About The Book

The Last Battle: Becoming Someone Else is a cinematic true story about a young man who made millions trafficking marijuana before he could legally drink—then vanished into the mirage of a golden sunset in search of a normal life. For the next seven years, his big-screen life turned corrosive, as he fought to escape the ego his past created.

By the age of twenty-two, Thomas Mayhew had already lived a Hollywood existence: a prodigious and popular West Point-bound teenager turned opiate-addicted, millionaire marijuana trafficker—evading the DEA, cartels, prison, and death—all beneath the façade of a full-time student-athlete earning two bachelor’s degrees. Upon graduating, he vanished into that sunset chasing one impossible dream: normalcy.

He commuted to work, earned a humble salary, met a Czech girl and married her. But in the theater of his mind, his ego threw popcorn and shouted, “This movie sucks!” as it unseated him with the restlessness of an unscratchable itch. Vodka’s nails scratched it, and for the next seven years, Mayhew free-falls as he fiercely battles his ego’s “diabolic spawn”—winless. His ego weaponizes hope against him. Death and Mayhew embrace endlessly—yet endlessly elude one another.