In a case that calls to mind the plot of the fictional crime show Breaking Bad, a former US educator with the last name White is faced with charges of illicitly dealing methamphetamine.

A 12 March statement from police in the town of Clarksville, Indiana, said officers searched the home of Alan Jay White five days earlier, finding 78 grams of suspected meth and counterfeit cash. They contended that the amount was too big for personal use, booking him with illegally peddling meth, counterfeiting and possessing drug paraphernalia, the agency’s statement added.

Clarksville police said they had been targeting White, 59, “for years”, accusing him of being a drug dealer whose nickname was “the professor” because he had once worked as a college dean.

The news outlet WAVE in nearby Louisville, Kentucky, interviewed White after he was released from jail pending the outcome of the case without being required to post a bond. White didn’t dispute that there were drugs which police found in his home – but maintained they did not belong to him.

“They didn’t find stacks of monies,” White remarked. “They did not find stacks of dope. They did not find guns.”

White noted how his arrest did not yield the kind of pictures often published by police departments after drug busts in which money, weapons and narcotics are laid out atop tables.

“If they’ve literally been following me for years, as they said, somebody’s got to answer to their boss about what an incredible waste of resources it was,” White continued. “I’m saying if they found anything, it was maybe $250 worth, and it wasn’t even mine.”

Regardless, White’s arrest immediately prompted the police department pursuing him to reference Breaking Bad, whose Emmy-winning run was from 2008 to 2013.

“He’s definitely no Walter White,” said a statement attributed to Clarksville’s police chief, Nathan Walls, explicitly referencing Breaking Bad’s protagonist: a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with cancer, starts to distribute crystal meth to secure his family’s financial future, and violently clashes with drug cartel goons.

Media reports online show Alan White was appointed as the dean of Indiana University Southeast (IUS)’s school of business in 2007. He had previously been an associate or assistant professor of finance at IUS and Kenutcky’s Murray State University.

White’s page on the LinkedIn platform said his time as the dean at IUS’s business school ended in 2017, the year after Louisville’s Courier Journal reported that local police arrested him upon allegedly finding him passed out in the driver’s seat of a car and in possession of drugs.

His LinkedIn page indicates he is semi-retired from education and self-employed in home renovation and repair.