"There’s heaps of petty crime here but it’s psychotic what he did."

Last Sunday, a furore erupted after a car thief, fleeing an enraged mob, nearly drove a surfer’s car into a daddy pushing a pram at D- bah, just over the hill from Snapper there.

Read, Wild Scenes on Gold Coast as Surfer’s 4WD stolen in front of him before nearly hitting a pram.

Car thefts, and stabbings and homicides, hits, ain’t anything new on the Gold Coast, the joint is crawling with junkies and gangsters and whomever else is locked into the system, as they say.

But what made this car theft different was how many people he nearly flattened on his way out of the carpark, and how widely disseminated the footage was.

 

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As it turned out, the surfer whose 2104 Toyota Prado, forty k or so if you wanted to buy, these things hold their value, is an old pal of DR’s, a surf industry vet called Liam Geale.

Geale is forty-three, six-two, a lean TRT-buffed two-twenty pounds, a jiujitsu purple belt and fight fan. Not the sorta cat you want confronting you while you’re sitting in the front seat trying to take the family whip away.

Geale was enjoying a post-surf debrief with his pal and shaper Alex Crews when he heard the familiar gurgle and roar of his customised exhaust system.

“I went, ‘That’s my fucking car,’” says Geale. “I turned around and saw it pulling out slowly. I was trying to register what was happening.”

Geale says he walked over, “hurriedly paced” is how he describes it, opens the door and tells the unofficial driver,

“Get of my fucking car, mate.”

The car thief is little compared to monster Geale and has already moved the seat close to the steering wheel and, safety conscious, is strapped in with his seat belt.

He roars off, door swinging open, and heads to the cul-de-sac at the northern end of the beach where you turn around and head back towards either up the hill to Rainbow Bay or around the headland to Tweed Heads and Coolangatta.

A carpenter moves his car into the middle of the road, blocking access.

Someone calls the cops.

The car thief drives around the edge of the embankment, Geale thinks he’;s going to flip the Prado and roll onto the beach.

Thief is lucky. Someone moves their car as he’s flying past, opening the road. The man with the pram with a two-year-old inside flies down the rock embankment to escape being crushed.

(Geale will later get a message from a pal telling him his car flew around a blind corner on the way out doing eighty clicks, nearly taking him out.)

Cops come.

Geale’s phone is still in the car so they use Find iPhone to track it down at a nearby mall. The thief is later filmed on CCTV running through the Tweed Heads hospital and being collected by accomplices in another car.

The event solidified two things in Geale’s mind, one, never to use those surf lock box things. The u-bolt was in tact, the bandit has simply prised it open. Two, it reinforced how tight the surf community is on the Gold Coast and Tweed.

Geale says it’s an interesting town ‘cause you’re valued on your etiquette and ability in the water, not on how much you earn or how much you spent on your Palm Springs lookalike joint with the palm trees and cactus arranged just so in the paved front yard.

Geale runs The Board Lab, about as core a surf shop as you’ll get in this VAL-dominated epoch, attached to the front of the Sharp Eye factory in South Tweed Heads. No clothes, boards, fins, wax and leashes. Like surf shops of yore it even sponsors surfers.

“It smells like surfboards and there’s actual surfers. Jack Robinson will come through picking up boards, Rio Wada will be here.”

About the theft, Geale says he’s been getting DMs from all over the world saying things like, “I hope you get him, I hope he gets what he deserves.”

The cops are taking it real seriously, given the kid in the pram bit.

“There’s heaps of petty crime here but it’s fucking psychotic what he did,” says Geale. It was almost like a car jacking.”