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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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However Ronald Dante was really raised, or wherever he was living during his formative years, Dante is told multiple versions of the story. One consistency is that the roots of how he'd come to view the world were planted, it appears, by his father. I was brought up where I didn't...
I wasn't conditioned to believe in anything. Dante was taught early to be skeptical of those in power. That no one should be telling you how to see the world. Not the government, not religion. I don't believe in any of that bullshit.
He was taught instead to study society from the sidelines, something he'd later pass on to his godson, Bobby Gold. Look at it like you're outside of it. From Dante's vantage point, he'd watch the rat race, see the masses fighting for a spot on the ladder trying to get ahead, always in single file, always one rung at a time.
He understood that if you want to be safe, you can learn the rules to this game and follow them. If you're good, you can make it pretty high up. But it was clear to him that if you want to make it to the very top and quickly, it's better to skip the game altogether and make your own. Most people put themselves as part of something. Why? Why aren't you just watching it like you're floating above it or you're outside of it? You see it from the top, the controlling part.
People with the ability to do this are rare, he learned. There's only about 3% of the people that think that way, and 97% don't. 97% think, I'm safe if I'm in the middle, I'm trying to climb. Over time, Dante learned to look at the world with fresh eyes, like he was an extraterrestrial who had just arrived here. When he looked at the most respected people, he'd wonder, why them?
Is it because they're from a better family? Because they worked harder for what they had? Or were they just wearing the right costume? He surmised that the right suit can get you into any room you want.
And it didn't even have to be a suit. Here's a clip from one of his self-help tapes he made. "Successful people always have a peaceful, placid, friendly look about their faces. Remember that. Always a relaxed look. Very friendly, very peaceful look." With the right clothing and demeanor, he knew that he could convince anyone of anything.
Seeing the world this way, you don't need to earn anything the quote-unquote "right way." It could all just be appearances and stories and titles. If I want to be a doctor, guess what? I'm a doctor. And when people would occasionally grill Dante about his doctor title, he would sometimes admit that he never earned a PhD.
And then he'd tell them this story about how he shrewdly changed his first name to Doctor and had a judge sign off on it. But even that story isn't true. We found no evidence that he ever did legally change his name to Doctor. But this is the point. Dante thought that the professional world in its entirety was bullshit. And he would do or say anything to undermine it.
And so when Dr. Ronald Dante found himself back at yet another drawing board, after the hypnotism seminars and after Permaderm was all but shut down by the authorities, Dante did what he'd done his whole life. He zoomed out and looked at the world in the way that only he could.
And as he surveyed the landscape, he honed in on one type of institution he had long disdained, but also strangely coveted. In articles across the span of his life, he claimed that he got a master's from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD from Singapore University.
But did he actually attend either of those schools? What do you think? Lying about his credentials was a passion of his. But his relationship with higher education was complicated.
He'd boast more than anyone about his impressive non-existent degrees. But he'd also say things like, I mean, it was all bullshit. It was all cons to make money. I mean, look at these schools, how wealthy they are. Look at Yale, Harvard, all those schools. He thought schools were a scam, but he also seemed to have a crush on them. It was all a bit the Lady Doth protest too much. But in this moment, at the tail end of the 80s, Dante surprised everyone.
when he made a right turn and decided to finally embrace academia. That's right. Dante was going to university. Pardon me. He was going to start a university. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Sam Mullins, and this is Dr. Dante. And he had no idea...
how big it was going to be or how much money he was going to make and how it was going to take off. You're listening to Camellia from Campside Media. 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. 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. Proud of 30.
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. I was looking for a hitchhiker, potential victim. 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. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
Ronald Dante wanted to start a university not because he saw them as bastions of growth and progress or temples of knowledge, but because he saw them as a lucrative con, a con that he wanted in on. But what would a Dante University look like?
He knew he didn't want to start a physical university, you know, with real estate and professors, HR departments and all the paperwork that goes along with it. The one thing he did know was that whatever this was going to be, he wanted, needed to stay behind the scenes in the operation so that he wouldn't have to deal with the FTC again.
So Dante gravitated toward the ancestor to online schools, the correspondence school.
For our dear, sweet Gen Z listeners, a correspondence school was where everything was through the mail. You sign up and they would send you textbooks and coursework and you physically mail back and forth all of your essays and assignments. It's like University of Phoenix if the Internet didn't exist. But they were also very legitimate and were an appealing way for people like single parents or folks with day jobs to get a degree working from home.
So as Dante started kicking the tires on how correspondence schools operate, he broke them down to their simplest level.
Basically, all they do is take money, send books, receive tests, and then in the end, the school sends out a nice 8x11 piece of paper with some calligraphy on it. And so he started just copying. He would send away for whatever courses and find out what the books were. Dante enrolled himself, and the student packages started arriving. They would get an overview book, like 101 on economics.
101 on psychology. He'd get curriculums from different schools and say, you know, I'll copy the best. Where would he go to get these books? Oh, I'd get it at the Irvine University, Southern California Irvine. As Dante saw it, a university is nothing more than a really expensive book club with a diploma at the end. And once people had that diploma, like magic came opportunity. Better pay, better jobs, a better life.
Coming out of the extremely niche worlds of hypnotism and permanent makeup, Dante saw the scaling potential of this idea. When you teach self-hypnosis, your students will consist of a weird small percentage of the population, permaderm much smaller still. But when you're offering degrees in pretty much anything you can learn in a university, your target becomes anyone and everyone. And thus,
A university was born. So he started this university called Columbia State University. Columbia State University. Columbia State University. Columbia State University. And the well-oiled Dante promotion machine kicked into gear, designing something he had a great deal of experience with, a promotional brochure. And the cover made it look like it was an Ivy League institution or a
palace someplace. Very impressive. Marty Emerald in JW August there, journalists who covered Columbia State.
So on the cover of it, wow, this looks kind of cool and it entices you to open the pages. This brochure would go to everyone who responded to his print ads, which Dante placed pretty much everywhere he could think of. I advertised in the Penny Saver. The Penny Savers were free newspapers available outside hundreds of grocery stores all across America. Fifteen billion Penny Savers.
It was essentially a physical copy of Craigslist, a good place to reach people looking for opportunity. He also placed ads in airline magazines and bought space in The Economist magazine. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing off the hook, as Dante realized that with this one, he'd struck gold.
But Dante was about to have a problem that threatened to quash Columbia State before it started. Because he was about to attract the attention of the exact wrong person. Let me introduce you to our final guest of the morning. His name is John Baer and he is an expert on the education process including distance learning, learning on the internet and other non-traditional ways of getting degrees. Good morning, Mr. Baer. Good morning.
John Baer devoted his life to weighing the legitimacy and cataloging the quality of academic institutions. He was a critic of schools, basically. And he looks the part, too. Even when he's not standing in front of a bookshelf, he seems like he is. He's like if a banker's box overflowing with files and documents was a person. I am the author of about 35 books, of which perhaps a dozen deal with higher education.
and the dark side of higher education, that is, fake degrees and diploma bills. And on this day in the early 90s, John Baer, expert in fake universities, got a call from the Department of Education in California. Hey, John, there's a really big new fake, at least we believe it's a fake, that has started up called Columbia State that we all have to pay attention to.
So I just want to put that on your radar. After receiving the heads up, John Baer got himself a copy of the Columbia State booklet and started scrutinizing every inch of it, beginning with a beautiful photo of the campus printed on its cover. The Columbia State catalog has on its cover, as its alleged campus, a photograph of Lindhurst,
a stately home in upstate New York. Dante had stolen and used an image of a well-known mansion for the cover. And then on the inside, even the names of listed staff were lifted from elsewhere. It lists as its president, Austin Henry Layard, a well-known archaeologist who died over 100 years ago. It seemed clear that there was no real campus and no real staff. The only real thing Columbia State appeared to offer, as far as John could tell, was the merch. They
They never had any of the trappings of a university other than the fact that they sold school rings. School rings imprinted with the fake insignia of their fake alma mater. But the biggest of the red flags in a brochure filled with them was the central claim, the same claim that Dante had printed in every penny saver that ran his ad. It said...
Get a college degree in 27 days or less. Get a college degree in 27 days or less. By the time you graduate, you might not even have to turn the page on your calendar. Or perhaps even turn the page of a book. Ostensibly, Dante would send you a book. Sometimes the book would be related to the program you were enrolled in. Sometimes it wouldn't be.
You would then have to take an exam or, if it's a graduate degree, write a thesis or dissertation and mail everything to CSU. And then, like a letter mailed to Santa at the North Pole, no one really knew what magic happened then.
All they did know was that they would then receive letter grades with little or no explanation. Would someone read your work? Take into consideration how well annotated your papers were or how well argued your thesis was? These were not questions that mattered to Dante. The only requirement to get a degree from Columbia State was writing a check or providing a credit card number. Absolutely nothing else. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. John Baer was well known for the guides he would publish on non-traditional higher education. His texts were considered to be some of the most reliable sources when determining whether a correspondence school was legitimate or not. And when it came time for a new edition of his university guide, he included an entry on Columbia State.
And he didn't go over the top. He was measured. Just like, be wary of this school. And so I put them in my book, not as a fake, because I am very leery of doing that. I've been sued five or six times, and it's no fun. So I need to have more facts than I had. Shortly after publication, John Baer received a phone call from one of the administrators at Columbia State University. I got a very friendly, sincere telephone call
from the man calling himself Douglas Ford, saying, we really appreciate your entry in our entry in your book, but I'd like to correct a few things and say a bit more. And I didn't know until years later that I was talking
to Dr. Dante. Because you know who didn't find John Bear's entry in his list of shady universities to be measured? John Bear is the biggest crook there is. Dante had had many nemeses in his life. Michael Dean, state and local governments, the Federal Trade Commission. But those were all gadflies, mere nuisances, road bumps along his path to glory. But with John Bear, it was different.
Not only was John Bear threatening to take away his shiny new money tree, he was also the avatar for all the things Dante hated most. If you could take everything in the world that drives Dante crazy, allegiance to rules, red tape, gatekeepers, whistleblowers, accreditation systems, if you could take all of Dante's pet peeves and create a person out of them, you would have John Bear with his tweed and elbow patches.
He was the perfect proxy for the institutions Dante was keen to flip the bird to. In Dante's mind, Bear was up in his ivory tower wagging his finger while Dante was trying to build a university for the people. People who'd been snubbed, people with skills and intelligence that was hard-earned and going unrecognized. People like Dante.
The thing that resonated with people wasn't just that you could get a degree quickly. It was that Columbia State believed that you're smarter than people give you credit for. The entire concept for Columbia State University was you could get credit for life experience. Get credit for your life experience. Life experiences are worth something.
Academic institutions are tools of oppression, Dante would preach, that undervalue your worth. But at Columbia State University, you would get credit for all of it.
Why would someone who indebted themselves to go to university be more respected in their field than someone who can just show up and be better at the job? Dante wanted to get ambitious people to the front of the line, where they could either sink or swim on their own merits. If you can do the job, then go do the job. Because most of what you learn at university is useless anyway. It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. Because...
Where do you learn? You learn through experience. And if you have the experience and the knowledge and whatever and you pass the test, you get the degree. You don't have to go through the classes. Dante's wife Elizabeth was on board with Columbia State's credit system the moment he pitched it to her. My mother used to say that she had a PhD in life and she thought that people should be given credit for life experience, life history.
And so when Ron came up with this idea, I thought, wow, that's amazing. You know, it's something that he believed in. It was something I believed in.
Dante believed in it because he accomplished what he had, not because he spent years in useless classes. He accomplished what he had because he could. He'd always found a way to move up in the world, and he wanted to show people that there's another way to get ahead, that the freight elevator goes all the way to the penthouse, baby. And now he was holding the door open, urging others to come with him. He was like a champion for...
people's rights. He thought he was. I mean, but it was legitimate. He actually felt that way. Why should people be held back?
Hop in, single mom who could get ahead if you could just get that degree. Saddle up, engineer who could earn more money doing the same job if only you had the letters P-H-N-D beside your name. Give me a shout. A few thousand dollars, I'll send you books. And then, whether you send in any assignments at the end of the month or not, a degree will appear in your mailbox. And by degree, I mean a piece of paper printed on a home laser printer.
And I ask you this: What's the harm in all of this? Who's really getting hurt by a fake university? John Baer has a lot of feelings about these questions.
It's complicated because by bear's account, most of the people getting these degrees are in on the scam. There are people who are taking a gamble that, fingers crossed, when people read Columbia State on their resumes, they think, "Huh, must be like a satellite school of the actual Ivy League Columbia University." Which is, by the way, a thing Dante told people. There were plenty of people willing to roll the dice.
There are still a lot of Columbia State University Dr. Dante time bombs in people's resumes. The ones who get caught really suffer. At best, they will lose their jobs. They may be cited under various state and federal fraud statutes. They're in big trouble.
But that's on them. They knew the risk. What so irked John Bear was that every time he would identify a predatory school and wave his arms to get the government to do something, people in power would always shrug at him and say, "So what? Are there really any victims here?"
The answer is yes. Because John Baer says there are two kinds of people who sign up for a degree mill like Columbia State. Those who are in on it and those who aren't. I had already spent six months of my life on this program to realize I had been betrayed. This is Jamie, a graduate of Dante's Columbia State University. I've always been very attracted to
the idea of serving the community.
Jamie grew up a military kid, and in her 20s, she was training to get her dream job as a California Highway Patrol officer. And she was almost done her training when the worst luck imaginable. I had been struck by lightning. Being struck by lightning changed nearly everything about Jamie's life. I'm disabled, and I was made partially deaf, which put me out of the running for the job.
A few years later, she and her husband had had a couple of kids, and eventually she started thinking about reentering the workforce. Yeah.
I looked them up, and this one particular one, Columbia State, I had stated that they were fully accredited. It was important to her that they were accredited because she wanted to go on to law school. So she called the number and talked with a Columbia State guidance counselor.
In addition to all the people Dante hired to stay on top of the mailing side of the operation, he hired people to pose as counselors and coach them to tell prospective students whatever it took to close the sale. After talking to these counselors, Jamie liked what she heard, and she wrote a check. I paid everything up front. It was like $3,600. ♪
$3,600 was steep for her and her family, but she saw it as an investment. Her books arrived in the mail shortly thereafter, and she started submitting her assignments. I did all the homework. I wrote the theses. And when it was time to reach out to the law school she was interested in, they were like, "Sorry, which school did you say you were studying at?" And they told me, "That's not an accredited university." Not accredited? That didn't seem right.
So she called them, but they wouldn't give her a straight answer about whether it was accredited or not. So she asked for a refund. And they said because I had already gone through the program that I wasn't entitled to a refund. And with that phone call, her dream of law school evaporated. I had been betrayed by these people that claimed to be guidance counselors at an accredited university. And they would do everything they could to get me into the law school of my dreams.
It was very disheartening. It's a toxic memory. This $3,600 that was supposed to be an investment in her family's future was suddenly an anvil. It was very hard on us financially with the disabilities. I had a lot of medical bills as well that we had to deal with.
So Jamie and her husband had no choice but to just take the hit and try and move on. But then, a couple months later, a piece of mail. Insult to injury.
Her degree. I wanted to burn it. I got a powder puff PhD. That's the word I use. And it's absolutely worthless.
So it's a constant embarrassment. This experience shook Jamie's sense of reality and left her paranoid and suspicious of any company or institution trying to get her money. I also find the lack of trust in interpersonal relationships as well. Not being able to open up to people. You can't trust somebody. You can't let them in.
That's the thing about cons in people like Dante. They're not just taking a few thousand dollars or dashing your chance of going to law school. They're changing the way you see the world entirely. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.
John Behr saw Dante as an agent of chaos. He felt that degree mills like his were eroding the safeguards of society, making every industry weaker, medical practitioners less qualified, nuclear safety more compromised. He felt like he was going to bat for the Jamies of the world,
and the world order that he felt protected them. John Bear believed in well-guarded institutions, of going through the proper channels and asking permission for things you want.
On the other hand, Dante fancied himself the leader of the people's university, a world built by moxie, bootstraps, boldness, smashing and grabbing, taking, not just for the sake of taking, but take in a way that undermines those with the real power. The more John Bear learned about Columbia State, the more convinced he was that it needed to be shut down. Within a year or two,
It had become clear to me that this was indeed a totally fake, non-existent university. When it was time to write a new edition of his guide, John Baer decided he would pull no punches about Columbia State. His first review had been more like, "Maybe this isn't a real school?" But now he was direct. This was a degree mill. A fake university. And I started writing about it in that way.
And when a fight is not so much about a tangible thing as it is about a worldview, it becomes kindling, lying in wait for a match. John Bear was the, he was the phoniest of all the phonies. Columbia State University is one of the biggest and most insidious diploma mills the world has ever known. He liked me at the beginning. He's the worst person I ever met in my whole life.
the most evil person I have ever interacted with. John Baer's review was the match that sparked the all-out, gloves-off war between these two. And that's when Dr. Dante decided to get even on me. And when Ronald Dante decided to get even, he also got creative. He was creative in business, and he was also creative in the business of revenge. He committed three crimes against me that were the three worst things
that anybody ever did to me. John Baer was used to people getting upset about his negative reviews. Every now and again, he'd hear from a school if he wrote about them unfavorably. I would get a few threatening letters or annoyed letters. But what happened between him and Dante was not like that. So how did Dante get even? Well, first of all, he wrote a letter in which he posed as John Baer, saying very racist things. 25,000 people
Dante was just getting started.
Next, he said, "Okay, if you're going to say correctly that my school is unaccredited, guess what? I'm going to start my own accreditation agency and publish my own book." Obviously, though, Dante didn't have the time to write an entire textbook. So he just stole John's book verbatim with one key difference. Publishing an entire book pirated from mine except the parts that
glorified his school as the best one in the country and one that I was consulting with as the worst one in the country. John couldn't believe what was happening. The scope of that, not just writing one nasty letter, but creating an entire book. But for Dante, it wasn't enough to just write a competing book. And it wasn't enough to plagiarize the whole thing. Dante wanted to remove Baer's book from circulation altogether.
He had a plan for that, too. First, he called John's publisher, posing as someone else, and was able to get access to the mailing list, thus learning the address of every single person who ordered a copy of John Bear's book. And then he wrote another letter, this time posing as the Department of Education. Using that list to send out a mailing from the Department of Education in Washington.
saying, "Warning! John Bear, arch criminal, don't buy his books. If you own them, return them. Get a refund." If you can't get a refund, throw it in the garbage. If John Bear didn't know the type of person Dante was, he was learning quickly. Again, just the chutzpah comes to mind, but
But the skill of those attacks, the man was scary. Trying to ruin John Bear's life didn't take up all of Dante's time and energy. It was more like a hobby. His main focus was still on Columbia State, which was doing better than ever. As John Bear's livelihood was in jeopardy and he was doing a significant amount of damage control, Dante was thriving. I was making almost a million dollars a week.
from Columbia State University. But just as Dante seemed to reach his pinnacle, his perfect moment of simultaneous jackpot and FU, a ghost from an earlier scheme came back to haunt him.
In the twilight days of Permaderm, his permanent makeup business, the FTC forbid him from making any more false claims about Permaderm or any other training course he offered or would offer. Which, with CSU, he obviously wasn't doing.
He didn't care to comply, even though people like Bobby Gold warned him about the consequences of screwing around with the feds. Why are you antagonizing these people? All they wanted was for us to just sign. We'll let you know what we're doing. And now they had him.
The FTC didn't have the manpower to build a big case that would uncover all the illegal shenanigans that Dante had been engaged with for the past decade. But what they could do is easily prove that he was in violation of the terms he had agreed to with the FTC. They could easily get him on this and indict him for being in contempt of federal court.
and he would lose everything, including the crowning jewel of his entire career. His masterpiece con would come undone. But Dante had no intention of going back to prison. So he consulted a lawyer who told him he really only had one choice, or two, I suppose. - The lawyer told me, he said, "If I don't want to go to prison, I gotta go south or north, Canada or the other place."
The other place, it turned out, was a short drive from his home in Southern California. So he filled a bag with cash and gold and headed south to the other place as a fugitive on the run. Next time on Dr. Dante. He was thumbing his nose at authority in the United States. And, you know, that's not a good thing to do. So...
I kind of had a feeling that things would escalate after that. 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 Abukar 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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