Unpublished Story for the Los Angeles Times View Section, 1988

FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, Mickey Thompson had the world by the short hairs. He was a extroverted one-time hot rodder, track operator and inventor, who had gone into automobile racing, accessory and promotion business and become multi-millionaire. He lived in a walled hillside estate in Bradbury, with a film lab, screening room, an professional machine shop equipped with milling machines and turret lathes. He showered his wife, Trudy, with diamond rings and gold pins. He put on off-road vehicle races in the Coliseum, the Rose Bowl and Anaheim stadium. He flew his own airplane, was on a first name basis with Lee Iacocca and taught race car driving to Paul Newman. He was dynamic, charismatic, and, within the small world of off-road racing, universally respected. He was also afraid for his life.

"He said he got threats on the phone," says Mike DeStefano, vice- president of marketing, sales and promotions for the Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group. "He said that (someone) was going to kill him." He said the man was "desperate."

It got to the point, says DeStefano, that "he wouldn't stand in front of a window. And if he was sitting in my office, he'd get up and close the shades." At night he would walk employees down to the parking lot under the guise of getting something from his car.

But most of all Thompson was worried about his wife. "I'm scared to death," he told his sister, Colleen Campbell, that someone is "going to hurt my baby."

In response to the threats, the Anaheim Police Department offered Thompson basic survival tips: "Leave at different times. Leave from different doors. Break up your routine."

Although Thompson did this for a while, says DeStefano, he soon reverted to his old ways, which is to say, leaving his house in Bradbury at 6 am with Trudy.

And then, on March 16, the threats came true.

As the Thompsons left for work that morning two black men armed with pistols and a stun gun were waiting outside.

"They had fired at Trudy in the van," says DeStefano. "The van rolled back and hit the wall. Mickey heard the gun shots and ran out. The same guy that shot at the van shot at Mickey. It looked like Mickey was coming at the guy screaming, 'Don't shoot my wife.' Apparently they dragged Trudy out of the van put her down on the street and shot her."

Then, according to neighbors, the two killers jumped on two ten speed bikes and fled down the hill towards the 210 freeway.

One neighbor called Thompson's Anaheim stadium offices to say that he "didn't know what had happened. But shots were fired. And someone is lying in the driveway."

The office, in turn, called Thompson's son, Danny at his home in Huntington Beach, and told him that there was "trouble at the house." Danny Thompson called his father's sister, Colleen Campbell, in San Juan Capistrano.

"Have you talked to my dad?" he asked.

"No," said Colleen, "I've been trying to get the rascal."

"Well, someone from the office called," said Danny. "He said there's been a shooting."

Colleen Campbell called the sheriff and he told her he would check. "He came back," says Campbell, "'My God, Mrs. Campbell, we have a coroner's number on Mickey and Trudy.'"

Mike DeStefano, Thompson's vice-president in charge of marketing, heard about the shootings while stuck in traffic on the way to work. He was so upset he had to pull off the freeway. "I drove a stick shift," he said, "and I couldn't get my foot on the clutch."

At the Anaheim stadium offices of the Mickey Thompson entertainment group, everyone was crying. "Look," DeStefano told the staff. "They're dead. There's nothing we can do about it. Now we've got to deal with the situation the way Mickey and Trudy would have wanted us to."

At this point, says DeStefano, he was still worried that it was going to be "a group killing, that maybe they were going to nail five or six of us." He had already called Phil Bartinetti, an attorney who was representing Thompson in a series of bitter and emotional lawsuits, to warn him to be careful. And now to protect the staff, he put armed policemen around the stadium entrance downstairs. Then, because the "phones were ringing off the hook," he put the staff to work pulling together pictures and videotapes of Mickey and Trudy for the news media.

The Thompson estate was cordoned off by the time Mickey Thompson's vice- president for operations, Bill Marcel, got to Bradbury, but he says, he could "see them lying there 50 feet apart."

Marcel spent the rest of the morning waiting around to be interviewed by the police. When finally, they got around to him, they asked, "Do you know anyone who would want to do this?"

As a matter of fact, said Marcel, he did.


FOR THE OFF-ROAD RACING COMMUNITY, Thompson's death was a profound shock. "He was a giant in the industry," says auto racing writer Deke Houlgate. "A lot of people didn't like him but they respected him. He was a one of a kind guy and head and shoulders above everyone else."

"He was a guy who barely finished high school but he was one of the most brilliant men I've ever known. He used to go up and race on the high desert. He had an idea that he could get better traction with tractor tires. They were only rated for 20 miles an hour. Yet he was out there running them at 220 mph. He took that information to Goodyear and told them how to build Bonneville Tires. (Later) he revolutionized the Indy racing business with wide profile tires." "He looked at things differently from other people. He could conceptualize things that weren't there. Once he got knocked out of (an off- road) race. So he viewed it from an airplane. 'I got to put this in front of spectators.'" And that's where he came up with the idea of putting off-road racing in a stadium.

Although it was a wild spectacle with buggies literally flying through the air, says Xydias, it turned out to be surprisingly safe. "Because of the terrain," says Xydias, "the cars actually are not going very fast. So when the buggies roll over, you just turn them right side up again and keep going."

In 1979, Thompson put the Riverside format in the coliseum. "He took a hunk of Baja and put it in the field," says Danny Thompson. "He would lay down 1100 sheets of plywood to protect the field and cover that with 25 million pounds of dirt."

Then to keep the spectators from being bored, he ran off something like 18 races in three hours. "My dad did some research," says Danny Thompson. "He found out that the average attention span of someone is 6 to 8 minutes. So he planned an eight minute race, with five minutes between races."

As soon as one heat was race was over another heat began. In the meanwhile Thompson would be running up and down the Coliseum steps like he was training for the Olympics. "He put on a great show," says Alex Xydias, a former partner of Thompson's in an off-road truck and equipment show. "He always kept things moving. He just knew what people liked."

Thompson was the sort of person who made friends easily. "I really liked him," says Coliseum general manager Joel Ralph. "He was a very imaginative guy. He was enthusiastic, exciting. He wasn't afraid to take a chance."

And it wasn't just Thompson himself. They both were "warm outgoing people," says Ralph. "They would attend any social event--even a retirement affair for an accountant." Furthermore, they "didn't just pop in and shake your hand. They would stay and talk."

Thompson loved to talk so much, it was almost funny. He was forever calling Joel Ralph at the Coliseum at 7 am. "When he came up with an idea he was like a little kid with a new toy," says Ralph. And he came up with new ideas all the time.

In spite of his worldly success, Thompson was not, someone who pounded his chest. "I didn't know how wealthy he was," says Ralph. "He would talk to the maintenance guy. Take kids around. Even the guy who handles the gate came to his funeral."

"Everyone was close to them from the receptionist to the sweeper," says Anaheim stadium general manager Greg Smith. "He could talk to anyone on his level. . . . He wasn't a typical promoter. . . He was one of the guys. He had been in the pits."

All his life, Thompson was a driven man. He never stopped. He went through life with his foot on the throttle. Before his death, he had started some 25 different companies (most of which he sold) and held upwards of 100 major patents. He invented an early hydraulic version of the Jaws of Life (to use on his own car when he made the assault on the land speed record at Bonneville). He came up with a water wheel retarded tethering device which enabled him to race 3000 horsepower Top Fuel dragsters inside the Coliseum. He invented a water filled rubber vehicle barrier which police used around St. Vibianas when the Pope visited Los Angeles.

"He had an unbelievable desire to win," says Danny Thompson. If he wasn't racing in a car or boat (and he was in some 10,000 races during his life), he would challenge you at tennis, bowling, badminton, racquet ball, flicking peanuts, whatever came up. "He loved competition," says his sister, Colleen Campbell. "He would challenge you at something he knew he was going to get beat at." Once he challenged her husband, Gary, to a foot race down the dragstrip (and these are not trim young men, she says). "Or he'd challenge kids to a race in a swimming pool."

It was this very drive, Thompson would muse in later life, that made him such a washout at basketball. He always wanted to play basketball, he once told Phil Bartinetti, but he was "into contact." And he'd play for five minutes and foul out.

Quick to anger when insulted, he once was waiting at an intersection when a car with five "characters" shouted a profanity at him as they drive by. He chased the car ten blocks, ran it off the road, knocked two of the five unconscious and drove the other three away.

"I wouldn't want to get in a fight with him," says former Coliseum general manager Jim Hardy. "You wouldn't beat him on points."

Even for a race card driver, Thompson's stamina was astonishing. "During his racing days," says Colleen, "he would go 48 hours without sleeping."

"I think he had a lifetime case of insomnia," says racing writer Deke Houlgate. "He worked around the clock for four or five days once to get a car ready to take up to Murdoc." And at Bonneville, where on once occasion he set an unofficial land speed record of 406 mph, he collapsed from exhaustion. "We thought it was a heart attack. He used himself up. He would say things that would be almost goofy at times. He used to call people at 2, 3 and 4 am. He was up." He rarely slept more than 3 1/2 hours a night.

As a race car driver, his exploits are both bizarre and legendary. Once in an 1972 off-road race in Arizona, he once told a reporter for Sports Illustrated, he wrecked his truck 45 miles from the nearest road. That night it got so cold he crawled into a 50 gallon oil drum to sleep and when he woke up the next morning his water bottle was frozen to his head.

In 1953, while racing in the PanAm Road Race through Mexico, he came around a curve to find a dozen people on the road including a woman holding a baby. Choosing to run off the road rather than hit the people, he clipped a policemen with the left side of the car, knocked him into the air, hit a boulder, rolled over 13 times and ended up in a ravine on top five people who were standing there inspecting an earlier wreck. Thompson ended up with cracked ribs and a brain concussion. The five people ended up dead.

At this point, Thompson panicked. "All I could think of," Thompson wrote in "Challenger," a 1964 autobiography with Griffith Borgeson, "was of all those fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins who would make it their sacred duty to avenge the family blood." Four the next several days, Thompson wandered around the Mexican countryside, filthy, dazed and bleeding until fellow hot rodder from Detroit spotted him on the outskirts of Mexico city and drove him back to the States.

Once while racing with his son, Thompson had a flat tire. Danny got out to change it. But as he was throwing the tire in the back of the truck his father took off. Danny spent the next five miles in the back of the truck holding on for dear life. His father didn't want to stop. He was afraid he'd lose time. Eventually Danny managed to climb inside the side window.

He won his last major race, the Baja 1000 in 1982 at age 55 by setting fire to his engine when it flooded out in a tidal pool. And then to put out the flames, he raced away at 100 mph. In another race his car broke down in first place just short of the finish line. So he got out and pushed it the final 200 feet.

While such determination made Thompson a dominant force in off road racing, not everyone found it the most endearing of traits. "By his nature and by his personality I'm sure that he has pissed off, alienated and offended may people," says Sal Fish, president of Score International, an off-road sanctioning and promotion company founded by Thompson. "In his negotiations Mickey was very bull headed. He got it done but in getting it done, he left a lot of carnage around. Mickey was the kind of guy who would pound on you and pound on you till he won."

In business his stamina gave him an incredible advantage. He could negotiate all day long and by 10 pm when the other people would be totally exhausted, says Fish, "he would say, 'We're going to settle it right now. Let's do it. Let's do it right now.' And 99% of the time the people would fold."

But it wasn't merely his energy, says Fish, Thompson was very smart and shrewd. "I'd put him up against any graduate of Harvard, Yale or MIT and Mickey would consume him. He was a street fighter." And he didn't much care about all the social graces.

You could go to a restaurant with him trying to settle a quarter of a million dollar deal and when the waitress would come, says Fish, before anyone else could say anything, he'd say, "Bring me three bowls of chocolate ice cream and two cokes, honey." Or if he was really hungry, he'd say, "Bring me the best steak in the house, and ketchup."

On the positive side, says Fish, "once you had a deal, Mickey kept his word. If he said you were going to get (paid so much) for something, you would get it and you would get it on time--no hanky panky, no 'Can you wait 20 days?' no 'Can you take it on installment?' But when you negotiated, you better get what you wanted because what you got was what you agreed on."

He never whined when a deal when bad, agrees Joel Ralph. "He said, 'I shook your hand. It's a deal.' He felt that his handshake was good as a signed contract."

In spite of the way he dominated the off-track racing industry, he was in some ways a humble guy. "When the (office) employees went home at 6 in the evening," says DeStefano, "he would thank them for coming to work. He thought they were doing him a favor by working for him."

Unlike some clients, says his attorney, Phil Bartinetti, he didn't "have the attitude, 'I'm paying. So your time is my time.' We had to talk business one Sunday. They came out to my house and brought a cake. Whenever Trudy came to the office she would bring a big tin of butter cookies." And whenever he had a stadium race scheduled he would send complimentary tickets for the office staff.

There was another side which many people didn't get to see either. "I never had a Christmas without my brother and I'm 55 years old," says Colleen Campbell. "I never had an Easter without him. I only missed Thanksgiving once. And he didn't come just for dinner. He used to show up every Christmas morning for breakfast and stay three days."

For a hard-nosed man of the world, says Campbell, Thompson was a sensitive man who cried easily. "He would try to say something sentimental and he couldn't get it out. He cried when mom gave the Thanksgiving dinner blessing (and thanked) God for us all being together."

In later years there was another occasion when Thompson cried a lot, but this time they tears of frustration. In 1984, Thompson's wife, Trudy, ended up in the hospital with knee problems. The doctors said she might never walk again. And Thompson, says DeStefano, decided on the spot, "That's it. I'm going to spend more time with Trudy."

In those days Thompson was still struggling to get off-track road racing established as a stadium sport. It was an expensive proposition. Just to prepare the track took four days and 350 truck loads of dirt. At the same time, he was competing for the same racing fans with Mike Goodwin, a Laguna Beach promoter who pioneered the idea of stadium motocross (motorcycle) racing.

At this point, Jim Hardy, who was then the Coliseum general manager, came up with the idea of Thompson and Goodwin working together in a joint venture.

"Mike is a terrific promoter," says Hardy. "It costs a lot of money to put the track on. I thought they could compliment one another."

Thompson was receptive. If for no other reason, it gave him more time with Trudy. Unfortunately, says racing writer Deke Houlgate, the relationship fell apart in less than six months after only three or four races. "It was chaos."

It was also a contrast in basic values. "Goodwin is a big buy with a beard, mustache and perm, who comes on strong," a reporter wrote about him in 1971. "At 6-3, 230, he seems all hair, chest and words."

In college at San Diego State, he got his start in promotion by holding TGIF parties. Later, he said, he put on "Janis Joplin's last tour" and "one of the first concerts by the Carpenters."

As someone who, he says, has an "epic appetite for life," on one occasion he speared an 185 pound boar in Tennessee, he lost "one cheek of my butt" when he fell off a motorcycle at 132 mph and he once shot a 9 foot Kodiak bear with a .44 magnum. In 1976, he told the Times, he ruptured his lungs while diving off Catalina. They choppered him to the USC medical center where an orderly put a Dead On Arrival tag on his toe before he finally revived.

Until recently he lived in a three level hillside home in Laguna Beach and worked at an an antique desk once owned by financier Jay Gould. By his own account, he was not an easy person to work for. "Half the people I hire," he once told the Times, "are gone in three days."

In short, says Sal Fish, the contrast with Thompson couldn't have been more striking. "Goodwin would drive up in a Clenet, wearing a full length white coat with his wife in the background talking about Rembrandts and how much money they made on the last race.

"Mickey Thompson, on the other hand, would drive up--figuratively--in bib overalls, in some shit box of a car, saying, 'I just lost a quarter million on my last race but . . . I'm to make it up on volume.'"

Their inevitable problems initially hinged on a different interpretation of their agreement. Thompson believed the contract called for them to share expenses for putting on races. Goodwin said the contract didn't require him to share any of Thompson's expenses until an 18 month trial period was up.

In short order, says DeStefano, Thompson found himself writing a series of big checks to Goodwin. After an Indianapolis event went down the tubes, says DeStefano, "Mickey finally asked, 'How much money are you putting in?' Goodwin said, 'I'm not. I'm pulling out.'"

Within 30 days of the Indianapolis race, Thompson sued Goodwin for hundreds of thousands of dollars he said he lost during the 1984 racing season. And Goodwin responded with a $2 million countersuit.

In May of 1986, a Superior Court "rent-a-judge" sided with Thompson on nearly ever point, ruling that Goodwin's failure to provide Thompson with financial statements was a "an intentional or recklessly careless act designed to mislead Thompson into continuing to advance cash." And the judge awarded Thompson approximately $750,000. When Thompson tried to collect the judgement, Goodwin declared bankruptcy.

Lawsuits in the meanwhile were flying back and forth thick and fast as rabid bats. When you added up all of Goodwin's lawsuits against third parties, says Collen Campbell, they reached as high as 14. Goodwin's attorney, Ronald Coulombe of Costa Mesa, said "I can say without a doubt it is probably the most complex set of lawsuits I have ever been involved in and the most highly emotionally charged."

Goodwin wasn't any stranger to lawsuits. "He was always suing someone for something," says DeStefano, who worked for Goodwin for 10 years before going to work for Thompson. But up till now he'd generally always won.

Which made his loss to Thompson all the more devastating.

For one, as Goodwin was fond of telling practically anyone who would listen, he was the one who invented motocross racing in a stadium. He introduced motorcycles to Anaheim, was a tenant for 13 years, sold out ten in a row and held the attendance record for a stadium sporting event. But "as soon as the judgement came down," says Houlgate, "Goodwin put himself in bankruptcy. He lost his franchise. He got his business taken away from him." Now it was Thompson who was running motorcycle races at Anaheim.

"One day (Goodwin) was king at Anaheim," says Fish. "The next day . . . he lost his world."

Goodwin tried to prevent Thompson from running motorcyles, but in January 1988, a judge denied the injunction. At the same time, the state supreme court refused to hear Goodwin's appeal of Thompson's original $750,000 against him. He had to sell his house. The sheriff repossessed his Mercedes. (Thompson offered it to DeStefano who said no.) Thompson attached $400,000 from the gate at Goodwin's last Coliseum show. "(Goodwin) had lost just about everything up to that date," says DeStefano. "His (press) releases no longer had any credibility. He couldn't get anyone to see his side. He was getting more and more desperate."

Thompson had long maintained that when Goodwin declared bankruptcy, he improperly withdrew assets from his estate and put them in his wife's name. Starting in March, Thompson and Goodwin began negotiating an agreement which would stipulate that Goodwin could not use bankruptcy as a way to avoid paying Thompson's judgement. "We were very close to settling it," says Bartinetti, "when it fell out of bed on the evening of March 15th." As part of the deal, says Bartinetti, Goodwin wanted to draw down an additional $300,000 from some Palm Desert property belonging to his wife. Thompson said, "no way." The next morning Thompson and his wife were dead.

As part of their investigation, sheriff homicide investigators tried to talk to Goodwin, but through his attorney he declined to be interviewed. As is his constitutional right, says Goodwin's attorney, Ronald Coulombe of Costa Mesa, Goodwin is "not commenting on anything having to do with the homicide." As for any alleged threats, "there is," says Coulombe, "not a scintilla of evidence that any threats were made by Mr. Goodwin against anyone."

In the 10 weeks since the Thompson's murder, family and friends have still not accommodated themselves to their loss. Greg Smith, the general manager at Anaheim, says he was so used to hearing the door open and Thompson coming down the hall every evening to sit in his office and chat that sometimes when he's working late he'll hear the door open and just for a second he'll "look up and expect to see Mickey."

"The days were different after his death," says Phil Bartinetti. "You did the same things you always did but they didn't have the same significance. It's a cliche but you were confronted with your own mortality. They did all these things and now they are gone."

To sheriff's investigators, the murder of Mickey and Trudy Thompson weren't just killings, they were outright "assassinations." For one thing, although Trudy was wearing $75,000 worth of jewelry when killed (a 3 caret engagement ring, a wedding ring, three other diamond rings and two gold pins), the killers never touched a thing. For another, says Deke Houlgate, "I suspect they made him watch them kill her. They shot his knees out and his (buttocks) and then they shot him in the head."

"The killers didn't have the balls to shoot him face to face," says Danny Thompson. "He was too powerful. Nothing would have stopped him, especially if he thought they were hurting his wife. It doesn't take much of a man to hide in the bushes and shoot someone when they walk out. The whole thing is so unjust. They didn't even give him a sporting chance. If you have to hide in a bush, what does that take? What kind of person do you have to do that?

As for Trudy, says Colleen Campbell, "she was dainty and petit and not athletic and they jumped out of the bushes and shot her. Even the Mafia doesn't kill women."

Although the sheriff's department still has seven full time investigators working on the case, they haven't had any luck up to this time and, says Lt. Kenneth J. Chausse of the homicide bureau, "we don't have a sense of progress."

To help find the Thompsons' killers, family and friends of Thompson raised a $255,000 reward for information leading to the killers' arrest and conviction. "But our news conference got pre-empted by two hot stories," says Danny Thompson, "the First Interstate fire and the explosion in Henderson."

Still Danny Thompson is confident. "When you got $255,000," he says, "that is going to turn some people over. Someone's girlfriend. Someone's wife. With that kind of money you can almost start a new life."

Perhaps even more important to eventually solving the murders, says Sal Fish, is the tenacity of Colleen Campbell. "Whoever did this thing should have taken Colleen out too. She will not let this thing rest. She is not going to let up." In 1982, Colleen lost her 27 year old son Scott Campbell when he was thrown out of an airplane near Catalina Island in a drug-related revenge slaying. The Campbells began a private investigation of the murder which five years later eventually led to the killers' convictions.

"I'm used to tragedy," says Colleen Campbell. "My father dove in a swimming pool, his head on the bottom and drowned. But to lose someone to murder is the worst punishment a family can go through. You re-live it and re- live it. There's no peace till you get the people who did it.

"I'm doing what I know my brother would do for me. I'll tell you, they got one more Thompson to take out if they think they are going to walk."