Dante’s inferno
A local documentarian finds himself in a fight over First Amendment rights.
Floyd Webb figured he had enough weirdness to contend with when he started making a documentary about Count Dante, a Chicago martial arts icon of the 1960s. After all, in addition to running a dojo (the Black Dragon Fighting Society) and writing a book called World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets, Dante worked as a hair stylist, kept a lion as a pet, supposedly had mob ties and is alleged by some to have been part of a covert operation that armed Che Guevara and Raul Castro in Cuba in 1959. He was involved in a rivalry with other Chicago martial artists that got so intense Keehan and his associates allegedly attempted to bomb a rival dojo. Born John Keehan to a Chicago Irish family, Dante fabricated a lineage tying him to Spanish nobility. He may have also been involved in the notorious 1974 Purolator Vault robbery, in which $4.3 million was stolen ($1.2 million of which was never recovered). Plenty of weirdness there.
Then the cease-and-desist letters started showing up. As part of his effort to unearth more Dante-related stories, Webb had put up a website (thesearchforcountdante.com) with images and some background information. William Aguiar III of the Fall River Black Dragon Fighting Society claimed that the website infringed on copyrights and trademarks that Aguiar controls. Finally, after some back-and-forth, Aguiar filed a lawsuit in federal court on September 7, charging copyright and trademark infringement. The claim regarding the trademarks has since been dropped, but Webb is still waiting for a judge to set a court date on the copyright question.
As Webb sees it, both his documentary and the website promoting it fall comfortably within the definition of fair use. Fair use is a key concept to anyone working in the arts, and especially to documentary filmmakers. To encourage creativity and to honor First Amendment protections, copyright law allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted materials in certain circumstances, including educational endeavors, social and political commentary, and parody.
“I’m not trying to get into the martial arts business,” Webb explained when we spoke to him in his production company’s office in the Fine Arts Building. “I’m not trying to publish a martial arts book. I’m not trying to open a dojo. I’m trying to make a social critique of a character that has impinged on the popular culture.”
Fortunately, Webb has some big guns on his side. He contacted Stanford University’s Fair Use Project (the brainchild of fair use and public domain activist Lawrence Lessig), and it’s now part of his defense team. The project was established to defend the rights of documentarians and others who are often pestered with “nuisance suits” filed to wear them out. The latest twist has involved websites. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was meant to clarify the situation, but suits like the one against Webb have actually proliferated.
Talking to Webb about the case and about Count Dante is rather like taking a trip down the rabbit hole. In the course of a half-hour conversation, he weaves a story that runs all the way from Teddy Roosevelt’s interest in judo to latter-day mob figures. Webb is trying to separate fact from fiction, but with a life based on lies, it’s a tough job. The word alleged comes up a lot in Webb’s conversation; he knows that many of the stories he has heard are apocryphal, and the lawsuit has made him cautious, but the material is juicy enough to make Oliver Stone drool.
Each story leads down another strange path: “[Mob attorney] Bob Cooley, who wore a wire and helped expose corruption, was one of the last people to see Dante alive, and he claims that Dante was poisoned as a result of his being involved in the Purolator robbery,” Webb says. Suspicious details pile up like autumn leaves. “I’ve got Dante’s FBI record, but it stops after the bombing. They have everything up until 1965. [The Purolator heist] was a $4 million robbery and the FBI found [some of] the money. But they don’t have any records related to Dante at that time.”
What makes the lawsuit so annoying to Webb is that he doesn’t even believe Aguiar has a legitimate claim to the copyright. According to Webb, “his proof in total is two letters. One is a letter written to a martial arts magazine by Count Dante’s wife saying that he left the governance of the Black Dragon Fighting Society to Bill Aguiar Jr. [Aguiar III’s father]. The second letter is from Christa [Keehan’s wife], addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ which grants [William Aguiar Jr.] the right to use text and images from the book for promotional purposes. There are no dates on the letters, they’re not notorized, there were no lawyers involved.”
Webb is confident that a judge will throw the suit out, and he’s eager to get the whole thing settled. He’s still chasing down leads on where Dante got that lion, and whether Dante really was in Cuba. And then there are those rumors that Dante faked his death…
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