Speaker 1: Push Kim.
Speaker 2: Hey there Against the Rules listeners, It's Michael Lewis here
Speaker 2: and I'm still working hard on my book Going Infinite,
Speaker 2: and we'll be back with a new episode of On
Speaker 2: Background in July. But in the meantime, I want to
Speaker 2: tell you about another podcast from Pushkin Industries with a
Speaker 2: story you'll want to hear. It's called Lost Hills and
Speaker 2: they just premiered their new season today. In it, hosts
Speaker 2: Dana Goodyear dives deep into the surf world to explore
Speaker 2: the legacy of Malibu's dark Prince, Mickey Dora. Dora was
Speaker 2: a surfer known for his style, grace, and aggression. He
Speaker 2: ruled Malibu from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: He was a celebrated rebel, but also a con man
Speaker 2: who led the FBI on a seven year manhunt around
Speaker 2: the world. Take a listen to a clip from the show,
Speaker 2: and if you want to hear more, head over to
Speaker 2: the Lost Hills podcast and don't forget to subscribe to
Speaker 2: Pushkin Plus if you'd like to binge all of Lost
Speaker 2: Hills season three, Early and ad free.
Speaker 3: Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk
Speaker 3: his way into anything and out of almost everything. His
Speaker 3: alleged scams ranged from petty and kind of ridiculous, like
Speaker 3: renting out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly
Speaker 3: criminal credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment,
Speaker 3: stolen antiques, stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him
Speaker 3: in federal prison. You associated with him at your own risk.
Speaker 3: Denny Auberg has a story about this, the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that would happen On a typical day hanging out
Speaker 3: with Mickey in the early seventies, Denny was invited to
Speaker 3: Kawhi by a Hawaiian surfer named Joey Cabell. At the time,
Speaker 3: Mickey was also in Hawaii. Cabell told Denny he'd like
Speaker 3: to see Mickey too, So.
Speaker 4: I called up Mickey and told him Joey invited you
Speaker 4: to come, and he came right over. He shut up.
Speaker 4: It was amazing.
Speaker 3: Cobbell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed the hike
Speaker 3: to a beach to spend the night. It was an
Speaker 3: eleven mile hike and not an easy one.
Speaker 4: So I'm trudging along with Mickey Dora on this really
Speaker 4: tough hike, you know, for us, and we're like city slickers.
Speaker 4: Dora had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment,
Speaker 4: you know, and I was kind of feeling a little
Speaker 4: sick myself. And it got dark on us, and we're
Speaker 4: going to these canyons and pushing branches away. Micky was tortured.
Speaker 3: Finally they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted, and
Speaker 3: Denny was starting to feel really bad.
Speaker 4: He passed out in some cave, you know. He woke
Speaker 4: up in the morning and Micky could see that I
Speaker 4: was a little sick, so he is mine started working like,
Speaker 4: I can't hike back. I got to figure something out.
Speaker 4: I saw this helicopter go by, you know, and it
Speaker 4: was they had a tourist. So Mickey had an idea.
Speaker 3: Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline. He
Speaker 3: gathered up some rocks and used them to write S
Speaker 3: O S in big letters.
Speaker 4: The next thing I know, the helicopter lands on this
Speaker 4: pad down the beach and Mickey goes up and talks
Speaker 4: to the guy. I don't know what he was saying,
Speaker 4: and apparently he was telling the guy that my friend's
Speaker 4: dying on the beach and we need help. And the
Speaker 4: guy said, I can't come back right now, but you
Speaker 4: know soon did I take these people? And right before dark,
Speaker 4: this guy came back and Micky says, come on, that's it,
Speaker 4: let's go. Okay, start doing the fifty yard dash toward
Speaker 4: this helicopter down the beach and Mickey says, slow down.
Speaker 4: You got to act a little sicker, you know. We
Speaker 4: walk up to the helicopter pilot and he kind of
Speaker 4: looks at me, and I was trying to stick her.
Speaker 4: He opens the door. He let me in to the
Speaker 4: helicopter and Mickey starts to get in behind him, and
Speaker 4: the guy goes, oh, no, it's not you. It's just
Speaker 4: a sick guy, you know. You know, Mickey pulls out
Speaker 4: this little bottle. He said, I'm having an asthma attack.
Speaker 4: Can't breathe, you know, my feet are bleeding, I can't walk,
Speaker 4: you know, just started crying the guy. You could tell
Speaker 4: the guy wasn't buying it, but he let him in
Speaker 4: so he got lifted off the pad. It was the
Speaker 4: most beautiful majestic thing. I mean, the serrated mountains is colors,
Speaker 4: you know, and running this little bubble up in the
Speaker 4: sky and Mickey turns. He says, our magic carpet.
Speaker 3: Right when the helicopter landed in town. There were news
Speaker 3: reporters and cameras everywhere.
Speaker 4: They thought somewhere they were bringing the dead guy. You know.
Speaker 4: We land and all these people kind of crowded around me,
Speaker 4: you know. And as soon as I get out and
Speaker 4: they go, where's the sick guy? Oh, that was me?
Speaker 4: And they're all disappointed, you know, and they leave. Mickey
Speaker 4: was disappeared. He's nowhere to around. He disappeared on me.
Speaker 4: He left me holding the bag. So he pulled this
Speaker 4: whole thing off, and I went through and got checked out.
Speaker 4: I did have some little dysentery thing. The cops had
Speaker 4: gone looking for Mickey and they found him trying to
Speaker 4: rent a car at the airport and they dragged him back,
Speaker 4: you know, and they were trying to interview the guy,
Speaker 4: and he's showing him all these fake ideas, and one
Speaker 4: said Chapin the other one said Dora, who are you?
Speaker 4: Are you chapin our Dora? And he's laughing, I'm chaping Dora,
Speaker 4: you know. And I don't know how it happened, but
Speaker 4: he got out of the whole thing, and I was the.
Speaker 5: Fall guy.
Speaker 3: To Mickey. Dora the highest value was freedom, and that
Speaker 3: to him meant doing whatever served him best in any situation.
Speaker 3: For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or
Speaker 3: ethical consideration, and do or say almost anything to get
Speaker 3: what he wanted. In nineteen seventy four, Mickey left Malibu
Speaker 3: and set out on an adventure that took him all
Speaker 3: over the world searching for the perfect empty wave. He
Speaker 3: didn't have the money to travel like this, but he
Speaker 3: did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he filled
Speaker 3: out for whatever destination he wanted.
Speaker 5: Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked
Speaker 5: at the Pan American office.
Speaker 3: This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend, an accomplice for much
Speaker 3: of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 5: You could actually write your own tickets back in those days.
Speaker 5: They were paper tickets written on and all you needed
Speaker 5: to know was the mile age. And he had all
Speaker 5: the paraphernalia to work it out.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: I don't know who the girl was to give him
Speaker 5: the stuff. He must have made a sweet.
Speaker 3: You know, but you're flying on these sort of forged.
Speaker 5: Everything was fake.
Speaker 3: They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels, all
Speaker 3: of it. According to Linda on forged credit cards, and
Speaker 3: all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot
Speaker 3: by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol.
Speaker 5: Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course,
Speaker 5: but they didn't have the strips on the backs like
Speaker 5: they do now. The manuscript they had numbers and dates.
Speaker 5: I was assigned to take a little razor blade and
Speaker 5: change some numbers, and we did and make it good
Speaker 5: for another month.
Speaker 3: Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception.
Speaker 5: Mickey described at once as he says, I'm not a criminal.
Speaker 5: He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw,
Speaker 5: he says, and there's a difference.
Speaker 3: Did you buy it?
Speaker 5: Yes, I still do.
Speaker 1: One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and
Speaker 1: probably was successful at, was never working a day in
Speaker 1: his life. That was his real goal, and he accomplished it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he ever actually had a job.
Speaker 3: Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine,
Speaker 3: and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He
Speaker 3: knew Mickey pretty well in the seventies when they were
Speaker 3: both living in a surf town in the south of France.
Speaker 3: In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used
Speaker 3: his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his
Speaker 3: passport was missing.
Speaker 1: And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two
Speaker 1: weeks later, I see this South African guy look sort
Speaker 1: of like me, and there's my passport.
Speaker 3: Micky sold it to him.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he did. I don't have I mean, how
Speaker 1: would you ever prove that right unless you arrested them both,
Speaker 1: which I was not going to do in any event.
Speaker 3: Did you ever say anything to Micky about it? In
Speaker 3: the surf world, it was almost currency to be scammed
Speaker 3: by Mickey. You'd come away from the experience with a
Speaker 3: story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal was
Speaker 3: not in spite of his criminality, but because of it.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people who love the outlaw, who
Speaker 1: loved getting away with it. Is something that for many
Speaker 1: people is a great satisfaction to them to see people
Speaker 1: be able to accomplish that, and Mickey, for a long time,
Speaker 1: was able to do that without payment. We tend to
Speaker 1: idolize our outlaws. Jesse James, pretty Boy Floyd. You hear
Speaker 1: those stories about them, you'd think that those guys were
Speaker 1: somehow like heroic. They are sociopathic killers, every one of them,
Speaker 1: you know, that murdered people in cold blood. And yet
Speaker 1: did they give to the poor. Yeah, they did, mostly
Speaker 1: though to say, to make sure that they didn't tell
Speaker 1: the cops where they were. We definitely idolize are outlaws.
Speaker 1: That's just something that is I think baked into the
Speaker 1: American psyche.
Speaker 3: And it's very prominent in surf culture.
Speaker 1: Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad
Speaker 1: boys are.
Speaker 3: And is Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys.
Speaker 1: He's not on the most idolized the bad boy, he's
Speaker 1: also the most bad guys of the bad guys.
Speaker 3: The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything
Speaker 3: to do with his hustles and his cons or even
Speaker 3: with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time.
Speaker 3: The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his
Speaker 3: soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism,
Speaker 3: and xenophobia, a pattern of hate that maps onto the white,
Speaker 3: white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar
Speaker 3: in his sunglasses, with his cheshire cat smile, showing all
Speaker 3: the little sociopaths how it was done.