Sunday Drive

Count Dante's Dance of Death

COUNT DANTE’S DANCE OF DEATH: A TRUE STORY

On April 24, 1970 Count Juan Raphael Dante, sensei of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, led a half dozen of his followers into a rival dojo – the Green Dragon Society’s Black Cobra Hall.  It would prove to be the tragic climax of the Chicago Dojo Wars – a time of frequent, bloody street-fights between inner-city karate schools.

This time would be different.

Count Dante, lean and savage, burst through the door of the Black Cobra Hall. Some say he was angry because one of his acolytes was getting threatening phone calls. Some say the dispute was over a woman. Some say it was over money.

All agree that the Green Dragons didn’t take kindly to the invasion. Instead of submitting, they grabbed martial arts weaponry from the walls – nunchakus, hatchets, swords, even a mace – and fought back.

Some say Dante plucked the rival sensei’s eye out with his fingers. Some say Dante fought his way through a gauntlet of knife-wielding students only to collapse, bloodied, at the other sensei’s feet. Some say he hid under a desk the whole fight.

All agree, when the battle was over, Count Dante’s best friend and chief lieutenant was bleeding to death on the sidewalk outside. Someone had stuck a sword through his gut.

And all agree: Count Dante was never the same again.

Who was Count Dante?

This guy:

From the late 60’s to the mid 70’s, he glared out of the back pages of comic books at a generation of weak adolescent boys. Crowned “The Deadliest Man Alive” after winning a series of “secret death matches,” Dante now promised to impart his bloody wisdom – and membership in the Black Dragon Fighting Society – for a mere five dollars and fifty cents.

Dante wasn’t the first karate instructor to offer correspondence classes through comic book ads. But he was the first –and only – who said he would teach his students to kill. And it wouldn’t be a difficult death either; Dante taught the Dim Mak, or “Death Touch.” A simple brush of the fingertips, and your enemy was gone forever. It was all part of Dante’s unique, “unstoppable” fighting system, which he called Dan-Te, or, less formally, “The Dance of Death.”

In some ads, Dante made his prospective students check a box swearing they would not use their new powers to kill anyone.

There were a lot of self-improvement ads in comic books in those days, but they mostly looked something like this:

The Muscle Boy ads promised their victimized readers that they would turn them into the very image of the jocks who picked on them, with girls nestled in their overdeveloped arms. There were no girls in Dante’s ads. He offered a sinister, left-hand path to redemption – an esoteric, clandestine knowledge that would overwhelm those whom nature had gifted with strength, beauty, and popularity.

The Muscle Boys offered acceptance. Dante offered revenge.

But he was more than just a comic book huckster. Count Dante was a legitimate master of the martial arts.

And before he died at the age of 35, before he was buried in an unmarked grave, Dante was:

·      The owner of a chain of dojos, car dealerships, and pornographic book shops.

·      A partner of the Chicago Syndicate.

·      The first American karate teacher to take Black and Latino pupils.

·      The originator of “Mixed Martial Arts” tournaments – the forerunner to today’s Ultimate Fighting Championships.

·      The reputed brains behind the $4.3 Million heist from the Purolator armored car company in 1974.

·      A hairdresser who styled Playboy bunnies.

His birth name was John Keehan (though he later claimed that was an alias). He was born in 1939, to upper-middle class parents in a posh Chicago suburb. After high school, he joined the marine reserves and the army, where he got his first taste of martial arts. He had a gift for them.

After the army, he studied full-time under the legendary Robert Trias, founder of the first karate school in the mainland U.S.

Trias was founder and president of the United States Karate Association, and Keehan was its Midwest Director. But he left Trias and the U.S.K.A. in 1964 because he was taking Black and Latino students, and Trias didn’t like that.

Keehan, at center, with his students and the pet lion cub he kept at his dojo. He used to put the lion on a leash and take it for walks along Lake Michigan. He had to get rid of it after it bit the mayor of Quincy, Illinois.

The turning point from dedicated martial artist to “Deadliest Man Alive” may have been a 1962 New York match which pitted Keehan against a black belt named Gary Alexander for the North American Karate Championship. Keehan lost; he was disqualified for using a karate move called “Monkey Steals a Peach.”

Above, Keehan demonstrates “Monkey Steals a Peach” – a technique known less poetically as “Ripping the Other Dude’s Nuts Off.”

That disappointment seems to have fueled Keehan’s rejection of the martial arts establishment. To Keehan, the traditional disciplines of the martial arts – mental composure, style, elaborate chains of moves called kata – were irrelevant to the true purpose of any fighting technique: kicking a man’s ass.  And doing it as brutally and quickly as possible, no holds barred. His opinion of traditional training was summed up in the title of an article he wrote for Black Belt magazine: “Karate is for Sissies.”

Not for Keehan was the Obi Wan Kenobi-style calm emphasized by other senseis. He believed in rage. Embraced it.  He believed in winning at any cost. As he put it in his book, Deadliest Fighting Secrets:

"Most karate schools place little emphasis on courage or ‘guts fighting’ and aggressiveness and usually even frown on it… The only true test of a fighting man is what he can do, and no more. “

According to karate chronicler Massad Ayoob, John Keehan “developed an obscene fascination with the most brutal part of the martial arts.”

He was no Kenobi. He was Darth Vader.

In Keehan’s dojos, there was no protective padding. Sparring practices were full contact. You didn’t win on points in a Keehan dojo; you won by knocking the other motherfucker out.

That held for the martial arts tournaments he started organizing, beginning in 1963. These were brutal affairs, matching practitioners from any fighting style, be it judo, wrestling, or boxing. What we would today call “Mixed Martial Arts.”

Eyes were gouged, teeth were lost, blood stained the mats. Though his public fame soared, Keehan swiftly fell, Satan-like, from Golden Boy to pariah of the traditional martial arts community. He couldn’t care less.

He promoted his Battles Royale with lurid publicity stunts: Pitting his karate reflexes against a cowboy quick draw artist; Challenging Muhammed Ali to a “Million Dollar Duel;” Announcing that one of his students would kill a bull with his bare hands (The ASPCA stopped that one).

While he was reinventing Karate, he was also reinventing himself. In ‘67 Keehan changed his name to Count Juan Raphael Dante. The “truth,” it turned out, was that he was Spanish Nobility. His family had fled the Spanish Civil War and had taken the name “Keehan” to fool assassins. Now he was proudly reclaiming his heritage. He painted the Dante coat of arms on the door of his chocolate brown Cadillac. He wore capes, canes, and silk. He grew the Satanic facial hair we remember him for today.

And he started making those awesome ads:

Yes, this is the DEADLIEST and most TERRIFYING fighting art known to man—and WITHOUT EQUAL. Its MAIMING, MUTILATING, DISFIGURING, PARALYZING and CRIPPLING techniques are known by only a few people in the world. An expert at DIM MAK could easily kill many Judo, Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, and Gung Fu experts at one time with only finger-tip pressure using his murderous POISON HAND WEAPONS. Instructing you step by step thru each move in this manual is none other than COUNT DANTE—“THE DEADLIEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED.” (THE CROWN PRINCE OF DEATH.)

By the late 60’s, Dante was making a shitload of money. His How-To-Kill Manual had sold copies in the millions. He had additional mail order businesses selling karate gear. He owned a small chain of dojos, a used car lot, and “The House of Dante,” a hair salon. He was so goddam manly, there was nothing he couldn’t get away with.

He became part-owner of some pornographic book stores. His co-owner introduced him to the world of the occult – Aleister Crowley style Sex Magick. Interestingly enough, for someone so dismissive of the corny “spiritual” aspects of the martial arts, Dante became deeply enmeshed in Chicago’s thriving occult underground. It was probably just for the orgies – and there were plenty of orgies – but he did take the trouble to get ordained as a genuine Voudon Priest.

Of course, Dante didn’t need Voodoo to get laid. He partook liberally of the Sexual Revolution. And, by all accounts, was a real shit to the women in his life.

Actually, by all accounts he was a real shit to everyone in his life.

Whatever might have been admirable about Dante’s race-blind admission policies was eventually overshadowed by his preferred students: gang members, gangsters. Dante loved rubbing shoulders with hoodlums, and his students included the notorious Blackstone Rangers, Chicago’s dominant street gang, as well as unaffiliated muggers and thieves.

His students loved getting into fights, breaking into other dojos, vandalizing them. Dante loved leading them into battle. He was arrested in 1965 for trying to blow up the front of a rival karate school with dynamite.

This was the start of the Dojo Wars. They ended in 1970, but only after Dante had led some students into the Green Dragon dojo and gotten his best friend killed.

Those closest to him say something broke in Dante that day. Which is not to say he cleaned up his act. Far from it – Dante doubled down. He became bolder, more aggressive, more obnoxious than ever – but now his confidence seemed forced. He’d always been a big drinker, but now he was drinking a shitload, popping pills. He needed chemical assistance to keep his edge.

Dante’s 70’s ads became even more graphic. Note the textbook use of “Monkey Steals a Peach.”

Dante pushed his luck. His porn shops brought him into conflict with the Chicago Syndicate – the most powerful mob in the country. He retained the services of a crooked mob lawyer, Bob Cooley, who would later be the central figure in the FBI’s “Gambat” investigation that brought down Chicago’s infamous First Ward forever.

Cooley arranged a sitdown for Dante and some mafia goons. Dante made peace, but more importantly, he’d made contact with the mob. Never content to merely be a bad guy, Dante wanted to the be the worst guy – and that meant working with the mob.

He started hanging with the mobsters, partying with them, pressuring them to work with him. He later claimed to have made a few hits for them, but that was probably bullshit.

His fancy clothes stopped fitting him now. Booze bloat. Dante was a little slower now, but if anything he was more dangerous and increasingly erratic.

One day in 1974 he stormed into Bob Cooley’s office, offering to cut the mafia mouthpiece in on a deal worth millions. Cooley begged off. A month later, Cooley turned on the radio to hear that $4.3 million had been stolen from the vaults of the Purolator Armored Car Company.

Dante was called in front of a Grand Jury, even given a lie detector test, but was never indicted for the crime, though several mobsters went down for it. But lawyer Cooley knew the Count was involved. One night, a drunken, coke-sweaty Count had shown Cooley a cardboard box in the closet of his lakefront condo. Cooley recognized big money when he saw it, and this box was full of something like a million dollars.  Cooley urged Dante to keep his mouth shut, to lie low for a while, but the Count was never known for his discretion.

A few months later, the Count hosted “The Taunton Death Matches,” an infamous Mixed Martial Arts tournament in Massachusetts that drew national headlines and condemnation. Dante was scared they’d drawn the very worst kind of publicity. He told friends that his mob associates weren’t happy with all the attention he was getting. He called reporters in the middle of the night, drunkenly, with a shotgun in his lap, to bemoan his fate. He knew they were going to hit him.

A few weeks later he died. The Coroner’s Report says it was a bleeding ulcer brought on by years of alcohol abuse, and there’s no doubt he was sick. But Bob Cooley thinks the Coroner’s report is a fabrication – and nobody knows more about corrupt Chicago than Bob Cooley. Cooley claims Dante’s young wife called him one night in a panic. When Cooley got to the condo, he found Dante dead in the bathroom, and the box of money gone from the closet. Dante’s wife wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, so Cooley called in some favors and arranged for a quick cremation and a clean death certificate.

It looked like poisoning to Bob Cooley. But, like a lot of things in Juan Raphael Dante’s life, we’ll never be sure of the whole truth. He was a uniquely American character: a self-made man, a rebel who rejected every authority he found until it killed him, a consummate bullshit artist who started to believe his own lies. He was comical, despicable, tragic – a clown who would kill you if you laughed at him.

His father was a wealthy, connected doctor. He could have gone to college, become a lawyer, a stockbroker… anything. But his pathological aversion to succeeding through fair play, his fixation on ultra-macho brutality in his interpersonal relationships, stifled him. He was almost childlike in his simplistic Apha-beats-Beta understanding of the world. And he never learned better, he never learned the truth, because he was so fucking good at karate. He was like a bratty kid with a tommy gun. He was one hundred percent wrong, all of the time, but he got what he wanted anyway.

As Massad Ayoob wrote in eulogy: “By any contemporary standard, he was an evil man. Yet in his own way he was brilliant, personable, even compelling. Those who knew him well describe him most often in two words: ‘Charismatic’ and ‘Psychotic.’ His criticisms of traditional martial arts as applied to American streetfighting were for the most part valid and were widely recognized as such. They will become more acceptable with him dead.”

Dante had his own take on his legacy. In reference to the legendary Samurai Musahi,

"Look up history. Musashi is the hero of Japan, yet he murdered innocent men, women and children for money. He was a 'stone killer.’ They despised him when he was alive and canonised him when he was dead. Mark my words, that's what they'll do to me.”

Hasn’t happened yet.