Tying Up Some Loose Ends

I usually write about New York City's history and about the great or notorious men and women who have passed through it. Because the events took place in the past and the participants are usually dead doesn't mean the stories are over. This is true of some of my columns, too. Let me discuss a few loose ends.

A little over two years ago, I wrote a column about winning the 2000 New Hampshire vice-presidential primary. One person who figured in that was a crank variously named Joseph Sanders Haas, Joseph S. Haas or Joe Haas. At any rate, he managed to sign his name three different ways in a single legal document, which was his formal objection to placing the names of some 30 candidates for president and vice president on the New Hampshire primary ballot?including George W. Bush, John McCain and me?because we had paid the filing fees with checks instead of what Haas chose to believe was the only form of lawful money, gold and silver. A New Hampshire state board denied his application, and so the nation was spared the shock of an election in which no candidates ran.

I wondered then whether the three different versions of his name evidenced an identity crisis, or just sloppiness. Anyway, Haas ran for governor of New Hampshire this year. Unlike most candidates, he apparently went out of his way to avoid attention. For example, he was the only gubernatorial candidate without a website or even an e-mail address. He didn't even inform the mass media of what he did for a living, which seemed ill-advised. After all, the other candidates were lawyers or physicians or officeholders, while Haas might be something honest like a hamburger flipper. Thus, he drew almost no media attention, a remarkable achievement in a state as small as New Hampshire.

Finally, I Googled him. Even there, I didn't find much. Haas apparently spends much of his time composing lengthy postings to UFO Web pages. The only statement of his political beliefs that I found was a two-year-old rant incoherently attacking George W. Bush for favoring tort reform, which nonetheless carefully noted that Haas and the President share a common ancestor.

At the Sept. 10, 2002, Republican gubernatorial primary, Haas came in fifth out of six candidates, polling 689 votes out of over 150,000 cast: less than one half of one percent. Having done everything possible to avoid public attention, he failed to come in last, apparently incompetent even in that.

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Two weeks ago, I reviewed the latest edition of John Bear's marvelous Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning, in which I discussed diploma mills, the institutions that award degrees on the payment of a fee with little or no work. In a moment of abstraction, I wondered whether people might be so bold or stupid as to list notorious diploma mill degrees in their online biographies. So I Googled several institutions of this kind.

The Metropolitan Collegiate Institute, whose last known address was 72 New Bond St., London UK W1S 1RR, is a British diploma mill that sells all degrees, including medical and dental, for $100 or less. Its address is a mail forwarding service that it shares with a bogus hospital, Sussex General Hospital. Sussex generated customized references on demand, attesting to the internships of Metropolitan's graduates. The BBC called these two institutions a "fake doctor factory," providing phony physicians to the United States and the Third World.

This is not as comic as it sounds: "Dr." Gregory Caplinger ran both a bogus cancer clinic and the British West Indies Medical College, a bogus medical school in the Dominican Republic, on the strength of his rapacity, charisma and MD from Metropolitan Collegiate. Another British diploma mill, the Sussex College of Technology, had awarded Caplinger a doctorate (D.Sc.). Caplinger obtained this with no course work of any kind. He merely mailed Sussex a check for $70 and a letter specifying the date of his degree, the title of his dissertation (never written) and a straight-A transcript. I wish it had been so easy back in my day. Yet a third diploma mill, the Anglo-American Institute of Drugless Therapy, which is run from the home of its dean, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine on the strength of completing a correspondence course and an 8000-word thesis. The dean had never met Caplinger.

This quack experimented on patients with "ImmuStim," a patented drug of his own invention that he claimed could cure cancer, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome and AIDS. He might still be getting away with it if he hadn't incorporated a pharmaceutical company to sell the product and began peddling its shares to investors. In July 2000, he was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 14 years in federal prison, three years' supervised release and restitution of $1,058,000 to his victims. He was indicted again in March 2001 on 39 counts of wire fraud in connection with his Dominican clinic: he faces up to 195 years' imprisonment and a $9.75 million fine.

Laurence Perry, one of Caplinger's business partners, armed with an MD from Caplinger's phony medical school, was indicted for involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license after the death of an eight-year-old diabetic girl whose mother followed his advice to stop administering her insulin.

Another "doctor," Lee Lorenzen, who peddles something called "clustered water" that he claims enhances toxin and waste removals from one's cells, holds his doctorate in nutritional biochemistry from Metropolitan Collegiate. And one "Dr." Joel Robbins, the proprietor of Health Freedom Resources, Inc., holds his doctor of naturopathy (ND) from Metropolitan Collegiate and his MD from the British West Indies College of Medicine, Caplinger's bogus medical school. Somehow, the academic backgrounds of these men do not inspire my confidence.

To be sure, most people with Metropolitan degrees tend to be like Master Ron Tramontano, "entrepreneur, businessman, author and martial arts master in the arts of Tang Soo Do," who proudly holds a bachelor's degree in electronics from MCI. There's also Dr. Jules E. BenBenek, the Director of Applied Technologies at Kokes Marine Technologies, LLC, a marine contractor offering commercial and industrial submarines for lease in industrial applications, who holds a doctorate from Metropolitan Collegiate Institute. He also claims he was employed by RCA and the War Dept. (which hasn't existed in more than 50 years) and consulted for NASA and other agencies.

The newsletter of the Illinois State Bar Association for June 15, 1999, headlined the presentation of its ISBA Law Enforcement Award to Mearl J. Justus, who was then sheriff of St. Clair County, IL. The Sheriff was chief of police in Cahokia for 20 years before his election as county sheriff in 1982 and has been president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police and the Illinois Sheriffs' Association. According to the newsletter, he requires a bachelor's degree from any officer promoted to sergeant or higher rank. Sheriff Justus was nominated for the ISBA award by Belleville attorney Michael J. Reagan, who noted that his "reputation for a proactive approach to law enforcement was manifested almost immediately as he embarked to make formal education an important ingredient" for department officers. One hopes that he expects more from his subordinates than his own master's degree from the Metropolitan Collegiate Institute.

The website for Miller & Associates, which proclaims itself America's largest criminal defense law firm, lists Henry J. Legere Jr. among its attorneys. Legere is a twofer. He holds a B.Sc. in environmental sciences from American Western University. This was a diploma mill operated from a mail drop in Columbus, OH, by Anthony Geruntino, who went to federal prison for mail fraud in connection with operating this phony university. Legere also holds a D.Sc. in preventive medicine from Metropolitan Collegiate.

The final touch, I guess, was the website of the Novelty Certificate Company of Hillview, KY, which offers "elegant handcrafted diplomas?for novelty purposes only." Among those illustrated on the site is a diploma of Metropolitan Collegiate Institute. In effect, Novelty Certificate is counterfeiting the diplomas of an utterly bogus college. Once you get beneath that phony tinsel, as Angela Lansbury once said in some Agatha Christie movie, you get to find the real tinsel.

As a patriot, I checked out a famous old American diploma mill, the Neotarian College of Philosophy, whose campus appeared to consist of Desk 8, the Pickwick Building, Kansas City, MO. Neotarian advertised itself for many years, not in the education section of The New York Times but in such scholarly publications as Popular Mechanics. I suspect it has been out of business for some time. Nonetheless, I found such stellar figures as Dr. Gyasi A. Foluke, a leading light of the PowerHouse Speakers Bureau, who holds a doctor of divinity degree from Neotarian. And for those who believe the problems facing our schools stem from those who teach in schools of education, I point to Professor Marcia J. Barret, a teaching specialist at the University of Texas at Brownsville. Her sole doctorate is a PsD from Neotarian. But then, what can one expect from Texas' southernmost college, where the biggest event on the calendar was the appearance of Happy the Comedian on Sept. 20-21?

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Last year, immediately after the World Trade Center attack, I also