The brilliantly-named Rick Rasmussen was a good old-fashioned criminal, who took the business of lawbreaking seriously. No miscarriages of justice, unpaid taxes, inadvertent drug-smuggling or drunken misdemeanours, but cocaine and heroin smuggled and sold by the kilo.

The son of an aerospace test pilot and former pro basketball player, Rasmussen took up surfing aged 10 when his family moved to Long Island. After impressing in the junior ranks, he graduated to the men’s division and became United States Surfing Champion in 1974, aged just 18. He won the kneeboard division too, which possibly undermined his gangster credentials in later years.

He excelled in small waves, but Rasmussen was also a tuberider of some note, which seems generally to be the way with both US surfers of east coast origin, and surfers with a flagrant disregard for the law — for small-wave specialists are largely absent from this list. His performances at big Pipeline won plaudits from Gerry Lopez, and he was one of the early standouts at Uluwatu and G-Land.

Few things get the adrenaline pumping quite like a giant Pipeline barrel; breaking the law on a large scale may be one of them. In 1979, Rasmussen was found in possession of a kilo of cocaine whilst in Bali — not the best place to be caught with large quantities of drugs, as recent events have underlined. After three months in prison awaiting trial he was acquitted, but two years later, back in New York, he sold $500,000 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer. Some months later, a week before he was to be sentenced on trafficking charges, he was shot dead in Harlem when yet another drug deal went wrong. He died, in time-honoured fashion, aged 27.

A good old-fashioned criminal, but perhaps not a very good one.