This is my firsthand account of my legal history, incarceration, education, dog-training career, move to Alaska, and the twenty-year rebuild that followed. It is not an attempt to rewrite the past. It is an attempt to put the complete record in one place.
Excerpt
Robert Forto shares the complete story behind his past, from addiction, fraud charges, incarceration, and restitution to rebuilding a career through dog training, returning to school, moving to Alaska, building Alaska Dog Works, and preparing the next generation to lead.
The Day the Rebuild Became Real
It was the afternoon of October 17, 2006. I walked into the American School of Dog Training in Aurora, Colorado, looking for work. The owner, Bob, looked at my stack of certificates and said, “I don’t care about any of that. Go in the back, pick out a dog, and show me what you’ve got.”
I did, and he hired me on the spot. Within months I was running the operation that became Denver Dog Works. We bought a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The kids played sports. Michele and I built a life that, on paper, looked like a successful restart.
What almost no one knew then, and what too many people still only half-know, is the full weight of the years that came before that day.
The Years Before My Arrest
In the late 1990s I was a young dog musher living in northern Minnesota with a growing team and a parallel addiction to day-trading the early internet stock boom. The trading turned compulsive and massive losses mounted. Civil complaints and criminal charges followed; bank fraud, stock fraud, and related counts across multiple states. By the time I met Michele and her three children, I was already in free fall. She had just lost her first husband in a motorcycle accident. We found each other at the bottom of our respective crises.
The Day Everything Came Apart
On February 21, 2001, deputies arrived at our place in Bailey, Colorado. Michele was in the kennel. Nicole, then three, was upstairs. I finished the dog dishes and looked down into the kennel as the cops swarmed the property, it looked like something out of the movies. I walked upstairs, sat her on my lap, and told her I would not be home for a long time.
They drove me away I looked back and saw Michele standing in the middle of the dirt road. The dogs were rehomed within days. I received an eighteen-year sentence. I served just over six years in minimum custody.
Prison, Restitution, and Starting Over
Inside, I started a service-dog program, appeared on Animal Planet’s Cell Dogs, went back to school, and paid every dollar of restitution. In 2005, a Jefferson County judge told me that if I finished the education program and cleared the restitution, he would reconsider the sentence. We paid it in full. I was released in October 2006.
Correcting My Educational Record
One of the schools I attended while incarcerated, Madison University, later proved to be a diploma mill. I had enrolled in good faith, completed the coursework and a dissertation under the conditions available to me, and used the credential for a time after release. When the truth became clear, I stopped using it.
Years later, I corrected the record the only way that mattered: I earned a bachelor’s degree from UAA (2018), a Master of Sports Management from Liberty University (2020), and completed the Doctor of Strategic Leadership at Liberty in December 2024. The dissertation focused on transgenerational succession and emerging female leaders in family firms, work that now shapes how we are transferring day-to-day operations of Alaska Dog Works to Nicole.
The rumors never fully stopped. When we moved to Willow in 2010–2011 to rebuild a mushing kennel and launch Alaska Dog Works, the stories traveled faster than we did. Some people asked directly. Most did not. I learned that the people willing to sit down and hear the entire account usually became colleagues or friends. The ones who preferred the abbreviated internet version rarely changed their minds.
I have never been violent. I have never had so much as a traffic ticket since 2006. I take full responsibility for the choices that put me in that position. I do not ask for sympathy or for anyone to rewrite the past. I simply refuse to keep living in the gray of other people’s summaries.
In 2024 we became the new stewards of Mushing Magazine, now Mushing.com, under First Paw Media. The previous owners chose us because of the long body of work we had already produced for the sport. That acquisition, Nicole’s growing operational leadership of the training business, and the coaching and media work we continue under the Adventure Strategist banner are not a rebrand. They are the logical continuation of the same rebuild that began the day I walked out of the facility with nothing.
What Twenty Years of Rebuilding Taught Me
People can change. The last twenty years of my life are the evidence. I will keep telling the full story, on the trail, in the kennel, in the classroom, and in the work we do with family businesses that are navigating their own pressure and succession moments, because the alternative is to keep letting incomplete versions define the space.
The Record Is Here. The Trail Continues
I no longer believe the answer is to hide the hardest chapters. The better answer is to document them accurately, take responsibility for them, correct what can be corrected, pay what must be paid, and then produce enough evidence through the way you live and work that the complete record speaks for itself. This page is part of that record. If you are here because you searched for Robert Forto and wanted to know the story, now you have it directly from me. If you are here because your own family, business, or organization is facing a difficult transition, that experience is also part of the work I do today.
The Short Verison
I made catastrophic choices driven by addiction, I paid the legal and personal price, I rebuilt from zero, I corrected the educational credential that was never legitimate, and I am now focused on the work in front of me, raising the next generation of the business, serving the mushing community as its current historians, and helping leaders turn hard chapters into usable systems.
