Michigan veterans' service dog provider accused of stolen valor

OCEOLA TOWNSHIP, Livingston County, Mich. (WLNS) — The leader of a Michigan nonprofit agency working with veterans has misled his volunteers, donors, clients and the media about his military service record – including embellishing his rank and claiming to have been a special operator for the United States Air Force.

Kirk A. Lanam, 52, is the executive director, president and founder of Veteran Service Dogs Organization (VSDO) and has claimed since at least 2017 to have been a special operations member with tours in combat zones all over the world. He’s also claimed to be a brigadier general and a two-star general, also known as a major general—appearing at promotional and fundraising events wearing a camouflage uniform bearing those ranks and patches from USAF Special Operations.

On April 19, 2023, Lanam, in civilian clothing and with one of his service dogs at his side, walked up to the podium at the Hamburg Township Planning Commission. “Good afternoon, my name is Brigadier General Kirk Lanam,” he said. “I am 34 years on paper with the United States Air Force and 22 years active combat.”

Those records also show Lanam never attended special operations schools or other training that would be part of a special operations service member’s military file.

Lanam did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lanam’s embellishments of his service and rank were brought to attention by a former volunteer for the organization on June 15.

“I felt betrayed and used,” Edgar Jones, 59, said. “I don’t have anything but my name and my reputation. And both of those have become so ingrained in the organization that I’m one of the faces of the organization. And that’s hurtful.”

Jones began interacting with VSDO in 2020 when he applied for and obtained a service dog. A steel gray pit bull named Doc Bradley. The yellow-green-eyed dog is named after a sailor photographed as part of a team of Marines hoisting the American flag on Iwo Jima after a bloody battle against the Japanese in World War II.

But earlier this year, Jones became suspicious of Lanam when a growing stack of banker boxes appeared in an area of the facility behind a door labeled Suite 1.

“A veteran’s life on paper,” he said. “Oh, stacks of bank boxes full of documents and files. Three to four-foot high.”

He said Lanam had organizational volunteers sorting the files. “Financial documents all over tables and chairs,” he said of the chaos of the deconstruction of the “veteran’s life on paper.”

Lanam has been pleading poverty in previous months, telling volunteers it was unclear if the organization could pay the phone bill or other utilities, Jones said.

But then, in April, extravagant new purchases started.

A new security camera system was installed. It had facial recognition and was paid for by the U.S. Department of Defense, Jones was told by Lanam. New bulletproof doors were paid for. Lawn equipment, a camper trailer, a Hyundai Palisades. All of it, Lanam told a more and more concerned Jones, the result of grants and the generosity of the DoD.

Jones began his own investigation into Lanam’s past, his service and his stories because of his concerns related to the spending and the veteran’s paperwork.

Lanam’s Claims

On paper, VSDO was formed as a domestic nonprofit with the state of Michigan and received a formal charitable organization designation from the IRS in 2019. Operating out of a blue building on Grand River Ave. in Howell, tax filings from 2019 and 2020 show the organization survived on less than $50,000 in those first two years.

Even with this financial challenge, the organization was able to connect 700 dogs with veterans to support and help each other, Lanam said in 2021. Jones said that number has increased to “about 1,000” teams—at least that’s what Lanam has claimed in various public events and conversations with veterans and volunteers.

Lanam always touted his status as a veteran. He has claimed to have been assigned “civil engineering, special operations,” according to a transcript of a video testimonial Lanam made for another service dog organization in 2017, obtained by 6 News. In a Livingston Daily report on the possible passage of the PAWS Act in 2019, Lanam claimed to be “a combat controller and forward operator in countries such as Bolivia, Panama, Kuwait and Iraq.”

Lanam told his volunteers he’d been an operator. In a transcript of an interview with him from 2017, he said in a testimonial video he was “civil engineering, special operations.” He told Jones he was part of the Joint Special Operations Command.

In 2017, Chuck Nelson met Lanam during the creation of his testimonial video. Nelson serves as the treasurer for the nonprofit Winter of the Beard in Waterford. Delving further into Lanam’s service claims was something he didn’t feel comfortable doing.

“With veterans in mental health situations, I really don’t pry about their service,” Nelson said. “Or ask anything that happened while they were in service. If they want to talk to me about, absolutely, I’m all ears. I’m not the one who initiates the conversation, especially in a kind of fragile environment like that – that are a very vulnerable environment.”

Nelson continued, “A lot of what he would say when we would kind of—when we’re doing the interview, at least, a lot of it was, ‘Oh, like I can’t talk about that. You know that’s classified.’ And, you know, he was presenting as a special operator, so we didn’t push.”

He said he has military family members, so the classification claim didn’t stand out as unfathomable. It rang true from his experiences. Sometimes, people go to war and perform actions or are stationed somewhere that is classified – and they don’t talk about it out of national pride, national security, or sometimes simply out of fear of legal ramifications for revealing sensitive national security information.

Winter of the Beard named VSDO as its grant recipient in 2021—a designation meaning the organization would provide the grantee at least $2,500, and, Nelson said, “much more.”

No one, including Lanam, was paid for their work with the organization. Lanam said the same thing. He said his income came entirely from disability payments.

Guidestar, a nonprofit that provides tax filings and detailed information about nonprofits, reports the organization had just over $131,000 in operational revenue in 2022. It had over $123,000. The information was provided by the VSDO, a spokesman for Guidestar said.

In 2022 something changed. “A lot going on just kind of the world stage, Russian and Ukraine and so forth,” Nathan Buchanan told 6 News. Buchanan is Kirk Lanam’s 24-year-old stepson.

“One night he sat me down at the kitchen table, and said, ‘I got to tell you something,’” Buchanan said. “And he said ‘The Air Force is bringing me back in.’”

In addition, Buchanan said Lanam claimed “he was being promoted to a one-star general in the Air Force. And that kind of blew me away. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting that.”

Photos provided by volunteers and veterans involved with VSDO show Lanam with a long and thick beard wearing Air Force “Digi Camo” fatigues adorned with patches from Air Force Special Operations a Special Tactics Officer duty patch and a Joint Special Operations Command patch.

Jones, Buchanan and other veterans involved in the organization said Lanam would occasionally rush out of the building. “You’d just be sitting there with him and the next thing you know he is running out the door,” Buchanan said. “He can’t tell you why, he says. I got, ‘It’s, you know, I have to go report to so and so.’ Or, you know, ‘I have an assignment I got to get to,’ or whatever. And so you never knew when it was going to happen, but it usually was when he was at the office – because, you know, for the past five or so years, that’s where he spends more of his time. But yeah. That would happen quite often.”

“He made a lot of claims about having to leave the country or having to meet at the Pentagon or some other location with a person he would refer to as Carlos,” Jones said

“Carlos,” Lanam revealed was Carlos Del Toro, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, according to Buchanan and Jones.

The other veterans who spoke on background said Lanam claimed to have been promoted from brigadier general to a two-star general in a secret weekend ceremony at the Pentagon. The promotion he told them, was bestowed by his “friend” Carlos. He also told those same veterans he decided not to show up to the weekend ceremony.

During a July 25 visit to the organization’s facility on Highland Rd. in Osceola Township, Lanam said he holds a doctorate from MIT and attended the University of Michigan. Buchanan said Lanam told him he has a doctorate from Northern Michigan University.

The four veterans who volunteered with VSDO and spoke on background all told similar stories of not pushing too hard on potentially sensitive and classified actions. The four agreed to empower Jones to speak on their behalf.

Each of them relayed a story Lanam had told to many. He would regale his volunteers with the tale of the time he was leading a “public access training”—a part of the program’s training for the service dogs and their veteran partners—in downtown Howell. A drunk, he claimed, came out of a bar and began an altercation.

Lanam claims his “team” was called in and they sealed off downtown Howell and dealt with the minor altercation.

There were text messages to a group of volunteers. Including Jones, warning them the Russo-Ukrainian war would end up involving U.S. and NATO forces. He hoped for “cooler heads to prevail.”

If those cooler heads didn’t prevail, his volunteers were to meet him at a property located in Red Feather, Colorado.

“I was given coordinates,” Jones said, “and on multiple occasions, he has talked about how the Department of Defense (DoD) hardened the property. Put in an airstrip. All these things to make it secure.”

In late 2022, Lanam said the organization needed to move because its lease on Grand River in the blue building was up. He found the Highland Rd. property and, Jones said, the organization had moved in a weekend.

In an August 6, 2023 interview with Veteran Radio, he said he was a dog handler in the Air Force.

“Yeah, I was a handler. I was not, initially, a trainer, but I was working—handling the dogs,” he said. “Then, you know, the Air Force trains most of the dogs for the other branches. Then we had a dog for our own group and I was the handler for our group.”

In his biography on the Veteran Radio webpage, he reports he served during Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Jones said in a presentation seeking corporate donations and volunteers with Trane in Livonia, Lanam wore a uniform with his General’s stars.

“We would go and present with the dogs, tell them what they’re donating money to,” Jones said of the various public speaking engagements he and Doc participated in over the years.

From motorcycle rallies to veterans’ organizations, Jones was singing the gospel of VSDO, and to some extent Lanam, despite the lingering and growing unease with the organization’s leader and his claims.

The Facts

Lanam, was convicted of three felony counts of computer intrusion by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District Court of Michigan, based in Detroit. “Computer intrusion” is the legal term for hacking.

It was a federal case filed in 2006 – United States of America V. Kirk Lanam.

He was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and ordered to pay back more than $12,000 to his victims. Lanam was found guilty by a jury and appealed multiple issues to the federal courts. All of his appeals were denied.

His time in federal prison overlaps with a time in which Lanam claimed he was an active duty “combat controller” in the United States Air Force.

While Lanam spoke often about his friend “Carlos” – the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, the man who allegedly bestowed his second star on him in a secret Pentagon promotion ceremony, a Navy spokesman denied Lanam’s engagement with the Navy.

“The Department of the Navy has no record of Kirk A. Lanam serving in the Navy,” a spokesman wrote in an email to 6 News, “nor any records of him meeting with senior Navy leadership.”

Nexstar’s 6 News Investigates team also contacted each of the universities Lanam claimed to have matriculated from to verify his claims.

“We’ve shared your inquiry with the MIT Registrar’s Office, and they do not have any record of enrollment or degree conferred for a person with the name Kirk A. Lanam, “wrote Abby Abazorius, senior media relations specialist for MIT Institute Office of Communications in an email response to a team inquiry about the doctorate.

“We do not offer a PhD of any kind,” said Northern Michigan University Spokesman Derek Hall in response to an inquiry.

A spokesperson for the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor emailed a statement that Kirk A. Lanam did not appear in the university’s registrar’s database.

Google Earth images (below) taken in 2024 of the coordinates Lanam directed volunteers to earlier this year, as tensions escalated in the Russia-Ukraine war, show no bunkers, as Lanam had claimed.

U.S. government VFR Charts—documentation of airports, air space, and landing strips—reveal no airstrips in the area of the coordinates Lanam sent.

Larimer County Colorado Assessor’s Office officials told 6 News Lanam does not appear as a property owner on any property in Larimer County.

Documents photographed by Nathan Buchanan, Lanam’s stepson, show Lanam signed a document acknowledging he was being separated from the Air Force for a “personality disorder.” The letter noted he’d consulted with legal counsel.

Buchanan snapped pictures of the Air Force documents he found in the family home he shares with Lanam and his mother. They were in an unremarkable box in a spare bedroom used for storage, Buchanan said.

“The reason I took their pictures is because, they’re sort of like the smoking gun, you know?” he said. “It’s official, straight from the source. There’s no way you can misinterpret or misrepresent the information here.”

Sophia Lavrick and Duncan Phenix contributed to this report.