Cautionary Tales Presents: Lost Hills - The Dark Prince
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Pushkin. From the 1950s to the 1970s, a surfer named Mickey Dora ruled Malibu. He was celebrated for his grace, his style and his rebellious spirit. He was also a conman who led the FBI on a seven-year manhunt around the world.

Another episode of Cautionary Tales will be released on the usual schedule, but while you wait, why not check out the new season of the gripping Pushkin podcast, Lost Hills, which takes a deep dive into the world of Malibu's dark prince. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, if you'd like to binge all of the season three episodes early and ad-free, make sure you subscribe to Pushkin Plus.

I now present to you the first episode of Lost Hills, The Dark Prince. Not too long ago, I met a surfer named Denny Auberg. He lives in Santa Barbara now, but he learned to surf in Malibu when the sport was barely known on the mainland. I still go surfing after about 62 years of surfing. I go down to Rincon. I live close by and I still have the stoke.

Denny told me a story about one of his early surf experiences, a day that made an indelible impression on him. It was 1959. He was 12. The waves at Malibu were huge, but he and his friend decided to paddle out anyway. They were kooks. They didn't know what they were doing. So we were beginners, you know, we're down at Malibu and it was...

a big day, you know. But we went out by the pier. When it gets real big, you have to go way down by the pier to paddle out. And so we jump in the water with our boards, you know, little skinny 12-year-olds, and start turning on little skinny arms, you know, doing this kook paddle, trying to get out. And a big set of waves. I mean, the big waves came, like a row of five or six waves out to sea. I never forget the beauty of this wave coming

As the wave approached, Denny saw there was a surfer on it. Just perfectly placed on this wave, just trimming at the very top of the wave.

And there's a precision. When you're trim, it means your board's flush sideways to the wave. It's inside and you're getting speed that way because it's in the right position. The fins just hanging on at the top of the wave. And his hand position, the way he's kind of arching and the little veils of water coming off the nose. It was the most gorgeous thing. You know, the colors. He's riding this wind blowing spin drift back and we're just watching this thing. Oh my God.

But we realized he was coming right at us. We were the kooks in his way, you know, coming right at us. So we had to turn sideways. It's hard to explain, but when you turn broadside, you just get obliterated. It just took our board. It just took us and blasted us, churning into the whitewater, down by the end of the pilings of the pier. I really felt like I was going to drown. My friend told me I almost drowned. I don't remember, but

I remember spitting out sand and just like, "Oh my God, who was that guy?" Who was that guy? His name was Mickey Dora, also known as the cat, also known as the Dark Prince of Malibu. In the 1950s, as surfing spread from Hawaii to California, Mickey gained a reputation as the most dynamic and watchable surfer on the mainland.

He was Malibu's first homegrown celebrity and the surf world's first personality. He put Malibu on the map. Niki Dora was beautiful and charismatic, but he was all shade. You don't earn that name, the Dark Prince, for nothing. He represented Malibu's dark side, what I think of as Malibu's true nature. He violently opposed the happy, sun-drenched Malibu that would come to dominate pop culture.

Starting with the Gidget movies in the late 50s, Malibu Barbie in the 70s, and everything that came after that. He hated Gidget and everything she stood for. New surfers, girl surfers, surfers he thought didn't belong. He went to war for the soul of Malibu, the soul of surfing. Some days, I think he won.

Mickey Dora was a surfing Jesse James, an unrepentant outlaw idolized by the so-called wild kids of Malibu Beach. A scoundrel who people say would screw them over for fun, scam them, steal from them, and break their hearts. A rebel who made his own rules. The legends were endless, mostly not fact-checkable, and Mickey was their primary author.

He stole Ringo Starr's snuff box. Or was it John Lennon's lighter? He dated Cher before Sonny. He knew who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. He was a diamond smuggler, a drug lord, a double agent, a European aristocrat, a prophet of the coming apocalypse. He was an emotionally unstable man, armed and dangerous. That one was courtesy of the FBI, who tried to catch him for seven years.

Because in the early 70s, at the height of his fame, when some of his bad deeds were catching up with him, Mickey just disappeared. He went on the lam, leading law enforcement on a goose chase that spanned the globe. But while the law was hunting him, he was hunting something else. The perfect wave, a once-in-a-century event, sometimes called the rogue wave, or the episodic wave, or the ninth wave. Does that sound familiar?

If it does, that's because it's a lot like the plot of Point Break, the cult classic from 1991. In Point Break, Patrick Swayze plays a groovy surfer named Bodhi, who robbed banks so he could travel the world and find the perfect wave. Well, Mickey was a real-life Bodhi, minus the kumbaya. He said, "'Criminals break the laws. I live outside the law.'"

Mickey's aliases. Richard Austin Roach Jr. Miklos Dora. Mickey Dora. It was a Swiss bank, and yeah, they found $400,000 in the bank. Alexander Dora. Nobody knows exactly where it came from. There were all sorts of theories. Miklos Dora Cornell. Michael S. Chapin. Australia, New Zealand, Bali.

Thailand, Malaysia, India, and I'm probably missing a few, all of Europe. Michael Spring Chapin. He went to amazing places before anybody was doing that stuff. By himself. Mikkel Spring Chapin. Michael Stanley Chapin. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots around this. Alexander Miklos. And I fell in love the minute he walked out of the water.

until I realized he was a scoundrel at a road and was training me to be an accomplice. I'm going to get in big trouble for saying all this. He was narcissistic but also incredibly intelligent and also, I'd say, a little bit sociopathic. It just all gets darker and darker and darker until I just want to sort of turn away from it. I don't want to know about it anymore. At its core, surfing is a counterculture.

So Mickey being an anti-hero, that just makes him surfing's hero. I'm Dana Goodyear, and this is Lost Hills, Season 3, The Dark Prince. Episode 1, The Legend of Mickey Dora.

Who's the best in the world? Who's the worst in the world? I don't give a fuck. I don't give a damn. If people want to think I'm any good, fine. If they don't think I'm any good, I don't give a shit. I'm there to ride waves and enjoy myself. Mickey Dora died from pancreatic cancer in 2002. For reasons I'll get into later, there are very few publicly available recordings of him. What you're about to hear is probably the longest and most revealing clip that's out there.

It's from a 1990 documentary called " The Movie." In it, Mickey lays out his surfing philosophy. "My whole life is this escape. My whole life is this wave. I drop into, set the whole thing up, pull up a bottom turn, pull up into it, and shoot for my life. Going for broke men. And behind me, all this shit goes over my back."

He had been such a big part of surf history. And as a kid, I soaked all that up. I started surfing in the mid-70s, late 70s. This is Kelly Slater, the 11-time World Surf League champion. He's regarded as the greatest surfer of all time. When he was in his 20s, Kelly had the chance to spend time with Mickey Dora. It was part of the experience, you know, it was a part of a, essentially like a

a grassroots experience to be around Mickey Dora in the surf world because he was a legend. He was a living character to us, to people in my era and just before me. Mickey was, he's one of the biggest names in surfing and he did represent the lifestyle and the freedom that surfers have and a means to an end to go travel around the world and surf.

Mickey was one of the original California surfers, an innovator who was among the few standout masters, certainly the most notorious and memorable. At the moment that surfing exploded into the mainstream, Mickey had an ideology about surfing. Casual surfers? They should get out of his way. Or better yet, stay out of Malibu altogether. Professionals like Slater? They were defiling something sacred.

Mickey's way was total commitment and total freedom. No rules. The cool thing about Mickey's story is there's always been this sort of tinge of like a little bit of an outlaw lifestyle or something, an expat, a traveling person, somebody who there's a little bit of mystery in their life or whatever. That was really prominent back in the 50s and 60s and 70s and surfing.

And it really built up the lore of mysterious characters around the world. I don't know if all the stories I heard were true or not, but that was the early days of 007. Maybe he pictured himself as almost like a spy in this surf world or something. And that was sort of celebrated to have this sort of life at all costs and make it fun while you're doing it.

I started surfing 10 years ago, and there's not another way to say it. I fell totally in love with it. The smell of the wax, the taste of salt, the squinting into the sun, the scar I'll have forever from the rock at low tide Malibu that cut through my wetsuit and gashed my shin. I love the salty, shaggy people who seem to congregate around the Southern California breaks. People with stories from the not-that-distant past, when mainland surfing was born.

I got into surfing when I had a newborn and a two-year-old, was writing a book and teaching at a university and writing full-time for The New Yorker. I was living in a world of obligations, deadlines, bedtimes, clocks. A life measured out in teaspoons. Very unfree. Surfing released me temporarily from that identity. It let me drop out. It let me live life by the tides.

This one day, early in my time surfing, I was in the water at sunset, a beginner's spot between Santa Monica and Malibu, where you park along Pacific Coast Highway and scramble down the rocks with your board. I was sitting there in the long lag between sets of waves, bobbing, looking up to the highway, watching all the cars streaming by. So many times I'd been in my car on that stretch of road. I'd glanced over at the surfers in the water below.

They had seemed scenic, a picturesque feature of Los Angeles. But now I was in the waves, and it was the opposite. The cars, the city clustered at the ocean's edge. That was the backdrop. That world looked temporary, illusory. This, out here, was real. To this day, Mickey Dora is held up as an idol, many people's idea of a pure surfer. That was the case for Denny Auberg, for sure.

He idolized Mickey as a kid on the beach in Malibu. And you can hear it in his voice. He still does. Mickey was 12 years older than me. He was a man when we were kids, you know. 25 is serious. Denny's house has a simple wooden structure on his buddy's avocado farm. The window ledges are lined with surf memorabilia.

trophies and plaques and photos of Denny as a toe-headed teenager. That's a picture of him. This is you surfing Malibu? Yeah, that's Mickey Dora next to me. Your style's not totally different from Mickey's. Yeah, we probably all copied Mickey, you know, he was a big influence. That's another thing, you know, that people copied his style and learned from him, you know. He was a teacher just by doing it, you know.

Taught us what to do, you know, how to ride a wave. Amazing. The way Mickey surfed, it was poetic. No one who saw it could forget it, and no one could match him, though everyone tried. His nickname was the Cat because he had feline grace on a wave. You know, the way he pussyfooted to the nose, you know, boom, boom, real agile, you know. So they called him the Cat. That's why they named him that. Not because he was a cat burglar, but I guess he was that, too.

Along with Mickey's unparalleled ability on a surfboard, his appearance was unique on the beaches of Southern California. In a sea of Boy Scout blondes, he was obsidian, dark hair and eyes, and the kind of complexion people often call swarthy. The fact that the guy who caught our attention the most is this hairy, dark-haired guy who didn't look at all like the archetype, I respond to that as well.

This is Matt Warshaw. He's a surf historian and the curator of an incredible online resource called the Encyclopedia of Surfing. In the surf world, you know, he looks so perfect to be that person the way Bowie looks so good to be the person for that period of glam rock, you know.

It's not even the handsomeness, the grin by itself, it's almost like this Cheshire Cat thing. Like sometimes when you think of Dora, it's like the rest of him sort of fades away and it's just this dark hair and that really sort of devilish grin. But what really set Mickey apart was the persona he invented. Mickey Dora was a character, a complex self-invention that was meant to draw maximum attention and to throw people off his trail.

Mickey seemed to have, I guess, what we would call a brand. And I got the feeling that he dressed sort of for us. He would show up in things that you wouldn't expect a surfer to wear. He would just wear a tennis sweater to the beach. I read someone said that Mickey would show up with a starlet one day and then he'd show up with two really pretty boys the next day. So I think that he was never not having fun and sort of

just enjoying himself, especially in these early years, just sort of playing with the image of being a surfer before anybody else was doing it. The ocean is infinite, but waves, waves shaped for surfing, with a face and room to play, are finite. The deepest joy in surfing comes from a long, uninterrupted ride. That's the whole point, to be alone on a wave. Or so I hear.

I've been surfing in Los Angeles for a decade, and I've rarely had a wave to myself for more than a few seconds. There are too many surfers and not enough waves. Denny Auberg remembers the time before, the early 1950s, when Malibu was an undiscovered wave. Most days, it was only Mickey Dora and one or two others in the water. And you had...

this wonderful wave to yourself, which makes a big difference because when you have a wave to yourself and a perfect wave, you get the ride of your life and nobody gets in your way. And it's just the nature all around you and it's yours, you know, and it's a personal connection with nature that is hard to duplicate. You know, it's just nothing like it because it's so gorgeous in the water and the wind blowing the waves back and you're free. There's no distractions. You're just you and the waves.

Malibu is a perfect, long, right-breaking wave that peels from way off the point to the Malibu Pier. And Mickey Dora owned it for about two decades, from the early 50s to the early 70s. And because it was Malibu, that meant that Mickey Dora stood for something, an attitude that would spread through the culture. Here's how one of his admirers wrote about Mickey's influence in an authorized biography. Quote,

He was our Elvis. There was no one else to articulate the fundamental gestures of the sociopathic manifesto of a coalescing youth consciousness." The youth were sociopaths, and Mickey was their leader, up until 1974 when he vanished from Malibu. That's when he became their god. It was a mystery. It was kind of like, "Where's Mickey Dora?" And they still had his name on the wall.

Some guy sprayed can DoraLyfs on the wall. It stayed there forever, you know? And it kind of left his mark in that way, you know? And people would wonder, "Where's Mickey?" Nobody knew. It was very much of a mystery for years because he was on the run, you know? And kind of like Billy the Kid, you know, he was gone. He's kind of had this reputation. The bad boy on the run was a fugitive, so it added to his reputation.

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Mickey Dora was a born con man. He could talk his way into anything, and out of almost everything. His alleged scams ranged from petty and kind of ridiculous, like renting out surfboards that didn't belong to him, to blatantly criminal, credit card fraud, fake plane tickets, stolen ski equipment, stolen antiques, stolen passports. Eventually, his schemes would land him in federal prison.

You associated with him at your own risk. Denny Ahlberg has a story about this, the kind of thing that would happen on a typical day hanging out with Mickey. In the early 70s, Denny was invited to Kauai by a Hawaiian surfer named Joey Cabell. At the time, Mickey was also in Hawaii. Cabell told Denny he'd like to see Mickey too. So I called up Mickey and told him, "Joey invited you to come," and he came right over. He showed up. It was amazing.

Cabell, who was in peak physical shape, proposed they hike to a beach to spend the night. It was an 11-mile hike, and not an easy one. So I'm trudging along with Mickey Dora on this really tough hike for us, and we're like city slickers. Dora had these leather boots on, really the wrong equipment, you know. And I was kind of feeling a little sick myself. And it got dark on us, and we're going through these canyons and pushing branches away. Mickey was tortured, you know.

Finally, they arrived at the beach. They were exhausted, and Denny was starting to feel really bad. He passed out in some cave, you know. He woke up in the morning, and Mickey could see that I was a little sick. So his mind started working, like, I can't hike back. I've got to figure something out. He saw this helicopter go by, you know, and they had a tourist, so Mickey had an idea.

Mickey slipped away and went down to the shoreline where he gathered up some rocks and used them to write SOS in big letters. The next day I know the helicopter lands on this pad down the beach and Mickey goes up and talks to the guy. I don't know what he was saying but apparently he was telling the guy, "My friend's dying on the beach. We need help." And the guy said, "I can't come back right now but as soon as I take these people." And right before dark this guy came back.

And Mickey says, "Come on, that's it. Let's go." "Oh, okay." We start doing the 50-yard dash toward this helicopter down the beach. And Mickey says, "Slow down. You gotta act a little sicker." We walk up to the helicopter pilot and he kind of looks at me and I was trying to act sicker. He opens the door. He let me in to the helicopter.

And Mickey starts to get in behind him and the guy goes, "Oh no, it's not you, it's just a sick guy." Mickey pulls out this little bottle and he said, "I'm having an asthma attack. I can't breathe. My feet are bleeding. I can't walk." He just started crying, the guy. You could tell the guy wasn't buying it, but he let him in.

So we got lifted off the pad. It was the most beautiful, majestic thing. I mean, the serrated mountains, it's colors, you know. And we're in this little bubble up in the sky, and Mickey turns, he says, our magic carpet ride. When the helicopter landed in town, there were news reporters and cameras everywhere. They thought they were bringing the dead guy, you know. We land, and all these people kind of crowd around me, you know. And as soon as I get out, they go, where's the sick guy? Yeah.

"Oh, that was me." And they're all disappointed. Mickey disappeared. He's nowhere around. He disappeared on me. He left me holding the bag. So he pulled this whole thing off.

And I went through and got checked out. I did have some little dysentery thing. The cops had gone looking for Mickey. And they found him trying to rent a car at the airport and they dragged him back, you know. They were trying to interview the guy and he's showing them all these fake IDs. And one said Chapin and the other one said Dora. Who are you? Are you Chapin or Dora? And he's laughing. I'm Chapin Dora, you know.

And I don't know how it happened, but he got out of the whole thing, and I was the fall guy. To Mickey Dora, the highest value was freedom. And that, to him, meant doing whatever served him best in any situation. For Mickey, freedom took priority over any other moral or ethical consideration. And he would do or say almost anything to get what he wanted.

In 1974, Mickey left Malibu and set out on an adventure that took him all over the world, searching for the perfect empty wave. He didn't have the money to travel like this, but he did it anyway, using blank airline tickets that he filled out for whatever destination he wanted. Mickey had a whole bunch from a woman who worked at the Pan American office. This is Linda Kai, Mickey's girlfriend and accomplice for much of the 1970s.

You could actually write your own tickets back in those days. They were paper tickets written on and all you needed to know was the mileage and he had all the paraphernalia to work it out. Now I don't know who the girl was that gave him this stuff. He must have made it sweet, you know. But you're flying on these sort of forged tickets. Everything was fake. They shopped and dined and stayed in nice hotels.

All of it, according to Linda, on forged credit cards. And all while being tracked from surf spot to surf spot by baffled agents of the FBI and Interpol. Back in the day, credit cards were plastic, of course, but they didn't have the strips on the backs like they do now in the mentorship. They had numbers and dates. I was assigned to take a little razor blade and change some numbers.

And we did. And make it good for another month. Mickey had a way of justifying all this theft and deception. Mickey described it once as, he says, I'm not a criminal. He says, I don't commit crimes. He says, I'm an outlaw. He says, and there's a difference. Did you buy it? Yes, I still do. One of the great accomplishments that Mickey set out and probably was successful at was never working a day in his life.

That was his real goal, and he accomplished it. I don't know if he ever actually had a job. Jim Kempton used to be the editor of Surfer magazine, and these days he runs the California Surf Museum. He knew Mickey pretty well in the 70s, when they were both living in a surf town in the south of France. In fact, Mickey crashed at his place a lot, used his shower and his kitchen. One day, Jim noticed his passport was missing.

And then sitting on the beach, you know, maybe two weeks later, I see this South African guy, looks sort of like me, and there's my passport. Mickey sold it to him? I'm sure he did. I don't have, I mean, how would you ever prove that, right? Unless you arrested them both, which I was not going to do. In any event... Did you ever say anything to Mickey about it? No.

In the surf world, it was almost currency to be scammed by Mickey. He'd come away from the experience with a story to dine out on for years. Mickey's appeal was not in spite of his criminality, but because of it. There's a lot of people who love the outlaw, who love getting away with it. It's something that, for many people, is a great satisfaction.

to them to see people be able to accomplish that. And Mickey, for a long time, was able to do that without payment. We tend to idolize our outlaws. Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, you know, you hear those stories about them, you'd think that those guys were somehow, like, heroic.

They were sociopathic killers, every one of them, you know, that murdered people in cold blood. And yeah, did they give to the poor? Yeah, they did. Mostly, though, to make sure that they didn't tell the cops where they were. We definitely idolize our outlaws. That's just something that is, I think, baked into the American psyche. And it's very prominent in surf culture.

Very few nice guys are as idolized as the bad boys are. And is Mickey Dora the most idolized of the bad boys? He's not only the most idolized of the bad boys, he's also the most bad guys of the bad guys. The darkest parts of Mickey Dora, though, don't have anything to do with his hustles and his cons, or even with the more serious fraud for which he eventually served time.

The darkest parts of Mickey have to do with his soul and the attitudes he harbored there of exclusion, racism, and xenophobia. A pattern of hate that maps onto the white, white world of mainland surfing, where he was Malibu's superstar in his sunglasses with his Cheshire Cat smile, showing all the little sociopaths how it was done.

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Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis, and even their extensive archives. So...

Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.

Mickey Dora was a secret key to California culture and an invisible thread that wound up running through much of what we know is modern California culture. You look at how California culture has affected America's culture and how America's culture has gone on to affect the world, and you can kind of draw a line back to Dora on a number of different things.

D.V. DeVicentis is a film and television writer who, back in 2004, was hired to write a movie about Mickey. I was approached by Appian Way, which is Leonardo DiCaprio's company. The movie never happened, but it was supposed to star DiCaprio as Da Cat. Just two years after he played the con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can, D.V. ended up spending a lot of time thinking about Mickey Dora.

He embodied in both his thinking and his actions the contradiction between not being a native to somewhere and somehow feeling proprietary about that place. Surfing is supposed to be a feel-good sport, right? Wrong. Surfing is a club, and the membership is capped.

Everybody's getting pissed off about being displaced and everybody's getting pissed off about being commodified and everybody's being pissed off about sharing resources and sharing territory. And it just never ends. And it still, it just goes on to today. So you have people like Mickey who have picked a spot where it's supposed to be and nobody else is supposed to show up.

I think that Mickey himself was very aware of the fact that he was excusing himself from any prosecution for being an invader. And he was just like, "Yeah, yeah, I know. I am too. But we're done now. No more after me." The way Mickey Dora saw the world, I have no business surfing. And neither do you. Not at Malibu. Not anywhere.

Knowing of my interest in the dark side of Malibu, a friend of mine, a fifth-generation Californian who grew up surfing in Santa Monica and Venice, turned me on to an essay that ran in the June-July 1976 issue of Surfer magazine. It was called The Curse of the Chumash, subtitle, Malibu is a land of strange occurrences and contrast. This was right up my street. I bought a copy of the magazine on eBay. ♪

It turned out to be an odd piece of work, a pseudo-history of Malibu told through the vibrant surf culture that flourished there and apparently died circa 1976 with the introduction of Malibu Barbie. The piece was peppered with arcane references to Mickey Dora, his antics, and his self-imposed exile. He was obviously the star of the article, of the place, and of the time.

I flipped through it, studying the grainy photographs. On one page, there were several pictures of Mickey going down the line at Malibu. And on the facing page, there was a picture of Mickey in a dinner jacket, sunglasses, and maybe a wig, holding a surf contest trophy in one hand and a baby doll in the other.

He's standing in front of a sign for Camarillo State Hospital, a mental institution that some say was the Hotel California the Eagles sang about, the one you could check out from but never leave. In the image, Mickey also has a surfboard with him, angled away from the camera so it dominates the lower half of the frame. And on the bottom of the board is an enormous swastika. Who wrote this thing? I flipped back to the byline.

Carlos Aizan. Aizan is an unusual name. It took me a second to realize that it was a pseudonym. Aizan is Nazi, spelled backwards. My friend who'd recommended this essay is Jewish and not in any way sympathetic to this kind of stuff. He's just into the Malibu lore, like I am, and probably hadn't read the piece since it came out in 1976. But looking at it now, I felt a kind of uncomfortable recognition.

Something, unfortunately, was starting to make sense. Much as I love surfing, there are things about it I have to suppress in order to keep enjoying it. Signals that there is something rotten there. There's the sign at my local break that warns kooks to stay off the main takeoff spot. There's the scarcity of black surfers in the water. There are the reports year after year of swastikas and Heil Hitlers and anti-Semitic flyers in beach towns across Southern California.

In 2021, in Manhattan Beach, a coastal city in L.A. County, an older white surfer was filmed yelling the N-word at two young Black men in the water. A nearby teenager told them, "'This is a local's beach.'"

And this was just in 2022, within a couple miles of that same beach. Whatever's going on here, call it surfing's Nazi problem, it goes back decades.

Mickey didn't invent this, but he played the supremacist to the hilt. Malibu belonged to him. Some called him the Dark Prince. He called himself Malibu's, quote, "rightful king." He believed himself to be superior, and everyone around him told him he was right.

As surfing was discovered and began to be widely popular in the 60s, he railed that Malibu was being overrun with, quote, "'cooks of all colors, fags and finks, and a thousand other social deviations," unquote. He railed against the Gidget movies that had exposed Malibu to the masses. He let it be known that this was why he had to leave. Too many people who didn't belong were ruining his wave."

And everywhere he went, Mickey stoked conflict, feeding surfing's rebellious young, the stories of his exile, and all those who'd done him wrong. There's a lot of faults I can find with this culture that I was in the middle of for 40-something years, and arguably still am, but I'm no longer sort of here to defend it. So putting Dory into all that, you know, there's just a lot about it that

isn't great and Mickey on his bad days is right at the center of all that. Matt Warshaw, the surf historian, remembers being a kid and seeing this famous photo shoot of Mickey Dora that was printed in Surfer Magazine in 1969. And there was a three-shot sequence of him surfing where he comes down the way of Malibu, he's dropping in, you can see a surfer in front of him, in the next picture Mickey's doing a turn off the bottom and the surfer in front of him is kind of looking back

And the third shot is Mickey's just shot his board right at the guy. And it's just gone right across his chest and knocked him off his feet. Right. And at nine, because I served Malibu, I was going to serve Malibu. And I just, it's so bought into kooks go home kind of thing. This was Dora regulating. Look what he's doing. You know, he's doing what needs to be done to get rid of the kooks. That guy dropped in on front of Mickey Dora, you know, get out of here, kook and dah, dah, dah. And so, uh,

As a kid, I thought that was kind of cool. And now I look at that now and I go, "They put that board right through that guy's back." And it was terrible to me. Mickey Dora presents a conundrum for surfers and anyone brought up on the California youth culture he so heavily influenced. If I see a clip of Mickey surfing for a few seconds at Malibu, my heart as a surfer just, it just melts, you know?

If I just see a picture of him with that grin, there's something about that that speaks to my depths as a surfer. He's unresolved for me almost on a weekly basis. Like, it's some days I'm very much on Team Mickey and some days I go, this guy's a really terrible human being. We need to put attention on and think about and talk about somebody else.

Anytime I sort of spend enough time in his life looking at how he treated people and things that he said, I just start pulling away. How do I feel about Mickey Dora? It depends on what day you ask me. It seems like the surfing world is still not ready to have the Mickey Dora conversation. Part of me is just saying, God, stay away from this. But it seems to me that if I can make sense of Mickey Dora, who he was and what he did, what he means to people, still...

I'll get closer to the heart of this strange place, Malibu, where the central question is about belonging. Insiders versus outsiders. Mickey was both. He was a shapeshifter and a con man with a cruel and narcissistic streak. Entitled, charming, and living entirely for himself. Is Mickey the secret key to California? If he is, it all begins in Malibu, on the beach where Mickey became famous.

On the next episode of Lost Hills, a suspicious death sets Mickey on a strange new path. At some point he was down in Mexico, I think fishing and trying to not drink. He was going to row a dinghy out to a friend's boat and the body turned up five days later. That's next in episode two, Death in Mexico.

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.fm slash plus.

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