With aspirations as lofty as his title, Maj. Dr. Leon Willis wants your vote for Maricopa City Council when the polls open July 30.
Such a title conveys a remarkable aptitude for leadership.
According to the university where he purportedly serves as Dean of Theology and earned his doctorate degree, Willis is a distinguished U.S. Air Force veteran. His academic journey, as depicted, is marked by scholarly achievements, including a master’s degree from a theological institution in Atlanta.
But none of this is true, an InMaricopa investigation reveals.
His military service, like his master’s degree, is entirely fabricated. And the university where he serves as dean? It doesn’t exist. And when it did, its credibility was cloudy at best.
So, like Gary Coleman in Different Strokes, we’re left asking this: Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?
Hitting the campaign trail
Although he announced he’d run for city council in August 2023, Willis pulled off the feat of gathering all 424 of his election signatures in just four days up to and including the April 1 deadline, according to nomination petitions he filed with the city.
Never mind some of those signatures were from people who don’t live in the city, an analysis of the documents revealed. That included voters registered in Ak-Chin Village and Tucson.
The same week Willis filed his bid to run last year, the 74-year-old Senita resident slammed the city council for failing to represent Maricopa’s Black community. He and fellow activist Kent O’Jon, whose wife Chrystal opposes Willis in this election, denigrated the city for employing just “three Blacks.”
The real number of Black employees was 36, proportionally comparable to the city’s Black population.
Since then, Willis has stayed mostly quiet in the Maricopa political space. A campaign finance statement last quarter shows he hasn’t raised a penny to unseat incumbents Eric Goettl, Amber Liermann and Bob Marsh.
The Independent candidate is gunning on a platform of attracting industry and improving the quality of public education, he said in an April 11 interview with InMaricopa. He’s banking his impressive résumé will do the talking for him.
Willis was a career public schoolteacher, retiring from the Thornton Township High Schools District in Harvey, Ill., in 2021.
“I do remember when Arizona ranked very high in education and we are not where we once was,” he said. “Given the fact that I’ve been in education for 20-plus years, and I taught from kindergarten through college, I have a good idea as to what is required to get back on the page that we may be able to really compete globally for the jobs that are globally demanding.”
Willis said he was qualified to teach when, in 1994, he obtained his master’s degree from Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
The school’s registrar, Arlene Clarke, told InMaricopa she “noted no record of this person as a graduate” in a March 10 email.
Crazy Little Thing Called Larry Love
Willis says he went on to earn his doctor title, one he displays proudly on all his election documents, at Larry Love University in Muskogee, Okla., in 2018.
He’s now the Dean of Theology at that university, he says. The school’s entity status expired in 2016, according to the Oklahoma Secretary of State.
“It means the LLC is not in good standing with the State of Oklahoma due to a late Annual Certificate,” the secretary of state said in a statement.
The university’s most recent graduation ceremony was in 2020, its website states. When Willis graduated in 2018, however, the university’s address was a vacant office building. That year, the building had been most recently occupied by several defunct outpatient medical facilities, according to brokers for the property.
Larry Love University does offer doctoral degrees, according to a document listing its 38 certificate and degree programs. In the same document, the university also claims it will award graduate degrees for $11,700 to students who haven’t completed any credit hours or taken any courses if they have “prior learning experience.”
Larry Love University was never accredited by an accepted accrediting agency, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In Willis’ native Illinois and 28 other states, the use of unaccredited degrees is not allowed. Arizona, however, has no such restriction.
Calls and emails to Larry Love University didn’t go through. Its website contains mostly broken links, save for pages where you can make donations or payments. The application page is still functional, too, which allows students to apply for scholarships — and next to the U.S. Veteran’s Scholarship is the Major Leon’ Willis Scholarship.
It’s on this website where Willis is pictured, clad in what’s ostensibly a U.S. Air Force uniform, with a caption reading, “US Airforce Major Dr. Leon’ Willis.”
CAP and gown
In his documents filed with the city, he goes by many variously punctuated aliases — Leon, Leron, Le’on, Léon, Leon’ and Le-on — but military records obtained in a public records request show no one under any variation of that name ever served in the Air Force.
In his interview with InMaricopa, he admitted he never served in the military.
Willis was a longtime member of the Civil Air Patrol’s Cornelius Coffey Composite Squadron in South Holland, Ill., a volunteer service arm of the U.S. Air Force. The auxiliary awards rank titles mirroring the Air Force, explaining Willis’ title of major.
CAP membership does not equate to membership in the military, however, according to the nonprofit humanitarian organization.
“If you’ve only served in CAP, you are not a veteran,” David Hutcheson, spokesperson for the CAP in Danville, Va., told InMaricopa. “They have asked us to never identify ourselves as Air Force.”
At the Larry Love University commencement ceremony in 2019, Willis is pictured wearing the standard senior CAP getup — a three-button uniform in Air Force blues with a Company Grande service cap. To the layperson, the uniform is indistinguishable from those worn by military service members.
That’s why the rules around where and when CAP officers can display their uniforms are so stringent. When asked if it’s permissible to wear your CAP uniform to a college graduation, Hutcheson said: “That is forbidden.”
“He cannot wear the uniform because it creates confusion that he was in the Air Force,” Hutcheson explained. “And believe me, he knows that. Our uniforms are very similar to the Air Force and our ranks are sometimes identical.”
Cornelius Coffey Squadron Commander Capt. Levetta Parker would not answer questions about her former member.
Although CAP members fly a variety of emergency and operational missions for the federal government including assisting the Air Force and Army National Guard, they aren’t even allowed to shop in basic exchange on an Air Force base.
CAP is very protective of its integrity, Hutcheson said. The organization wants to know who’s misrepresenting themselves so they can take action.
“Anyone who does that is not playing straight and we want to know who they are so they can straighten out their act,” he said. “You don’t borrow respect or steal it. You earn it.”
The weight of the title
Major Doctors are vanishingly rare in the U.S.
For example, there are only 620 airmen in the entire country who can claim that title, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Deana M. Heitzman told InMaricopa.
It’s among the most prestigious titles an American can obtain, both because of the tremendous amount of back-breaking work it takes to earn it and the gravity it carries.
Just ask Maj. Dr. Jennifer Waterman, an Air Force flight surgeon in Maine who offered her medical expertise across the wing in October when she responded to the state’s deadliest mass shooting in history.
It was the tenth-deadliest shooting in American history when Robert Card slaughtered 18 children and adults at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Me. Waterman saw most of the casualties pass through her ER doors and desperately tried to save their lives.
The horror of their injuries was so extreme, she likened it to the savagery she witnessed on deployment during the Afghanistan conflict.
“The injuries that came in weren’t something you usually see in a civilian hospital,” she said. “The weapon used in this setting was much more similar to something you would see in a combat zone, far more destructive and there were many people I worked with who had never seen injuries like that.”
