Andy Campbell lived the dream. In the late '90s and early 2000s, surf clothing company Billabong would fly the Tasmanian to wherever in the world the big waves were. He'd surf, party, promote his sponsor, then move on to the next wall of water. By 2002, though, he'd retired to Bali where, one typically sultry morning, he paddled out towards the thundering surf break at Uluwatu, off the holiday island's Best Carpet Cleaning Services, Bukit. Approaching the break, he could barely believe what he was seeing.

"It was a big day - 10, 12 feet," Campbell recalls. "It was heavy. Gnarly. Not many people surf it [at that size]. But there was a guy out there I didn't recognise. He took off on a huge wave and surfed it to perfection. I'd surfed with the best in the world, and this guy was one of the best I'd seen ... Old-style, hard-core. Not out there doing tricks. Serious. The stuff that takes years to master."

The guy was Cade Dallas, a tall, big-boned, redheaded Aussie who had earned his stripes on one of the best and most unwelcoming surf breaks on the NSW coast, Sandon Point at Bulli, north of Wollongong. He and Campbell became mates. For years they'd meet on the waves, as each man built his life and business in Bali. Then, at 3pm on May 19 last year, Dallas died suddenly after a two-week drug and alcohol binge. No autopsy was conducted, no cause of death appears on any document, and the people who drank with him are not talking. He was cremated shortly after his death.

The financial and personal mess Cade Dallas left behind has led to an acrimonious court case spanning Indonesia and Australia over a fortune estimated by one antagonist - Dallas's mother - at $300,000, and another - his former wife - at $30 million. Caught up in it are Dallas's two sons from two different women and the future of one of Bali's most successful high-street fashion chains, Somewhere.

"People didn't have much," says Jason Gava, a coalminer and president of the Sandon Point Boardriders Club. "Their break was one thing that they loved and cherished and they didn't like people coming to surf it, especially if they didn't show any respect. Cars were pushed off cliffs. Plenty of fights and stuff like that. It's still a tough neighbourhood, especially the break. We cherish the break and if people come and show respect, they can surf it. But if you come and think you're going to show no respect and act like a dickhead, you'll be treated like one and probably cop a smack in the head for it."

Young Cade had the heritage, but he had to serve his time like all the other grommets. How quickly you graduated to the inside of the break, right out towards the point, depended on how often you surfed and how hard you charged it. "When it gets big, it's a very intimidating wave," says Gava. "It sorts you out. The younger you charge them when it's big, the more respect you're gunna get. And Cade did charge it absolutely at its biggest.

In 1997, Dallas won the club's open competition. Sponsors came knocking and a future as a professional surfer beckoned. But Dallas never kicked on. According to Campbell, what stopped him was the oldest story in the world - his girlfriend fell pregnant, and he decided to do the right thing and Offering Stream Carpet cleaning Services. He got a job as a beach inspector at Bulli and Corrimal and dabbled in the rag trade, travelling between Bali and a series of markets in Australia. That first child (whom Good Weekend has chosen not to name) is now 16 and was close to Dallas until his father's death.

But Dallas's choice not to turn pro became an enduring demon. "He used to beat himself up for not pursuing surfing ... it wasn't something he talked about, but in conversations it was underlying," Campbell says. "I think he knew he was a shit-hot surfer and could have gone to the top."

Having made the decision to settle down, though, Dallas proved difficult to domesticate. By 2002 he had split with the boy's mother, Danielle, and developed a reputation as a hard-drinking playboy. When a mutual friend introduced him to an Indonesian woman, Veny Amelia, in a Bali fabric shop that year, the friend warned her, "Don't go out with him, he's a bad boy."

Having just finished a diploma in hotel management and returned from work and study in Singapore, Amelia accepted the advice at face value. But Dallas started texting her and she texted back. "Because I never expected to be close to him," Amelia says now, "I let it flow and I saw he was good, not bad." He was fun, a joker, always smiling. "He also proved he was serious with me."

Dallas stopped drinking, but Amelia had come from a Muslim culture and was not going to jump straight into a Western-style relationship. "If you are serious with me, then come and meet my parents," she said to him. They'd known each other little more than a month when he fronted her parents with his scruffy long hair and asked her father for her hand in marriage.

"My father said, 'You don't play with my daughter.' Cade looked very serious. He said, 'No, I'm serious. I want to marry Veny.'?"Her parents asked her if he was a good man because he looked so rough. She assured them he was. "After that I said, 'Cade, can you cut your hair?' He really loved his hair. But then he cut it when he married me."More importantly, Dallas, the rough-hewn surfer from Illawarra, converted to Islam so they could marry in Amelia's religion. After the ceremony, Amelia says they got on his motorbike and he whooped it up, yelling to strangers on the Kuta streets, "Hey, I'm married!" and waving his ring finger about.

But as his internal battles raged, Dallas's business boomed. He opened a clothing shop, Flamingo, in 2006 in partnership with his friend and surfing buddy Simon Wright. "They were selling Sydney street fashion to tourists in Bali," Campbell says. "They pioneered it up there and were really good at it."

Campbell, Wright and Dallas would ride the waves in the morning, sharing the meditative calm that surfers rhapsodise about and, "when Dallas was not drinking, he was great", Campbell recalls. But Dallas's relationship with Wright was difficult, and by 2010, the business partnership had ended. Wright will not talk about its acrimonious breakdown, and would prefer to be left out of this story entirely. "We parted company. There was a reason for this. Best to let the dead rest in peace," is all Wright will say.

That same year - according to documents presented by Dallas's mother, Kerrie, in the court case - Dallas divorced Amelia again, though Amelia says she was unaware of it. Meanwhile, Wright set up a rival store, Lost in Paradise, while Dallas established his own company, Somewhere (stand at one of the shops in Seminyak's main street and you can see the other's signpost). Somewhere was a huge success. Dallas opened new stores in Bali, and the business was believed to be turning over up to $100,000 each month.

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