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There's something I haven't told you before. What? What? Camellia. Season 5. Dr. Dante. A production of Campside Media. Oh. Dr. Dante.
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Dr. Ronald Dante and Bobby Gold, Dante's sidekick slash godson, had taken their hypnotism seminars as far as they could go, as far as people would let them. But now, the heat was hot, the warnings stern, the threats from people trying to shut them down legitimate. Once we got out of hypnosis, we had so many people mad. When you had to lie low.
But as Bobby Gold can attest, the Ronald Dante version of laying low was different than most people's. No, no, no, he was always trying stuff. No, he was... Ran was always trying stuff. Sure, he was now all but forbidden from teaching any iteration of his hypnosis seminar.
But he wasn't leaving this chapter empty-handed. Through those seminars, he'd figured out the outlines of a product he knew would always sell. Anything you learn, it just works.
It's the most valuable thing in the world. He goes, "I'm selling information." It was the mid-80s by now, and since the internet hadn't arrived in a meaningful way yet, learning was very hand-to-hand. And Dante was fashioning himself as human clickbait. He had a natural eye for, you know, what's out there that's a new different idea. And then he'd say, "I have a way I could make a seminar out of it." Dante could see that seminars was where it was at.
He felt like he could convincingly teach anything. He just needed to find something that people wanted. There's something people are interested in.
And they will pay a certain amount just if someone tell them how to do it. They don't want to go do all the research. He goes, and that's all I do. Make it a little bit showbiz, make it a little fun, put it in a fun place. They're going to come. Because in a Dante seminar, it was never about the information you left with. It was about the star you met along the way. He had a real knack for giving people worth, generosity.
just by spending time with them. He talked for three hours and he wouldn't cover anything and it was the best part of the seminar.
Dante shifted gears into a mode that those who knew him well had seen many times before, and would see many times again. They describe it as a sort of open mode, like a novelist between books or a guitar player noodling, waiting for the right chords to reveal themselves. Dante was actively figuring out what to teach the world next. He'd buy up all the magazines at a newsstand and flip through, curiously, putting his ear to the belly of the zeitgeist, his mind...
all the way open. He didn't rely on focus groups or data or surveys to help point him in the right direction. He had something much more powerful than that. He went by gut. He knew how people
He had a great understanding of what really drove people. He had a knack for discovering what the next craze or the next fad was. Dante's wife at the time, Elizabeth. When Dante was in open mode, he was Wile E. Coyote. Your hard-earned dollars, the roadrunner.
And like Wile E. Coyote flipping through the Acme catalog, he was open to trying almost anything. Ron understood a concept that most people don't understand. It's testing. Testing. The secret is not just in having ideas, but in testing them. It's like, you know there's gold in those hills. They don't call him Bobby Gold for nothing.
Bobby had proven his worth to Dante during the hypnosis seminars, but that whole operation was one that he'd been simply plugged into. This time, though, he could get in at the ground floor of the next big thing and start a true partnership with his godfather. He would call me from time to time and go, I think I hit on something, I think I've got something. And then Bobby would throw his ideas back to Dante, the two of them with an inexhaustible willingness to spitball.
It wasn't about having one big idea. It was about having a hundred small ones. Test, test, test. That's how he thinks. I keep on trying different things until something works. Would it work to teach people how to be paralegals over a weekend? Why not?
He started an organization that certified "paralegals." Both the words "certified" and "paralegals" in air quotes. I don't know anything about paralegals. That didn't quite pan out. So he wondered, could he train women how to make premium clothing, perhaps by posing as a fictitious fashion icon? Yep. He went in as Mr. Fabian, a famous designer from Europe. Did Dante know the first thing about how to sew? Nope.
But Mr. Fabian did. And he was teaching women how to sew a dress. He's just trying to figure out what he can sell. So these were all little testers. Could he sell a janky little box that claims to tone your muscles by gently electrocuting them?
Sure. He had these electric muscle stimulators. A small box he could buy from China for $40 and sell for hundreds. Dante brought the electric muscle stimulators and Bobby would bring his muscles. He put these things on my muscles and of course it just worked out. So he'd turn the electric boom, boom, boom, because your muscles are already kind of pumping and jumping around and we'd sell out. Before long, Dante would have not just one line cast, but more than a dozen. Test, test, test. But after a time in this mode,
Dante closed in on something. The thing that he was convinced would be the next big thing. It came to him as if in a dream. Permanent makeup. Permanent makeup. Permanent makeup. Permanent makeup. Dante decided he was going to teach people how to permanently tattoo onto the faces of the masses. Eyeliner, lip liner, and eyebrows. No more putting it on every morning. You wake up, you're made up.
The more he thought about it, the more he fell in love with the idea. Permanent makeup had just started to tiptoe into the mainstream in the 80s, an era known for its not-so-subtle makeup.
But there were no big players yet. The procedure was nascent and growing in popularity. Regulators hadn't quite figured out what to do with it yet. So even if he did run into regulations in one state, no bother, he'd just go to the next one. He went to Bobby and his wife Elizabeth and said, I found it. Our million-dollar ticket is here. I thought he was nuts because he didn't have the first clue
Dante's like, that's not the point. Don't you get it by now? I'm just the coach. And then Bobby has an epiphany. Bobby tells Dante, oh, you're the music man. Folks, listen. May I have your attention, please?
The Music Man, the hit musical where a man who doesn't know how to play music goes to a town selling instruments and then skips town before he teaches anyone how to play them. I can handle your troubled friend. Now you know I can. Oh, yes, I can. He goes, well, that's basically what I am. And I said, well, Music Man was a con man, Ron. He was teaching people to play music you didn't know how to play. He says, yeah, but he taught them. He says a good coach isn't supposed to know how to play. They're supposed to know how to get you to believe in yourself and get you to play.
If Dante knows how to do anything at all, he knows how to convince people to look past reality. In the old hypnotism act, it was, now you're a dog, now you're a child, you're the best dancer in the world. But now it was, you're a successful, permanent makeup artist. Bobby said, I'm in. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Sam Mullins, and this is Dr. Dante.
You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. The following interview is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami-Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Ronald F. Carpenter. In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. Arriving in Miami, I proceeded to do certain things that I considered to be necessary to the crime that I planned to commit.
But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidant, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes. From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
If somebody says the right words, promises the right things, anybody can become a victim. Since the early 2000s, millions of handwritten letters were landing at people's doors all across America. She truly believed that this was going to save her mind from going further astray.
into the depths of demand shut. I'm investigative journalist Rachel Brown, and I'm going to tell you the story of a scam unlike anything I've ever seen and the shape-shifting mastermind who evaded capture for more than 20 years. We never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. They'd been without water for two months. All they wanted in return was whatever it was that Maria Duval was promising them.
From ITN Productions and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
Even if Dante claimed to have great instincts as a coach, and even if he had an extreme confidence in his ability to learn new things, permanent makeup meant that he would essentially be teaching people how to become a tattoo artist, which is a real art form, obviously. And even when you're not exclusively tattooing high stakes parts of a person's body, like say their eyelids, you're
It can take a couple of years of apprenticeship before you get good. Dante looked at the existing system and thought, "Pfft, I don't need two years to learn this."
So what did he do? Study for one year? Six months? One lady, an Asian lady, showed me in one hour how to do permanent makeup. That's all it was. And after this one hour in this woman's studio, Dante left convinced that he could do this. Because yes, tattoo work is sensitive work. Needles are going into people's skin. But the tattoo training didn't have to be.
He could just teach the students the way that she taught him. Working on a banana skin, first of all, with the tattoo needle. And then they would go from there to pig's ears to, you know, get a sense of working on real skin. The wheels were turning in Dante's head, dollar signs in his eyes, thinking, this is going to be a piece of cake.
Because what does nearly every town in America, even the smallest of them, have? A beauty salon.
There are tens of thousands of them in the U.S., filled with people looking to expand their offerings. The students would be 99% women, a crowd very much in Dante's wheelhouse. So he'd show up well-coiffed, impeccably dressed, charm the hell out of them, and then at the end of the seminar, every student would leave a certified dermologist. And no, I didn't mispronounce that. And yes, it is a word that Dante made up.
He'd offer a certificate in the made-up field of dermology. And to top it off, he'd even sell them his own marked-up tattoo machines. And about those machines. It's only a bell. The tattoo machine is a bell, a doorbell. Do you realize that? It's a doorbell. It's all it is. It's a ringing doorbell.
This is real. People have been modifying doorbells into tattoo machines since the 19th century. And for Dante, it would be an easy way to make a few extra hundred dollars a person. This was all gonna work. He was certain.
Every great idea needs an equally great name. He had one of those too. Permaderm. Permaderm was a permanent makeup procedure which I invented. Coming to a town near you, Dr. Dante, revered pioneer of the permanent makeup industry. A man who has tattooed permanent eyeliner on more satisfied, beautiful faces than anyone else alive. Come learn from the godfather of dermology as we know it.
All it'll cost you is two days of your time and $1,800. I was going to teach people how to do perimeter, which would cost $1,800 a class. And it was a two-day class. Company named, industry made up, ads placed. It was time to take the show on the road.
They made plans to do a trial run in a few test cities first to see how viable this would all be at scale. Okay, the brochures worked, the calls were working, everything was working, now you gotta actually teach the thing. And it's here where it's important to mention the one caveat to this whole plan. Just one small, very minor, no big deal issue. He didn't like needles. He didn't want to be... He didn't want to be doing it himself. ♪
That's right. The godfather of dermology, the art of using needles on faces, was worried that he might faint at the sight of a needle. But never fear, Dante had a plan for this too. A plan he just forgot to mention to Bobby. And that's where I wanted to kill him. Into the first trial city rolled Dante, a needlephobic whose experience amounted to watching a woman tattoo fruits for an hour, and Bobby, who had, checks notes, no experience whatsoever.
But it turned out that when there's needles involved, Dante would not be taking the lead. He decided he didn't want to really do the procedure. It kind of scared him. The morning of the first day of the seminar, Dante walks into the room wearing, on his dominant arm, a cast. One of his students approached him before class to ask what happened. And I told him that my hand was broken. It was in a ski accident and it wasn't. I had a fake cast on it.
He devised this plan so that he wouldn't be able to demonstrate the technique. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to do the permanent makeup. So he decided he was going to cast down his arm just for the seminar. You know, he's not going to touch the instrument. Dante would rely only on the instrument of his voice. No one but Ron could pull that off. So it basically, do as I say, not as I do. Bobby was mortified.
But even though Dante knew nothing about what he was talking about, the women staring expectantly at him were, in essence, just an audience. And when you get Dante in front of an audience, he can deliver.
He actually got through the whole damn class just teaching them theory. I couldn't believe, but his talent, he had them all, and they were having fun. Eventually, Dante told them that it was time to try it out for themselves. And like the coach he was, he walked among them, giving them pointers. The women were focused, serious, trying to get this right. The place would sound loud because there's a hundred machines going, meh, meh, meh.
and they'd be tapping on a banana, and the banana would look great. A yellow banana with the ink. Wow, they'd be making eyebrows.
Eyeliner, this, that, the lips, whatever. It was just like drawing. It was like artwork. Progressively, he moved them up the food chain. And then the next thing I'd have them do it a grapefruit. And then you'd go, wow, grapefruit. Then the last day on a pig's ear. And they were having fun. A lot of these people are talented. But then, just as they're about to say class dismissed, Dante's worst needle-based nightmare comes true.
Finally, one person said, well, you got to show me how to make a mark on my hand. Dante raised his cast like, remember my very serious skiing injury?
But it was clear, no one was leaving this room until the king of dermology dermologized. And I was scared to death. Knowing that he couldn't go any further without this bare minimum of a demonstration, he grabbed a seat on the stool in the willing hand of a student as everyone gathered around to finally watch the master in his element, who had agreed to make a single dot. And I was afraid to make the dot. I did not know how to do it.
Focusing on her hand and doing his best not to think about the needle, he squeezed the instrument tight, bringing it down to the perfectly still, trusting hand of a student. I finally made a dot on somebody's hand and they all applauded. It was so fantastic. The first graduating class of Permaderm Academy applauded Dante's dot and they dispersed, presumably to go make some Permaderm dollars of their own and embark on their dermology careers.
If it was going to be like this everywhere, Dante was about to make a fortune. You're listening to Camellia from Campside Media. You're listening to Camellia from Campside Media. Dante and Bobby had made their way across America enough times with hypnosis seminars to know which markets were, let's say, more embracing of new ideas. So they plotted their course carefully. You knew there were certain places that were always good. People were very receptive in California, California.
Washington, Dallas and Texas, they all wanted to be modern. They wanted the new stuff. We didn't go near the Northeast. Oh my God, you get in New York, Massachusetts, this law, that law, this law, and they're all highly educated and they all want to argue. So they stuck to the receptive regions and the seminar only picked up steam. More graduates, more money. Everything was rolling. But then we got to Chicago.
Packed along with their tattoo machines and other gear making the trip to Chicago was Dante's cast. This fake ski accident was serious enough that his fake doctor said he should wear the fake cast for a few more weeks, at least until the Permaderm Academy was fully operational.
Dante and Bobby were especially excited about this stop in Chicago, playing to their hometown crowd. Chicago, where they have the nice salons. I figured these people would have the most money. They walked into the first morning in Chicago wearing their official Permaderm lab coats, and Dante took the floor to do what he'd done so successfully in the other cities.
yadda yadda, ski accident, can you believe it? Joke, joke, joke. But then when Dante reached the point where the women should be sufficiently charmed with stars in their eyes, tell us more Dr. Dante, it became apparent that with this group, they would not be in for a smooth two days. - 12 women who own beauty salons in Chicago, which means they're probably half mafia anyway. These aren't dumb women who own a beauty salon. - These were tough women.
The one skill Dante had never doubted, that had never failed him, was his ability to charm women. But this crowd, Chicago salon owners, were impervious to Dante's charm. And because their whole business depended on them having a fine eye for detail, right away they could tell that something about Dante's cast was fishy. They had questions.
How long have you been doing this? They wanted to know. Where are your credentials? What's the deal with your cast? It doesn't even look real. And about halfway through, they were ready to call their lawyers with this bullshit cast. These women were mad.
Dante starts to sweat, dodging questions, telling jokes. But things are getting heated, and the women start heading for the exits. They're calling either their lawyers or their hitmen. And this whole bizarre endeavor should have ended there, with Dante and Bobby being chased out of their hometown by the mafia and a bunch of lawyers, back to the drawing board yet again. But then, one last Hail Mary. Dante.
Dante said, "Oh, you want a demonstration? Wait, you thought we weren't going to? Oh, I can't do it because, you know, the cast. But that's okay because I have here with me in this very room a permaderm expert. Ladies, please welcome to the floor Mr. Bobby Gold!" If Dante's one hour of training was meager, Bobby's was nil.
Bobby had never so much as picked up one of these needles. So far, his job had just been on the back end of things. Research hotels, business insurance, figure out the tattoo laws from state to state, place the ads. But now, his job was suddenly to swim in the deep end. In this room filled with angry, perhaps mafia-adjacent women staring at him. I go, okay, I'll do it. I'll go do it. He goes, Bobby, I'm hurt, but Bobby's going to do it for you.
Was Dante doing this to Bobby because he knew what he could handle? Was he taking advantage of his godson? Or was he forging Bobby from fire, making him in his image, helping him reach his own potential?
The answer doesn't matter right now. Because right now, there were 12 angry women. And unlike the 12 angry men from the jury room drama, these women were all on the same page. There was no way we were getting out of that class without doing a demo. So Bobby rolls up his sleeves and starts doing a thing he's never done with a machine he's never used.
pressing the needle very delicately into the grapefruit as the women look on, knowing that if he fails, the jig is up. I'm pretty good under pressure, but I get serious. I mean, so serious, I mean, you don't even think it's me. Game face on, Bobby takes that grapefruit and taps on a killer pair of eyebrows. And they were back in the game. There would be no hitmen this day.
And against all odds, there would be a day two of the two-day seminar in Chicago. Bobby headed back to his hotel room early that night. I immediately started practicing and coming to my room and getting a feel for it and calling people who were tattooing. He gathered all the oranges and lemons that he could find in the hotel, and he stayed up late, burning the midnight oil, making any fruit he could find beautiful. ♪
Bobby was a lot better prepared for the second day, and they made it out of Chicago intact. But this hometown hiccup left the two men flying back to California unsure whether they should continue with Permaderm at all. This Chicago group exposed a problem that had dogged this idea from the beginning.
the type of women who own these salons are too discerning, too savvy. With their other schemes, they had a routine and the routine worked. They'd run an ad and people would sign up. End of story. But
But with permaderm, the phone was ringing all day. And as with the Chicago salon owners, these women had questions about permaderm. A lot of them. They talk to you for hours and days, and they call back, and they don't know if they want to do it. And they do want to do it. And is it this? Is it that? Dante turns to Bobby, and with uncharacteristic hesitancy. And he's going, this isn't like hypnosis. That they just want to learn it. They really want all this. And then you finally talk one into it, and then they're not sure.
He goes, "This is gonna kill us. Even if I hire a salesman, this is gonna kill us. It's gotta be a snap sale." People were signing up. They just required way too much convincing. Time is money. And Dante and Bobby's dreams for this were big money. They wanted a Permaderm-branded machine in every salon in America.
But how could they stop these business owners from doing their due diligence and tying up the phone lines? He was going to scrap the project, and I was thinking of scrapping it too. But just as they were making their way back to the drawing board, one day, Dante was on the phone on an unrelated personal call, calling an 800 number or something. He just called the company on the phone and they just said, "What state are you calling from?" "What state are you calling from?" was the line that changed everything.
Dante comes into the room where their phones were set up and takes them all off the hook. I shut the phones off and made them sound like they were busy. And then I said, "We're going to tell the people what state are you calling from." You just interrupt them. "What state are you calling from?" And then whatever state they're in, they're going to say, "I'm sorry, but all the classes in that state are completely filled. Would you be willing to go to another state?" "Would you be willing to go to another state?" He goes, "You've got complete control of the call." And it stopped all questions.
All questions ceased. They're like, well, I don't even know if I want to do it yet. Well, you don't have to worry about it, lady, because they're not doing it in your town unless we get a second one. Now, we have a waiting list. We might have another one. I had my girl say, and she had a fake keyboard. She said, just a moment. There's two people who haven't paid for the class yet. They haven't put a deposit on it. They go, well, yeah, OK, put me on the waiting list. And you got them right off the phone. And he says, now you got your clothes. Now you're calling back almost later the same day.
Or the next day. You didn't want to wait too long. And then the next day we call her, "Hello, Sarah?" You know, you own the such and such beauty salon? Hi, this is Tanya from Pernoderm in LA. We got a seat for you. There's an opening in your city. They got it. Do you want it? Then shut up.
Don't say a word. Don't sell it. Don't say nothing. They feel all the pressure because it's a takeaway now. It's like, do you want it? It's like having a ticket for that big concert. And then she had to send the money that day. And all of a sudden we took what was two months on the phone with them talking to all their relatives to suddenly... Nine times out of ten. Boom. And you had your sale. And they sent the money that day. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
From the almost ashes of Permaderm rose Dante's greatest epiphany, an epiphany that would change the course of Permaderm and the course of everything that came after it. This breakthrough would make Ronald Dante a millionaire more than once, and it all started with, what state are you calling from?
Up until this point, Dante had always relied so much on print. But now it was obvious that the phone was a tool that they hadn't deployed to its fullest potential. Because with Permaderm, they weren't trying to reach the masses in a way that they were with hypnosis. They were trying to sell a relatively small corner of the beauty market.
They didn't need to carpet bomb. They needed to snipe. The challenge was that salons get calls from all manner of hucksters all day, every day. It's a really competitive industry. And then another stroke of crooked genius. Dante thought, how do you stand out in a competitive industry? How can we be not just one more phone call from one more vendor begging the salon to buy our product? How do we get them to beg us for our product?
The answer: create your own demand.
First, Dante hired a small army of phone operators. He puts an ad out to hire phone operators to just make phone calls. And he said, "You think three calls for every beauty salon's enough?" I go, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "To make them want it. They gotta want something that everybody's talking about." Once a week, a given salon's phone would ring, and the operators that Dante was paying minimum wage to would ask, "Do you have that new permaderm where you get the permanent makeup?" They'd say no and hang up. Same thing the next day.
Do you have that permaderm? I want to get it. And then what should arrive in the salon's mailbox a day after that but a slickly designed permaderm brochure. Oh wow, it's that permaderm thing everyone's been calling us about. And these brochures that had Liz's before and after on the front. It had all the testimonials on the back of the neighbors and all these people.
and how it's been done in Asia for years, and he's going to teach you the secrets. So if you're an owner fielding these calls from people who want this thing you've never heard of, you're going to prepare a list of questions and call that number. And the damn thing's filled. Oh wait, we do have one opening. It's yours if you want it, but you have to pay today. And the cycle continued. Create demand,
Very quickly, according to Bobby and Dante, they were picking off hundreds of salon owners on the back of Dante's phone technique, all at around $2,000 a pop. Seminars were filling up all over the country. By then, Dante was in his 50s. He'd done his time as a traveling act and knew that life on the road is a young man's game. Whereas Bobby was the prime age to undertake this project, and he was chomping at the bit. I was getting too tired to roll it in.
And then Bob, he says, let me take it on the road. Give me a couple of thousand dollars and I'll take it on the road. Dante said, it's all yours, son. Make me proud. So Bobby packed the world's most unusual suitcase, filled it with ink, bananas and pig's ears and hit the road. I gave him $5,000 a week.
So he made a lot of money, and he'd pick up a lot of girls and stuff like that. Dante's lifelong mentorship was paying off. Bobby was on the road getting in his reps, and very quickly, the student was becoming the master. It took Bobby some trial and error before he landed on the coaching style he'd go with. At first, he tried his hand at being a Steve Kerr type, you know, encouraging, player-friendly, but then he scrapped that for a different persona altogether.
On the first morning of class, he'd stand in front of a room of new students and look at them coldly. I go, "Look, I don't know what you heard, and I don't care what they're doing back at the office. My name's on this thing. You don't learn this? I don't think you're good enough. You don't pass. You can take it again. You don't pass." All the students would straighten up in their seats. "Is anybody thinking they're gonna come here and get rich? I just badger 'em!" If you guys don't buckle down this weekend, we're gonna have to make this thing two weekends. Two weekends? This is serious stuff.
You just want to take their head and say, "I'm not going to tell you it's easy." So now what are you going to do? Then they'd all be happy calling home, "No, I think this is legit. This guy's a real asshole." Once they perfected the whole machine from cold call to bad cop teacher to handing a salon owner a laminated dermology certificate, Bobby and Dante say they were printing money. And meanwhile, we made a quarter of a million dollars a week, which is a profit, which is all
It was all net profit, and it was an all-net idea. Bobby was the face of the thing, and his godfather paid him accordingly. For the several years of Permaderm, Bobby was living the baller life, staying in a different luxury hotel every week. Every city there was...
for 50 weeks in every major city in the country. It was their salad days. But with the money also came the prying eyes of the authorities. Regulators at the Federal Trade Commission started just checking in with the two of them. The issues the FTC were having were not large. It started out with something small that was printed in his ad copy that they wanted changed.
Because of his advertisement. He said that the process was painless. It wasn't painless. It was tattooing. So they said change that copy. A pretty reasonable request. But even something as minor as that is completely out of the question with Dante. He wasn't willing to change his advertisements. He just didn't want to. No, not changing it.
So next comes the fine. And when a federal agency fines you, even for a small amount, there are suddenly stakes. Especially when you're running a not 100% legitimate or above board business. In these situations, it's best to comply with a smile so they don't probe further.
Because it wasn't like he didn't have the money to pay the fine. He just didn't think he should have to pay it. He'd run into things like this before, and he always came out unscathed. By that time, he was thinking he was invincible. So he saw these probes and the fine as a challenge, as a game almost. He figured he'd bob and weave and still be standing at the end, as he usually was.
And it appeared that things might go in that direction. They told the FTC, look, there's no evidence that anyone has been hurt by permaderm. And there's lots of evidence that our students are out there making a good living doing quality work. So what's the problem here?
The truth was the FTC didn't really know what to do with these guys. So they essentially said, okay, we suspect that what you guys are doing is sketchy. We're going to keep an eye on you. So just sign this paper that says that you will promise to stop making false claims about your trainings.
But Dante was like, no. It was the principle of the thing. I'm curious to know if you think that there was an ultimate goal in Ron's mind. Like, was there an amount of money or fame or anything that was winning? Showing him the hypocrisy, bringing out hypocrisy. It's all about they're fucked up.
I see things and they're wrong. He likes showing them they're... He liked taking power and showing them you're not, you don't have that much power. And it's this way of being that attracts people like Bobby to Dante in the first place. Running with Dante is exciting. It was edgy. There's a thrill to skating the line of every rule and getting away with it. Bobby loved this life, but only up to a point. He had a limit. And he assumed Dante did too, but...
He didn't. Because sure, Dante loved the money, the power, the fame, the women. But what he really loved was the game.
And in this game, he was the hero and they were the villains. He was so right about so many things. He just had this little devil in him. He liked fighting the government. And it's here where the thing that made Bobby and Dante a great pair started to break them apart. Dante was the ideas man and Bobby the doer of ideas. Before, that had meant perfect harmony. But now it was splitting them apart. Bobby was like,
While you've been sitting at home cashing checks, I've been on the road sweating it, building something. Let's just jump through these little hoops so that we can keep milking this cow.
It felt so needlessly reckless. Like, why burn the house down over something so small? You know, don't waste this, but he liked the challenge of challenging the system. They wanted me to cease and desist, and I didn't cease and desist. All they wanted was for us to just sign, we'll let you know what we're doing. I had to tell them every time I moved, anytime somebody worked for me, I had to tell them that I was at one time indicted by the Federal Trade Commission. But he wouldn't, even when the walls started closing in.
Bobby couldn't hold it in anymore. You know, I'm getting mad because these are powerful people. You know, we won. Let's get out of there and I keep pissing them off. I'm actually saying things like sign the fucking papers. Why are you antagonizing these people? Bobby felt they were 95% legitimate already. You think you're sticking it to the man, Dante, that you're being punk rock when really you're just being stupid.
This fight between them played out for over a year. Bobby would keep carrying on, figuring that he could protect them both by crossing the T's and dotting the I's himself when Dante wasn't looking. Until one day, Dante did something that crossed a line and changed his relationship with his godson forever.
He did one thing I hated. He did one thing I hated. One day Bobby checks his mail and there's something with the state of Colorado seal on the envelope. And all of a sudden I'm getting notices from the attorney general of Colorado. And these notices said, you signed something that said you'd never come to our state again and you violated it.
Bobby had no idea what this was about. So he called Dante. And Dante said, oh, that. Yeah. So... Ron had gone out there, done a deposition as somebody other than Ron Dante, described Ron Dante as bald when he didn't want to hire a lawyer because we'd already been there now and he wasn't going back. Apparently they needed me to sign something too.
And he signed my name. So Bobby, unbeknownst to him, had just had his name forged by Dante. And Dante had never given him the heads up that he would be committing a crime by doing business in the state of Colorado ever again, which he had just done. So all of a sudden, I got a problem. We just mailed that state. We needed to hit. I spent a bunch of money. And I got the attorney general saying, I broke a major thing I signed. I'm not supposed to do business in Colorado again.
Dante had always been comfortable throwing Bobby into sticky situations. But this wasn't like when he would put Bobby in front of a crowd when he was a little kid, or when he sent him to get signatures on bad contracts, or when he threw him to the wolves in the first permaderm stop in Chicago. There's a code among outlaws. We can scam other people, but never each other.
Bobby said, "You could have landed me in prison, Dante!" And that's when I realized it was partly it was, "Oh geez, now I realize anything I do with Ron, we're always going to have this battle with the government." Bobby from day one had been as loyal as you can possibly be. He would have done anything to help his godfather. He loved him, and he'd put himself in harm's way again and again. But this time, it was Dante putting Bobby in danger, exposing him.
And it was over nothing. Bobby knew his pleas and arguments to make this operation more legitimate would never be considered. And therefore, he knew he'd never be safe. So Bobby did something that his younger self never could have imagined when he sat at his childhood kitchen table, listening in awe to Uncle Ron's incredible stories, longing to be part of his exciting life. Bobby turned his back on Dante, and he took the idea of Permaderm with him.
The idea was good. The execution was not. Even though he knew it would piss off his godfather, he set out on his own. And so, Dante lost his right-hand man. The doer in their dynamic duo. The one person who, if anyone was capable, could have kept Dante in check. And he would need to be kept in check. Because with no one to rein him in, he was back in open mode.
And in the pan of Dante's ideas and future schemes, the biggest kernel of all was about to pop. Next time on Dr. Dante. The lawyer told me, he said, if I don't want to go to prison, I got to go south or north, Canada or the other place.
Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. Dr. Dante was written and hosted by me, Sam Mullins. It's produced by Aboukar Adan and edited by Karen Duffin. Our associate producer is Tanita Rahmani. Original music, sound design, and mixing by Garrett Tiedemann.
Additional music by APM and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Lauren Vespoli. Our consulting producer is Bradley Beasley. Special thanks to Johnny Kaufman and to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Aaliyah Papes, and Destiny Dingle. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Matt Scher, Vanessa Grigoriadis, and Adam Hoff.
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