Copy Cats : Detectives staked out the suspect. Backup units were called in. Drugs? Stolen cars? No. The bust was for bogus collector surfboards.

Detective John Metcalf eased his El Camino to the curb in a quiet Agoura neighborhood. It was 7 on a Tuesday morning in April, and as he pulled out his binoculars, he figured the stakeout might last a few days.

Less than half an hour later, though, the suspect emerged from his garage carrying two sawhorses and a gallon of resin.

Metcalf keyed the microphone on his police radio. “Hey, it’s looking good,” he said to the two backup units waiting at either end of the block. “Operation Black Cat” was under way.

For the next hour or so, the detectives tailed their suspect, who went by the alias John Farrell, as he drove to a Lumber City to pick up acetone, to a photo supply store, then they watched from a distance as he stopped at a house in Canoga Park and went into its garage.

Slowly, Metcalf cruised down the alley. He saw what he was looking for. Raising the microphone to his lips, he yelped the prearranged code word: “Surfboards.”

As backup units closed in from either side, Metcalf stepped into the garage and flicked open his wallet. “Detective Metcalf, LAPD,” he said. “You’re under arrest for trademark infringement, counterfeiting surfboards.”

The bust had been brewing for almost two months, since the legendary surfer and shaper Greg Noll strolled into the Longboard Grotto surf shop in Encinitas. Amid a display of vintage nine-, 10- and 11-foot boards stood a black and white fiberglass beauty, with the Noll decal and the imprint of ‘60s surf star Mickey Dora, a.k.a. “da Cat.”

There was just one problem with the exquisitely crafted board. Noll knew his designs, and that board wasn’t one of them.

*

Noll, now 57, bought his first redwood surfboard in 1950. He paid for the enormous plank with $15 he’d earned working as bait boy on the Manhattan Beach Pier.

“I weighed 75 pounds and the board was over 100,” Noll says.

Soon, dense foam replaced redwood as the preferred flotation material for surfboards, and Noll continued shaping, using rasps and Shur-forms to sculpt the white “blanks.”

By the mid-’60s, as the Beach Boys and other surf bands turned an arcane sport into a subculture, Noll’s passion became a business. Between 1963 and 1970, Noll’s shop employed 60 people and cranked out 150 boards a week during the summer months.

In 1967, though, the first short boards began appearing on waves. Quick, aggressive, acrobatic surfing upstaged the more fluid and easygoing longboard style. By the mid-’70s, longboards were an obligatory white elephant at Southern California garage sales, fetching $25 or $30.

Sam Ryan, owner of the Longboard Grotto, dates the beginning of the longboard’s salvation to 1981, when Dewey Weber held a contest for the handful of die-hards who remained devoted to the behemoths.

Interest grew, and surfboard makers began introducing new lightweight longboards. Now, even young shredders often have a 10-footer or two in their surfboard quivers.

The revival of the longboarding style also saw a renewed interest in the originals.

Says Scott Hulet, editor of Longboard magazine: “A lot of guys who were surfing in that era and got out of it for a while are now getting jacked up on the nostalgic angle--that these totems of their youth are still out there.”

In the ‘60s, the coolest boards were “signature models,” bearing the names of the hot riders popularized by Surfer magazine. Noll, who is also known as “da Bull” scored a coup by persuading Dora, surfing’s notoriously cantankerous problem child, to lend his name to a design.

Now “da Cat” boards are among the most coveted models, selling for as much as $4,200, and Noll, who lives near the Oregon border in Crescent City, has been cranking out a limited-edition run of 250 official replicas.

But the originals are the ones collectors lust after.

Dora, Noll says, is as reclusive and difficult as ever. “I thought he’d mellow a little bit, but he’s just gotten worse.”

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a surf legend. “He’s the only guy I know from back then who’s kept surfing as the most important thing in his life,” Noll says.

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Lt. James Oneil began shuffling surfing down on his list of life’s priorities about the time he joined the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in 1974.

Recently, though, the 48-year-old, who is now Marina del Rey Harbor Master, has been re-evaluating that list.

As a prelude to getting back into surfing, he got into collecting, informally networking with the small cadre of people who collect vintage longboards.

By now, the surfing subculture had begun to assert its rightful place as a bona fide contributor to the broader pop culture. Like animation cels and orange crate labels, surfboards became collectible as Californicana, with Japanese aficionados in particular drawn to the mystique.

When Oneil saw an ad for a Noll “da Cat” model in a weekly advertiser for $1,500, he jumped at the chance to add it to the Wardy, Jacobs, and Gordon and Smith boards in his small collection.

He called “Farrell,” who suggested they meet by a freeway on-ramp midway between their homes. Oneil could barely contain himself. The board’s white foam was slightly yellowed like an original. It had the sort of dents in the deck that came from contact with the knotted knees of kneeling surfers.

“I thought I had a real treasure there,” Oneil says. “In the back of my mind, I can remember saying to myself, ‘This is too good to be true.’ But at the moment, I just wanted to get my hands on it.”

Oneil couldn’t help boasting about his find to other collectors, several of whom were stunned. They, too, it turned out, had recently purchased suspiciously similar boards.

Finally, one of the collectors called the Grotto and learned that Noll himself had declared one of the boards bogus.

As the lawman in the group, Oneil was given the job of contacting the authorities. The call set off a small stir at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Bunco and Forgery Division--several of the officers surf.

“My first custom board was a Greg Noll,” Metcalf says. So when he heard the call being discussed, he shouted out, “I’ll take that one!”

A more typical case in Bunco might involve counterfeit Levi’s or videotapes, or bringing to justice a fraudulent carpet cleaning outfit.

The surfboard counterfeiter was a first.

Noll, who got called in to identify the ersatz cats, was amazed at the police officers’ level of interest. “These guys got wired up,” he says. “They were treating it like a major narc bust or something.”

The case fell into place easily. A victim called the suspected forger and asked if he had another Noll. The suspect said no, but added that he might be able to find one bearing the signature of ‘60s surf idol David Nuuhiwa. “He was putting him off long enough to make another board,” Metcalf says.

“Farrell” was putting masking tape on the bottom of the counterfeit board when Metcalf stepped into the garage. At first the perpetrator didn’t react. “I wasn’t getting through to him,” Metcalf says.

Even when the backup unit pulled into the driveway, the suspect politely told the detective that his friend was blocking the alley.

Metcalf replied, “No, that’s my partner.” Finally, the gravity of the moment sunk in. “He turned white.”

Metcalf cuffed his man and took him to jail.

“I sympathize with him,” says Metcalf, who describes the suspect as a 38-year-old photographer who had shaped boards years ago and turned to board forgery after a financial crisis threatened foreclosure on his family’s home. Since then, the board forger has paid restitution to his four victims, who declined to press charges. “There’s no question he learned his lesson,” Metcalf says.

One of these days Noll plans to ceremoniously destroy the confiscated fakes with a steamroller, he says.

Still, da Bull remains dumbfounded that his boards could trigger such an affair.

“The bail on the thing was $20 grand. If he had had two strikes against him, the guy could have done life for making a ‘cat’ board.”