Author Left LAPD After Bitter Clash With Officials : Police: Department says former member of secretive unit faked a disability claim to collect pension.

With the flash of a semiautomatic pistol, Michael J. Rothmiller became either a courageous whistle-blower or a cop off the deep end.

On a hot August night in 1982, the former Los Angeles Police Department detective says, he was nearly killed in an ambush set up after informants in a Mafia drug case discovered that he was an undercover officer.

The LAPD, however, accused him of faking the attack in order to “extort” a disability pension and suspended Rothmiller from the secretive Organized Crime Intelligence Division.

Today, 10 years after a bitter exchange of allegations and legal maneuvers that led to his resignation, Rothmiller has returned with a vengeance--slamming the department’s OCID in his new paperback, “L.A. Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network.”

The book, with its contention that the unit improperly spied on politicians and celebrities, has again made Rothmiller a thorn in the side of the police force that he believes betrayed him.

“It’s not sour grapes,” the 41-year-old detective turned author told a news conference Friday. “I just thought it was probably time for the information to come out and right a lot of wrongs.”

Even though a judge ultimately sided with Rothmiller in his dispute with the department, he is still remembered in some circles as an “LAPD detective turned loony,” as an Orange County district attorney’s investigator once described him. A former OCID colleague said he was a “superb, top-10% detective” who clashed with the head of his unit.

“I’m sure he has a bone to pick,” the source said.

For the last several years, Rothmiller had avoided thinking about the episode that cut short his 11-year law enforcement career. He said he began doing television work, first reporting on outdoor recreation--rock climbing, fishing, hang-gliding--for KGTV in San Diego. Lately, he said, he has worked as an independent TV producer.

“We didn’t talk about the LAPD,” said Paul Sands, the KGTV news director. “We just talked television.”

But the incident that ended his career as a young cop on the fast track began to gnaw anew. Last year’s police beating of Rodney G. King seemed to usher in a new climate, he said, with old assumptions about law enforcement suddenly being questioned.

With the help of a former part-time Times copy editor, Ivan G. Goldman, he set out to tell the tale of a good cop let down by the department he had sworn to serve. He considers himself a loyal soldier who, only after being spurned by his superiors, felt compelled to reveal the distasteful acts of espionage and deceit he had been required to perform.

“He was, all of a sudden, an outsider to this department that he had given his life to,” said attorney Mary Ann Healy, who represented Rothmiller. “It was devastating for him to be deprived of that.”

Chapter One, not surprisingly, begins on that night in 1982 when a helmeted motorcyclist pulled alongside his unmarked police car on a residential street near Rothmiller’s Huntington Beach home.

“He heard the pop, pop, pop, of the weapon, saw the muzzle flash,” reads the book, which refers to Rothmiller in the third person. “Behind the wheel, he felt like a naked target strapped inside a rolling casket.”

Rothmiller tumbled from the moving vehicle and hit the ground hard. At first, doctors thought he had been hit by a bullet, but his wound later turned out to have been caused by a shard of glass shattered in the gun blast.

Rothmiller said that he had nerve damage to his right leg, constant pain in his back and that he suffered from “long periods of anxiety and severe depression.”

“I would break out in hives and hide in the bathroom out of fear,” he said.

At first, police officials took the threat so seriously they stationed a SWAT team in his home for five weeks. Rothmiller kept his own M-1 carbine by his side at all times.

But LAPD investigators began to grow suspicious. Supervisors had grown disgruntled about setbacks in the Mafia case and had pulled Rothmiller from the assignment right before the attack.

Then, shortly after the shooting, when Rothmiller flew to Hawaii with his wife to calm his nerves, an internal affairs sergeant followed him. In a court statement, police officials said they saw Rothmiller snorkeling and sailing--”behavior (that) was entirely inconsistent with . . . alleged leg and back injuries,” according to documents.

Meanwhile, Rothmiller’s emotional condition was deteriorating, leading to two suicide attempts. Once, during a psychiatric evaluation, he fled to the hospital restroom and tried to slash his wrists.

But even the doctor was suspicious, concluding that the cuts were superficial.

The LAPD brass was even more openly skeptical of Rothmiller, who by that time had begun to break ranks by divulging allegations of illegal spying to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The department filed a 17-count disciplinary complaint against Rothmiller. Then-Cmdr. William Booth, a police spokesman, accused him of a “scurrilous attempt to extort an undeserved disability pension.”

But when the matter went before a state workers’ compensation judge in 1984, the LAPD found itself in the hot seat.

Judge Gabriel L. Sipo blistered the department, ruling it had suppressed evidence of the assassination attempt and harassed Rothmiller in order to discredit his claim.

Rather than face an administrative hearing on the charges, however, Rothmiller resigned.

“You have to remember . . . if you’re a whistle-blower, that’s a death warrant,” he said. “Whistle-blowers always lose.”

But with the paperback version of the book due on bookstore shelves today, Rothmiller stands to finally profit from his bitter split with the department that he has now embarrassed.

Times staff writer Paul Lieberman contributed to this story.

A Look at the Book

Revelations from ex-Detective Michael J. Rothmiller’s book on the LAPD’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division.

“Because of OCID, the LAPD had secret files on the gay council member hiding in the closet and on the council member who was sleeping with an aide,” Rothmiller wrote. “The department had intelligence files on questionable deals and campaign funding and a mountain of other embarrassing, sticky business. As soon as someone declared candidacy, a full-scale investigation began.”

This information was gathered by a two-detective “sphinx-like” political team. These two detectives would sometimes be joined by other detectives to form so-called quiet teams for larger political investigations.

“OCID had files on everything and everybody who counted . . . Muhammad Ali, Connie Chung, Alan Cranston, Rock Hudson, Sam Yorty, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sandy Koufax, Robert Redford, Tommy Lasorda and assorted church prelates were all fair game.”

“Political ‘enemies’ like Ramona Ripston of the ACLU were targeted along with ‘friends’ like columnist Pat Buchanan . . .”

Rothmiller said he was personally ordered to collect information on “such notables” as political figures Tom Bradley, Edward Roybal, Richard Alatorre, Mervyn Dymally and Art Torres, as well as Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay, Los Angeles Rams Coach Chuck Knox and Hollywood mogul Dino De Laurentiis.

One of OCID’s favorite targets was former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. Detectives allegedly tracked his business deals, acquaintances and, in later years, collected information on his son, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.

“The file on his son, Jerry Brown, was clearer in purpose: prove he’s gay. There was, for example, an unsubstantiated report that the bedroom walls in his apartment in L.A.’s Fairfax District were painted black in the then-preferred manner of sadomasochistic freaks. The files showed eavesdropping on his car phone conversations, intensive surveillance at the apartment. Results? Absolutely nothing confirmed.”

When the LAPD brass learned that then-state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp had a home in Laguna Beach, which he had never mentioned to them, they concluded he “must be gay,” Rothmiller wrote.

Rothmiller said that he and five other OCID officers were ordered to stake out the beach house, which actually was in Corona del Mar. The team watched the house for a full day, and an OCID captain even considered renting a boat to conduct surveillance from the ocean, despite the fact that the home was obviously empty.

The unit pulled out only when neighbors began to call the police about the suspicious men in the neighborhood--leading to fears that the undercover unit would be exposed, Rothmiller wrote. The absurdity of the investigation became clear later, he wrote, when it was learned that another LAPD intelligence unit was trying to prove that Van De Kamp was having an affair with a woman. “Those guys came up empty, too,” Rothmiller said.

Bradley had become such an intense enemy of Chief Daryl F. Gates that “when OCID got anything nasty on Bradley it would be put out there for all to see, and fast.” The unit tried to make a “tenuous” connection between the mayor and a figure under investigation for organized crime connections because Bradley had chartered an airplane from a company that the man owned. “. . . It was one of those associations that just didn’t look good to voters. OCID leaked the story.” The department’s “mole” on Bradley’s staff was the mayor’s own driver.

Figuring that the world of professional sports was rife with mobsters, OCID targeted teams for special surveillance, particularly the Los Angeles Rams. Rothmiller wrote that the suspicion about the Rams centered on little more than the show-biz pasts of owner Georgia Rosenbloom and her husband, Dominic Frontiere, and his Italian-sounding last name.

This “sizable Keystone Kops-style operation had nothing to show for itself but a big phone bill,” Rothmiller wrote.

“OCID was conducting massive operations against non-criminals for no other reason than to try to embarrass them or pressure them sometime in the future. Pickings were good.”