A First Step to Rebutting Internet Rumors
By Farah Oshun

As a personal friend and biographer of Danny “Mack” Fowlie, I feel obliged to clear the air of rumors about him on the World Wide Web. As many have discovered by watching the surf documentary Chasing the Lotus, Danny Mack is much different than how he’s depicted on the Internet. Danny Mack founded and then managed Pavones for eleven years, and he kept Pavones’s waves pristine and available only to friends, family, and locals. Unless people know Dan from the Internet or from Allan Weisbecker’s rants, most people either don’t know of Dan, as he likes to keep a low profile, or have only heard the mysterious whisperings circulating in the surf community today. Those who do know him are old-school friends, part of the privileged few who literally knew him from school growing up or who were invited to experience Pavones before the surfing world knew about its world-class left point break. Most of these friends are now legends themselves, and it is only by their stories that knowledge of Danny Mack has been passed down. Yet, information about Danny has often been glamorized into tall tales.

Fowlie was never involved with cocaine; he was convicted of a marijuana conspiracy charge. Simply put, Fowlie didn’t get a good deal. It was a dry conspiracy, meaning that the prosecution had minimal hard evidence—in this case, less than one ounce of marijuana on his California property, which was seized from the homes of tenants when Fowlie lived in Costa Rica. During that time, the drug war had just begun under the tutelage of Nancy Regan. Now, dry conspiracy cases are never tried in many countries and are not tired in US courts when testimonies come from people who are paid by the prosecution—as was the case with Dan’s trial. Yet for just one ounce found on his property, Fowlie spent eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence in jail! He was released early for good behavior.

I must applaud all the Internet sites for their entertaining stories, but there were no drug dealings on the beaches of Pavones, and Dan never knew Noriega, although he did know the fugitive financier Robert Vesco, from whom Fowlie bought a house. Through this association, Dan started to take heat from the FBI and Customs, who were the agencies involved in his arrest, not the DEA as typically written. Dan, by the way, would like anyone who believes false rumors about him to know that he thinks they are “kooks.” Gotta’ love Dan.