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He used to call me when I'm back in California. Half the conversations, some guys were wondering about who was out trying to get him with the FPI looking for him. Don't talk to so and so, don't tell so and so where I am.
Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, the Surfer magazine photojournalists, kept in touch with Mickey after they left France in nineteen seventy eight, or he kept in touch with them. He'd always call from a certain phone booth.
The phone booth was in in a was it bi own on.
Board main Telecommunications and Biota.
Right outside the main telecommunications building in byone, and it's a classic phone booth. And you would go in there and put in your frank pieces of coin and in there and try to dial internationally to different places.
Remember Craig. There was a couple of dozen phone booths outside.
The building, but Mickey's phone booth didn't work like other telephones. There was a trick to.
It, but Mickey showed us the one that if you did it a certain putting your coins a certain way, and as the coin was dropping down, you hit it like on the side of the machine twice and once at the bottom or something, then it would be unlimited time on the phone.
That phone booth by the main telecommunications building in Bayone was the way Mickey kept in touch with his network around the world.
He would only go late at night when there was no one else around, and he liked to do it in the secret like that, you know, and be the guy making these calls, probably because of some time zone changes too.
What he didn't realize was that he was being watched.
He kept going there regularly at night and that after a while it aroused his suspicion of the French authorities. There were bass Separatists very active around the French Spanish border at that time.
The Basque Separatists, a militant leftist group seeking independence from Spain, had carried out a number of high profile robberies kidnappings and terror attacks in the region, so the.
Authorities thought, you know, if they're going to blow up something, it might be the telecommunications buildings, so let's keep an eye on it. Of course, Then after a while they noticed this guy end of showing up in his van the Florida going to this back to the well, what's he doing at this same phone making all these calls? You know. This went on for weeks and then months and going to gone and on, and they swooped in. One night he showed up, was making a call somewhere,
and they busted him. And that was when all his past deeds caught up with him very quickly. Everything happened at once. They ran an international check on him, and it all came collapsed down his world, all because of this one little phone in France that he showed us that he just didn't know enough to stop using it, and he kept going back to it. And that's the single frank that led to his downfall.
Mickey was busted in May of nineteen eighty one. He'd been a fugitive for nearly seven years now. He was headed for a moldy French jail cell and he was one step closer to seeing his long lost California coast, courtesy of the FBI, which couldn't wait to bring him home. I'm Dana go Year and this is Lost Hills episode ten, Aging Boy of Summer.
Okay, here's a here's a box full of eight hundred pages of the FBI file. Enter at your OSK.
This is David Renson again, the journalist who wrote the definitive oral history of Mickey Dora's life.
I moved to California in nineteen sixty four with my family. Before I left, some young classmate said you'll be able to go surfing. I said, what's that? And so I got aboard and went with my friends, and I started reading the genre magazines in sixty four and sixty five, Surf Guide, Surfer, International Surfing. So that's how I discovered Mickey.
He's been fascinated by Mickey Dora ever since he moved to southern California from New Jersey.
I found out that, you know, from reading these magazines, he disappeared in nineteen seventy four, and so all of us wondered would happened. The rumors were always a lawyer in Century City. You know, he's living with the third Reich escapees in Argentina. He's doing this, He's doing that. Nobody knew.
From most of the nineteen seventies. There were only rumors, all of them added to the Mickey Dora mythology.
And then in nineteen eighty two, I saw a clip that said famous surfer health in Denver for credit card fraud Mickey Dora.
Not only was Mickey Dora not a lawyer in Century City, he was about to be an inmate in federal prison. David was working for California Magazine at the time. He pitched his editor a profile of Mickey Mickey the felon, and he submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI.
Water Coffee, he will say.
I'm sitting at David's dining room table, looking out a big window at the ocean. On a chair, there's a box containing all the documentation of the criminal investigations into Mickey Dora. The FBI's file on Mickey Dora is eight hundred and seventy six pages long. That's a little longer than the FBI's file on the Zodiac Killer, and not
much shorter than its file on and Clyde. But the contents of Mickey's file are a whole lot of nothing, eight hundred and seventy six pages of tracking and minutely documenting the worldwide travels of a surfer who had number one stolen some ski equipment and antiques and violated his probation. Number two allegedly filed false information on a passport application for a passport that was never issued, and number three
defrauded the Diners Club while on said worldwide travels. David walks me through the first case, the ski equipment stolen from a shop in Mammoth in Mono County.
Charges abroad. I believe he missed a few court dates, got there, finally pled guilty. You know, Judge Harry Roberts set up the repayment schedule, plus came on need credit cards and need permission to leave California.
But instead of sticking around and doing what he was told.
He applies for a passport in the name of a dead guy.
So then he's on the run.
So then he's on the run.
That's the second case, the passport application in the name of Richard Austin Roach Junior. And that's what caught the attention of the FBI, and once they started looking at Mickey. They couldn't take their eyes off him. They interviewed people up and down the coast of California, staked out Mickey's father's house, intercepted mail agents, spent years interviewing his friend's family, x'es, and his quote blood enemies. In particular, they focused on surfers.
Interviewing sources in Malibu and other beach cities, they got an earful about quote, the surfing god. They call him the cat. One informant told the FBI because quote, no one knows when he's coming or going.
Yeah, this is all this stuff is just this route up the Where's Mickey? What's going on with Mickey? Where's Mickey? Some people know knew, but the interview is family and friends. Please let us know if you hear from him. It's illegal to harbor a criminal. People would either say I wouldn't tell you if I did know, or you know, just put out a bag of jewels in the center of the square and the Mickey door, A snake will slither out and grab it.
One FBI informant offered to provide information on Mickey, quote for the right price. Another went on at length about illegal operations Mickey was supposedly the mastermind of jewelry heists in Central and South America, smuggling counterfeit US currency from Singapore to New Zealand and Australia. According to another FBI source, Mickey had been smuggling drugs into New Zealand using quote hollowed out surfboards. The more the FBI asked around about Mickey,
the more interested they got. Agents had been keeping close tabs on Linda Kai when she was traveling with Mickey. When she left Mickey and came back to California, they swooped and.
I was sick. I'd just come back from somewhere I can't remember where now, some long trip.
She was recuperating at her parents' house.
I was in the front room and the dog was barking like nuts. There was some guy ran around through the back gate to be sure nobody was back there with a gun drawn. And a guy comes to the front, you know, plain clothes, and he goes, where's Mickey door here? And I said, no, he doesn't live here, why would he be here. Well, you're Linda right and Nicai and I said yes, And he said, well, we almost caught you in Kenya. And I was like, well, I don't know anything about any of that.
You know.
He says, yeah, we caught, we were close.
Oh okay. I was like, what else?
I said, I'm not feeling real good, you know, I'm sick.
You know.
He goes, where's Mickey? And I said, I don't know. I said, I haven't seen him at all. And it was just a real like a quick kind of scarer and you know, I said, you don't need to have guns, you know, come on, this is scary.
And did you call Mickey right away?
There's no where to call.
Where was he? I have no idea, so you really didn't know where he was.
No.
The FBI also visited Jim Kempton. He's now the president of the California Surf Museum, but back then he was editing Surfer magazine.
I got a visit from the FBI.
First, the agent showed up at his parents' house.
And of course, my parents, being you know, the greatest generation forties people, immediately told him right where I was. You're right, not like, oh you don't know, you know, like, oh, no, my son lives right down here. You'll be able to find him right away. No, assuming that, like I was a total good guy, you know, which probably wasn't the
greatest assumption to make. But so they came and they asked me all about Mickey and what I knew, and I went out of my way to give them as little information as I possibly could without lying to them, because I knew that lying with the FBI was a crime, so I wasn't going to tell him anything untrue, but I was I was going to I don't recall as many times as I could, or I don't know as many times as I could without being obvious, but Mickey heard about it.
For a guy hiding out in a van in the south of France, Mickey was pretty connected.
So a few weeks later at Surfer magazine, this box arrives that I open. It's from Mickey, dressed on the outside so i'd be sure to open it right. And it's a dried turn with a relatively threatening note in it. And all it did was really make me angry, because it made me angry that he would think that I would do that, and the fact that I had gone out of my way not to do that and wasn't being credited by him for having protected his position was very aggravating.
To me, the FBI seemed to really want Mickey, but why.
I thought it was really interesting how vociferously the FBI pursued the Richard Austin roach thing. It seemed like, so what I mean, it's a crime and making a false statement. They would chase him all over the world and send all those telicxis back and forth, And that FBI file is heavy, heavy, heavy with that stuff.
The alleged crime they wanted him for making a false statement in a passport application for a passport that was never issued, would have meant at the most five years in prison or a fine of a couple thousand dollars. It just doesn't seem to justify all this effort. And meanwhile, Mickey was denying he'd done anything wrong, So what was really going on. The third case against Mickey had to do with all those doctored credit cards Linda says they
were using in their travels. The Diners Club was alleging large scale fraud, and Mickey, in absentia, had been indicted in federal court. By the late seventies, Mickey's father was speaking regularly to the FBI. He would sometimes confront Mickey with the allegations against him. Mickey insisted he was innocent. Mickey said he was being framed. Dear father, Mickey wrote to Miklosch, there is this creature by the name of
Don Wilson, the poor man's dillinger of our times. This person is an escaped convict, a record of forgery, credit card theft, and many other offenses. I'm quite sure he's been dashing around the US and elsewhere using my checks and credit cards and identifications. Don Wilson the pirate captain, Linda's old con artist boyfriend who'd shown up at their doorstep in New Zealand. Mickey said Don was impersonating him,
committing crimes in his name. According to a memo in Mickey's FBI file, Mieklos spoke to Mickey about the passport fraud, saying he'd seen the photo submitted with the passport application for Richard Austin Roch Junior, and he recognized Mickey. Mieklos told the agents that Mickey had said someone else must have done the fraud and was trying to put the blame on him. The memo goes on to state that Mickey claimed that back when he was living in Brentwood,
an old friend from the Pacific Palisades. I e. Don Wilson had somehow gotten into his house and stolen his credit cards and some other documents. Don Wilson, Mickey said, was likely the person behind the passport fraud, and Don Wilson was probably the one using doctored credit cards with Mickey's name on them. Don had been pulling scams in Mickey's name, Mickey was the victim. It's intriguing, mostly because Mickey and Don seemed to sabotage each other whenever possible.
But I struggle to believe that Don Wilson's mischief explains Mickey's legal trouble. Mickey's storage unit in New Zealand, for example, it was filled with one hundred thousand dollars worth of antiques and other valuables, twenty four used fake airline tickets, and sixty credit cards, many of them altered or defaced, that had been taken out in Dora's name. I don't think even the pirate captain could have managed to get
inside Mickey's storage unit and plant that incriminating evidence. But there is something that doesn't make sense about the case against Mickey. Why is his file so fat? Why did agents trace his movements around the world on such flimsy and insignificant charges. Some people say the reason Mickey was so on their radar was because he was working for them. That he wasn't a target of the FBI. He was an asset. The file, all the dirt they gathered on him,
the gossip and the rumors that was collateral. They let him run so far and for so long, not because they were inept and couldn't nab him, but because he was gathering useful information for them in India, Africa, Indonesia, everywhere he went on his search for the perfect wave. This theory turns the whole Mickey story inside out.
David Ran, You've got all that stuff about people saying he wasn't really working for the FBI. You've heard of that. I don't know what to make of that, because I believe the idea was noticed how he ends up in these hotspots coincidentally.
I'm tempted to think that this is pure myth making. Mickey's fanboys trying to glamorize his exploits give a James Bond varnish to Mickey's chintzy three card monty approach to life, but David says there's some reason to give credence to the idea that Mickey had a special status with the FBI. He says, while Mickey was still a fugitive, he'd somehow gotten access to his own FBI file.
My friend Jerry said he was in Beeritz one day when before the the repatriation to America, and Mickey had his FBI file and said to Jerry, here, look at here it is. And Jerry said, I don't know how he got that. And he looked through it and he saw sorts of stuff that is obviously I don't know how Mickey got it, which leads to the I don't know.
I think Jerry's telling the truth. And I talked to a friend of mine who's an FBI agent, who did describe to me that sometimes informants, you know, get some privileges, but no guarantees, you know, if they screw up, they could just it's just a total guess that it's possible Mickey cut a deal, But I don't know.
Who or what would he have had info on that they wanted.
Stolen passports, smuggling, drug smuggling, a credit card fraud. I don't know, but that's the nature of Mickey Dora, you never know what's true, or there.
Could be a little tiny.
Bit, so you took the words out of my mouth.
Whatever the truth is about Mickey's relationship with the FBI, the longer he stayed in exile, the more he began to unravel. The records in Mickey's FBI file painted dark picture of his time and gettory. Leading up to his arrest, Linda told agents Mickey was quote totally paranoid and emotionally unstable, and that she was quote scared to death of him. Mickey, she said, had hidden her passport and her money to try to keep her from leaving. She told the agents
she was done with him. Back in France in his green Mercedes Benz camper van, Mickey was losing it. Quote subject recently returned to France from South Africa, believed to be using altered expired passport in his own name, and believed heavily involved in narcotics. Unquote quote subject becoming paranoid and erratic unquote quote. Subject appears to be undergoing nervous breakdown, has alienated a number of friends, and believed to be
financially desperate. Unquote. Mickey was arrested at the rigged phone booth in May of nineteen eighty one. His first instinct, formed of lifelong habit, was to try to get out of it.
He said, well, you know, I'm just calling some friends and I put my fifty so teams in and I don't know, it doesn't ask for more money.
This is Bob Simpson, an American lawyer who knew Mickey in France.
So I just keep talking. I don't know what the problem is with this thing, but I use it all the time. I thought maybe this was made available for foreigners or something, so he made up all sorts of stories.
The French police took Mickey to a damp stone prison known by locals as Villa Chagrin.
They took him to jail in Bayjun, where he was for several months, and when they were there, the police discovered that he was wanted by Interpol and that there was an international arrest warrant out from the United States from California.
According to Bob, they found eight fake passports with different names on them. Mickey no longer had a valid passport, and authorities in France gave him a choice go back to the United States and deal with the outstanding warrants or go to another country of his choice.
He made the choice. As far as I know, Niklos convinced him to come back. It's some suggestion that get it over with now and it'll be okay.
Mickey, after consulting some lawyers for the Rothschilds who were helping out, decided to surrender himself. Miklos sent him a first class ticket. He made a reservation on Air France flight zero zero three, NonStop from Paris to lax A. U S Marshal was dispatched to meet him. The US Marshal watched as every single passenger got off that plane and Mickey wasn't there. A few days later, the FBI's man in Paris sent a telex to the director of
the FBI. Quote. It would appear that Dora, best described as a quintessential, albeit aging boy of summer on a perennial quest for the legendary ninth Wave, may have returned to Beurritz or some other surfing site instead of too Los Angeles as originally planned, given his surf compulsion and legendary lack of responsibility unquote. A short time later, the FBI learned Mickey had booked a new flight. The bureau telex noted quote Paris aware of Dora's hidonic pilgrimage. Magniloquently described,
heretofore realized he may alter his plans unquote. Then the FBI lost track of him. The next bureau communication read quote Paris assumes Scintillating Sandor has surfed into the sunset and sunk unquote. Sandor was Mickey's middle name. The FBI's man in Paris was calling him Scintillating Sandor, an aging boy of summer with a legendary lack of responsibility on a quest for the ninth Wave. What is this guy his handler? He sounds more like a press agent than
an FBI agent. And why is he so invested in Mickey's persona and his quest? Maybe Mickey was working for the FBI. Either way, they'd lost him. Mickey was in the wind. Micky Dora didn't surf into the sunset and sink, though he probably would have loved to. It took another two weeks, but Mickey did eventually arrive in Los Angeles on September one, nineteen eighty one. He was arrested by an FBI agent who took him to a medium security federal prison at Terminal Island. He was forty seven years old.
The first thing Mickey had to do was go up to Mono County and face the judge. He was sentenced to three years in state prison, suspended he'd need to serve less than six months in county jail. In the passport case, the FBI's handwriting analysts failed to match Mickey's sample with the writing on the Richard Austin Rose Junior application. The fingerprint analysis failed too, so the case was dropped
due to insufficient evidence. That just left the charge over the alleged Diners Club fraud, which had been whittled down to almost nothing. That case was being heard at a federal court in Denver. Mickey's lawyer, a Public Defender, later represented Terry Nichols, a conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Essentially, the charge was reduced to throwing away your own mail.
Mickey's biographer David Renson.
Diners Club sends you a bill, you don't pay it, and if you don't pay it or don't open it or don't receive it, it's sent back to diners Club, but you throw it in the garbage, so you've thrown away the mail and interfered with That's what he ultimately got nailed.
For throwing away his own mail. The judge in Denver sentenced Mickey to approximately six months at Lompok, a low security federal facility in California, and the Diners Club auctioned off the one hundred thousand dollars worth of loot in his storage facility in New Zealand. Among the auctioned items, according to Renson's book, there were six trunks full of tuxedos, cashmere, a pink Paisley silk sleeping bag, the street sign from the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and the SS leather
trench coat. A Mawori guy named Mickey bought all of Mickey's clothes throughout all this. No matter what he told the judges, Mickey insisted that he was innocent. Someone had broken into his house and stolen his credit card, leading to all those charges. Don Wilson had framed him on the passport fraud. He'd returned the ski equipment to the shop he couldn't pay restitution because of an accident. He had the probation officer's permission to go to Europe, he
had amnesia and hypoglycemia. Mickey didn't feel sorry, not then, not ever, not that he would admit. But when he wasn't saying he didn't do it, he was bragging about his accomplishments. He'd write. Quote, from nineteen seventy four to nineteen eighty one, I covered well over two hundred thousand miles over four continents, ninety percent of the time, reconnoitering the coastal areas of India, Africa, the Far East, Indonesia, Australia,
New Zealand, South America, and hundreds of islands. Only in Europe did Interpol or the FEDS ever get close. Only after five sports and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on the hunt, did I, with a gun pointed at my head, volunteer to return to the USA just visiting thanks, thus ending the most extraordinary surfing odyssey in the history of mankind. While Mickey was waiting to begin serving his time, he was sent to a prison medical facility for a psychiatric evaluation.
At his dining room table, David pulls a page out of Mickey's file.
Subject is alert and displays some intertention during the interview, but he remains composed in a good conditioned contact. He has no health complaints except for asthmatic condition. Has to be careful in neither smokes nor drinks, which I think is true. He states the only drugs he uses a prescription plus enormous amounts of health vitamins. You know. Yeah, sounds like Mickey. He's defensive and talking about his arrests
becomes at stated. When he's asked about the Diner's club matter, he denies he's involved in that as an upset because of his personal property was confiscated to pay off the diner's club charges. It appears he's shown some asocial behavior in the past, unwilling to admit responsibility. It does appear at the present time he has now developed a sense of conscience. He's willing to at least face the music and get things straightened out.
The psychologist noted Mickey's hang dog expression and gave him a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.
Narcissistic personality Well, okay, that's bandied about a lot these days. I'm not sure what that is. But if it's care only about yourself and see people's extension of yourself and know how to wind them around your finger when you need to help yourself. Okay.
While he was at the prison medical facility for his psychovaluation, Mickey ran into someone he'd known back in the sixties, another notorious Malibu character, Charles Manson. FBI file one hundred and fifty six pages to Dora's eight hundred and seventy six.
This is the story that he told us here in France later. And I've been told so many times. Is it true? Is it not true? I don't know, but he told it to everybody.
Bob Simpson, the ex pat lawyer.
He said, this man came over and talked to me and he said, I want to thank you for that tip you gave me. And Mickey said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, you know, I'm Charles Manson, and you know, back in the day when you were doing your little thefts in Los Angeles areas at the celebrity parties with your girlfriends, you gave me a tip to go to one party and I went there with my friends and we got a good heist and I
just thank you, thanks for the tip. So Mickey says, okay, you're welcome, and you know, but he didn't really want to have anything to do with Charles Manson. And everybody saw that Charles Manson knew him, and I said, so Mickey all of a sudden became the biggest star in the prison, even more so than Charles Manson. He said, I don't like this. I needed to get out of here.
Well, Mickey was serving his sentence. David started trying to figure out how to get to him.
So I spent you know, many months talking to people who knew him, who liked him, who, according to Mickey, later didn't like him.
But of course he needed Mickey.
So now my editor said, well, you've got to talk to him. I said, you don't know Mickey he is. You got to talk to him. Whut it's published, And I found him three days after he got out of Lompock Men's Penitentiary.
David had gotten to know some of Mickey's friends, and he asked one of them to act as a go between. After months of back and forth, Mickey told David to meet him in the library a small community college in Orange County. David didn't know what to expect. It was May nineteen eighty three, you know.
He was had a wispy beard goatee looked disheveled. He said, why have you taken any interest in me? And I don't know. I probably should have been more afraid or nervous about it, but I was something. You know how it is when you interview someone, you just sort of click in. And I said, well, I've taken an interest you because where have you been.
What he remembers is that Mickey was angry at me Kloch for being the one who convinced him to return to the US and face his accusers.
In my interview, I said, you came back, and he goes, I didn't want to come back, but he did come back, and he did have to stay in prison for a little while, and that he felt as a betrayal.
So you think he was changed by his experience in prison.
I do. I think he said I'm never going back. I'm not going to risk that stuff. I just, you know, I just sensed a whole change in Mickey.
After prison, Mickey went back to Gittory, determined not to repeat his mistakes. That meant no more funny business with the credit cards. With no honest source of income, Mickey seemed to be living hand to mouth. He got his van back, but it was falling apart. After years of being left outside in the salt air, Mickey was showing where too. According to Renson's book, he got tossed out of a health club for cleaning his clothes in the jacuzzi and putting them in the sauna to dry. The
cat it seemed had used up all his lives. But then one day, as Mickey was lying in his van in a youth hostel parking lot, there was a knock at the door. It was someone from the surf apparel company Quicksilver. They were offering a lifeline, an entree to the world of professional surfing and the professional surfers. He would have once despised. Mickey had relentlessly mocked the surf industry for years, but this time Mickey was in no
position to be choosy. Next time on Lost Tails, Mickey's being recorded.
I mean Chili in the coastline in a little town called Pechi Limo. I'm in the little one bedroom hotel room, Nicky Dora. Enter, Nicky Dora.
That's next. In episode eleven, Writing on the Wall Lost Hills is written and reported by me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Ben Adair and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the entire season right now ad free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash plus