Mike Ramirez used to live large. Armani suits. Rolex watches. Picasso prints.
Local radio executives remember him as an advertising genius and one of the best negotiators ever to work in the L.A. media business.
He got his start buying ad time for get-rich-quick tapes and 900-number hotlines on late-night TV. But he rose to become known as the guy behind Best Funding mortgage ads, which were ubiquitous on radio a few years ago.
Considering he had worked in the fields when he was young, Ramirez’s career climb was impressive. But in recent years, his life spiraled downward at a stunning pace. He used drugs, abused alcohol, and grew estranged from his ex-wives and children. Last year, he was homeless for a time. Finally, in a cheap apartment near downtown Los Angeles, Ramirez was found dead Jan. 10. He was 62.
The Los Angeles County Coroner turned the body over to his family, who had it cremated after a small private service.
“Mike had a great mind,” said Bill Hooey, a TV commercial director who knew him for 20 years. “Looking back at how much money flowed through his hands, Mike was definitely luckier than most. But not lucky enough.”
How did that happen? How could a man who had so much talent and success sink so low? Friends, former colleagues and his daughter pieced the story together for the Business Journal.
‘Downtown man’
Ramirez was born in 1948 in Watsonville in Monterey Bay and grew up in Delano in the Central Valley. As a teen, he picked crops to help support his family and was involved in Cesar Chavez’s historic fight to organize the United Farm Workers.
After graduating from high school, Ramirez got a job selling advertising for a Spanish-language radio station in Bakersfield. He became general manager, then bought his own station in Santa Maria, where he moved with his wife and two daughters.
Later, he went to work at a radio station in Ontario, divorced his wife and moved to Los Angeles, which is where he wanted to make his name.
“He was a downtown man; he loved the fast-paced lifestyle,” said daughter Monica Olesniewicz, who now lives in Claremont. “We always lived out in the suburbs, so it didn’t work out.”
In 1982, Ramirez founded ad agency MultiMedia American. He soon married again and had another daughter and a son, but divorced his second wife within a few years.
By 1991, MultiMedia American had seven employees and an office in Pasadena. Ramirez bought ad time on both English- and Spanish-language stations for several small retailers. His biggest account was Don LePre, who sold get-rich-quick books and tapes.
Hooey described Ramirez as “a very impulsive guy.” For example, Ramirez met a young female model and married her within days, only to divorce her a few weeks later.
But he could tap into those impulses and use them to fashion ad campaigns.
“He would listen to a piece of copy for an ad and instantly know if that copy was going to work,” Hooey said. “He was always right when it came to that.”
Ramirez made his first big money selling psychic hot lines and party chat lines, famous for their 900 prefixes, in the mid-1990s.
“He had a knack for getting people to pick up the phone,” said Andrew Reeder, a former commercial director who is now chief executive of Hispanic Business Radio in Laguna Niguel. “He was a romantic and knew the right words to get people to make that pay-by-the-minute call.”
When the money was flowing, Ramirez indulged his two vices: alcohol and cocaine.
“People would say, ‘He’s just partying, but he’s good at what he does,’” Reeder recalled. “It was real prevalent in adverting and entertainment to do the things that killed him.”
One of Ramirez’s favorite ad formats was the live radio spot. Chuck Buck, a partner in MultiMedia American from 2002 to 2004 and now chief executive of Internet firm RAC Monitor in San Diego, remembers driving in Ramirez’s white Mercedes-Benz on the San Diego (405) Freeway while Ramirez was phoning in a live ad on his cell phone.
Weaving through traffic, Ramirez flawlessly delivered the commercial, repeated the phone number and cracked jokes with the disc jockey in Spanish. In the passenger seat, Buck remembers counting down the final seconds of the ad, but Ramirez was so funny the DJ let him keep talking, getting extra air time for his client.
It was Ramirez at the top of his game, Buck said.
Mortgage gold mine
Maybe the booze and coke wouldn’t have done him in. Maybe he could’ve sobered up. But his 7-year-old son, Michael Jr., died of cancer in 1995, and Ramirez was despondent about it.
He had already distanced himself from his former spouses and families, but that didn’t matter – he took the boy’s death hard. He suffered whenever the anniversary date came around.
“Today is the day that Mikey died,” Ramirez said to Buck quietly one day as they were making their rounds in Los Angeles.
“Every anniversary he would remind me,” Buck said. “It left a scar that never healed. He would recite exactly what the doctor told him about his son’s condition.”
With the rise of the Internet, the 900-number fad died. Ramirez took on more conventional clients, including the San Diego Zoo, Discount Tires and local car dealerships. He closed the Pasadena agency and worked solo from his white Mercedes for several years.
Ramirez found his next gold mine in 2004. Best Funding was a small mortgage broker with a single office in the City of Industry, but Ramirez saw its potential.
Mary Beth Garber, president of industry trade group Southern California Broadcasters Association, said Ramirez had already established himself as a radio ad wiz, but his legacy will be his work selling mortgages.
“Best Funding was his gold mine,” she said. “At one point, he was booking millions of dollars in advertising for that one client.”
Ramirez started running Best Funding ads heavily on English- and Spanish-language radio stations. Bob Moore, now general manager KABC-AM (790), was then general manager at KLSX-FM (97.1), owned by CBS. He said Ramirez bought more than $100,000 a month worth of Best Funding ads on the station.
These were peak years for shock-jock programming and KLSX was the L.A. station for Howard Stern. Ramirez put on so many ads starring Fernando Perez, chief executive at Best Funding, that listener polls found Perez was a recognizable name, too.
“With his help, Best Funding became the biggest client CBS radio ever had in Los Angeles,” said Cal Saul, a former sales executive at CBS who now works at ABC Radio.
The good life
With the money flowing again, Ramirez bought a luxury condominium in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. He also rented a posh office on the second floor of the same building.
Always a smart dresser, he wore Rolex watches, $300 shirts and Armani suits.
Because of his connections to Spanish-language media, he was invited to parties when Mexican singers or stars came to Los Angeles. Sometimes he would fly off on a private jet to see them in Cancun or Miami. He bought a vacation home in Del Mar. He started collecting art, notably Picasso prints.
But business associates noticed a change. It became apparent that Ramirez had a drinking and drug habit, although they were amazed at his ability to keep his demons under control when business demanded it.
“He could come into his office Monday morning after a weekend of excess and he would be completely sharp,” Hooey said.
“He was pretty much partying all the time,” said Saul. “He was an old-school radio guy who would have double-martini lunches and stuff like that. But he was probably the best negotiator I’ve ever worked with in terms of getting low rates for his clients.”
One day Hooey visited Ramirez at his Bunker Hill office. A line of cocaine was on the desk. Ramirez snorted it, then picked up the phone and talked with a client, coherent and composed.
“That’s a talent, in a bizarre way,” said Hooey. “Sometimes with Mike I thought God gave the wrong man a lot of talent. But of course that’s God’s prerogative.”
‘I didn’t like him’
Ramirez’s life fell further in 2009. By then, the mortgage business had cratered and Best Funding was reduced to a shell. (Perez, chief executive of Best Funding, did not respond to an e-mail for this article.)
“Once the housing boom busted, he essentially lost his only source of income,” Garber said.
The economy had sent the entire advertising sector into a tailspin. In 2009, radio advertising in Los Angeles shrank 21 percent.
Phill Gottstein, ad sales executive at Spanish-language radio duopoly KLAX-FM (97.9) and KXOL-FM (96.3), said that by that time the drug abuse was showing when Ramirez did business.
In meetings, he would talk fast and loud, almost shouting big ideas, and then suddenly fall quiet and fatigued. Ramirez negotiated big ad buys, but Gottstein thought he was being conned by Ramirez. His suspicions were confirmed when no dollars materialized, so the negotiations were a waste of time.
“He had a problem with his habit and it cost him his better judgment,” Gottstein said. “I grew tired of his games. In all honesty, I didn’t like him.”
Moore, the general manager at CBS, had similar experiences.
“At meetings you never knew which Mike Ramirez you would get – the brilliant marketing genius or this slobbering guy not making any sense,” he said.
Gottstein said that Ramirez eventually lost the trust of people at local media stations. That destroyed his ability to buy time on credit or negotiate low rates. His career, essentially, was finished.
“It bruised his ego to see himself shut off that way,” Hooey said.
And he still felt the pain of his son’s death. One day Ramirez called Hooey saying he was going to commit suicide. Hooey had a dinner appointment that evening with a black evangelical preacher and invited Ramirez to come along. The preacher tried to give Ramirez hope, but “Mike didn’t get religion; he was too angry,” Hooey recalled.
The end
By early 2010, Best Funding had closed. Ramirez was evicted from his office and condo. A married couple and the wife’s sister took him into their Van Nuys home. He had met the wife at a botox clinic where he’d been getting treatments and they had become friends.
He was still promoting a few small law firms and retailers, working on a cell phone Hooey loaned him and using a fax machine at a FedEx Office storefront.
Last July, he showed up at an apartment complex Hooey owns in the Mid-City area looking for a place to live. The family in Van Nuys had kicked him out. Ramirez said it was because one night he was sleepwalking and unconsciously climbed into bed with the wife’s sister.
Hooey knew it was a ridiculous lie, but he agreed to let Ramirez live in an unused TV studio behind the apartment building in exchange for a promise to keep off drugs and alcohol. Hooey encouraged him to return to rehab, but Ramirez just rolled his eyes.
He stayed two months before moving into an apartment in the 1200 block of Seventh Street, just west of downtown. He got a job as a shoe salesman – the only work he could find – but was let go.
Soon after that, on Jan. 10, he was found unresponsive in his apartment and pronounced dead when paramedics arrived. The coroner has not yet announced the cause of death, pending results of toxicology tests.
“Unfortunately, he was haunted by demons,” said KABC’s Moore.
“Some people can’t be saved,” Hooey concluded. “Eventually, they self-destruct. Sometimes they just become a statistic, and that’s how Mike ended up.”
