Screen grab from a video of a fight taken by a passerby at Lunada Bay.
It’s possible that the Lunada Bay Boys — if you believe they exist! — got more media coverage this year than Bernie Sanders. Now that Bernie is all but gone, we have only the Bay Boys and Donald Trump. And what a fitting combination, given that Palos Verdes is home to a golf course bearing Trump’s name and many, many rich white republicans who abhor outsiders. Amirite or amirite!?
The Bay Boys saga continues this week with stories from LA Weekly and the L.A. Times. Both pieces are light on new revelations, but the Times did something clever: They filed a public records request to see what Palos Verdes Estates officials had been saying to one another regarding the Bay Boys and the allegations that the city’s police force turns a blind eye toward them.
Not shockingly, city officials appear to give two shits about the actual problem. What concerns them is avoiding more media scrutiny. The Times tells us that officials “repeatedly downplayed” the whole clusterf*ck and dismissed the existence of the Bay Boys gang as “urban legend.”
LA Weekly informs us that zero arrests have been made for Lunada Bay-related incidents despite “more than a dozen” police reports since January 2015. They also tell us that one of the Bay Boys named in the federal class action lawsuit, Michael Rae Papayans, was arrested in February for “punching a 50-year-old man at Dodger Stadium, leaving him in a coma.”
On a funnier note, LA Weekly’s story notes that “Papayans was friends with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter and that the two had been arrested in a bar fight in Florida.” LA Weekly wasn’t able to get any comments from Bay Boys themselves, but some locals basically told them the whole thing was BS.
Now brace yourself for a sampling of LA Weekly’s breathless prose about the burgery, big wavey righthanders of Lunada:
“On a winter’s day, its pristine, emerald waters routinely get 15- to 20-foot waves, perfectly shaped — not breaking in one big wall but peeling slowly down to the right, offering surfers a long, continuous ride. It is, according to The Encyclopedia of Surfing, “Southern California’s premier big-wave break.”
The definition of the word “routinely” is up for discussion. But yeah.
And, just so you know, that quip about rich white republicans is true. LA Weekly points out the following:
“According to Forbes, Palos Verdes Estates has a median home value of $2.2 million, comparable to Beverly Hills or Palo Alto. Nearly all of its registered voters live in single-family homes and make more than $100,000 a year. Republicans outnumber Democrats roughly 2-to-1. And the town is about three-quarters white, according to the 2010 census.”
Just one question: Who will play the Bay Boys in the inevitable Hollywood surf thriller? Did I just see Russell Crowe’s hand go up?
