After all these years, Masoud Karkehabadi can still remember standing with his friends in Aldrich Park, the center of the campus at UC Irvine.

His graduation gown was a tad long, but the mortarboard cap was snug. And as he approached the podium, his face flecked with pink silly string, Masoud remembers the crowd going wild. There was, he says, 16 years later, “a lot of applause.”

For good reason. If a graduating class can have a star, Masoud Karkehabadi, UCI, class of ’94, was it.

He was just getting his undergrad degree, but he’d already performed brain surgery on rats. And he’d helped well-known neuroscientist James Fallon in his then pioneering research on stem cells.

He’d been on talk shows (Arsenio, Conan, Phil Donahue); he’d been written up in magazines and newspapers, (in English and in Farsi.) He was treated like a full-blown celebrity in Australia, of all places.

All the attention was due to his brains and his age. Masoud Karkehabadi had started community college at age 9, and when he graduated from UCI in June of 1994 he was 13.

“I’m going to medical school,” he soon told a reporter.

But five years later, young Karkehabadi – 200-something IQ; frequently compared to fictional boy genius “Dougie Howser” – was making a living by selling electronics at a Best Buy.

What the heck happened?

FAME FADES

Initially, Masoud tried the medical school route.

At 14, Masoud says, he sent out a dozen or so applications, but the response wasn’t strong.

Two years later, he sent out more applications and the response was slightly better. But he couldn’t get any scholarships (his grades at UCI weren’t stellar, a result, Masoud says, of cramming four years of classes into two years of study,) and there was no school he could get into that wouldn’t require him to take on huge student loans – up to $200,000 or so.

At his age, such loans would require a co-signature from a family member. And that wasn’t happening in the Karkehabadi household.

In the last ten years Masoud’s father, Mahmoud “Mike” Karkehabadi has been repeatedly accused of orchestrating fraudulent schemes in Southern California.

In the early 2000s The Department of Motor Vehicles took steps to revoke the elder Karkehabadi’s license to sell cars after accusing him of 181 incidents of fraud, theft and false advertisement in connection with his work as a sales manager at South Bay Toyota.

In 2003, he was again accused of fraud, this time for illegally seeking upfront fees for so-called “Gold” cards – which were not bank credit cards. The California Attorney General estimated that 500,000 consumers were defrauded. In a civil suit filed by the California Attorney General’s office Mahmoud Karkehabadi was ordered to pay $5 million; officials said he filed for bankruptcy protection and the money was never collected.

And just a few months ago the elder Karkehabadi was arrested and again accused of fraud.

In August, while in jail on charges of auto theft, Mahmoud Karkehabadi was charged with 89 felony counts related to an alleged Ponzi scheme in which millions of dollars were raised to finance B-movies. If convicted, Masoud’s father – who could not be reached for this story – faces up to 25 years in prison.

For Masoud, who lives in Aliso Viejo – and who has never been accused of fraud or any other financial crime – his father’s reputation was a non-issue growing up.

“Whatever may or may not have been happening, I don’t know. (My parents) kept that from me.”

What’s more, his father wasn’t the only man in young Masoud’s life who might have disappointed him.

As a celebrity boy genius with an interest in stem cell research, Masoud, at age 14, became a spokesman for the American Parkinson’s disease Association. But the charity’s director was charged with embezzling more than $870,000 in donations. Masoud eventually hooked up with another group, the National Parkinson’s Foundation.

During that period, Masoud says he also continued to work on stem cells with Fallon, but in a nonpaid capacity.

“Back then… people said I was a celebrity,” he says. “It was big exposure to the schools.”

So, after he couldn’t get into medical school, and after he left his role as a Parkinson’s spokesman, the teen genius had to make a very adult decision.

“At that point (my fame) began to dwindle,” he says.

“I tried a different route, a normal route.”

REGULAR GENIUS

His first paying job was at 18, selling electronics at a Best Buy. He says he needed to help his family pay their bills.

Later, he says, he found some success in real estate, but he got out in 2005, the same year he left Orange County and had a falling out with his father. He took other jobs, eventually working for Verizon.

As his time was eaten up making a living, Masoud’s dreams of medical school faded.

“You have a job, so you have bills… a car payment… a house payment. It becomes very, very difficult.

“Definitely more difficult than anything I’ve ever done in science.”

What would he tell his 13-year-old self now?

“I’d probably tell myself to learn about the world a lot quicker than I did. I was focused a lot on science,” he says.

“There are a lot of obstacles in the way. You have to find ways around them… The only way to find ways around them is to know how the world works.”

Lately, a new plan has been growing in Masoud’s still vibrant mind. He wants to earn a teaching degree and teach biology in high school. With time and patience, he says, he plans to earn a master’s degree and, later, a Ph.D.

He’s also considering work in a local laboratory.

He’s encouraged by his belief that “everybody has a special ability of some kind. Everyone excels at one thing.”

Now Masoud wants to renew his own ability and find a place within an institution doing the work he loves.

“I did everything because I wanted to help people, and I still want to help people to this day,” he says.

“Money is definitely important. You have to have money to live. But, for me, money has not been a driving force. It’s the will to help people… to make the world a better place.”

On June 6 of next year Masoud Karkehabadi will turn 30.