-New Details Emerge About How Lang Used His Phony Martial Arts Credentials to Target Vulnerable Young Mothers Being Served at a Christian Non-Profit in Cortland Run by His Mother Patricia Lang
-Lang’s History of Manipulating and Abusing Teenage “Students” Further Uncovered
-How the Phony War Veteran’s Lies Undermined a Real Soldier on Deployment and Destroyed His Marriage
-Dave Lang, Dog Murderer?
-Dave Lang Ignoring an Open Challenge
By Briggs Seekins, thewritingcoach@yahoo.com
If there is one thing this writer has learned while researching this three-part exposé it is that truly despicable individuals like Dave Lang, AKA David Da Silva Lang, AKA David Dabean Silva Lan, leave a long trail of angry, outraged people. After each edition of this story, multiple unsolicited sources have emerged anxious to share information about the destructive and negative impact Lang has had on their own lives. Other sources, when contacted, have been anxious to chime in. As one person interviewed for this article stated, “Yes, I would love to help bring that scumbag down!”
Nobody in this world is perfect and most people probably have other people who don’t like them and will gossip about them to other friends or acquaintances. That’s the nature of social interaction. But a person has to violate the social contract to a pretty serious degree to have people anxious to dish dirt to a writer they don’t know who is going to print what they tell him.
Lang has stomped all over the social contract time and again. And people have lined up to dish the dirt about him to this writer.
What Lang has done over the past several years goes far beyond simply lying about his martial arts credentials and making false claims about his nonexistent military background. There are pathetic slobs doing that in barrooms all over the United States every night of the week. Guys like that are certainly contemptible, but pitiful as well. They are merely attempting to cultivate a few hours of self-esteem before retreating back into their meager real-life existences.
Lang, on the other hand, has repeatedly used these claims to establish “schools” where he has conned members of the public into paying him money for instructions that he is not remotely qualified to provide. He has used his fraudulent status as a “black belt” to earn the admiration and cultivate the trust of young people, some actually underage. He has created an unsafe training environment in which “students” are encouraged to spar and exchange head trauma and potential joint injuries without the benefit of proper training and without the necessary level of expert oversight that would exist in a legitimate martial arts school or fight gym.
Since 2010 Lang has claimed to be a black belt under Brazilian Jiu Jitsu legends Wallid Ismael and Giva Santana, both of whom were contacted about these claims and eagerly recorded videos in which they denounced Lang as a fraud and stated that they had never even met him. Lang also initiated a pen-pal relationship sometime during the past two years with BJJ black belt and UFC veteran Hermes Franca Barros, who has been incarcerated in Oregon for sexual assault of a minor. Lang actually did manage to create a relationship of sorts with Barros and even managed to bring Barros’s nephew, Lucca Franca, to the United States under the pretense of being his manager and getting him fights in the U.S. Lucca Franca went back to Brazil after a short period of time, without ever fighting in the U.S.
Lang managed to use the pretense of his “friendship” with the Francas to insinuate himself into an affiliate relationship with Carlos David Oliveira, a well-known BJJ black belt from Virginia and long-time friend of the Franca family back in Brazil. During the course of investigating the first installment of this report, this writer contacted Mr. Oliveira and was able to help him uncover Lang’s deception and break all ties with him. Lang had claimed to Mr. Oliveira that he was a black belt under Hermes Franca and had trained with him for years in Florida.
This writer has spoken to numerous people who have known Lang at an intimate level over the past 15 years who all confirm that he has likely never been to Florida and certainly never spent any extended period of time there. Mr. Oliveira later confirmed with Lucca Franca that Lang had never actually met Hermes Franca Barros in person and had only begun to write to him after he was sent to prison.
All of this was covered in more detail in parts one and two of this series. These actions by Lang have been viewed as outrageous blasphemies by dedicated members of the BJJ and MMA communities, who understand the years of struggle, commitment and financial sacrifice that are required to achieve the credentials Lang has assigned to himself. But people who are not involved in those communities are understandably less outraged.
But these kind of claims are valuable tools for a remorseless, predatory con man like Lang.
David Lang: Maybe he should have stuck to playing drums?
From the perspective of public safety, perhaps no incident in Lang’s recent past is more disturbing than the period of time in 2011 when he was operating a “school” on Main Street in McGraw, New York. This writer recently interviewed an individual who was a “student” during that time period and what he revealed should be of grave concern to any people in Cortland County who are worried about dangerous and corrupting influences on the area’s young people.
The people conned by Lang during that time period were particularly young, many still students at McGraw High School. In at least one case, two girls who the source for this information described as “about 15” were allowed to walk in off the street and start sparring with each other without presenting any sort of parental consent. During this time Lang encouraged the petty, high-school confrontations his “students” became involved in and urged escalation. In other words, he was behaving in the exact opposite manner of any legitimate martial arts instructor, unless one counts the villain from The Karate Kid.
Lang had a partner at this version of his “school” who this writer is choosing not to directly identify by name. The partner, who was serving as the “striking coach,” is a relatively well-known punchline in the Southern Tier MMA scene, known for making ridiculous boasts about his history as a martial artist and a street fighter. A few years prior to his involvement with Lang he had been a semi-regular hang around at the famous “barn” behind Team Bombsquad founder Ryan Ciotoli’s house in Polkville, at the time when it was also the headquarters for the CNY MMA school.
This individual got a tattoo of the CNY MMA school logo on his neck within about a week of joining the school. He would rarely train in earnest, but would loudly shout encouragement to the fight team as they trained, occasionally hitting a heavy bag before becoming winded and going outside to smoke a cigarette. Some members of Team Bombsquad referred to him as “Radio” among themselves, after the Cuba Gooding Jr. character, who was an enthusiastic but intellectually disabled manager of a high school football team. It should be noted that this “Radio” was not actually in anyway intellectually disabled, and in fact attended Tompkins-Cortland Community College, where he was also well known for making claims about his martial arts bona fides. He was simply a loudmouth poseur, unable to gauge what a realistic level of BS would be for a dude who looked like him.
By the time Radio was “coaching” alongside Lang, Team Bombsquad had moved their headquarters to Ithaca and Radio had gone through a falling out with the owners of CNY MMA, which was particularly regrettable considering the neck ink he had gotten in their honor. Facebook posts by Radio during this time period feature disparaging comments towards CNY and boasts about the quality of Lang MMA, and “the proof” being “in the pudding.”
Although Radio was in no way remotely qualified to be teaching striking to aspiring mixed martial artists, he was actually closer to legitimate than Lang. And a sparring match between Lang and Radio led to one of the more despicable actions I have uncovered in Lang’s past.
According to my source, Radio was lighting Lang up. As somebody who has seen Radio spar and fight, this writer can report that this is truly hilarious. “(Name redacted) hit him a couple of times in the face,” the source reports, “and one of the kids watching made a playful little joke that Dave doesn’t have any striking.”
Lang became enraged by this. This writer can state with absolute certainty that Lang knew exactly what Radio’s reputation was prior to approaching him and targeting him as a partner for his newest school. It is this writer’s theory that Lang actually targeted him due to realizing that the level of buffoonery routinely displayed by Radio would only make him seem more credible by comparison.
So to get handled by the likes of Radio was a severely damaging intrusion on Lang’s own mythic self-image. Somebody had to pay for it. Lang selected the high school student who was playfully taunting him. The source continued: “Lang yelled at him to get up and spar with him. He started battering the kid with leg kicks and taunting him. It was sickening, because he had no idea at all what to do and was just getting abused. He fell over a couple of times and Lang yelled at him to get up and then kept kicking him more.”
The source said that Lang only stopped beating this minor after he and Radio intervened. “After that Lang got a really cocky attitude towards everybody,” the source reported.
At the time this incident was happening, Phil Gizzi and other members of the MixedMartialArts.com UG thread devoted to exposing Lang were closing in on this latest phony school. The source reported that within a week after this abusive incident, he and the other “students” had all been contacted with the truth about Lang and his history of deceptions. According to the source, Radio does deserve credit for helping to quickly convince everybody that Lang probably was a fraud after all.
Lang was supposed to meet with Radio and the “students” to explain himself and provide proof of his true credentials. Instead he removed all the equipment from his rented space while nobody was around and locked the doors. The source reports that Lang sent him an email a few days later. “He said he didn’t need to explain himself to me and that I should come train with him in the shed behind his house because he wasn’t going to refund the money I had paid for the month.”
Lang with “Radio”
Dave Lang has not used his phony martial arts credential only to negatively influence high school students. During the course of this investigation, this writer has also learned that Lang has actively recruited “students” from among the young mothers being served by a Christian non-profit operated by his own mother, Patricia Lang, called “Helping Hands Caring Hearts, Inc.” In at least one case this has led a vulnerable mother who went looking for help in the spirit of Christian fellowship down a path of debauchery that has resulted in public exposure and humiliation.
One of Lang’s most devoted and loyal students during the recent unraveling of his latest school at the Northeast Martial Arts Institute in Cortland is a young mother he met through Patricia Lang. Multiple sources have confirmed her involvement with Patricia Lang and “Helping Hands,” and one source who briefly attended Lang’s most recent “school”—and reported that Lang had also attempted to sexually seduce her—confirmed to this writer that this woman had told her that she and Lang had met at Patricia Lang’s office.
This student can be seen in numerous photos of Lang and his students, posing proudly. Sources who attended a Carlos David Oliveira seminar in Virginia, that this young woman attended with Lang, report that she behaved in a cocky, disrespectful manner throughout the weekend. She is clearly very enamored by her phony tough-guy boyfriend, so much so that she eagerly engaged in a sordid affair with him while he was still living with his second wife, reportedly even recording a homemade sex video with him.
This came to light when Lang’s most recent ex-wife posted this woman’s name and photograph on the notorious website “She’s a Homewrecker,” along with still shots from the reputed sex video. It should be noted that Lang’s second wife became involved with him while his first wife was pregnant with his first child. Lang’s second wife was also at one time an active accomplice in his fraudulent attempts to convince the world that he was a BJJ expert.
From what this writer has learned about Lang’s latest paramour, she is certainly of questionable moral character. She also contacted the Police Gazette directly to stand up for her man and to denounce this writer as a “fraud.” However, this writer can only really feel pity for her and hope that she comes to her senses at some point and realizes how badly she has been manipulated.
One can only imagine how vulnerable a single mother would be to the manipulations of a skilled con man who is presenting himself as a kind of ultimate alpha male, a martial arts expert and war veteran who offers to teach her how to “defend herself.” This fraud was introduced to her as the son of the woman running the Christian agency where she had gone for help. So it should not be surprising that she easily fell for his scam.
It is difficult to determine the degree to which Patricia Lang is aware of just how much of a fraud her son is. In the past few years as he has been exposed time and again, she has remained an active, vocal Facebook supporter of every incarnation of his school that has appeared, regardless of the shifting claims he has made about his martial arts lineage and the ever-changing aliases he has used to represent himself.
It is also known that Patricia Lang has told people that the Langs are in fact descended from Brazil, even though she knows very well that her husband was born in Canada and that members of the family have traced the lineage from Canada back to Ireland and France.
What cannot be doubted is that Patricia Lang has funded her non-profit endeavors with the tax-deductible donations of sincere Christian people in the Cortland County area who believed they were supporting a mission consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Nowhere in my Bible does Jesus appear to condone lying to and sexually seducing those who come to you in need of help.
Patricia Lang with the student who her son David got posted on Homewreckers
Earlier installments of this exposé have already detailed Lang’s history of lying about his past as a member of the 101st Airborne who served two combat tours in Afghanistan. Multiple sources have confirmed that Lang in fact has a longtime acquaintance who did serve with the 101st and that Lang has consistently presented this acquaintance’s stories as his own.
This writer is himself a veteran who served as a mechanized infantry dismount during Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Desert Sabre. For this reason, the phony war veteran angle has always been a particularly infuriating aspect of Lang’s con.
But really, one does not need to be a veteran to find Lang’s miscreant appropriation of veteran status offensive. Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation or foreign policy opinions, have a great deal of respect and appreciation for service members. It’s built into the national DNA. This writer believes he has almost certainly received jobs and academic appointments over the past 20 years in part due to being a veteran.
So to lie and claim you are a veteran is really one of the most manipulative and offensive things you can do in American society. It’s a slap in the face to every man and woman who ever signed the blank check to Uncle Sam that is redeemable with their lives. It is a betrayal of the collective goodwill our society feels towards and offers those men and women.
But the most recent information uncovered during this investigation has revealed that Lang’s offenses against that member of the 101st Airborne go beyond merely appropriating aspects of that soldier’s identity for his own personal gain. David Lang did not merely appropriate that soldier’s tours as his own; Lang actively undermined him while he was on deployment, sending him false information that threatened his ability to carry out his mission and potentially put his life and the lives of his squad members at risk. Lang also appears to have played a chief role in destroying this young soldier’s marriage.
According to sources this writer spoke with last week, while this soldier was on deployment to Afghanistan with the 101st, Lang began to send the soldier messages reporting that he had seen the soldier’s wife at “swingers parties,” making out with different men. The young wife became aware of this when a MySpace contact she barely knew messaged her and said her husband had been sending him threatening messages from Afghanistan. The wife was also contacted by a higher-ranking soldier’s wife who reported that her husband was “going crazy” because of suspected infidelity.
Any veteran who has been on deployment will know that nothing screws with a soldier’s head worse than thinking that his wife or girlfriend is back at home being unfaithful to him. For young soldiers, this can be particularly difficult to put aside while focusing on the life-or-death realities of daily life. Grunts on deployment in a line unit have a lot of time to do nothing but churn over the poison thoughts in their heads. Worrying about what their wife is doing back home with “Jody” has caused more than one young soldier to blow out his brains, or go crazy and shoot a commanding officer or an NCO or a team member.
Nobody who truly cared about a soldier on deployment would ever send them messages about their significant other cheating on them. Even if it were true, it’s the sort of thing that should be withheld until they are back in a safe place. Putting that kind of information into a soldier’s head while he’s deployed to the front lines does nothing but make him a danger to himself and those who are depending upon him.
But trying to undermine the relationships of those Lang has cultivated a trust with is entirely consistent with his methods. This writer has spoken at length with a former “student” who spent hundreds of hours developing what he thought was a meaningful friendship with Lang and he reported that Lang had always subtly tried to undermine his relationship with his fiance, and eventual wife, by suggesting that she was fooling around with various Facebook contacts she knew from school.
In the case of the soldier from the 101st, Lang had convinced the young man to take out a large personal loan so that the two could start a business selling guitars. Sources have reported that the wife had always been distrustful of Lang, so his motivation for getting her out of the picture was obvious.
This young army couple had a dog together, a female pit bull named “Snow” who multiple sources have described as a sweet and intelligent dog. During the deployment, when their marriage began to falter, the wife moved back in with her parents and had to find some temporary housing for the dog.
Near the end of the soldier’s deployment, when he and his wife had reportedly made plans for marriage counseling once he was back in the United States, the wife dropped the dog off with Lang. The wife never saw the dog alive again.
Lang’s specific role in the death of the dog is not precisely known. SPCA investigations at the time were incompletely conducted. What is known is that the dog’s death was a ghoulish ordeal. First it was fed chicken bones. It was also shot approximately 20 times with .22 caliber bullets, with 8 or 9 bullets fired directly into the dog’s head at point-blank range.
When the wife learned about the death of her dog, she was no longer interested in any sort of reconciliation. The soldier came back from deployment to find his marriage over, with a restraining order against him.
* * *
A Final Note from the Author: This concludes the final installment of this three-part series on Dave Lang. Please note that the convoluted history of his lies and deceptions cannot even began to be covered in a space this small. There will be a book developed from this investigation.
Also please note that some of Lang’s most unspeakable acts have been omitted from this report, out of deference to his victims.
Various sources have contacted me stating that Lang has claimed he plans to take legal action and “sue” me. I laugh out loud every time I hear this. I dream of the day I can face down Dave Lang and his enabling mother Patricia in a courtroom and feel 100 percent confident that without any formal legal training I will be able to rout whatever lowlife bottom feeder they are able to muster for an attorney.
But I seriously doubt David Lang will ever take legal action. He knows very well that everything I have written about him is true and he does not have any basis whatsoever to sue for libel. His claims of planning to do so are for no other purpose than to continue deceiving those who are still naïve enough to believe in him. “Don’t worry,” this lowlife fraud is telling those poor souls, “I’m going to sue this guy and prove I am who I claim to be.”
It will never happen.
Those poor fools who still believe in this con man should also be aware that Lang has been actively ignoring a twice-issued challenge from an Ithaca-based BJJ blue belt. This challenge has been made twice on the UG Fraud thread and was passed along to Lang’s current girlfriend when she contacted the Police Gazette. It is known without a doubt that Lang follows the UG thread with devotion. Time and again, when his bogus social media postings have been posted to the thread, he has reacted within hours to remove or block access to that social media.
So he knows he’s been called out. And he knows that he’s a fraud and would get smashed by the blue belt who is calling him out.
Keep that in mind, those few of you who might be reading this who still believe that Dave Lang is anything other than a two-bit con artist and fraud.
