MASSACHUSETTS -- For more than a decade, Kim LeMaire's schemes to sell Maltese dogs have duped customers across New England, but the state has known for at least as long that LeMaire is bad news.
With a perfect combination of questionable business practices and a lack of state regulations for dog breeders, she continued her underground Maltese breeding business that has left in its wake a trail of sick, deformed dogs.
LeMaire’s file at the Department of Agricultural Resources’ fifth-floor office in Boston is more than 900 pages thick.
The documents, a combination of LeMaire’s own records gathered by investigators, as well as state and local enforcement letters against her, show the 66-year-old woman, who lists a Wayland postal box as her address, has made it a habit of living in squalor and dodging the law while breeding and selling pocketbook-sized Maltese puppies.
She fell off the state’s radar three years ago after she won a settlement from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
But this summer she came crashing back into the spotlight when Framingham firefighters rescued her from the floor of a filthy Red Roof Inn motel room, soiled by dog droppings and trash. She is said to have suffered a spine hemorrhage and heart attack.
Framingham Animal Control also rescued 19 dogs, their matted fur caked with feces and urine. Many have congenital defects that left them with holes in their skulls and terrified of the outside world.
Three thick black binders in the state’s offices, compiled as part of the state’s defense in response to a suit LeMaire filed against it in 2005, hold reams of documents suggesting LeMaire knew how to work a system designed to protect against people like her.
A 2005 report by Animal Inspector Linda Harrod into LeMaire’s operation of an illegal pet shop said LeMaire used a network of helpers across New England, as well as many names and addresses she admitted were fake, to import hundreds of dogs from Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri without drawing attention to her illegal pet shop business.
But when you buy a puppy from LeMaire, you have no idea about her housekeeping habits or her illegal business, customers said.
LeMaire speaks in an airy, sing-song voice and will bring a litter of her pups to your home and let them romp around. She will relentlessly interview you before entrusting you with one of "her babies."
"In her mind, she cares for them better than anyone in the world," said June Ruggiero, a West Hartford, Conn., woman who said she bought a dog from LeMaire two years ago.
LeMaire’s sales contract describes special food that owners must feed their puppy and how it must sleep in the owner’s bed for at least the first two weeks.
But as much as LeMaire loves her dogs, the records the state has gathered about her suggest she also has failed to treat her animals with care.
In all, the 2005 investigation records show LeMaire purchased and imported 211 puppies between 2002 and 2005, selling 194 and making $235,904.
Meanwhile, state tax records show LeMaire has not filed a tax return since 2005. She has a lien against her for $16,000 in unpaid taxes from 2003 to 2005, Middlesex County records show.
The Department of Agricultural Resources’ report says 95 of the dogs LeMaire bought lacked health certificates. However, the state does not have rules for breeders like it does for pet shops and shelters. The only thing LeMaire technically was missing was a kennel license for having more than four dogs in her home.
"There’s no rules at the state level even if she’s breeding 100 dogs. As long as she has a kennel license, it’s legal," said Michael Cahill, the director of the Division of Animal Health at the Department of Agricultural Resources.
Department of Agricultural Resources officials have said LeMaire did not have a kennel license at the Red Roof Inn, or at several Wayland homes where she operated, on Highgate Road and Boston Post Road. She also lived on Stevens Street in Marlborough during the past 10 years.
Once in 2002, she had dogs shipped to her son at a Pemerton Street, Wayland, address, according to records collected by the Department of Agricultural Resources.
In her 2005 suit against the Department of Agricultural Resources, two of its employees, Tufts University and the MSPCA, LeMaire claimed she was coerced into surrendering her dogs.
Wayland officials seized the five dogs after 15 of her Maltese puppies tested positive for canine parvovirus, a deadly disease.
A summary judgment issued by the Massachusetts Appeals Court in 2010 essentially dismissed LeMaire’s claims against all parties except the MSPCA, which later settled with LeMaire for an undisclosed amount.
The state’s file on LeMaire also contains emails from customers asking for American Kennel Club registration papers for dogs they bought from LeMaire.
"I realize that you have had some personal issues, but I paid $1,200 for an AKC registerable dog and have no papers or proof of pedigree. This deeply concerns me," wrote customer Carol Jackson, of South Weymouth, in 2002.
LeMaire did business under the name Laptop Maltese. The website was recently deleted.
On the other hand, in interviews with at least a dozen customers who bought dogs with LeMaire, many people said LeMaire was quirky, but sold them healthy dogs.
LeMaire sold to well-off and well-known people including Stacy Rubin, wife of Democratic political consultant Doug Rubin who advises Gov. Deval Patrick and, recently, Attorney General Martha Coakley.
"I only had a wonderful experience," said Stacy Rubin, who has three of LeMaire’s dogs. She said LeMaire occasionally brought groups of prospective buyers to Rubin’s home to show her dogs.
Matthew Growney, whose family bought a dog from LeMaire in 2004, said even back then, her home looked messy.
"It wasn’t like a hoarder house yet, but it was like all the makings," he said.
LeMaire would let her pups eat off a shining glass cake stand, he said, but the comforter on her oversize wooden poster bed where she slept with her dogs was soiled with stains, he said.
Wayland officials knew about LeMaire, even before Growney’s visit to her home, records show.
The state’s file on LeMaire contains a Wayland Board of Health report from July 2002, when local officials inspected her property at 24 Highgate Road. Along with a "strong odor of animal waste" they found three males, nine females and 20 Maltese puppies, plus one Shih Tzu, the report said.
"There is no question that she is breeding and selling puppies from her house," Health Director Steven Calichman wrote.
Two months earlier, the state had ordered LeMaire to stop operating an illegal pet shop at the same location, issuing a cease and desist order.
"There was a long history of what she was up to," said Cahill, the state official.
Cahill was not the director during the 2005 court case, but has come to know LeMaire’s name well since he took over in 2008.
"As far as I knew she wasn’t continuing to operate," he said.
After the Red Roof Inn incident last month, records show state officials planned a sort of sting operation to simultaneously inspect five locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts where they believed LeMaire could have stashed as many as 100 dogs.
They even prepared a staging area where they could erect tents to house the dogs, records show.
In the end, officials only found five dogs at a home on Stevens Street in Marlborough, and two in Framingham on Danforth Street at the home of a woman who called herself LeMaire’s assistant.
Officials still believe there could be more dogs. Their investigation, which could result in charges against LeMaire, is far from over.
Cahill said it wasn’t for lack of trying that LeMaire has been able to continue her unsanitary breeding. He said inspectors typically investigate breeders only after a tip from a local animal control or a complaint from a buyer.
"If they’re tricky about the documentation it can be very hard for us to prove what they’re doing," he said.
Cahill said a new database he implemented since taking over in 2008 makes it easier to track records of people like LeMaire.
He said there should be regulations for breeders, but he said most problems they deal with come from pet shops and shelters or kennels. Unlike kennels and pet shops, breeders operations are not inspected.
Ruggiero, from Connecticut, said she bought a Maltese puppy from LeMaire two years ago. LeMaire babysat Lulu during the bad winter storm of 2011 and said the patent leather bag she sent with Lulu reeked for a year after LeMaire returned it.
Ruggiero said she assumed LeMaire was just an eccentric breeder with a Honda Civic full of garbage bags.
"I kind of thought the whole living situation was bizarre because of the strange meeting places, the car, but I would never in a million years think she was living in the Red Roof Inn," she said.
"I don’t think she was intentionally ripping people off. I think this was her survival," said Joyce Doucet, of Londonderry, N.H., who also bought a dog from LeMaire.
"They’re like in a breed of their own," said Nancy Marinick, of Belmont, who bought her dog Lily from LeMaire 13 years ago and reported no problems.
LeMaire insisted her customers take their puppies to Dr. Rodney Poling, a Holliston vet, who said he first met LeMaire 35 years ago.
"All in all I found the puppies to be of superior quality compared to what I see at local pet stores," Poling said.
Poling has had his own run-ins with the state. In 2008 the state shut down a Holliston pet care facility he owned and he was sued over the death of a dog in its care.
Two weeks ago, Framingham Animal Control officer Katherine MacKenzie’s alarm buzzed at 3:45 a.m. on the day she took 21 of LeMaire’s dogs to Grafton to be vaccinated, de-wormed and spayed or neutered.
MacKenzie said even the adult dogs need to be trained like puppies because they do not know how to walk on a leash, are not house trained and are terrified of the outside world.
The dogs are now up for adoption, through animal control, the Animal Rescue League of Boston and the Medfield Animal Shelter.
When reached numerous times by phone, LeMaire declined to answer questions.
(
Metro West Daily - Sept 14, 2013)
Earlier:
Woman,
6 dogs found living in squalor at Framingham motel
Dog
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In
link to Framingham case, officials remove dogs at filthy home in Marlborough
Marlborough homeowner avoids animal cruelty charges
