If you ever wonder what would frighten a Los Angeles undercover cop, retired Detective Mike Rothmiller can name a few things. But fear has never stopped him. He credits his mother for arming him with his “Aha Moment,” which has created the courage to pursue a number of successful careers, opportunities that have him jumping unassisted out of planes, diving with sharks, acting in movies alongside superstars like the late Charlton Heston and writing New York Times bestsellers that end up in the libraries of U.S. presidents and British royalty.
Rothmiller, a Prescott resident, says all of these adventures had their moments of anxiety, but he thinks back on his Little League days when he wanted to play ball but did not have the confidence to join in. What he needed was some deep down encouragement, which came from his mother.
“My mom just said, ‘Don’t be afraid. You don’t know what you can do unless you try. And even if it doesn’t work out, at least you tried and you know you gave it your best.’”
This is the message he shared with Mutual of Omaha this spring when the insurance company toured Northern Arizona in search of Aha Moments from locals.
So, young Mike started to play hardball and within the first four games, the coach had him pitch. “The first time I struck out nine out of 12 batters. I was a pitcher through high school and junior college.” Unfortunately, his baseball days ended when he tore his rotator cuff while playing at the University of Redlands.
From there, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. “I was working deep undercover when I unknowingly came across the Iran-Contra affair [a secret arrangement in the 1980s to provide funds to the Nicaraguan contra rebels from profits gained by selling arms to Iran].We were quickly involved with the Mexican federales; guns were running back and forth. We didn’t quite know what it was, but we knew it wasn’t good.”
Rothmiller says his identity became known to the wrong people. “A guy ambushed me at my house, he machine-gunned the car, the car crashed and I said, ‘That was enough.’”
Today, he carries that memory in his injured spinal cord and damaged nerves.
After the shooting, Rothmiller quit his 10-year career with the LAPD. At 31 years old, he did not know what he could do. But he remembered his mother’s words about the importance of trying, and not giving in to fear. So he wrote a letter to a San Diego television news director and soon was working as a reporter.
“Reading live from a teleprompter for the first time was perhaps one of the scariest experiences I’ve had to overcome,” he says.
From there, ESPN approached him to host an adventure reality show called The Gamesman. This involved flying with the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angles, driving a car in a demolition derby and cave diving in the Yucatán.
He later became the director of government, media, public relations and marketing for large companies like Sony Electronics and found himself briefing President Clinton on the technology of the future.
Along the line, he started a business that handled security for major entertainers, mostly country-western singers like Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, The Oakridge Boys and Garth Brooks. “They are all very nice people,” he said.
And as if his extraordinary life was not charmed enough, he decided he would like to try his hand at writing. His first book, “L.A. Secret Police. Inside the Elite LAPD Spy Network,” which chronicles his life on the LAPD, was a New York Times bestseller and now a Kindle non-fiction bestseller.
His second book, also a bestseller, “Old Dog’s Guide for Pups,” ended up at the White House.
“The point of view is an old dog talking to puppies about how to manipulate humans. I knew Charlton Heston and so he had a copy of it. I gave it to Bill Clinton. He liked it because he had Buddy at the time and we’d talk about our dogs. I received a letter from Laura Bush when she was First Lady. They [the Bushes] sent me an autographed photo of their dog. And I received a letter from the first lady in waiting from Queen Elizabeth. She read it!”
Rothmiller currently is writing three more books: a non-fiction sequel to “LA Secret Police,” a mystery novel, and a history book starting in the year 1000 in England and going up through U.S. history.
“Basically there’s a lot of stuff people have never heard about that’s shocking,” he said. “For example, people believe Henry VIII [King of England in the early 1500s] started the Church of England because the Pope would not give him an annulment. But once you get into the documents, you find he was a spender. But he couldn’t print money; all the currency was in silver and gold. He was bankrupting the country so he needed to find cash right away. He had his people look at all the church properties in England, which included the goats, cows and everything. They reported back how much property the churches had so he started taking over all the churches, seized the property and started his own church.”
Rothmiller says the bottom line to success is this: You never know what you can accomplish until you try, but you have to overcome anxiety and fear of failure. “Don’t be afraid of failure,” he says. “Even if you fail at business or whatever, you will learn something from that and the next time you try it, you will learn from your mistakes and you will succeed the next time. If it’s not going to kill you, you will become stronger, more knowledgeable and you will eventually succeed.”
The 64-year-old is a member of the Arizona Author’s Association and was encouraged to share his Aha Moment with Mutual of Omaha in hopes of inspiring others. The company set up a television studio in an Airstream at Wheeler Park in Flagstaff last May and encouraged businesspeople to offer their revelatory experiences on camera. The best ones may show up as nationally-televised commercials. Stay tuned! QCBN
By Bonnie Stevens
Quad Cities Business News
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