Fast Eddie's Last Stand
by Chas Smith, Playboy, July 18, 2013 (excerpts)
...Today I walk down a dead-end road not five miles north of Waimea Bay, where he is waiting for me. I turn left and push my way into his million-dollar beach compound. Rumors and whispers about his penchant for violence haunt the North Shore. Brave surfers speak of him in hushed tones, afraid they might turn around and see him standing there and then see the darkness of a knockout.
On paper Rothman is simply a successful surf promoter and co-founder of the surf brand Da Hui, which makes boardshorts, surf apparel and, more recently, MMA fighting gear. But the past, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, is when Rothman’s specter was born dark....
Da Hui taught them this by knocking the teeth out of their mouths. During the winter of 1977, visiting surfers’ blood ran both freely and cold, and Rothman became the embodiment of fear....
In 1987 he was indicted on racketeering and drug distribution charges, which were dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct. He had been in and out of jail before and has been in and out since, but his relationship with “legality” is, again, only ever whispered about. Few are brave enough to ask directly what it is that he does. There are outrageous, whispered rumors that he’s in the Hawaiian mafia, that he’s a drug dealer, that he’s a murderer for hire....
(BTW: This explains Billy Kenoi signing the Hawaii County Anti-GMO bill.)
Rothman looks at me and takes me by surprise. Instead of a left hook he drops this bomb: “If you want to tell a fucking important story, then tell this one: Monsanto. Those fuckers are here. They have all these experimental farms right over the hill and are poisoning the land and poisoning the people. Write that shit.”
“They got all these research farms right over the hill from my house,” says Rothman. “We’re having a March Against Monsanto in Hale’iwa tomorrow.” He grinds me with his eyes and it is completely expected that I will show up....
And Rothman is not alone, not by far. When I exit the main road toward Hale’iwa, hundreds of protesters have already grouped together near the 7-Eleven at the south end of town, or the “bottom” as it is called. It’s a motley bunch: moms pushing strollers, old people with canes, chunky white transplants in awful denim shorts, surfers, Japanese tourists, dreadlocked hippies banging on ukuleles, girls in bikinis, tough mokes....
Pit bulls roam freely. A man wearing a V for Vendetta mask tells a man with a head as big as a Fiat, “Look at those clouds, brah. I hope they don’t chemtrail us.” It is a widely held belief here that Monsanto dumps heavy metals into the clouds in order to control the weather....
Across the parking lot a giant pickup truck draped in Hawaiian flags is surrounded by men wearing red Da Hui T-shirts. There is Kala Alexander, a surfer and actor who became famous as the unlikely star of a series of YouTube videos featuring the beatdowns he gave surfers who showed disrespect in the waves.... Alexander’s most recent activist star turn is as a concerned citizen speaking out against the encroachments of the biotech companies in a documentary about GMOs and Hawaii.
Rothman stands with the protesters, arms folded across his chest like a sentinel, and lets the others do the talking. As I approach, he says, “You gotta meet the guys who started the march,” and walks me over to two men busily directing the proceedings. “These are the real people. These are the ones changing shit.”
One of them is Dustin Barca, a professional surfer and also an MMA fighter from Kauai. He is handsome, with severely cauliflowered ears. “Five years ago I started studying, reading, watching the movies about GMOs,” he says. “I wanted to get my facts straight before acting. I learned how damaging they are to the people and to the land. It is poison. And so now I want to build awareness. I want to educate the local people on what is happening. I’m not interested in saving the world. I’m interested in saving my island.”
Rarely is a word spoken here today that isn’t rooted in fierce localism. Walter Ritte, standing next to Barca, nods his head in approval....
There was a time when Rothman was the interloper, the unknown quantity on the North Shore. Although many people assume he is Hawaiian, he was born Jewish in Philadelphia. “I don’t know nothing about Jew stuff, but once this lady on the North Shore made me some Jew food and it was good,” he tells me. He has said that his mother physically abused him as a boy. Eventually she left, and his father moved to Long Beach, California with him. “My father would fucking beat the shit out of me because I was little, and that made him mad.” Eventually Eddie’d had enough. When he was 14 years old he stole enough money out of his father’s wallet for a one-way ticket to Honolulu. He had surfed in California and had seen the surf-ploitation films featuring Hawaii, with its perfect giant waves, palm trees, white sand and easy smiles.
He landed in Honolulu knowing no one. He knew only that something felt almost right. He stayed in Honolulu for a few years, flying to southern California to pick up marijuana and bring it back to Hawaii. He briefly went to school in Long Beach. “I went to school a couple of times, but the school told me if I didn’t show up, they would pass me.” He eventually moved permanently to the North Shore. It had everything he needed: surf, sun, a market for his marijuana. And as a 16-year-old he would get by selling it and stealing cars.
One bright day he was in the bushes at the Sunset, one of the North Shore’s famous wave breaks, breaking into cars, when he ran into a pack of Hawaiian locals who were doing the same thing. How did they come to accept this unlikely outsider? “I don’t talk good,” says Rothman. “I have bad speech like them, so it was easy, and everything went from there. I sounded like them, and they just accepted that I was like them.” He was tenacious, so they flew him around the islands to crack heads for such offenses as not paying debts within an appropriate time. When I suggest that the tough Hawaiians had adopted him, he bristles. “They didn’t adopt shit. I proved myself every fucking day. I proved myself with these.” Again, he holds up a fist. A scarred, tooth-nicked fist. On the North Shore, not speaking well goes only so far....
read ... The Rest of the Article
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