Push Kim.
Hey there Against the Rules listeners, It's Michael Lewis here and I'm still working hard on my book Going Infinite, and we'll be back with a new episode of On Background in July. But in the meantime, I want to tell you about another podcast from Pushkin Industries with a story you'll want to hear. It's called Lost Hills and they just premiered their new season today. In it, hosts Dana Goodyear dives deep into the surf world to explore the legacy of Malibu's dark Prince, Mickey Dora. Dora was
a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression. He ruled Malibu from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. He was a celebrated rebel, but also a con man who led the FBI on a seven year manhunt around the world. Take a listen to a clip from the show, and if you want to hear more, head over to the Lost Hills podcast and don't forget to subscribe to Pushkin Plus if you'd like to binge all of Lost Hills season three, Early and ad free.
Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk his way into anything and out of almost everything. His alleged scams ranged from petty and kind of ridiculous, like renting out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly criminal credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment, stolen antiques, stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him in federal prison. You associated with him at your own risk.
Denny Auberg has a story about this, the kind of thing that would happen On a typical day hanging out with Mickey in the early seventies, Denny was invited to Kawhi by a Hawaiian surfer named Joey Cabell. At the time, Mickey was also in Hawaii. Cabell told Denny he'd like to see Mickey too, So.
I called up Mickey and told him Joey invited you to come, and he came right over. He shut up. It was amazing.
Cobbell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed the hike to a beach to spend the night. It was an eleven mile hike and not an easy one.
So I'm trudging along with Mickey Dora on this really tough hike, you know, for us, and we're like city slickers. Dora had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment, you know, and I was kind of feeling a little sick myself. And it got dark on us, and we're going to these canyons and pushing branches away. Micky was tortured.
Finally they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted, and Denny was starting to feel really bad.
He passed out in some cave, you know. He woke up in the morning and Micky could see that I was a little sick, so he is mine started working like, I can't hike back. I got to figure something out. I saw this helicopter go by, you know, and it was they had a tourist. So Mickey had an idea.
Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline. He gathered up some rocks and used them to write S O S in big letters.
The next thing I know, the helicopter lands on this pad down the beach and Mickey goes up and talks to the guy. I don't know what he was saying, and apparently he was telling the guy that my friend's dying on the beach and we need help. And the guy said, I can't come back right now, but you know soon did I take these people? And right before dark, this guy came back and Micky says, come on, that's it,
let's go. Okay, start doing the fifty yard dash toward this helicopter down the beach and Mickey says, slow down. You got to act a little sicker, you know. We walk up to the helicopter pilot and he kind of looks at me, and I was trying to stick her. He opens the door. He let me in to the helicopter and Mickey starts to get in behind him, and the guy goes, oh, no, it's not you. It's just a sick guy, you know. You know, Mickey pulls out this little bottle. He said, I'm having an asthma attack.
Can't breathe, you know, my feet are bleeding, I can't walk, you know, just started crying the guy. You could tell the guy wasn't buying it, but he let him in so he got lifted off the pad. It was the most beautiful majestic thing. I mean, the serrated mountains is colors, you know, and running this little bubble up in the sky and Mickey turns. He says, our magic carpet.
Right when the helicopter landed in town. There were news reporters and cameras everywhere.
They thought somewhere they were bringing the dead guy. You know. We land and all these people kind of crowded around me, you know. And as soon as I get out and they go, where's the sick guy? Oh, that was me? And they're all disappointed, you know, and they leave. Mickey was disappeared. He's nowhere to around. He disappeared on me. He left me holding the bag. So he pulled this whole thing off, and I went through and got checked out.
I did have some little dysentery thing. The cops had gone looking for Mickey and they found him trying to rent a car at the airport and they dragged him back, you know, and they were trying to interview the guy, and he's showing him all these fake ideas, and one said Chapin the other one said Dora, who are you? Are you chapin our Dora? And he's laughing, I'm chaping Dora, you know. And I don't know how it happened, but he got out of the whole thing, and I was the.
Fall guy.
To Mickey. Dora the highest value was freedom, and that to him meant doing whatever served him best in any situation. For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or ethical consideration, and do or say almost anything to get what he wanted. In nineteen seventy four, Mickey left Malibu and set out on an adventure that took him all
over the world searching for the perfect empty wave. He didn't have the money to travel like this, but he did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he filled out for whatever destination he wanted.
Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked at the Pan American office.
This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend, an accomplice for much of the nineteen seventies.
You could actually write your own tickets back in those days. They were paper tickets written on and all you needed to know was the mile age. And he had all the paraphernalia to work it out.
Now.
I don't know who the girl was to give him the stuff. He must have made a sweet.
You know, but you're flying on these sort of forged.
Everything was fake.
They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels, all of it. According to Linda on forged credit cards, and all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol.
Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course, but they didn't have the strips on the backs like they do now. The manuscript they had numbers and dates. I was assigned to take a little razor blade and change some numbers, and we did and make it good for another month.
Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Mickey described at once as he says, I'm not a criminal. He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw, he says, and there's a difference.
Did you buy it?
Yes, I still do.
One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and probably was successful at, was never working a day in his life. That was his real goal, and he accomplished it. I don't know if he ever actually had a job.
Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine, and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He knew Mickey pretty well in the seventies when they were both living in a surf town in the south of France. In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his passport was missing.
And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two weeks later, I see this South African guy look sort of like me, and there's my passport.
Micky sold it to him.
I'm sure he did. I don't have I mean, how would you ever prove that right unless you arrested them both, which I was not going to do in any event.
Did you ever say anything to Micky about it? In the surf world, it was almost currency to be scammed by Mickey. You'd come away from the experience with a story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal was not in spite of his criminality, but because of it.
There's a lot of people who love the outlaw, who loved getting away with it. Is something that for many people is a great satisfaction to them to see people be able to accomplish that, and Mickey, for a long time, was able to do that without payment. We tend to idolize our outlaws. Jesse James, pretty Boy Floyd. You hear those stories about them, you'd think that those guys were somehow like heroic. They are sociopathic killers, every one of them,
you know, that murdered people in cold blood. And yet did they give to the poor. Yeah, they did, mostly though to say, to make sure that they didn't tell the cops where they were. We definitely idolize are outlaws. That's just something that is I think baked into the American psyche.
And it's very prominent in surf culture.
Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad boys are.
And is Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
He's not on the most idolized the bad boy, he's also the most bad guys of the bad guys.
The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything to do with his hustles and his cons or even with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time.
The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism, and xenophobia, a pattern of hate that maps onto the white, white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar in his sunglasses, with his cheshire cat smile, showing all the little sociopaths how it was done.