Puppy Death
Mickey Rourke Leads Demonstration Against Pet Store

“They kept him alive for five days.”

Mickey Rourke was so annoyed over the death of Cheech that it inspired a police report. Photo by Angie Hargot

By Erik Bojnansky

They may have been residents or perhaps visitors in town for the Super Bowl. But one couple gave only a passing glance to the television crew vans, uniformed police officers and more than 30 picketers who screamed slogans and held up signs in front of Hot Dog Puppies on Española Way in Miami Beach last Thursday.

“There’s a protest for everything,” the man said.

He didn’t see (or maybe he did) that a tall, long-haired man sporting sunglasses at the center of the throng was Mickey Rourke, the actor who starred in 91/2 Weeks, Johnny Handsome and, most recently, Sin City. Rourke, whose assistant held his pet Chihuahua, and more than a dozen others demonstrated for a little more than a half hour as the employees and owners of Hot Dog Puppies watched.

“Show us a healthy puppy!” one of the demonstrators challenged them.

Afterward many of the marchers walked toward a mini-van where they placed their signs.

“It went well?” a tall blonde asked Rourke.

Rourke, after inserting a cigarette into his mouth, replied, “It went really fucking well.”

Many of the demonstrators were friends of Rourke or J.P. Parlavecchio, owner of Fanucci’s, a restaurant on Lincoln Road. Recently Rourke visited Hot Dog Puppies to buy a Chihuahua puppy for Parlavecchio as a belated Christmas gift. The restaurant owner named the puppy Cheech. He soon died of the parvovirus, Parlavecchio said, a disease that often attacks puppies, starting with their intestinal lining (causing bloody diarrhea) and white blood cells. “In very young puppies it can infect the heart muscle and lead to ‘sudden’ death,” states an article on the Web site workingdogs.com.

“At least 12 dogs purchased here died,” Rourke told the SunPost during the demonstration.

That’s a lie, responded Marisol Restrepo, one of the owners of Hot Dog Puppies, when confronted with Rourke’s claims. She insists Rourke has been encouraging past customers to file complaints against the store. Apart from a few customers who think the store is too hot or too cold for the puppies, there have been few complaints, she said. Restrepo also says that, prior to the protest, one investigator from Miami-Dade Animal Services gave her this advice: “Let them protest.”

Erika Montoya, co-owner of Hot Dog Puppies, invited the media to take pictures of her store. Concerned about the protestors, Montoya said the dogs were taken out of the store. Photo by Angie Hargot

But Parlavecchio said he has been contacted by 15 or 20 people who say they bought canines from Hot Dog Puppies that were sick and later died.

“This is not an isolated incident,” said Parlavecchio. “If it was a restaurant and someone gets food poising, if it happens once, that is one thing, if 20 people go there [and get sick] that’s something else.”

Open for roughly a year, the 436 Española Way location of Hot Dog Puppies has had six complaints phoned in to Miami-Dade Animal Services against it, with four of those pertaining to sick dogs. An Aug. 11, 2006 complaint states the store sold a puppy that had parvo. The store owner agreed to reimburse the customer for the vet bill. Shelter inspectors found that the health certificates were in order in response to three other complaints filed between Dec. 20, 2006 and Jan. 18, 2007.

Restrepo pointed out that Rourke bought a perfectly healthy puppy from them a year ago. In fact she recognized the dog at the protest — he was Cheech’s brother. Another sibling of Cheech was also still alive and kicking, she said.

“All our dogs are checked out every couple of days [by a vet],” Restrepo said.

“He was sick from day one,” Parlavecchio insisted.

For Rourke, day one was Dec. 28, when he bought the puppy who would be named Cheech. By New Year’s Eve Parlavecchio said he was transporting Cheech to the Hollywood Animal Hospital. “They kept him alive for five days,” he said. Toward the end he was fed intravenously.

The dog’s death inspired Rourke, a former boxer, to pay a visit to the store on Jan. 11, according to a Miami Beach Police Department incident report. “He came with three [other men],” Restrepo said. She added that one of them advised: “You don’t want Mickey Rourke mad.” Rourke later went outside yelling and screaming, she said, and then one of the friends ran back in the store and begged for a refund because Rourke was “going crazy.” He was given a full refund of $1,400 — $990 for the puppy and the rest for pet food, said co-owner Erika Montoya.

Then on Jan. 16, according to an MBPD report, Parlavecchio came in and asked for restitution for the veterinary bills. A check for $1,461.05 was written by Nancy Restrepo “as a good faith offer,” according to a Miami Beach Police Department incident report. A day later Parlavecchio asked that the previous check be canceled and that a new check of $1,461.05 be written to “Jose Gonzalez.”

“They were very nice people,” said Parlavecchio, who explained that since he had lost his I.D., he had the check rewritten to one of his employees.

Nancy Restrepo then called the Hollywood Animal Hospital, where Cheech was taken, and found out the $1,400 amount was only an estimate — the actual bill was $1,012.38 “a net difference of $448.67,” the MBPD report stated. “It is not known at this time if this was an error on behalf of [Parlavecchio] or an act of fraud,” wrote Officer F. Celestre.

“I gave them the bill,” Parlavecchio insisted.

Det. Bobby Hernandez, spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department, said there is no open criminal investigation of any kind of Parlavecchio, Rourke or Hot Dog Puppies. “It’s a total civil matter,” he said.

But it’s a civil matter that attracted national attention. Also present during the demonstration was Michelle Cho, a representative from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In past demonstrations for PETA, Cho has been willing to demonstrate with little clothing in cold weather to protest the eating of animal flesh or the treatment of circus animals, a Google search revealed. (Near-nude protests are a favored demonstration tactic of PETA.)

Last week, though, all that was required was catching a red-eye flight to Los Angeles just prior to Super Bowl weekend.

PETA activist Michelle Cho makes a point without taking off her clothes. Photo by Angie Hargot.

“We heard just a couple of days ago,” Cho told the SunPost during the protest. Her main message was that pet stores buy puppies from puppy farms, which often produce unhealthy canines (often through inbreeding) that have short and painful lives. Stop buying from pet stores and you will put puppy farms out of business, she reasoned. Besides, dogs need to be adopted from animal shelters, she said, before they are put to death.

“This shop should be closed down,” Rourke wrote in an e-mail to MSNBC’s The Scoop, which was printed in the Feb. 1 celebrity column. “And as I have learned from my friends at PETA, pet shops across the country often sell sick animals. So the message I’ve learned really well here is to only ever adopt animals from a shelter, never buy them from a shop.”

Co-owner Erika Montoya insists that the dogs at Hot Dog Puppies are not purchased from puppy farms. She is also insulted by the notion that they don’t care about their puppies. “We are animal lovers,” she said.

Comments? E-mail erik@miamisunpost.com.