Fit to Be Recognized

0

When Phillip Maltin agreed to be filmed working out for a P90X video about eight years ago, he never thought he’d become famous.

Maltin and Tony Horton, the founder of the popular exercise regimen, have been friends for years, he said, and they would regularly work out together on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier.

But sure enough, the exercise video went viral and fitness fanatics from all over the country began recognizing Maltin everywhere he went, he said.

“They’d come up to the dinner table,” Maltin said. “It usually happened at least twice a week when it first came out.”

He still gets attention.

Maltin, 56, was hired last month as a partner in the Century City law office of Lathrop & Gage. When he traveled to the law firm’s home office in Kansas City, Mo., late last month to meet his new partners, a staffer asked if he was the workout guy.

“People are just so into it,” Maltin said. “It’s still funny to me how people reach out because they’ve seen me on the video.”

While he doesn’t have immediate plans to participate in another workout video, Maltin said he wouldn’t mind returning to the spotlight.

“If asked, I will serve,” he said.

Loose Lips …

Ernie Cooper is a partner in the downtown L.A. office of Glendora accounting firm Vicenti Lloyd & Stutzman. But before that, he was an FBI agent who combed the books of such organizations as La Cosa Nostra looking for suspicious activity.

While Cooper wouldn’t trade his experience for anything, today he enjoys the relatively predictable – and less hazardous – schedule of a partner at a regional accounting firm. That’s a big difference from his time at the bureau, where he could be shipped anywhere on a moment’s notice – and once because of a random comment.

Cooper, 62, remembered a call he received one evening from his boss when he was working for the bureau in San Francisco.

“He said, ‘Ernie, I didn’t know you wanted to go to Puerto Rico?’” Cooper said.

That was news to Cooper, whose former supervisor had been assigned to the FBI’s office in the commonwealth’s capital of San Juan. Then Cooper remembered he had mentioned to his old boss that he liked to travel and spoke pretty good Spanish.

“I called up my buddy and asked him if he knew anything about me being transferred to San Juan,” Cooper said. “He said, ‘Oh, man, I didn’t think the bureau worked that fast.’”

Staff reporters Cale Ottens and Matt Pressberg contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

No posts to display