterprise, as in the case of the Laurel Creek pit.
Following our exposure of Sheriff Robinson and his team of co-criminals, Sheriff Robinson threatened to sue us for defamation. We weren’t going to bullied by a thug with a badge for telling the truth. We dared Robinson to file his lawsuit. He didn’t.
Trent Baker, Sheriff Robinson’s public affairs officer, went on to make a death threat against SHARK on what he thought was a private social media posting site: “SHARK guys gonna go missing”
If the Kentucky State Police were a legitimate law enforcement organization, Patrick Robinson would have been jailed a long time ago. SHARK sent record requests to the sheriff’s office, but Patrick Robinson illegally refused to produce those records, because he knew that there would only be more evidence of corruption.
Even in Kentucky, the most corrupt state in the nation, Clay County Sheriff Patrick Robinson stands out, in the worst possible way.
