Who Was Count Dante?

The ads in the back of comic books proclaimed him “The Deadliest Man Alive.”  In them, for a mere 4 dollars and 98 cents, the reader was promised “the FORBIDDEN and SECRET training manual of the BLACK DRAGON FIGHTING SOCIETY,” 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.” Claiming to have been crowned “The World’s Deadliest Fighting Master” on August 1, 1967, after winning the World overall Fighting Arts Championship, he called himself Count Juan Rafael Dante.  His real name was John Keehan, and he would have a profound effect on the martial arts world for decades to come.

In the spring of 1964, Black Belt Magazine’s  John Van Nutter credited John Keehan as one of two men greatly responsible for what he called the rapid growth of the United States Karate association.  At the time, the organization had more than 5,000 members, and had the previous July held its first nation-wide karate tournament.  The tournament drew over 300 contestants from around the country, and the USKA was poised to hold its second World Karate tournament in June of 1964.

Answering the question, “What kind of man is John Keehan?” Nutter praised the man who would later anoint himself Count Dante, saying that Keehan, at age 25, is “one of the top instructors of karate in the US.  He has,” Nutter wrote, “already supplied 18 instructors to other schools and clubs in the Midwest area.”  Nutter described Keehan’s “proficiency as an instructor” in glowing terms, pointing to the success of Keehan’s students in competition and describing Keehan himself as an able competitor in his own right.  The article also uncritically repeats Keehan’s assertions that he was a former Marine and Army Ranger who had never been defeated in freestyle or kumite competition.

By 1967, Black Belt had changed its tune, and John Keehan had fallen out of favor, becoming almost a pariah — a karate villain whom the magazine invited its members to pillory in the article, “Storm Clouds over Chicago.”

Keehan’s World Karate Federation was, at the time of the article’s writing, slated to stage an infamously billed “no-holds-barred” karate competition in Chicago that summer. Black Belt was quick to point out that the WKF was “mainly confined to a few dojos in the Chicago area.”  It was in 1965 that Keehan was arrested on charges of trying to bomb a competitor’s dojos, a charge that would follow him as surely as would the charge of murder that still lay in his future.

“Virtually every single major karate leader in the country has denounced the Chicago bout,” Black Belt pronounced,  quoting “top karatemen and leading players throughout the country” in their characterizations of the coming competition as a “return to barbarism” and an “insult to karate.”  By column length, the article consisted mainly of a huge photo of the city and several pull-out quotes condemning the competition.  Among those quoted were notable figures Jhoon Rhee, of the US Tae Kwon Do Association, and Skipper Mullins, who would go on to be called one of the top ten fighters of all time in a 1987 survey in Black Belt.

Even Robert Trias, whom Black Belt praised in 1964 alongside Trias’ student Keehan, took the opportunity to decry what he called the “disgraceful attitudes of the promoters of such a tournament” to what he called “karate-do.”  He made the dire pronouncement that the competition would, “for certain,” affect, presumably negatively, “the growth of karate in this country,” saying it could well be “the beginning of the end for the science some of us have dedicated our lives to in promoting brotherhood, sportsmanship, competition, and tournaments on a high amateur level, with the dream of someday bringing unity and respect to this fine art.”  One can only assume Keehan and Trias had a falling out since the days when Keehan called Trias “Sensei.”

In 1969, Black Belt’s Managing Editor, D. David Dreis, penned an article called “The Trial of Count Dante,” in which he commented at length on a martial arts forum held in Chicago with John Keehan and several other martial artists.  The forum was, in Dreis’ words, “a means for [Count Dante] to explain himself; to tell all of us who he really is.” Dreis admitted that Black Belt had refused to cover the man who, in his words, had done “more harm and more good for karate than any man in Chicago.” Dreis’ bias is clear; he describes Keehan as a “smartly dressed, bearded karateka with a pomposity in his manner which seems to mark him as a man set apart from the usual trappings of the Oriental karateka.” He writes, “Dante, upon meeting me, displayed an open contempt, a hostility, which seemed less against me than for an image he disliked.”  Several times in his commentary, Dreis invokes his psychic powers to tell us what John Keehan was thinking, even if the man didn’t say it.

The real reason for Dreis’ and Black Belt’s disdain, of course, is found a couple of pages in.  He mentions Dante’s self-published “World’s Deadliest Fighting Arts,” getting the title wrong, and says, “Why [Keehan] would publish such a booklet is beside the point. The answer is readily understandable. The fact that the book is spawning ‘fighters’ throughout the nation is an uncomfortable reality to those who know of his reputation and who are trying to wade their way out of the mire he has put them in.”

In the forum, the man who called himself Count Dante took to task those who presumed to sit in judgment over him.  “The streets,” he said, “are where you learn whether you can fight, not tournaments where they pull their punches. I know plenty of guys who have black belts who couldn’t defend themselves when they got into a street fight. Black Belt respects them.” He also pointed out the hypocrisy of Black Belt refusing to cover tournaments in Keehan’s Chicago, while giving plenty of coverage to what he called “blood baths” of more traditional karate bouts in Japan.

Attorney Robert Cooley, writing with Hillel Levin, in the book, When Corruption was King, recounted the often suddenly violent, larger-than-life man who was Count Juan Rafael Dante.  Keehan was charged with murder under an accountability statute that held him liable for the death of his student, after he started a fight at a competitor’s school and the student was run through with a spear. In court, Cooley argued that the students of the Black Cobra Hall were the aggressors, but once on the stand, Keehan was as belligerent and macho as ever, declaring that no one could ever get away with attacking him.  The Black Cobra Hall members were equally belligerent and, in the end, the judge declared them all “a pack of lunatics” and dismissed the charges against everyone.

Keehan was still making headlines in Black Belt in 1976, when noted firearms writer Massad Ayoob wrote an article titled, “Count Dante’s Inferno: What It’s All About.”  But now, the Count was making headlines for doing something he’d never done before or would since: He was dead at only 36 years old.

Interestingly, in this article, Ayoob describes Bill Aguiar II, who ran a dojo in Fall River, Massachusetts, as “perhaps the most dedicated and enduring of all Dante’s students. To him had fallen the mantle of president of the World Karate Federation and chairmanship of the Black Dragon Fighting Society.”

Ayoob’s article is the text of an interview Dante gave to Black Belt just a couple of months before he passed away in his sleep on May 25^th, 1975.  In the article, Dante claimed to have studied a variety of arts and with many teachers, including Bruce Lee.  Of Lee, the ever-bombastic Dante proclaimed, “He was very good. He got a lot of reputation, but for what? Did he ever win a championship? Did he ever challenge anybody? Did he ever accept a challenge?”  When asked if he had challenged Bruce Lee, Dante said, no, he did not, because he did not challenge people that were “no competition.”  He went on to demand what Bruce Lee had ever done for the arts.  “Was he a pioneer?” he asked.  He concluded that being in the movies had made Lee lucky, and if he, Count Dante, had that kind of backing… well, he doesn’t say, but the implication is clear.

Ayoob’s commentary subsequent to the interview is damning.  He dismisses the implausible death matches on which much of what he calls the Dante legend was based, and says that most of the people who knew Dante in Chicago thought he was “basically a coward who let other people fight his battles… a charlatan, a mediocre shodan whose only outstanding skill was his ability to impress strangers with his dramatic lies and his charismatic personality.”  Even after he was dead, the three-part series Ayoob wrote for Black Belt about the life and death of Count Dante still titled his booklet “World’s Deadliest Fighting Arts” rather than World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets.

Massad Ayoob writes that Count Dante’s system “never appeared, really, in anything he wrote; the most he ever put down in print was a critique of other systems.”  He referred to his form at times as simply a means of “fucking up” another human being.  Later, Ayoob claims William Aguiar, among others, encouraged Keehan to name it something more commercial, and he called it Dan-Te, or “deadly hands.”  In his philosophy of combat, Dante said, “you don’t use your feet much until your man is on the floor.”

According to Ayoob, World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets was written between 1966 and 1967, published in 1968. It has, Ayoob wrote, sold millions of copies. Arguably, it was Count Dante who helped put mail-order martial arts on the map, forever changing the self-defense industry.

Reading of John Keehan’s disdain for the powers that were during his day, it was hard not to develop a certain regard for him. In some ways, he had the right attitude about self-defense.  He dismissed traditionalism in favor of efficacy, and he spat in the faces of those who presumed to tell him what he could or could not do.

He was also, from all accounts, a huckster, a showman, and possibly a deluded egomaniac with a violent temper and poor impulse control. His fame did little to hurt karate as a commercial martial art in the long run, as was feared during his day; those following his business model continue to empower or to misguide self-study practitioners, however, which surely was a blow to the traditional martial arts power structure then …and now.