Fight Rumors Dogged Vick for Years

Tracing what they call the "open secret" of Michael Vick's dogfighting involvement, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on a trail of tips, whispers and investigations that led nowhere until the Falcons QB's indictment and subsequent guilty plea this year. PETA and the Humane Society both received repeated alerts—but each organization kept the information to itself, saying the tips were too vague to act.

"It did not come as a surprise" when he was finally arrested, a PETA official told the Journal-Constitution. The Falcons, however, maintain that Vick's activities were completely unknown to them; said owner Arthur Blank at a press converence last week, "Nobody— nobody—had any inkling, any ideas, any feelings about this. Nobody did. So I don't know what else we really could have done." (More Michael Vick stories.)