Hey, Alphabet boys listeners, I wanted to tell you about another podcast from Western Sound. It's called Lost Hills, and the third season premieres today. Host Dana Goodyear takes a deep dive into the surf world to explore the legacy of Malibu's dark prints. Mickey Dora, a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression. Dora ruled Malibu from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. He was celebrated for
his rebellious spirit. He was 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 then go and subscribe. You can find the Lost Hills podcast wherever you like to listen.
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 Kawai 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, joe invited you to come, and he came right over. He shut up. It was amazing.
Kabell, 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 for us, and we'red 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 through 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. He saw this helicopter go by, you know it was they had a tourist, so Micky had an idea.
Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline where 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 path down the beach and Mickey goes up and talks to the guy. I don't know what he was saying, but apparently he was telling the guy that my friends died on the beach. 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 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, and 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, no, Mickey
pulls out this little bottle. He said, having an asthma attack. I 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, this 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 someone 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. I'm 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 showed him all these fake ideas, and one said Chapin. And then then when 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 he would 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. In the manutroup, they had numbers and dates. I was assigned to take little razor blade and changed some numbers and we did and make it good for another month.
Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Micky described it 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, he 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?
No.
In the surf world it was almost currency to be scammed by Mickey. He'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 know, 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 our 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 as Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
He's not only the most idolized the bad boy, who'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.
It's an amazing story. You'll love Lost Hills the Dark Prince. Search for Lost Hills and follow all episodes wherever you get your podcasts.