Count Dante: The World's Deadliest Myth
John Keehan turned himself into a real life Karate Superhero in 1960s Chicago. Then it all went wrong.
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Every Sports Stories these days I tell myself I’m not going to talk about the pandemic. This week’s issue is about a self-made karate icon (and possible madman) who called himself Count Dante. His life had nothing to do with what’s going in the world right now. And lord knows more than enough happened in his 36 years to fill up a dozen volumes of Sports Stories.
But I can’t help but think that I wish we could get back to a world where weirdo geniuses could just be weirdo geniuses. And I can’t help but think about what we’re missing right now with sports: not just the games but the soap opera, the drama, the backstory.
It takes a certain level of imagination to watch and enjoy a professional sporting event. You trick yourself into thinking it matters: that it’s the most important thing in the world. You trick yourself into thinking that something about what these men and women do on the field or in the ring or wherever is revealing of their personalities.
Count Dante loved the soap opera, the drama, and the backstory. His trick was becoming a real life comic book superhero. He was born in Chicago in 1939 as John Keehan, the son of a well-to-do Irish-American family. As a kid, he learned to box. Then he joined the Marines and became enamored with martial arts. In the 1950s, Asian martial arts were just beginning to take hold in the United States -- not just as competitive sports, or as effective self-defense systems, but as something exotic and mysterious. There was, it seemed, secret knowledge from an exotic, faraway place.
Young John Keehan was enamored. And by all means he was good at it: tall and strong and coordinated. He learned a bit in the military, and after his discharge, he trained under a legendary master named Robert Trias. Trias was one of the first white people to really push martial arts in the United States. (He may or may not have been the first white person to open a karate studio in this country.) The studio was in Phoenix; John Keehan went and visited often.
But there were signs that Keehan was not what you would call a normal karate enthusiast. Keehan was in his early 20s, working with Trias to run an organization called the United States Karate Association (USKA). He was already a well-regarded instructor. He was popular and energetic. And he was also telling people that he had been a guerilla fighting in the mountains in the Cuban Revolution. He had big ambitions, and strong opinions, and he began to clash with Trias. In 1964, when Keehan was 25, he was expelled from the USKA. Keehan claimed it was because he insisted on teaching black students. The USKA said that was ridiculous -- Trias told a reporter that 40 percent of its membership was black.
Regardless, Keehan was liberated from the chains of bureaucracy and from the supervision of his mentor. And within two years he would no longer be John Keehan. He would be Count Dante. From the beginning, Keehan had his own ideas about karate, and from the beginning he was more than willing to invoke its supposed mysteries to burnish his own legacy, and his own aura. He would say crazy things -- but then again, he could also really fight. His technique was great. He knew what he was doing.
Here’s how his friend Algene Caraulia remembered Keehan/Dante in a story published in Black Belt Magazine shortly after Keehan’s death, but written while he was still alive:
And here we have the “official” end of John Keehan and the beginning of Count Dante. In 1967, Keehan legally changed his name to Count Juan Raphael Dante. He was no longer an Irish kid from the south side of Chicago. He was a descendant of Spanish Civil War refugees. And he began to build a “new” reputation around the same bullshitting he would do with his old buddies when he was still John Keehan.
He was, in the classic sense of the word, a hustler. Dante worked as a hairstylist. He took out ads in comic books proclaiming himself to be THE DEADLIEST MAN ALIVE. He sold memberships to a secret society called The Black Dragon Fighting Society. He fostered the notion that he was capable of killing a man with a single, well-placed blow. He bought a pet lion cub and walked it around Chicago like a dog.
Dante shrouded himself in layers of mythology and bullshit. He built his persona on the preconceived biases of his audience: karate was still mystical to most of the working class Chicagoans and distant comic book readers he was targeting: people with imaginations to match his own and ordinary lives that led them to seek out something big and exciting and different.
In retrospect, Dante looked like a (physically fit) Danny McBride character. But at the time, to the right person, he really could seem like the deadliest man alive. Even if he was just a hairdresser. He claimed that he knocked on the door of Muhammad Ali and challenged him to a fight. He mailed off pamphlets called “World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets” that he said contained a system called “Dance of Death.”
Here’s the text of one of his ads, courtesy of an excellent story from the Chicago Reader.
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.)
Dante hustled and hustled. And it seemed to be working. He owned two dojos. He was becoming famous, or at least “famous.” His comic book ads gave him a reputation that spread all the way to Europe. Dante understood one thing better than karate, and that was promotion. Then it all came crashing down.
In 1970, Dante and a group of students went one night to a rival dojo called the Green Dragon Hall to settle some kind of dispute. The nature of the dispute, like the action that followed, remains a mystery. But it doesn’t matter. A fight broke out, and it ended in the death of one of Dante’s best students and best friends: a fellow black belt named Jim Koncevic: stabbed and slashed with a sword, and then impaled through the neck with a spear.
This was also a sort of death for Dante. His career and reputation were ruined -- even as charges were all dropped. And he had to reckon with the fact that his fantasy life as the world’s deadliest man -- the life that had led him and his students to the dojo for the fight that night in the first place -- is what caused the death of a beloved friend.
He sank into alcoholism and pills. He ran afoul of the Chicago mob. He literally sold peanuts at sporting events. In an interview dug up by the Chicago Reader’s Dan Kelly, Dante told a reporter in 1975: “I want people to forget me.”
Two months later, he was found dead in his apartment of bleeding ulcers. But nobody forgot Count Dante.
Read More:
There’s so much to read about Count Dante. I really found two stories to be helpful in assembling this one: Dan Kelly’s aforementioned Chicago Reader profile, and a long profile in the February, 1976 issue of Black Belt. The Dante passages in Jared Miracle’s Now With Kung Fu Grip are entertaining and helpful. Same goes for David Hernandez’s Broken Face in the Mirror. Last one I’ll share here is Paco Taylor’s Medium story on Dante, Man You Come Right Out of a Comic Book. Taylor really explores Dante’s mythmaking, and his aesthetic and pop culture legacy -- which more than his actual karate exploits, has come to define him.
The Elusive Dante
There’s not a lot of footage of Count Dante out there. Just little snips of silent video here and there, from what I can see. But one man is trying to bring Dante to life on film. Floyd Webb has been trying to make a documentary that would capture Count Dante for nearly two decades.
The project, “The Search for Count Dante, began in 2004, and has gone through various iterations and funding attempts. It somehow seems appropriate making a film about a man who buried himself under endless layers of bullshit would be deeply difficult; and that the project itself would take on its own kind of mythology. And that’s exactly what seems to have happened. Webb has gone around the world to make this film. He even spoke to Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s longtime trainer about that particular Dante claim.
“The Search for Count Dante” has now taken about as long as Dante’s actual career. But for now, the film remains a work in progress. Here’s to hoping we can see it soon:
Boss Tres Bien
One way you can support Sports Stories (besides subscribing) is to support our other projects. For example, Adam sells awesome clothes on the internet featuring his artwork You should go check it out and buy some. He even came out with a pandemic mask design.
Stealing Home
The book is still out! Go get it! Here’s a video of myself and internet darling David Roth talking about it through the Brooklyn Historical Society.