FBI Files: BOMBING MATTERS: 80 pages on Keehan

I have always had a certain confidence in good bureacrats. After a year I finally got the FBI records I was looking for for John Keehan aka Juan R. Dante. But this is already confusing, or shall I say once again confusing. Something is definitely missing here and the question is do I go back and ask or just leave it alone? John Keehan’s record came to me as a file for Juan R. Dante. As far as I have heard, Juan R. Dante was not an alias of his until the late 1960s. It just does not end it seems. Do I want to know how this works? Of course I do!!!

What I got is FBI results of the investigation into Keehan as a terror suspect after the blasting cap prank at Gene Wyka’s Judo and Karate Center. There were lots of businesses being bombed by the mob and this prank was taken very seriously. It was the same M.O. as all the bombings were, money.

The FBI fils say John had been employed by Wyka as a Marketing and Sales manager. They then follow up on his presence in Phoenix, never saying anything about him being at Trias’s School. They check his credit and police record there, find nothing except a bad phone bill at his former address that was not in his name, either name.

It is about 80 pages which goes into a routine investigation of a person with known military background in posession of explosives. This file is very useful to me. There are things in it I do not want to talk about and things that may turn up in the film. I was shocked (of course) to see that his criminal record begins in the mid-1950s with an arrest for allegedly selling a firearm, assault and battery, something that looks like marijuana possession, the stuff of a normal Chicago childhood in the 1950s.

I got the name of his hairdressing school and have put my associate at Modern Salon magazine onto helping me run down an old-timer or two from those days. There were not that many male hair dressers back in those days. So John Keehan aka Count Dante, hairdresser, will be easy to trace.

But I feel like there is stuff missing. There is nothing about the Purolator Robbery, nothing about the Black Dragons, as the name alone is enough to trigger scrunity as it was a know intelligence threat in World War II and was associated with black militancy. John was bucking traditions and looking like a “fellow traveller” by his associations. There is nothing regarding his tranfer from the Marines to the US Army, except to mention disciplinary actions regarding marijuana possession and his being AWOL with another person.

I also see he went to college for awhile at the University of Miami, and at Northern Illinois University. He is also listed as married at the time of his arrest.

Lots of stuff to re-read here for usuable substance. Next weekend I head to Vegas for what I think will be an incredible interview for the film with an incredible person.