Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: From the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies, a surfer
Speaker 2: named Mickey Dora ruled Malibu. He was celebrated for his grace,
Speaker 2: his style, and his rebellious spirit. He was also a
Speaker 2: con man who led the FBI on a seven year
Speaker 2: manhunt around the world. Another episode of Caution Retales will
Speaker 2: be released on the usual schedule. But while you wait,
Speaker 2: why not check out the new season of the gripping
Speaker 2: Pushkin podcast Lost Hills, which takes a deep dive into
Speaker 2: the world of Malibu's dark Prints. It's available wherever you
Speaker 2: get your podcasts, and of course, if you'd like to
Speaker 2: binge all of the season three episodes early and ad free,
Speaker 2: make sure you subscribe to Pushkin Plus. I now present
Speaker 2: to you the first episode of Lost Hills doc Prints.
Speaker 3: Not too long ago, I met a surfer named Denny Auburg.
Speaker 3: He lives in Santa Barbara now, but he learned to
Speaker 3: surf in Malibu when the sport was barely known on
Speaker 3: the mainland.
Speaker 4: I still go surfing after about sixty two years of surfing,
Speaker 4: and go down to Rincon and live close by him.
Speaker 4: I still have the stoke.
Speaker 3: Denny told me a story about one of his early
Speaker 3: surf experiences, a day that made an indelible impression on him.
Speaker 3: It was nineteen fifty nine, he was twelve. The waves
Speaker 3: at Malibu were huge, but he and his friend decided
Speaker 3: to paddle out anyway. They were kooks, They didn't know
Speaker 3: what they were doing.
Speaker 5: So we were beginners, you know.
Speaker 4: We're down at Malibu and it was a big day,
Speaker 4: you know, but we went out by the pier. When
Speaker 4: it gets real big, you have to go way down
Speaker 4: by the piero to paddle out. So we jump in
Speaker 4: the water with our boards, you know, a little skinny
Speaker 4: twelve year olds, and start turning our little skinny arms,
Speaker 4: you know, doing this cook paddle, trying to get out
Speaker 4: in a big set of waves. I mean, the big
Speaker 4: waves came like a row of five or six waves.
Speaker 4: Out to see them, I never forget this, the beauty
Speaker 4: of this wave coming.
Speaker 3: As the wave approached, Denny saw there was a surfer
Speaker 3: on it.
Speaker 4: Just perfectly placed on this wave, just trimming at the
Speaker 4: very top of the wave. And there's a precision. When
Speaker 4: you're trim it means your board's flushed sideways to the wave,
Speaker 4: it's inside it, and you're getting speed that way because
Speaker 4: it's in the right position, the fins just hanging on
Speaker 4: at the top of the wave, and it's hand position
Speaker 4: the way he's kind of arching in the little vales
Speaker 4: of water coming off to those. It was the most
Speaker 4: gorgeous thing, you know, the colors. He's riding this wind
Speaker 4: blowing spin, drifts back and we're just watching this thing.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: But we realized he was coming right at us. You know,
Speaker 4: we were the cooks in his way, you know, coming
Speaker 4: right at us. So we had to turn sideways. You know,
Speaker 4: it's hard to explain, but when you turn broadside, you
Speaker 4: just get obliterated. It just took our board, It just
Speaker 4: took us and lasted us, churning into the whitewater down
Speaker 4: by the end of the pilings at the pier, I
Speaker 4: really felt like I was going to drown. My friend
Speaker 4: told me I almost drowned. I don't remember, but I
Speaker 4: remember spitting out sand, and you know, just like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, who was that guy?
Speaker 3: Who was that guy? His name was Mickey Dora, also
Speaker 3: known as the Cat, also known as the Dark Prince
Speaker 3: of Malibu. In the nineteen fifties, as surfing spread from
Speaker 3: Hawaii to California. Mickey gained a reputation as the most
Speaker 3: dynamic and watchable surfer on the mainland. He was Malibu's
Speaker 3: first homegrown celebrity and the surf world's first personality. He
Speaker 3: put Malibu on the map. Mickey Doro was beautiful and charismatic,
Speaker 3: but he was all shade. You don't earn that name,
Speaker 3: the dark Prince for nothing. He represented Malibu's dark side,
Speaker 3: what I think of as Malibu's true nature. He violently
Speaker 3: opposed the happy, sun drenched Malibu that would come to
Speaker 3: dominate pop culture, starting with the Gidget movies in the
Speaker 3: late fifties, Malibu Barbie in the seventies, and everything that
Speaker 3: came after that. He hated Gidget and everything she stood
Speaker 3: for new surfers, girl surfers, surfers he thought didn't belong.
Speaker 3: He went to war for the soul of Malibu, the
Speaker 3: soul of surfing. Some days I think he won. Mickey
Speaker 3: Dora was a surfing Jesse James, an unrepentant outlaw, idolized
Speaker 3: by the so called wild kids of Malibu Beach, A
Speaker 3: scoundrel who people say would screw them over for fun,
Speaker 3: scam them, steal from them, and break their hearts, a
Speaker 3: rebel who made his own rules. The legends were endless,
Speaker 3: mostly not fact checkable, and Mickey was their primary author.
Speaker 3: He stole Ringo Stars snuffbox or was it John Lennon's lighter?
Speaker 3: He dated Cher before Sonny. He knew who kidnapped Frank
Speaker 3: Sinatra Junior. He was a diamond smuggler, a drug lord,
Speaker 3: a double agent, a European aristocrat, a prophet of the
Speaker 3: coming apocalypse. He was an emotionally unstable man, armed and dangerous.
Speaker 3: That one was courtesy of the FBI, who tried to
Speaker 3: catch him for seven years. Because in the early seventies,
Speaker 3: at the height of his fame, when some of his
Speaker 3: bad deeds were catching up with him, Mickey just disappeared.
Speaker 3: He went on the lamb, leading law enforcement on a
Speaker 3: goose chase that spanned the globe. But while the law
Speaker 3: was hunting him, he was hunting something else. The Perfect Wave,
Speaker 3: a once in a century event sometimes called the rogue
Speaker 3: Wave or the episodic Wave or the Ninth Wave. Does
Speaker 3: that sound familiar. If it does, that's because it's a
Speaker 3: lot like the plot of Point Break, the cult classic
Speaker 3: from nineteen ninety one. In Point Break, Patrick Swayze plays
Speaker 3: a groovy surfer named Body who robbed banks so he
Speaker 3: could travel the world and find the perfect wave. Well,
Speaker 3: Mickey was a real life Body, minus the Kumbaya.
Speaker 6: He said.
Speaker 7: Criminals break the laws, live outside the law.
Speaker 1: Mickey's alias's Richard Austin Roach Junior, Michlos Dora, Mickey Dora.
Speaker 4: It was a Swiss bank and yeah, they found four
Speaker 4: hundred thousand dollars in the.
Speaker 1: Bank, Alexander Dora.
Speaker 4: Nobody knows exactly where it came from. There are all
Speaker 4: sorts of theories.
Speaker 1: Michlos Dora, Cornell, Michael s Chapin.
Speaker 7: Australia, New Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and I'm probably
Speaker 7: missing a few, all of Europe.
Speaker 1: Michael spring Chapin.
Speaker 8: He went to amazing places before anybody was doing that
Speaker 8: stuff by himself.
Speaker 1: Michol spring Chapin, Michael Stanley Chapin.
Speaker 3: You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect
Speaker 3: the dots around this.
Speaker 1: Alexander Michlos and I fell in love the Manye he
Speaker 1: walked out of the water until I realized he was
Speaker 1: a scoundrel.
Speaker 7: At a road and was chaining me to being accomplice.
Speaker 6: I'm going to get in big trouble for saying all this.
Speaker 6: He was narcissistic, but also incredibly intelligent and also, i'd
Speaker 6: say a little bit sociopathic.
Speaker 8: It just all gets darker and darker and darker until
Speaker 8: I just want to sort of turn away from it.
Speaker 8: I don't want to know about it anymore.
Speaker 3: At its core, surfing is a counterculture, So Mickey being
Speaker 3: an anti hero that just makes him Surfing's hero. I'm
Speaker 3: Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills Season three, The
Speaker 3: Dark Prince, Episode one, The legend of Mickey Dora.
Speaker 8: Who is the best in the world, who's the worst
Speaker 8: in the world.
Speaker 5: I don't give a fuck.
Speaker 4: I don't give it to have if you want to
Speaker 4: think I'm any good, find if they don't think I'm
Speaker 4: any good, I don't give a shit. I have there
Speaker 4: no right ways and enjoy myself.
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora died from pancreatic cancer in two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: For reasons i'll get into later, there are very few
Speaker 3: publicly available recordings of him. What you're about to hear
Speaker 3: is probably the longest and most revealing clip that's out there.
Speaker 3: It's from a nineteen ninety documentary called Surfers the movie.
Speaker 3: In it, Mickey lays out his surfing philosophy.
Speaker 5: My whole life is this escape. My whole life is
Speaker 5: this way.
Speaker 4: If I drop into set, the whole thing up, pull
Speaker 4: up the bottom droom and pull up into it and
Speaker 4: shoot for five go into a man and behind me,
Speaker 4: all of this shit goes.
Speaker 8: Over my bed.
Speaker 9: He had been such a big part of surf history,
Speaker 9: and as a kid, I soaked all that up. I
Speaker 9: started surfing in the mid seventies, late seventies.
Speaker 3: This is Kelly Slater, the eleven time World Surf League Champion.
Speaker 3: He's regarded as the greatest surfer of all time. When
Speaker 3: he was in his twenties, Kelly had the chance to
Speaker 3: spend time with Mickey Dora.
Speaker 9: It was part of the experience, you know, it was
Speaker 9: a part of a essentially like a grassroots experience to
Speaker 9: be around Mickey Dora in the surf world because he
Speaker 9: was a legend. He was a living character to us,
Speaker 9: to people in my era and just before me. Mickey
Speaker 9: was He's one of the biggest names in surfing, and
Speaker 9: he did represent the lifestyle and the freedom that surfers have,
Speaker 9: and you know, a means to an end to go
Speaker 9: travel around the world and surf.
Speaker 3: Mickey was one of the original California surfers, an innovator
Speaker 3: who was among the few standout masters, certainly the most
Speaker 3: notorious and memorable. At the moment that surfing exploded into
Speaker 3: the mainstream. Mickey had an ideology about surfing. Casual surfers
Speaker 3: they should get out of his way, or better yet,
Speaker 3: stay out of Malibu altogether. Professionals like Slater, they were
Speaker 3: defiling something sacred. Mickey's way was total commitment and total freedom,
Speaker 3: no rules.
Speaker 9: The cool thing about Mickey's story is there's always been
Speaker 9: this sort of tinge of like a little bit of
Speaker 9: an outlaw lifestyle or something, an expat, a traveling person,
Speaker 9: somebody who there's a little bit of mystery in their
Speaker 9: life or whatever. And that was really prominent back in
Speaker 9: the fifties and sixties and seventies surfing, and it really
Speaker 9: built up the lore of mysterious characters around the world.
Speaker 9: I don't know if all the stories I heard were
Speaker 9: true or not, but that was the early days of
Speaker 9: like Double seven. Maybe he pictured himself as like this
Speaker 9: kind of like almost like a spy in this surf world.
Speaker 9: Or something, and that was sort of celebrated to have
Speaker 9: this sort of life at all costs and make it
Speaker 9: fun while you're doing it.
Speaker 3: I started surfing ten years ago, and there's not another
Speaker 3: way to say it. I felt totally in love with it.
Speaker 3: The smell of the wax, the taste of salt, the
Speaker 3: squinting into the sun, the scar I'll have forever from
Speaker 3: the rock at low tide Malibu that cut through my
Speaker 3: wet suit and gashed my shin. I love the salty,
Speaker 3: shaggy people who seem to congregate around the southern California
Speaker 3: breaks people with stories from the not that distant past,
Speaker 3: when mainland surfing was born. I got into surfing when
Speaker 3: I had a newborn and a two year old, was
Speaker 3: writing a book and teaching at a university and writing
Speaker 3: full time for The New Yorker. I was living in
Speaker 3: a world of obligations, deadlines, bedtimes, clocks, a life measured
Speaker 3: out in teaspoons, very unfree. Surfing released me temporarily from
Speaker 3: that identity. It let me drop out, It let me
Speaker 3: live life by the tides. This one day, early in
Speaker 3: my time surfing, I was in the water at sunset,
Speaker 3: a beginner's spot between Santa Monica and Malibu, where you
Speaker 3: park along Pacific Coast Highway and scramble down the rocks
Speaker 3: with your board. I was sitting there in the long
Speaker 3: lag between sets of waves, bobbing, looking up to the highway,
Speaker 3: watching all the cars streaming by. So many times I'd
Speaker 3: been in my car on that stretch of road. I
Speaker 3: glanced over at the surfers in the water below. They
Speaker 3: had seemed scenic, a picturesque feature of Los Angeles. But
Speaker 3: now I was in the waves, and it was the
Speaker 3: opposite the cars, the city clustered at the ocean's edge.
Speaker 3: That was the backdrop. That world looked temporary, illusory. This
Speaker 3: out here was real. To this day, Mickey Dora is
Speaker 3: held up as an idol many people's idea of a
Speaker 3: pure surfer. That was the case for Denny Auburg, for sure.
Speaker 3: He idolized Mickey as a kid on the beach in Malibu,
Speaker 3: and you can hear it in his voice. He still does.
Speaker 4: Mickey was twelve years older than me. He was a
Speaker 4: man when we were kids, you know, twenty five.
Speaker 3: Denny's house is a simple wooden structure on his buddy's
Speaker 3: avocado farm. The window ledges are lined with surf memorabilia,
Speaker 3: trophies and plaques and photos of Denny as a toe
Speaker 3: headed teenager.
Speaker 5: That's a picture of him.
Speaker 3: This is you surfing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's Mickey Dora next to me.
Speaker 3: Your style is not totally different from Mickey's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we probably all copied Mickey. You know, he was
Speaker 4: a big influence. That's another thing, you know that people
Speaker 4: copied his style and learned from him. You know, he
Speaker 4: was a teacher just by doing it, you know, taught
Speaker 4: us what to do, you know, how to ride away.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: Amazing the way Mickey surfed, it was poetic. No one
Speaker 3: who saw it could forget it, and no one could
Speaker 3: match him, though everyone tried.
Speaker 4: His nickname was the Cat because he had feline grace
Speaker 4: on a way, you know, the way pushy flipped to
Speaker 4: the nose, you know, boom boom, agile. You know, they
Speaker 4: call him the cat. That's why they made him, not
Speaker 4: because he was a cat burglar, but I guess he
Speaker 4: was it.
Speaker 3: Along with Mickey's unparalleled ability on a surfboard, his appearance
Speaker 3: was unique on the beaches of southern California. In a
Speaker 3: sea of boy scout blondes, he was obsidian dark hair
Speaker 3: and eyes and the kind of complexion people often call swarthy.
Speaker 8: The fact that the guy who caught our attention the
Speaker 8: most is this hairy, dark haired guy who didn't look
Speaker 8: at all like the archetype. I respond to that as well.
Speaker 3: This is Matt Warshaw. He's a surf historian and the
Speaker 3: curator of an incredible online resource called the Encyclopedia of Surfing.
Speaker 8: In the surf World. You know, he looks so perfect
Speaker 8: to be that person, the way Bowie looks so good
Speaker 8: to be the person for that period of glam rock,
Speaker 8: you know. And it's not even the handsomeess Grin by itself.
Speaker 8: It's almost like this chesture cap thing, Like sometimes when
Speaker 8: you think of Dora, it's like the rest of him
Speaker 8: sort of fades away and it's just this dark hair
Speaker 8: and that really sort of devilish grin.
Speaker 3: But what really set Mickey apart was the persona he invented.
Speaker 3: Micky Dora was a character, a complex self invention that
Speaker 3: was meant to draw a maximum attention and to throw
Speaker 3: people off his trail.
Speaker 8: Micky seemed to have a I guess what we would
Speaker 8: call a brand, And I got the feeling that he
Speaker 8: dressed sort of for us. You know, he would show
Speaker 8: up in things that you wouldn't expect a surfer to wear.
Speaker 8: You know, he would just wear a tennis sweater to
Speaker 8: the beach. I read someone said that Nicky would show
Speaker 8: up with a starlet one day, and they'd show up
Speaker 8: with two really pretty boys the next day. So I
Speaker 8: think that he was never not having fun and sort
Speaker 8: of just enjoying himself, especially in these early years, just
Speaker 8: sort of playing with the image of being a surfer
Speaker 8: before anybody else was doing it.
Speaker 3: The ocean is infinite, but waves, waves shaped for surfing
Speaker 3: with a face and room to play, are finite. The
Speaker 3: deepest joy in surfing comes from a long, uninterrupted ride.
Speaker 3: That's the whole point, to be alone on a wave,
Speaker 3: or so I hear. I've been surfing in Los Angeles
Speaker 3: for a decade, and I've rarely had a wave to
Speaker 3: myself for more than a few seconds. There are too
Speaker 3: many surfers and not enough waves. Denny Auberg remembers the
Speaker 3: time before the early nineteen fifties when Malibu was an
Speaker 3: undiscovered wave. Most days it was only Mickey Dora and
Speaker 3: one or two others in the water.
Speaker 4: And you had this wonderful wave to yourself, which makes
Speaker 4: a big difference, because when you have a wave to
Speaker 4: yourself and a perfect wave, you get the right of
Speaker 4: your life and nobody gets in your way, and it's
Speaker 4: just the nature all around you, and it's yours, you know,
Speaker 4: and it's a personal connection with nature that it's hard
Speaker 4: to duplicate.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: It's just nothing like it, because it's so gorgeous in
Speaker 4: the water and the wind blowing the waves back, and
Speaker 4: you're free and there's no distractions.
Speaker 5: You're just you and the waves.
Speaker 3: Malibu is a perfect, long, right breaking wave that peels
Speaker 3: from way off the point to the Malibu Pier, and
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora owned it for about two decades from the
Speaker 3: early fifties to the early seventies. And because it was Malibu,
Speaker 3: that meant that Mickey Dora stood for something, an attitude
Speaker 3: that would spread through the culture. Here's how one of
Speaker 3: his admirers wrote about Mickey's influence in an authorized biography, quote,
Speaker 3: he was our Elvis. There was no one else to
Speaker 3: articulate the fundamental gestures of the sociopathic manifesto of a
Speaker 3: coalescing youth consciousness unquote. The youth were sociopaths, and Mickey
Speaker 3: was their leader up until nineteen seventy four when he
Speaker 3: vanished from Malibu. That's when he became their god.
Speaker 4: It was a mystery. It was kind of like, where's
Speaker 4: Mickey Dora And they still had his name on the wall.
Speaker 4: Some guy spray can Dora lives you know, on the
Speaker 4: wall and stayed there forever, you know, and it kind
Speaker 4: of left us. He left his mark in that way,
Speaker 4: you know, and people would wonder where's Mickey. Nobody knew.
Speaker 4: It was very much of a mystery for years because
Speaker 4: he was on the run, you know, and kind of
Speaker 4: like Billy the kid, you know, he was gone. He's
Speaker 4: kind of had this reputation the bad boy on the run,
Speaker 4: the fugitive so an added to his reputation.
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk
Speaker 3: his way into anything and out of almost everything. His
Speaker 3: alleged scams ranged from petty and kind of ridiculous, like
Speaker 3: renting out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly
Speaker 3: criminal credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment,
Speaker 3: stolen antiques, stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him
Speaker 3: in federal prison. You associated with him at your own risk.
Speaker 3: Denny Auberg has a story about this, the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that would happen on a typical day hanging out
Speaker 3: with Mickey in the early seventies, Denny was invited to
Speaker 3: Kawhi by a Hawaiian surf named Joey Cabbell. At the time,
Speaker 3: Mickey was also in Hawaii. Cobell told Denny he'd like
Speaker 3: to see Mickey too, So I.
Speaker 4: Called up Mickey and told him, Joey invited you to come,
Speaker 4: and he came right over.
Speaker 5: He shut up. It was amazing.
Speaker 3: Cobell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed the hike
Speaker 3: to a beach to spend the night. It was an
Speaker 3: eleven mile hike and not an easy one.
Speaker 4: So I'm trudging along with Mickey Dora on this really
Speaker 4: tough hike, you know, for us, and we're like city slickers.
Speaker 4: Dora had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment,
Speaker 4: you know, and I was kind of feeling a little
Speaker 4: sick myself, and it got dark on us, and we're
Speaker 4: going to these canyons and pushing branches away.
Speaker 5: Micky was tortured.
Speaker 3: Finally they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted, and
Speaker 3: Denny was starting to feel really bad.
Speaker 5: He passed out in some cave.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: He woke up in the morning and Mickey could see
Speaker 4: that I was a little sick. He his mine started
Speaker 4: working like I can't hike back.
Speaker 5: I got to figure something out.
Speaker 4: He saw this helicopter go by, you know it was
Speaker 4: they had a tourist.
Speaker 5: So Mickey had an idea.
Speaker 3: Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline. He
Speaker 3: gathered up some rocks and used them to write S
Speaker 3: O S in big letters.
Speaker 4: The next thing I know, the helicopter lands on this
Speaker 4: path down the beach and Mickey goes up and talks
Speaker 4: to the guy. I don't know what he was saying,
Speaker 4: but apparently he was telling the guy that my friend's
Speaker 4: died on the beach.
Speaker 5: We need help.
Speaker 4: And the guy said, I can't come back right now,
Speaker 4: but you know soon did I take these people? And
Speaker 4: right before dark, this guy came back and Micky says,
Speaker 4: come on, that's it, let's go.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: He start doing the fifty yard dash toward this helicopter
Speaker 4: down the beach and Mickey says, slow down. You got
Speaker 4: to act a little sicker. You know, we walk up
Speaker 4: to the helicopter pilot and he kind of looks at me,
Speaker 4: and I was trying to stick her, and he opens
Speaker 4: the door. He let me in to the helicopter and
Speaker 4: Mickey starts to get in behind him, and the guy goes, oh, no,
Speaker 4: it's not you. It's just a sick guy, you know,
Speaker 4: you know no. Mickey pulls out this little bottle. He said,
Speaker 4: having an asthma attack. I can't breathe, you know, my
Speaker 4: feet are bleeding, I can't walk. You know, you just
Speaker 4: started crying the guy. You could tell the guy wasn't
Speaker 4: buying it, but he let him in so he got
Speaker 4: lifted off the pad. It was the most beautiful majestic thing.
Speaker 4: I mean, the serrated mountains is colors, you know, and
Speaker 4: running this little bubble up in the sky. And Mickey
Speaker 4: turns he says, our magic carpet.
Speaker 3: Right when the helicopter landed in town, there were news
Speaker 3: reporters and cameras everywhere.
Speaker 5: They thought somewhere they were bringing the dead guy.
Speaker 4: You know, we land and all these people kind of
Speaker 4: crowded around me, you know, and as soon as I
Speaker 4: get out and they go, where's the sick guy?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 6: That was me?
Speaker 4: And they're all disappointed, you know, and they leave.
Speaker 5: Mickey was disappeared. He's nowhere.
Speaker 4: I'm around. He disappeared on me. He left me holding
Speaker 4: the bag. So he pulled this whole thing off, and
Speaker 4: I went through and got checked out. I did have
Speaker 4: some little dysentery thing. The cops had gone looking for
Speaker 4: Mickey and they found him trying to rent a car
Speaker 4: at the airport and they dragged him back, you know,
Speaker 4: and they were trying to interview the guy, and he
Speaker 4: shown him all these fake ideas and one said chapin
Speaker 4: the other one said Dora, who are you? Are you
Speaker 4: chapin our Dora? And he's laughing, I'm chaping Dora, you know.
Speaker 4: And I don't know how it happened, but he got
Speaker 4: out of the whole thing, and I.
Speaker 5: Was the fall guy.
Speaker 3: To Mickey, Dora, the highest value was freedom, and that
Speaker 3: to him meant doing whatever served him best in any situation.
Speaker 3: For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or
Speaker 3: ethical cannsideration, and he would do or say almost anything
Speaker 3: to get what he wanted. In nineteen seventy four, Mickey
Speaker 3: left Malibu and set out on an adventure that took
Speaker 3: him all over the world searching for the perfect empty wave.
Speaker 3: He didn't have the money to travel like this, but
Speaker 3: he did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he
Speaker 3: filled out for whatever destination he wanted.
Speaker 7: Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked
Speaker 7: at the Pan American office.
Speaker 3: This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend, an accomplice for much
Speaker 3: of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 7: You could actually write your own tickets back in those days.
Speaker 7: They were paper tickets written on and all you needed
Speaker 7: to know was the mile age, and he had all
Speaker 7: the paraphernalia to work it out.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 7: I don't know who the girl was to give him
Speaker 7: the stuff. He must have made a sweet you know,
Speaker 7: but you're flying on these sort of forged Everything was fake.
Speaker 3: They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels, all
Speaker 3: of it, according to Linda, on forged credit cards, and
Speaker 3: all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot
Speaker 3: by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol.
Speaker 7: Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course,
Speaker 7: but they didn't have the strips on the backs like
Speaker 7: they do now. In the manucrip, they had numbers and dates.
Speaker 7: I was assigned to take a little razor blade and
Speaker 7: change some numbers, and we did and make it good
Speaker 7: for another month.
Speaker 3: Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Speaker 7: Mickey described at once as he says, I'm not a criminal.
Speaker 7: He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw,
Speaker 7: he says, and there's a difference.
Speaker 1: Did you buy it?
Speaker 7: Yes, I still do.
Speaker 6: One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and
Speaker 6: probably was successful at, was never working a day in
Speaker 6: his life. That was his real goal, and he accomplished it.
Speaker 6: I don't know if he ever actually had a job.
Speaker 3: Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine,
Speaker 3: and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He
Speaker 3: knew Mickey pretty well in the seventies when they were
Speaker 3: both living in a surf town in the south of France.
Speaker 3: In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used
Speaker 3: his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his
Speaker 3: passport was missing.
Speaker 6: And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two
Speaker 6: weeks later, I see this South African guy look sort
Speaker 6: of like me, and there's my passport.
Speaker 3: Micky sold it to him.
Speaker 6: I'm sure he did. I don't have. I mean, how
Speaker 6: would you ever prove that right unless you arrested them both,
Speaker 6: which I was not going to do in any.
Speaker 3: Event, Did you ever say anything to Micky about it? Now,
Speaker 3: in the surf world, it was almost currency to be
Speaker 3: scammed by Mickey. You'd come away from the experience with
Speaker 3: a story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal
Speaker 3: was not in spite of his criminality, but because of it.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of people who love the outlaw, who
Speaker 6: loved getting away with it is something that for many
Speaker 6: people is a great satisfaction to them to see people
Speaker 6: be able to accomplish that, and Mickey, for a long
Speaker 6: time was able to do that without payment. We tend
Speaker 6: to idolize our outlaws. Jesse James, pretty boy Floyd. You know,
Speaker 6: you hear those stories about them, you'd think that those
Speaker 6: guys were somehow like heroic. They are sociopathic killers, every
Speaker 6: one of them, you know, that murdered people in cold blood,
Speaker 6: and yet did they give to the poor. Yeah, they did,
Speaker 6: mostly though, to say, to make sure that they didn't
Speaker 6: tell the cops where they were. We definitely idolize are outlaws.
Speaker 6: That's just something that is I think baked into the
Speaker 6: American psyche.
Speaker 3: And it's very prominent in surf culture.
Speaker 6: Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad
Speaker 6: boys are.
Speaker 3: And is Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
Speaker 6: He's not on the most idolized the bad boy who's
Speaker 6: also the most bad guys of the bad guys.
Speaker 3: The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything
Speaker 3: to do with his hustles and his cons or even
Speaker 3: with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time.
Speaker 3: The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his
Speaker 3: soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism,
Speaker 3: and xenophobia, a pattern of hate that maps onto the white,
Speaker 3: white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar
Speaker 3: in his sunglasses, with his cheshire cat smile, showing all
Speaker 3: the little sociopaths how it was done.
Speaker 10: Mickey Dora was a secret key to California culture and
Speaker 10: an invisible thread that wound up running through much of
Speaker 10: what we know is modern California culture. You look at
Speaker 10: how California culture has affected America's culture and how America's
Speaker 10: culture has gone on to affect the world, and you
Speaker 10: can kind of draw a line back to Dora on
Speaker 10: a number of different things.
Speaker 3: DVI Divisentis is a film and television writer who, back
Speaker 3: in two thousand and four, was hired to write a
Speaker 3: movie about Mickey.
Speaker 10: I was approached by Appian Way, which is Leonardo DiCaprio's company.
Speaker 3: The movie never happened, but it was supposed to start.
Speaker 3: DiCaprio as Decat just two years after he played the
Speaker 3: con artist Frank Abagnail Junior and Catch Me if you can.
Speaker 3: Dev ended up spending a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora.
Speaker 10: He embodied, in both his thinking and his actions, the
Speaker 10: contradiction between not being a native to somewhere and somehow
Speaker 10: feeling proprietary about that place.
Speaker 3: Surfing is supposed to be a feel good sport, right wrong.
Speaker 3: Surfing is a club and the membership is capped.
Speaker 10: Everybody's getting pissed off about being displaced, and everybody's getting
Speaker 10: pissed off about being commodified, and everybody's being pissed off
Speaker 10: about sharing resources and sharing territory, and it just never ends,
Speaker 10: and it still it just goes on to today. So
Speaker 10: you have people like Mickey who have picked a spot
Speaker 10: where it's supposed to be and nobody else is supposed
Speaker 10: to show up. I think that Mickey himself was very
Speaker 10: aware of the fact that he was excusing himself from
Speaker 10: any prosecution for being an invader, and it was just like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: I know, I am too, but we're done now. No
Speaker 10: more after me.
Speaker 3: The way Mickey Doora saw the world, I have no
Speaker 3: business surfing, and neither do you, Not at Malibu, not anywhere.
Speaker 3: Knowing of my interest in the dark side of Malibu,
Speaker 3: a friend of mine, a fifth generation Californian who grew
Speaker 3: up surfing in Santa Monica and Venice, turned me on
Speaker 3: to an essay that ran in the June July nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy six issue of Surfer Magazine. It was called the
Speaker 3: Curse of the Shumash subtitle Malibu is a land of
Speaker 3: strange occurrences and contrast. This was right up my street.
Speaker 3: I bought a copy of the magazine on eBay. It
Speaker 3: turned out to be an odd piece of work, a
Speaker 3: pseudo history of Malibu told through the vibrant surf culture
Speaker 3: that flourished there and apparently died circa nineteen seventy six
Speaker 3: with the introduction of Malibu Barbie. The piece was peppered
Speaker 3: with arcane references to Mickey Dora, his antics, and his
Speaker 3: self imposed exile. He was obviously the star of the article,
Speaker 3: of the place and of the time. I flipped through it,
Speaker 3: studying the grainy photographs. On one page there were several
Speaker 3: pictures of Mickey going down the line at Malibu, and
Speaker 3: on the facing page there was a picture of Mickey
Speaker 3: in a dinner jacket, sunglasses and maybe a wig, holding
Speaker 3: a surf contest trophy in one hand and a baby
Speaker 3: doll in the other. He's standing in front of a
Speaker 3: sign for Camerrio State Hospital, a mental institution that some
Speaker 3: say was the Hotel California the Eagles sang about the
Speaker 3: one you could check out from but never leave. In
Speaker 3: the image, Mickey also has a surfboard with him angled
Speaker 3: away from the camera so it dominates the lower half
Speaker 3: of the frame, and on the bottom of the board
Speaker 3: is an enormous swastika. Who wrote this thing? I flipped
Speaker 3: back to the byline, Carlos Eizan Isizan is an unusual name.
Speaker 3: It took me a second to realize that it was
Speaker 3: a pseudonym Aizen is Nazi spelled backwards. My friend who'd
Speaker 3: recommended this essay as Jewish and not in any way
Speaker 3: sympathetic to this kind of stuff. He's just into the
Speaker 3: Malibu lore like I am, and probably hadn't read the
Speaker 3: piece since it came out in nineteen seventy six. But
Speaker 3: looking at it now I felt a kind of uncomfortable recognition. Something,
Speaker 3: unfortunately was starting to make sense. Much as I love,
Speaker 3: there are things about it I have to suppress in
Speaker 3: order to keep enjoying it. Signals that there is something
Speaker 3: rotten there. There's the sign at my local break that
Speaker 3: warns kooks to stay off the main takeoff spot. There's
Speaker 3: the scarcity of black surfers in the water. There are
Speaker 3: the reports year after year of swastikas and Hyle Hitler's
Speaker 3: and antisemitic flyers in beach towns across southern California. In
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, in Manhattan Beach, a coastal city in
Speaker 3: La County, an older white surfer was filmed yelling the
Speaker 3: N word at two young black men in the water.
Speaker 3: A nearby teenager told them this is a locals beach hateful,
Speaker 3: racist and atismitic messages spray painted all over the playground
Speaker 3: of a South Bay elementary school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is not the first time or even
Speaker 2: the second time.
Speaker 3: And this was just in twenty twenty two. Within a
Speaker 3: couple miles of that same beach.
Speaker 6: A photo of a giant swastika, which we've blurred, spray
Speaker 6: painted in the middle of the playground and you could
Speaker 6: see some kids playing nearby.
Speaker 3: Whatever's going on here. Call it surfing's Nazi problem. It
Speaker 3: goes back decades. Mickey didn't invent this, but he played
Speaker 3: the supremacist to the hilt. Malibu belonged to him. Some
Speaker 3: called him the Dark Prince. He called himself Malibu's quote
Speaker 3: rightful king. He believed himself to be superior, and everyone
Speaker 3: around him told him he was right. As surfing was
Speaker 3: discovered and began to be widely popular in the sixties,
Speaker 3: he railed that Malibu was being overrun with quote kooks
Speaker 3: of all colors, fags and finks, and a thousand other
Speaker 3: social deviations unquote. He railed against the gidget movies that
Speaker 3: had exposed Malibu to the masses. He let it be
Speaker 3: known that this was why he had to leave. Too
Speaker 3: many people who didn't belong were ruining his wave and
Speaker 3: everywhere he went, Mickey stoked conflict, feeding surfing's rebellious young,
Speaker 3: the stories of his exile and all those who'd done
Speaker 3: him wrong.
Speaker 8: There's a lot of faults I can find with this
Speaker 8: culture that I was in the middle of for forty
Speaker 8: something years and arguably still am, but I'm no longer
Speaker 8: sort of here to defend it. So putting Dora into
Speaker 8: all that, you know, there's just a lot about it
Speaker 8: that isn't great, and Mickey, on his bad days, is
Speaker 8: right at the center of all that.
Speaker 3: Matt Warshaw, the surf historian, remembers being a kid and
Speaker 3: seeing this famous photoshoot of Mickey Dora that was printed
Speaker 3: in Surfer magazine in nineteen sixty nine, and.
Speaker 8: There was a three shot sequence of him surfing where
Speaker 8: he comes down the way. It's Malibu. He's dropping in
Speaker 8: you can see a surfer in front of him, and
Speaker 8: the next picture Mickey's doing a turn off the bottom
Speaker 8: and the surfer in front of him kind of looking back.
Speaker 8: And the third shot is Mickey's just shot his board
Speaker 8: right at the guy and it's gone right across his
Speaker 8: chest and knocked him off his feet. Right and at nine,
Speaker 8: because I surfed Malibu or I was going to surf Malibu,
Speaker 8: and I just it so bought into Kook's go home
Speaker 8: kind of thing. This was Dora regulating. Look what he's doing,
Speaker 8: you know, he's doing what needs to be done to
Speaker 8: get rid of the kooks. That guy dropped in on
Speaker 8: front of Mickey Dora, you know, get out of here,
Speaker 8: Kouk and Da da dah. And so as a kid,
Speaker 8: I thought that was kind of cool. And now I
Speaker 8: look at that now and I put that porn right
Speaker 8: through that guy's back, and it looks terrible to me.
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora presents a conundrum for surfers and anyone brought
Speaker 3: up on the California youth culture. He's so heavily influenced.
Speaker 8: If I see a clip of Mickey surfing for a
Speaker 8: few seconds at Malibu, my heart as a surfer just
Speaker 8: it just melts, you know. If I just see a
Speaker 8: picture of him with that grin, there's something about that
Speaker 8: that speaks to my depths as a surfer. He's unresolved
Speaker 8: for me almost on a weekly basis, Like it's some
Speaker 8: days I'm very much on team Mickey, and some days
Speaker 8: I go this guy's a really terrible human being. We
Speaker 8: need to put attention on and think about and talk
Speaker 8: about somebody else. Anytime I sort of spend enough time
Speaker 8: in his life looking at at how he treated people
Speaker 8: and things that he said, I just start pulling away.
Speaker 8: How do I feel about Mickey Dora? You know, it
Speaker 8: depends on what day you ask me.
Speaker 3: It seems like the surfing world is still not ready
Speaker 3: to have the Mickey Dora conversation.
Speaker 8: Part of me is just saying, God, stay away from this.
Speaker 3: But it seems to me that if I can make
Speaker 3: sense of Mickey Dora, who he was and what he did,
Speaker 3: what he means to people still, I'll get closer to
Speaker 3: the heart of this strange place Malibu, where the central
Speaker 3: question is about belonging insiders versus outsiders. Mickey was both.
Speaker 3: He was a shape shifter and a con man with
Speaker 3: a cruel and narcissistic streak entitled charming and living entirely
Speaker 3: for himself. Is Mickey the secret key to California? If
Speaker 3: he is? It all begins in Malibu, on the beach
Speaker 3: where Mickey became famous. On the next episode of Lost Hills,
Speaker 3: a suspicious death sets Mickey on a strange new path.
Speaker 8: At some point he was down in Mexico, I think,
Speaker 8: fishing and trying to not drink. He was going to
Speaker 8: row a dinghy out to a friend's boat, and the
Speaker 8: body turned up five days later.
Speaker 3: That's next in episode two, Death in Mexico. Lost Hills
Speaker 3: is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created
Speaker 3: by me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and
Speaker 3: Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge
Speaker 3: the entire season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus
Speaker 3: on the Lost Tail show page in Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 3: at pushkin dot fm, slash plus