... It seems ironic that the author of this article goes to such lengths to paint Patterson and DeAtley as fraudsters when he himself was sentenced to 15 months in prison for wire fraud to the tune of $200,000 - $400,000. ...
True, but ... Any implications linking Dunning's and Patterson's misbehaviors are weak at best, and the irony only extends skin-deep.
Dunning's legal woes derive from a business enterprise unrelated to his fortean-related activities, meaning that any aspersions cast on these activities are cast based on presumptuous
ad hominem generalization rather than direct evidence of misdeeds or missteps in the context of those separate and distinct activities.
In contrast, any possible misdeeds attributed to Patterson are attributed based on hard facts surrounding the very same activities (promoting the Bigfoot phenomenon generally; the documentary film project specifically) for which his integrity has been called into question. The two major non-family (i.e., non-DeAtley) underwriters of Patterson's film project were never repaid their basic investments, much less any of the promised additional proceeds from the product they were told they were supporting. Gimlin never received a penny from the share of such proceeds Patterson had promised him, and after years of being consistently evaded about it he finally gave up and signed away his seemingly worthless rights for a pittance.
... It seems to have become the official narrative that Patterson was a highly untrustworthy individual, a con-man. From what I've read, he sounded more like an unsuccessful entrepreneur who often found it difficult to repay his debts. ...
It's more accurate to say the narrative is the "most defensible one given the available facts" rather than "official" in any sense.
In any case, there's a thin line between being remembered as a con artist versus an entrepreneurial visionary, and whichever side of that line a person is assigned to ends up being a matter of whether his / her proposals or promises panned out in the eyes of others.
Every con artist is an entrepreneur who profits from misleading his audience about the real beneficiary of a proposal, and every entrepreneur risks being painted as a con artist until he / she delivers a success or a reasonable explanation for failure to deliver. Under the most benign interpretation of available evidence Patterson is an example of this latter case whose own actions and broken promises gave critics more than enough reason to assign him to the less respectable side of the dividing line.