8. AKA Fugitive

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Nearly twenty five years ago, Diner's Club introduced the first executive credit card. Today around the world, Diner's Club is still the first card.

We're on it.

In the nineteen seventies, the accessory to a life of luxury, travel and access was the Diner's Club card. At least if you believe it's advertisements, you've got off outsign writing service.

You'll spend love money without getting nervous. It's easy to spot a member of the club. Last year, Diner's Club members had over ten million fine meals, took over five hundred thousand vacations, and save it many helpings of chop suey.

That was the kind of life that Mickey Dora wanted and felt he deserved.

I don't see a Diner's Club member. If you want to be one, call eight hundred five, two, five, seven thousand.

Back in the late fifties, Mickey had applied for a diner's club card. He studied a book called Credit Cardsmanship about how to builk credit card companies and reap the rewards. With the world a wash in plastic, it was almost too easy to take out a bunch of cards, spend freely, and split for a new life far far away. By the early seventies, Mickey had set his sights on New Zealand that would be a good place to sit out

I just work here.

You're kidding me, because I here I'm data good here.

You guys are late.

Sorry. Linda Kai is in her seventies now. She's married to a surfer, of course, and lives in a cute mobile home ten minutes from the ocean in Ventura County.

Oh yeah, yeah, I thought we couldn't paintings. They're online.

You made these?

Yeah, wow, yeah, I just finished this one. This is my friend's dog that we watch all the time. We babysit her when they go out on their boat, and she's a wonderful.

Oh my god, she's an artist. Her place is full of her paintings, mostly surf breaks, but there are also photographs, including one of Linda in her twenties in a camber van somewhere in the world. Her dirty blonde hair is pulled into a thick braid and there's a hard look in her eye. Back when Linda met Mickey Dora, she'd been twenty two, living on her own in a VW van at the beach. Mickey was thirty seven, just like Diane before her. When she was young and innocent and

There's another wrangler in this mix, Don Wilson, who set the thing alight. Now, if it wasn't for this other care this is not all about Mickey, because Don jumps into the fray, and you know, things get nasty.

In twenty fifteen, Linda published a book about her adventures. She called it The surf Sting Travels with Mickey, Dora the Cat and Don Wilson. Pirate Captain Don Wilson was another Malibu surfer. Don and Mickey had been friends and then they'd become enemies.

I didn't know it at the down, but those two had a big fall out at Malibu at one time because Mickey hated Don because you would show up in pink Cadillacts and fill his car full of girls and go drive off.

Linda happened to meet Don at a time when she and Nicky were temporarily split up.

Don Wilson came along when Nicky kind of threw me out of the apartment. I was at the beach at State Beach Lane in the sand, just kind of like I'm not really I'm a mass now, you know. I blew it. And I heard two guys sitting next to me, kind of a little bit further over, a couple of towels over. You know.

These two guys were talking about a friend of Linda's. So Linda piped up and.

They both looked over at me. That was Don Wilson.

And they looked over at me and they said with the hell the hell are you? You know like, and I said, oh, it was Mickey's girlfriend, you know. And boy Don's had come up with the sand like this, you know, like what and he says, hey, he says, I'm having a barbecue tonight. He says, come on up, And there it was.

I went up to the barbecue.

And Don Wilson, aka the Pirate Captain. And why was he called the Pirate Captain?

Well, I should be obvious he was a thief.

For much of the decade that Linda was with Mickey, she was also intermittently with the Pirate Captain. She even married Don at one point for a year playing type of war over Linda. The two men became sworn enemies.

Don was complete opposite of Mickey. Mickey was dark haired and dark handsome, this heavy, heavy, hungarian darkness, beautiful, you know. Don was Scottish, fair skinned, blue eyes, and white white hair, not gray but really white. Now. Don was not the better surfer, but Don was the better talker.

But in some respects, Linda's two boyfriends were incredibly alike. They were both con men. Don had even been to prison for his schemes.

He was a famous rubber check writer. I heard a story where he invited everybody to a big party in a big, fancy restaurant and then wrote a big, big check to the waiter. And then, evidently I heard that the waiter ran out right away and put a down payment on a car. I say, wow, you know, but then nothing was paid for.

It just bounced.

Don come from a very wealthy family in Palisades. His dad owned most of Santa Monica and Montana Boulevard where all the boutiques are. And I think Mickey hated this because I think Mickey's dad was very wealthy also. But Mickey had no chance to touch any of the money.

And Linda. The pirate captain saw an opportunity to mess with the cat. So when you meet Don, the thing that gets his attention is that you say, oh, I'm Mickey's ex.

Yes, Dad, da da da, Here comes the bugles and horns.

He goes, this is going to work.

In nineteen seventy two, Mickey was still stringing Linda along about going to New Zealand. He was spending a lot of time traveling with his other girlfriend, a non surfer named Marcia. She was the heiress to a gold mine fortune. In her book, Linda writes that while she was waiting on Mickey, Don was arrested for writing bad checks. He jumped bail and fled to Mexico. From there, Don flew

Don was a champion on this because you could tell Mickey flailed a bit. You know, he was just a bit nervous. You know, it wasn't really like good. But with Don, he was a champion. You know, it was just like, come on, you know, let's.

Do this, do this, you know, let's get this going.

Traveling with Don, Linda doctored credit cards, license plates, and government documents. But when Linda and Don got back to California, Linda fell in with Mickey again. She and Don parted ways and she didn't hear from him until one day she went to her parents' house in the valley and there was a letter from him from prison. When she visited Don, she says he blamed Mickey for his arrest.

This whole story, I got to tell you right now, was never about love.

Now.

I might have thought so, being young and naiven stupid, but this was never about love. This is never about like, oh, Mickey's gonna overpower me with his love, or Don's going to love me and romance me and you know, take me away.

This was about rivalry.

And you were upon.

I was the middle. I was the fox.

You know, here's the two guys running out into the woods.

I didn't know it then, Uh.

I was kind of caught up too close and enjoying some of it, you know, let travel and enjoying the attention. But I thought it was about love periodically, and I'd break down.

With Don out of the way in prison, the path was clear for Mickey and Linda, and Linda had some new skills in her repertoire.

I was a valuable asset, you know, to have.

So you'd been traveling around the world with Don Wilson, the pirate captain, doing these kinds of schemes with him. Yes, And Mickey knows you're trained up by Don. Yes, and now you know how to do this stuff.

Yes, yes, oh yes.

After years of talking about the decline of Malibu, of California, of the entire country, Mickey was finally going to leave.

I really feel the Americans or something has happened to them, but they've become barbaristic, barbaristic, and I'm sure that's the term, but I think we're having a nervous breakout in this country. I don't want to spell it out for you, but it is difficult to live to surrounding a middle class, mediocre beach and wade.

That's Mickey in an interview he gave for the nineteen seventy film Placific Vibrations. The golden days of Malibu were over. According to Mickey, he was going to see if he could recreate them somewhere else.

No evolution, was it all going? Was it coming to an end? Or is it just beginning? When the one fellow gold Malibu quite well at a certain time in history. And I doubt if few people who are able to find these type of conditions again through crowds and controls and much bureaucracy. But there are other areas which are magnificent. The are treasures in this world.

So long Malibu Mickey's exile was finally about to begin. In October of nineteen seventy four, a man named Richard Austin Roche Junior applied for a new passport in Los Angeles. He submitted a photograph of himself wearing a sport coat and tie. Roche was a surfer friend of Mickey Dora's. He was in the business of building tennis courts. But the passport office flagged the application and didn't issue the document. That's because eighteen months earlier, Richard Austin Roach Junior had

Malibu crowds Adventure? Was he also on the run? Probably?

Yeah? That good.

Yeah.

About eighteen months before he left Malibu, Mickey he had been arrested for stealing ski equipment. In January nineteen seventy three, Mickey went on a ski weekend with some surfer friends. They went to Mammoth that same ski mountain he took Gidget to back in the fifties. Mickey bought four hundred and one dollars in eighty nine cents worth of equipment and services. He paid by check made out to the

He was packing up a van to ship over there. What was he plating in the van? Everything?

Clothes, all his antiques, tiger skins, tiger skins.

Yeah, the whole show. Everything was going in.

Mickey had invited Linda to New Zealand, but it also invited Marcia, the non surfing heiress, and on the day he was packing up, Marcia was there helping him. Linda was there too, strategizing.

My mind was working overtime as to what to say to get him to not do it. With Marcia, I had a couple of long talks with them by myself, and I said, you go to New Zealand with her. I said, you are not. You could be waiting on her hand and foot. He's got loads of money.

She's going to be.

One to shop. You'll be wanting to surf. I said, down there, there'd be nobody around. I said, who's going to be your friend to go surfing with? I said, that's me.

But he didn't take Linda. Mickey left La with Marcia and they didn't go to New Zealand. A few months later, Mickey told Linda to meet him in Switzerland. This was in January of nineteen seventy five.

He summonsed me in Zurich. Marcia was going to leave. She was going to I think Greece. That was the split up. Then we continued right on to New Zealand.

On the way to New Zealand, they went to London, Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, New Delhi, Gawa, Sri Lanka and Sydney. They looked for surf antiques and rugs along the way. Linda had a job to alter Mickey's Diners Club card. She already knew how.

I was assigned to take a little razor blade and change some numbers, and we did and make it good for another month. Because the way it worked back then, these credit cards went through a kachunker, as I call them. They're big machines and they go over the top and they make a copy of the numbers. So my job was it to glue them back on the numbers and letters and whatever we took off to change.

In New Zealand, Mickey and Linda looked for a place to hide, somewhere clean and safe with empty waves. The plan was stop the paper trail and spend the rest of their lives in peace.

Micky picked a place at Opatama. It was on the Mahia Coast. It was actually an older gentleman who lived next door, would you believe, And he was selling the house, and Vicky went with the pretense to do just go to buy it and started paying him.

I guess some rent it was. He's a cute little blaze.

But what they didn't realize was that the FBI was looking for them, hunting a fugitive who had tried to get a passport in a dead man's name. In March of nineteen seventy five, a federal warrant was issued for John Doe aka Richard Austin Roche Junior, aka Fugitive. Around the same time, a bench warrant was issued by a judge in Mono County, California for Michael Chapin. He was a probationer convicted of stealing ski equipment who had absconded

We got involved with some one of the local Maori guys. He said, let's go down to the beach and we went down on the beach and there were wild goats. So we shot one of those, brought that up and hung it in the garage for about a week, you know, letting it meat tender. I don't know what it was doing, but we ended up eating stuff like that. Our best thing was roadkilled. We drove out the road, dirt road, and then we come back. This is surf surf checking.

Then the FBI put another piece in place. Mickey Dora had been on a worldwide spending spree. September fourth, nineteen seventy FBI teletype two director Washington Field from Los Angeles quote as of August twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five, Dora, through the fraudulent counterfeit use of a diner's club card, was in debt to the Diners Club in the amount of nineteen thousand, seven hundred and eighty five dollars and ninety one cents. That's about one hundred and ten thousand

The stove was actually a wood fired stove to keep that thing going and for the heat of the house too. And I was good at it, you know, I could do it. I wasn't a good cook like Marsha, but you know I could, you know, make soup and stuff like that. But that was good.

Life was simple and pretty sweet and as far as they knew they had successfully dropped out.

We'd go in to like a local gym and play badminton and trying to play tennis, which was one of Mickey's favorites, walking down to the little beach down there and enjoying surf.

But one day the person they least expected to see showed up, not law enforcement, someone who posed a much greater threat.

Well, we're gonna knock on the door. I see this car drive up and I'm like, who the hell's uh? You know, I see this blonde come out as dawn. I said, Mickey, down's here, and he goes what He had a rifle of course, because we were hunting, you know, and he had it behind the door. He picks it up and he says, get rid of him, he.

Said, got him out of here.

So he comes to the door and I opened it and he went, what the hell you know, and he goes, oh, come on, as you got to get out of here, you know. He says, I'll just take a spin for this talk, you know. So I didn't have any of my stuff. He say, come on, he says, grab your purse, you know. So I grab my purse, go out. He says, do you like living here? And I said, you know yeah, and he says, come.

On, let's go. I got blends. So we get we lie laughed. I had my purse. That's it.

You didn't feel bad you were leaving Mickey?

Well here it was the adventure thing again' you know. I don't know if it was me pulling it off or I guess I got tired of new Zealand, you know, kind of war. I just took off, you know, and then we get to I think it was Wellington, but I hadn't my passport wasn't in my purse. Mickey of course immediately figured out she's got to take off. He took my passport.

Mickey knew Linda couldn't get far without a passport, and he knew the first place she'd have to go.

In the meantime, Don was wanted by the Inner pol And Micky had called someone in the upper departments of passport divisions and said, Hey, this girl's coming. She's with a guy who's wanted by the FBI.

Get them. So they did.

They got Don, Yeah, and they had to let me go.

They arrested Don.

Yeah, yeah, he got He got clinked.

The New Zealand authorities gave Linda a temporary passport and in four armed her that she was going to be deported unless she left immediately.

My flight was Pango Pango, Los Angeles. And when I got to Pango Pango, I went to the tourist office and changed my ticket and went to New Caledonia.

Where is that And why do you go there?

Because it's right above New Zealand, and I was going to go back and kick Mickey's ass.

Linda was furious, but she still wanted to warn Mickey of the danger he was in.

So I talked to him, Mickey, and I said, I'm in New Caledonia and I said, they're going to come after you next because you know, I said, Don is going to tell them that you're there. You better join me in New Caledonia. And I'm not telling a lie. Now, this is the truth. This wasn't like to scare Mickey.

He knew.

So he's going to lose everything, his whole, all his everything that he owned. Get on a flight and get the hell out of the well. He stole me out. I was there for thirty days. He didn't show up.

Mickey was punishing her. He believed Linda had been writing to Don and led him to their hideout.

I didn't tell Don where I was, you know, he found out through my parents.

But he thought you tipped on off to wear his own whereabouts. Yeah, and then he was mad because you left with Don.

Yeah yeah, So.

How cute tangled web?

What a web she weaves?

Linda waited for Mickey for a month, running up a hotel bill she could not afford. She had to call her parents back in California for help, but then surprisingly, the New Zealand authorities permitted her to return.

I went back to Mickey's. I saw him on the beach and I kneeled him. I said, hey, you know you're in trouble. I said, we'll both get in trouble because they're going to come. You know.

We had to go.

But he was mad, you know, he was mad at me, and I was mad at him.

But as they'd done many times before, Mickey and Linda made up and put it behind them. Mickey put all his possessions in a storage facility and he and Linda

I actually went around the world three times at one time.

So there's Australia, New.

Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, India, I'm probably missing a few, all of Europe, Tahiti, Costa Rica, Venezuela.

This time, though the FBI was tracking their movements with help from Interpol and the Diners Club. Mickey and Linda were evading law enforcement, but the circuitest path they took was dictated by something else Entirely.

This was this whole search of looking for waves that weren't ridden at places, you know, early in the early days, just the discovery and pioneering stage, and Micky had all these crazy ideas of leaving here to go somewhere else where you could ride waves like he did in the past at Malibu at some other place like Malibu.

Linda was using everything she'd learned from Don Wilson, as well as her skills as an artist, to doctor credit cards so she and Mickey could keep on moving. But they were starting to feel hunted. Mickey's passport had expired. When he went to reinstate it, the clerk tried to detain him. He was wearing tennis shoes for exactly this reason. He ran out of the building and escaped to Linda,

Switching passports around with names and stuff.

To insurance scams.

Mickey was an expert at this and passed it down. He said, what you do is you get travels insurance and take a bag, go into Bustipo and stand there like you're on the phone, and then go over to security guard and say my bag was just stolen, get a police rip, take it to the insurance company, claim your insurance money.

Travelers check scams.

American Express had what was called travelers checks, where you get a packet of.

Them, and then Mickey said.

What you do is you go back and tell them that you lost them or somebody stole them, you lost them, and then you get that amount again. So instead of five hundred and now you have a thousand.

I didn't do any of that.

When you're doing stuff like that, everything you know is on the line.

Linda never lost sight of why she was taking these enormous risks with Mickey. It was for the surf.

After we had a good session somewhere, we'd say, ah, look at that, you know, how would we do that?

You must have felt like you were getting away with the most amazing heist of all time.

Yes, yes, Bonnie and Clyde, here we are.

You know.

Don Wilson had ruined Mickey's plan to duck all his creditors and law enforcement and surf empty waves in New Zealand for the rest of his life. Now New Zealand was burned, Mickey had to find a different place to hide. He decided on the south of France. There was a small town there called Getori. It reminded him of Malibu as it had been in the fifties. In France, he'd be beyond the reach of US authorities. The French did not tend to extradite, Plus, he could spend his winters

That's all blown. There is no episonic wave.

It's all a ploy, you know, to just keep traveling.

According to Mickey, the episodic wave was quote a Bermuda triangle like phenomenon, supposedly accountable for the mysterious disappearance of many ships. It is a wave of enormous proportions not caused by any of the usual means e g. Storms, earth tremors, or quakes. The episodic wave, sometimes known as the Rogue Wave or the Ninth Wave, is a real phenomenon, but Mickey's expedition probably wasn't. He wanted to go looking for it in New Guinea with Jacques Cousteau and maybe

And the baron we were sitting at the table and he was so excited talking and to have me and Micky there with him, and he was moving his arms around and talking and knocked over a bottle of wine and it was probably a five hundred dollars bottle of wine, you know, went on the floor, and all these beautiful tiles and all the maids and everybody came running in to clean it up, you know, before it stained the dials.

Mickey asked the baron if he would fund an expedition to find the episodic wave.

The baron wasn't going to bite on that, you know, he was like, what, no, No, it wasn't going to help.

And the relentless pace of being on the run with Mickey was starting to wear Linda down.

There was the amazing, amazing, beautiful places and hotels and opulence, and then down to the absolute rough garbage, just roughing it and flies coming after you, and you're trying to run away on the beach and here comes this pack of flies and fishing off the beach, and here's a couple of you know, catch a couple of god, you know, well, they'll put that on the barbecue and eat that. There was times when it was rough, and there was times when the weather was bad. There was times when I

When you look back and think about your younger self, who you know, you said you were naive, but you're sounding less naive by the minute. You're you're getting some.

Worldly experience out there.

How do you feel about it? Do you feel like angry that these guys got you to do this stuff that could have gotten you in real trouble in places you couldn't have gotten out of.

People got mad at me a little bit because they said you were stupid, you know, but actually I don't think I was. You know, I think I was kind of in there too, working it. And the reason why is I figured out I'm a surfer.

And I mean that says it all.

I mean, when you see it, I mean, if you do it and see it and you understand it, you can see how it kind of pushed me to kind of work it more.

There's the surf, there's the adventure.

So you were pulling these scams so that you could surf the world and survive. Yeah, but Linda restless and more important, she didn't trust Mickey.

I never felt that he did have my back.

You were on your own, yes, even though you were with Mickey.

Yes.

He used to kind of say to me too a little bit. You know, if you get caught with Don pulling shit like this, he said, He's got a lot of money. You know, he'll bail himself out, but you won't, he says, you know, you know you're not going to get bailed out. So he used to kind of like put the teeth in with that, you.

Know, manipulating of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, mental, little bit of mental girl.

And Mickey could be aggressive. One time, toward the end of their relationship, Mickey crossed a line with her. They were in France, staying in Mickey's Capra van.

He threw a pot of hot tea at me and we were in the little van, the Mercedes. That's when I jumped out of the door and everything was getting frayed. Everything was like coming apart at the threads. There was too many obstacles, barriers, people, circumstances. I was seeing clutter. I wasn't focusing on what I really wanted to do anymore. I wanted to just surf and have peace. As a friend of mine used to say, I wanted to trim in peace. And this wasn't happening.

You know.

There was too many poles and tugs.

At some point it all became too much.

I'll tell you when I lost it. I was in France.

Mickey was stuck there because he had no means to get anywhere with the passport.

It burnt out everything.

France was going to be the place, and I got tired of France, and I got tired of the whole thing. Well, two Irish guys came down from Ireland and kind of talked about surf and we were talking and talking, and I said, when you're going up there? And he goes next week and I said, can I come? Hecause you got money for gas.

I said yes. I left.

Mickey was left city. I told him, I said I'm leaving. He was in a stairwell in Beuritz. It was a chamborda more. He was in the stairwell, and he broke down cried, Now, I gotta tell you. I don't know if it was real tears or if it was the game's not over yet tears, But mine were over. I was done.

Linda relocated to a desolate beach in County Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic Coast. She moved into a broken down VW bus and spent the winter surfing alone. Mickey also found himself alone in France. He'd been there before, left behind, abandoned, but Mickey was a survivor. He'd park his Mercedes camera van in the little town of Gettory, keep his head down and wait for someone else to come along next time on lost Hills. Mickey can't hide.

The editor called or publisher called is into his office and he said, okay, you guys are going to France. And we know Mickey dor is hanging out in France. He's been dropped off the radar now for a few years and no one's heard anything of him, are from him, but we know he's there, and you guys are going there, and no matter what, you know, what did he say to you?

He said, if Mickey even farts, I want a picture of it.

That's how let's say what it coverage from Vicky right, so we said, okay, we're on it.

That's next in episode nine, The Fall Guys. Lost Hills is written and reported by Me Dana Goodyear. It's created by me and Benadere and produced by Western Sound and Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can binge the entire season right now. Add free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus