Pushkin Hey, Lost Hills listeners, it's Dana. I wanted to let you know that you can hear the entire new season of Lost Hills ad free, along with other great binge listens by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the Lost Hills show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm Slash Plus. Mickey Dora, the Dark Prince, had vanished from Malibu in nineteen seventy four, but he didn't disappear from the surf world's collective consciousness.
Everybody wanted to know where the so called King of Surfers was. Some people claim to have spotted him surfing in California. Others said he'd given up the surf life and was a lawyer in Century City. The article Curse of the Shumash said, quote in nineteen seventy five, he's so conspicuous in his absence that there were collective group hallucinations in which numerous sycophants saw his illusionistic presence unquote. Someone kept tagging the Wallet surf rider with the words
Dora lives. Was Mickey Dora dead? Not possible. He was sending letters postmarked from all over the world from anywhere but where he actually was. A few years into Mickey's Vanishing act, two young surfers set out to find him there.
It is Craig Kevin, and this is Mickey. How's that this is my son's T shirt? They had to wear even though it's my son's. You got to take a picture.
Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson are pushing seventy now, still surfing, still close friends. I met them at Kevin's house in the Buna Beach, California. Kevin greeted me wearing a T shirt printed with a photo of Mickey flipping off the camera at Malibu in nineteen sixty three.
I'm Kevin Naughton, and I used to be a surf journalist, mostly for Surfer Magazine, traveling around the world and writing stories of great venture tales for about our travels.
And I'm Craig Peterson. I was the photographer staff photographer for Surfer Magazine for over a decade and during our surf travels back in the seventies and eighties.
We made our way into the living room and I noticed a photograph leaning against the wall. It was a picture of Kevin, his back to the camera, sitting on a bench looking out at the Bay of Biscay in the south of France. The waves are peeling in perfect, clean, mostly right breaking lines, and there's not a single surfer out.
See that photo there. That's where we first met Mick. That's when we met Mickey at Guitary And this is something that will never You'll never see again in your lives or anybody's lives from now until the end of time. There's empty perfect gitory as perfect as it.
Gainst Gitori is a small fishing village on the Basque coast between Beerret's and Saint Jean Balous.
So oftentimes I would look at it and just to think that it's almost like going through a portal into another world, to look at the photo. World that will never come back. But we were a part of it. And then this is probably within the same week that we had met Mickey in nineteen seventy seven, and it's a phenomena that only surfers really could appreciate, to see a way this good, at a spot this famous and no one out, And this was Mickey's spot.
Here in France. Mickey had found a new Malibu Gitori in the seventies was a surfer's paradise. It was hidden, tucked away off the radar, and it had a perfect right breaking wave, Mickey's kind of wave.
So we served it with him quite a few times, and quite a few times it would just be the three of us, that's just us.
Out in France, Mickey was unexpectedly mellow, no measure schmidting other surfers or posturing with his Nazi surfboard, and he'd left his SS trench coat behind in the storage unit in New Zealand there was no one around to intimidate anyway.
Yeah, it was nice to get to know him in some place other than Malibu, were he was so entrenched. He was so ingrained there that it was like his little personal fortress or fiefdom. And when France were all there sort of on this neutral were in Swiss neutral country.
He would have poured the boiling oil on you in Maliboumi, yeah.
Right, Whereas in France it was more like it was this, we're in neutral ground. Everyone was more on neque footing, and that's how you felt when you were around in there.
But Kevin and Craig were not just twenty something meters surf nomads stoked to find a kindred spirit. They were traveling on assignment, and their assignment was to find Mickey and report back to their boss at Surfer Magazine. Turns out finding Mickey would be the easy part. The hard part would be getting away. I'm Dana Goodyear and this is Lost Hills, Episode nine. The Fall Guys. Kevin and
Craig got their start young. They published their first piece in Surfer in nineteen seventy three when they were still teenagers. And the two of you were a team.
Act right right, We're a photojournalist team. And the funny thing is Craig needed someone to take photos of somebody you could surf. He was a good photographer. I was a good surfer, and we both like adventure and searching for good waves.
A bonus too that Kevin was a good writer, so we could write the stories and send them back to Surfer Magazine.
The pictures of them from this time are classic. Craig with his shoulder length blonde hair and Jesus Beard wearing his frame backpack, a surfboard under one arm and a silver briefcase full of photo equipment under the other. Kevin with a Duffel bag and a board and a curly mane. Heaven and Craig filed dispatches from all over the world under the heading the Further Misadventures of Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson. Early on they wrote about a surf trip
to Al Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. At the time, it was Tara incognita for surfers.
Surfer said, hey, you readers love this stuff. This is really popular because at that point you time, you're mefor think that most of the articles you saw in the magazines were about Hawaii or California, you know, maybe Australia once in a while, but that was kind of it. So we kind of opened up this kind of window of hey, there's a lot of surf adventure out there to be done in Surfer. To their credit, they recognized that and said, hey, you know, what, where do you
guys want to go next? You know, and because this.
Is working, their timing was good. Surfing had fully taken off in California and the breaks were crowded. Here's Craig.
Malibu was crowded, Huntington, all these places. So when I approached Surfer magazine, and said, hey, we want to go down and try to find some waves down in Central America and see who we can find. They kind of didn't know what to make of it. They knew that there was probably good waves there, but it was like, well, we don't know how many articles will do or get out of it, so let's just see what happens.
Kevin and Craig traveled to West Africa, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, and back through Central America, publishing stories as they went. When they returned home, Surfer Magazine asked them where they were headed next. Kevin and Craig were hoping to explore the unknown surf spots of Europe. They pitched a trip to Portugal, Ireland and France.
So Surfer kind of scratched their heads and said okay. And then right before we left, it was one priceless moment where the editor called or publisher called, was into his office and he said, okay, you guys are going to France, and we know Mickey Dorr 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 or 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 much they wanted coverage of Mickey. Right. Of course, he was one of our surf finals from the sixties, so we were all stoked a chance to meet him. So we said, okay, we're on it.
Kevin and Craig had grown up on Dora stories. He was legendary, not just for his surfing, but for his celebrity surfer persona, the elegant, vicious prankster who'd show up to the beach in tennis whites, built a kid out of twenty bucks and drive off in a lotus.
He had this genes sikuah, this air about him. He had this more than just the surfer persona. He had another persona that he took, you know, all the way on the land. It's not just in the water. The cat, you know, the mysterious cat.
It made sense that Mickey had fetched up in France, quietly on the surf world's Whispernet, that stretch of Basque coastline that included Saint Jean Valou's Gitory and Beeritz was becoming known as the next great spot. It was California as it used to be before Gidget, before the crowds. It's probably why Mickey was so relaxed.
Everyone at that point surfers in California had been to France or braving about how much it was like California in terms of climate food waves. So the word was out from like nineteen sixty nine on that France was a cool place to be in. Mickey just was one of the first guys there hanging out.
It was the ultimate assignment surf largely undiscovered waves in an idyllic place the next Malibu, and in the process meet the most mysterious figure in surfing who you've worshiped since childhood. Kevin and Craig were in They made it to the south of France in the fall of nineteen seventy seven.
It was late in the season, I think around November, so all the surfers that had been there kind of cleared out. There was this surfer migration at the time where everybody kind of moved on from France down through Spain and Portugal and went to Morocco for the winter. It was nice and warm, so everybody was gone, and we pulled in in a kind of a stormy, cloudy day to get to ree and lo and behold, there in the parking lot was Mickey's big green Mercedes then
and you know, outsteps Mickey looks at us. It was just Mickey and us in the parking lot, you know, no one else.
Mickey spotted the surfboards tied to the top of their car. He came over and they could feel him sizing them up. He could tell right away that Kevin and Craig were from California, and he invited them to surf with him.
He's a you know, a little bit of a initially shy guy, cautious, but you know, approachable in that way. And I kind of think he already knew who we were from our previous articles on surf travel and misadventure theory.
So absolutely he did. Because after a few days of hanging around in his Mercedes Van, he was feeding us from this bottomless pot of stew that he would just keep throwing whatever he had into the stew. It never emptied, it never ended. It was great for us because he, you know, he always offered us something in the vent and come in for surf or freezing and get some of his stew and talk.
As far as the surfer assignment was concerned, they were killing it. They'd surfed with Mickey, They'd hung out in his van, they were gaining trust.
And then finally, after about a week of this, you know, the other shoe dropped and Micky said, Okay, look at I know who you guys are. You know, and you guys have done a bunch of star for surfer. I read your articles, I've seen your stories, and here's the deal. You know, I know you're here. You've probably been told to take photos of me and write something about me, because I just can tell. You said, but here's the
deal I'll do. You guys are as broke as can be broker than any surfers I've ever run across, which was typical for surf journalists at the time, And you said, I'll make you a bargain. I'll feed you on this pot of great stew I have going to my Mercedes all the time. As much as you want, doors always open, you're always welcoming, You're always ready to have a ball of a stew on the condition that you don't take any photos of me, and you don't write anything about me.
And if you're going to try to take photos and you're going to try to write about me, get out of the van right now and get out of my life. What's it going to be? So it was like this ten second of pause. You know, Craig I looked at each other. Well, you know what, remember what best remember your tolgienced surfer. We thought, uh, well Mickey uh never parted? Yeah, yeah, Hannah is a bull of that stew. Yeah.
Kevin and Craig decided to ignore their assignment for surfer in favor of something more sustaining. The stew was good and a lifetime supply of Mickey stories that would be totally worth it.
We took his offer up on the stew and Craig didn't take any photos of him, and I never wrote about him. But we all hung out together and surf together, and you know, through New Year's and Christmas and had a great time surf in incredible ways through that winner. It was just an epic winner of surf in France, and you know, nobody was around except seemed like Mickey and us. And that was it, really, that was it.
When Kevin and Craig met him. Mickey was alone, and he was hiding. He was evading any number of angry innkeepers and restauranteurs and antiques dealers, having burned bridges from Hong Kong to Nairobi. There was a bench warrant out for him in California, a federal warrant for the alleged passport fraud, and another federal warrant for allegedly defrauding the Diners Club of nearly twenty thousand dollars. Interpol was looking
for him too. Add to that, Linda had left. She was exhausted, sick of fighting, sick of running, and she told authorities she was afraid of Mickey. He was so paranoid she'd run away from him in the middle of the night. A couple of wide eyed surfers from SoCal were the perfect distraction for Mickey.
You know, he was so entertaining. I mean, it's hard to describe. He seemed to like company. You know, he wasn't like he was a recluse or hermit, or he wasn't completely antisocial. He was actually quite social. But he it was almost like a big game for him all the time. You know, the social interaction with people. He had a wicked sense of humor and he liked to keep it sharpened.
Mickey was as quick as ever mentally, and for a guy in his mid forties, he was surfing well.
At that time, in the fall of seventy seven. Mickey was very athletic still, you know, a great surfer, had his classic style, and we never really saw him physically surfing at Malibu. We did see it in movies and later on times, but you could definitely tell it was Mickey outsurfing, you know the ways when he was out in water.
Hanging out with Mickey, Kevin and Craig got to know his quirks. Mickey was convinced the world was going to hell, starting with his own body.
I remember him also as being somewhat of a hyperchondriac. Remember he had a shelf of pills he would take every day, and Mickey winter, all these pills or my knees are popping, and he had pills for every conceivable ailment,
and he was taking them all the time. He did complain a lot about knees popping and backs hurting, and a little prematurely, you know, because for my opinion, now, because he would have been in his forties then, and you know that seems like, wow, that's he's still in your prime now to be now, but he was already complaining quite a bit then.
Kevin and Craig were broke and traveling light. They had T shirts and jeans. Micky was always dressed to the nines. Even if he was a little threadbare from his years on the run living in a van, Mickey was still dapper.
I think it's a lot why the French liked him so much, because you really would, you know, make an effort to you know, look his best. You know, had that classic California rogue look to him.
You know. We was coming up to New Year's at the party time and there's parties here and there. He said, hey, guys, what do you think of this one? I'm ready for anything. He broke out this jacket right and it was you know, he had some white pants on and he had the white jacket. Mickey, that's pretty spiffy, you know, white on white. You're ready for stepping out? Said yeah, but watch this just in case I go to a different party that
has a kind of a different scene happening. Watched this and he think the jacket he turned it inside out and it was leopardskin. So what leverskin. It could be a leverskin jacket, or it could be a white jacket, depending on what party it was you were going to. And he loved that. He just loved the fact that he could kind of go and switch personas from party to party.
During this time, Mickey was living in his van the Gittory parking lot. But Mickey's van wasn't just any van. It was a gigantic, late model, dark green Mercedes camper. It was his home, his safe place, and also his escape plan. If anyone closed in, or if the surf started sucking or the water got too cold, then he wanted to move on. One of Mickey's girlfriends told Mickey's biographer that van was Mickey. It had his heart's soul, story travels, his secrets, which were in a black briefcase.
Also his scent, which was quite like a lion.
Mercedes Dan was something else. It was state of the art mess of surfers that had these converted VW vans in that and this one thing was sizable. It was you know, like a motor home size kitchen there. Oh yeah, kitchen bed, the whole works. You know, it had everything you would see in a Winnebago, but with that great German engineering and style, so it was top of the lion event. You would not see any surfer drive it around.
Only Mickey had this fan and he was known for it. Fancy, yeah, very fancy mess ad cost a pretty penny at that time.
We would usually be sitting in the front two seats and Mickey would be you know, cooking up the stew or serving it up, and conversation would go on back that way. Usually these conversations would go on for either a half hour, depending on the surf were up to, you know, two or three hours at night. So it was you know, a lot of you know, good conversation. I remember covering all kinds of.
Subjects, subjects like Mickey's apocalyptic philosophy, the surf, the price of gold, politics, the surf, and of course the surf. But Kevin and Craig noticed a wistfulness in Mickey for his youth and for his home.
There was a certain kind of sadness for Mickey being around him that I remember kind of he wished he could still be in California for you know, aside from all of his other troubles that he still, you know, loved California and now he could not go back to California. Really, I mean, I think there was a certain sadness to his character when he talked about California to us. You'd want to know what's going on, you know, what's what's being developed.
He was in exile because of his grifter ways, but part of him also had this sort of romanticized, idealized version of going someplace and finding more empty great waves like he'd had in Malibu in the fifties before it turned into something else. Because a lot of our conversations would kind of talk about where'd you go to to get empty ways? Was it like, you want to know all about Central America and what were the ways were like and where we found empty great spots, And he
was really quisitive about the details. So I think he kind of sensed in this sort of we had this romantic idealized version, We're going to escape the crowds, the madness of southern California. That's what got started on our travels, you know, that was the driving force, the impetus to get away and find new empty waves and hopefully find our own personal Malibu, and I think Micky always held on to that kind of hope and.
Ideal, but there was always the possibility lingering in the back of their minds that Mickey was playing them. They knew Mickey's reputation as a hustler. Kevin and Craig, by their own admission, were pretty naive, but they weren't fools.
Even the people that got taken advantage of by Mickey he was He is so charismatic and in a lot of ways, they were kind of like, Wow, I've got a Mickey's Dora story to tell, even though I lost my camera or something else, or my girlfriend or something else, but it was Mickey Dora.
We do that.
So, yeah, you had to always be kind of cautious about what you were stepping into.
Well, I think he did have a reputation around so just kind of people say that, just be careful around Mickey, you know, because you know, you don't know what he's kind of up to or thinking, you know. So we knew that we really enjoyed the relationship that we had with Mickey at the time while we're in France, but somewhere something was going to pop up, and of.
Course, something did pop up. Eventually, Inevitably, Mickey's charm seemed less companionable and more intentional. He wanted something from them, but they couldn't figure out what.
Because we got to know him, we realized the guy's always up to something, and we never quite knew what it was. Remember, you would have to take bottles of wine back and forth across the border. Yeah, can you take this wine and bring it back? And why is he having to? Why would bring this Aaron for Mickey?
But we would good naturally go along with some of these things, and I think he was just kind of sensing about how he could to kind of work with us, or manipulate us, or used to deal with us, and some for one of his schemes.
Later they'd figure out that Mickey had been testing them, seeing how far he could push them.
He set us off on these kind of fool's errands to get refill, not even refill a bottle wine, bring the wine and bring it back. I think you want to see if we're going to do anything with the wine they've given us. Looking back on it, probably that we were too naive to even though at the time, what's what's this all about? But I think he was kind of testing the waters to see how far, you know, what would we do.
He sent you with a full bottle to bring just cross the border and come back with that same body.
Yeah, just do just to see what's you to do it? Why we just go ahead and do it. Don't ask questions, just you know, go ahead and please do this for me.
I mean, cult leaders do that when they want to start to create, they do, uh, groom, it's grooming.
Yes.
This went on for like a week or two all and I can't even remember all the other little nonsensical errands that he was asking us to do. And so we said yes, and somebody said, come on, Mickey, we're not going to stop, you know. But then that's after that. That was the warm up to the big prize.
Mickey hadn't just been toying around with them for fun, and he didn't really need that bottle of wine taken over the border and back. He was laying the groundwork for something much grander, a plot they came to think of as the Van Scam. Kevin and Craig had come to France with the goal of finding Mickey Dora. They'd played it cool, worked their way in cultivated him, but then they'd fallen under Mickey's spell, gorged themselves on his stew stayed too long in the van, gone to parties
with Mickey dressed in his magic reversible suit. Micky even introduced Kevin to his future wife.
I'd seen her on the Get to Read the streets the day before. We'd kind of seen each other but were felt too shy to talk. And then a few days later I met La Fitania looking at the really good ways, and up pulled the Mercedes van and lo and behold in the passenger your seat, she was sitting there. She's friends with Mickey. So Mickey stepped out, and you know, there I have, and he introduced me Kevin. Here's Chelsey, and introduced this and took it from there. We've been married ever since.
Maybe Micky Dora had found and cultivated them, not the other way around. He'd wooed them over to his side, played on their weaknesses, shaped them to his ends because he had something big in mind for these two carefree young men. Look, they'd already given up on the sturt for magazine assignment. They might as well work for him.
He came up with a grand plan one day where sat us down in the van with first of the bull a stew in the bottle of wine. He said, look it, I can see you guys are you know, broke, even beyond any thing I would believe in. But you are that broke, you know. And so I've got a plan where we can all keep traveling and surfing and doing the stuff we like to do, and you just have to go along with my plan and it's all going to work out. So we said, okay, Mickey, we're
or open for anything. Fill us in. And he said, okay, I've got this Mercedes van here you were all sitting in, and which by the way, he had bought in England and written a bad check for of course, so Inner Pol was out looking for him in the France anyway, So the van was bought on a bad check and Harry was hanging out hiding out in France, and he said, what I'll do is we'll go to Spain, three of us, and then I'm going to sell you guys the van there.
In Spain.
Micky told them they'd be able to buy a Swiss insurance policy on the van in their names.
And you guys are of course established photojournalist team. So of the big deal and you're traveling around Europe doing some stories. So then you drive the van to Italy and to a place someone has struck you to go to. Well, it turned out at this time there was a lot of activity going on in Italy with the Red Brigade.
The Red Brigade was a violent far left gorilla group, a.
Lot of social unrest and they were blowing up cars and burning down buildings. So the Red Brigade, they were
very active in Italy. Micky was going to send us to a town where they were doing a lot of mischief, and we were checking the hotel there, and then Mickey would sort of in the stealth of the night, jump into the van and drive it straight to Greece where he had somebody in who was going to buy this van, no questions asked, And we wake up the next day and we report our van stolen to the Italian authorities.
Mickey thought the Italian police would be ready to blame the Red Brigade and sympathize with clueless Americans who had just rolled in in a Mercedes van.
They'll go on that premise, he said, And then what happened is the insurance company in Switzerland. You know, you can cash it on the policy there and we all meet back here in France afterwards and we divvy up the money half to me and after you two guys. We're involving now five countries, France, Spain, Italy, Greece. So the list goes on. But I don't I'm not doing justice to the detail which with Mickey had planned this.
He really had it down to like all these things on a time schedule was going to happen just as he had planned, and we were going to just go along with his instructions and everything was going to be cool, and we were going to end up cashing in on this great policy, come back to France, celebrate over a bottle of wine, and divvy up the money. And I mean, he made it sound like so enticing, like this can't go wrong, this is great. We're gonna have we're gonna
have money to travel for the next year. We go or we want just we just have to go with Mickey's grand plan. Let's do it. And so we said, okay, just give us a little bit of time to think about it, because it did kind of cross a little There were some moral issues that it was crossing some boundaries we kind of had ourselves. And then of course getting involved with something with Mickey, you always got to
a little wonder is it going to backfire? And then so we thought about it overnight and went back and forth, and then the next day said, Mickey, it sounds really good, but what happens at the end, you know, and let's say it all goes through and make you said, no problem, we just meet here and you know, half the money goes to you and have to meet He said, of course, I will have to make deductions for whatever costs me to you know, support you guys for in the month
to two it takes to this. You know, it's it's not going to be a free ride for you guys, and so I will make whatever deductions I think I have to make. I looked at each other and said, okay, that tells us we're going to end up with a bus ticket to London. You know, that's that's pretty much it. Not even a plane fair home, just a bus ticket.
A in pole looking for looking for us and Vicky high tailing it off somewhere else in the world New Zealand, whoever where skiing in Switzerland, and we're going to be the straw guys and we're going to be the fall guys for this. So we politely said, you know, Mickey is really not in our wheelhouse. We're not We're not going to go with this. Would rather be poor and broken,
honest than get involved in something like this. And he just said, okay, I just wanted to put the offer out there, and it's there if you guys want to do it. And I said, well, Mickey, if it's so good, why don't you know, why don't you do it yourself? And he said, well, I actually I've already done it. I can't go back to the well, I can't do it again. So okay, now we see. Then we saw the big picture.
Mickey's m O was to embroil other people in his elaborate plots, and if they got burned, so what Mickey would pussy foot away with his cheshire cat smile. But maybe he was losing his touch. He was definitely changing.
He had a certain paranoia streak in a suspicion about society in general and who was out to get him. And I sensed this kind of paranoia to his personality that was kind of strange.
Or maybe it was just that his luck was running out.
You know, you're never really fully free from your past deeds, and I think Mickey is a good example of that.
Kevin and Craig got out of Getory a little wiser to the world, but with their morals intact and a classic Mickey Dora story. They'd escaped and just in time. Being a friend of Mickey's was getting dangerous. Next time I Lost Hills, the FBIS got questions.
I got a visit from the FBI, 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 lying with the FBI with crime, so I wasn't going to tell them. I wasn't going to tell him anything untrue, but 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.
That's next in episode ten, Aging Boy of 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 Hill Show page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fmslash plus