.gif)
David Mack (police officer)
Encyclopedia
David Anthony Mack is a former LAPD
Rampart Division
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH)
officer. He is one of the central figures in the LAPD
Rampart police corruption scandal
. Mack was arrested for masterminding the November 6, 1997, robbery of $722,000 from a South Central Los Angeles
branch of Bank of America
. He was sentenced to 14 years and three months in federal prison. Mack has never revealed the whereabouts of the money.
neighborhood as Suge Knight
.
A remarkable athlete, Mack ran for Locke High School
and was champion at the CIF California State Meet
at 880 yards, two years in a row. Mack earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon
, where he ran track and after finishing 6th in the Olympic Trials
in 1980, eventually made the United States national team running the 800 metres
in the 1987 World Championships in Athletics
. Mack won three Pac-10 conference titles and an NCAA championship in the 800 meters. As of 2008, Mack is still the third fastest American in history at 800 meters with a personal best of 1 minute, 43.35 seconds. A leg injury kept him out of the 1984 Summer Olympics
and eventually cut short his track career.
Mack joined the LAPD
in 1988. He was married with two children. Before the scandal, Mack held the rank
of Senior Lead Officer (two chevrons above a star).
during an undercover drug operation.
campus. Normally the bank kept about $350,000 cash in the vault, but slightly more than double that amount had just been delivered by armored car on the morning of November 6, 1997, when a black male (Mack) wearing a three-piece gray suit, sunglasses and a tweed beret, walked into the bank and headed for the bulletproof door that separated the tellers from customers. After the man in the suit (Mack) told a security guard that he wanted to get into his safe deposit box
, Romero buzzed him through the first gate, then left her window and unlocked a second security door that opened into the vault area. Mack immediately shoved Romero to the floor, opened his suit jacket to reveal a Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol hanging from a shoulder strap, pointed it at two women counting money and threatened them. By the time Mack and his two accomplices abandoned their white van a half-mile away, they had pulled off one of the largest heists in Los Angeles history.
, a gang with ties to Death Row Records
. Mack was hired as an off-duty body guard for Death Row Records by Death Row founder Marion "Suge" Knight, also a Blood. Investigating LAPD detectives Russell Poole (Ret.) and Brian Tyndall (Ret.) both believe David Mack was involved in the conspiracy to kill rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
What helped to make Mack a person of interest in the case was the black seventh generation (1994–1996) Chevrolet Impala SS parked in Mack's garage next to a wall decorated with Tupac Shakur posters and memorabilia; detectives described it as a sort of "shrine" to the slain rapper who was murdered when an unknown number of assailants in a white, four-door, late-model Cadillac killed him.
"As soon as I learned that David Mack owned a vehicle that matched the one used in the Biggie Smalls killing and that Mack had used it in the bank robbery, I asked to have it tested by our forensics people," Russell Poole, the lead investigator in the Shakur murder investigation, recalled in 2001. "But the brass said they didn't want to step on the FBI's toes. What they didn't want was to find out that one of our officers was implicated in Biggie Smalls' murder."
Mack did not become the primary focus of Poole's investigation, however, until the detective learned that the first person to visit the officer in jail was former Oregon teammate Harry Billups aka Amir Muhammed, who at the time was also suspected in the murder.
Mack was named in the April 16, 2007 wrongful death lawsuit filed by the rapper's family against the city of Los Angeles.
street gang. Mack's jailers reported he used a red toothbrush, wore red socks, and wore as much red as could be attained in a federal prison. According to former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, "It appears he has completely divested himself of all relationships of his life as a police officer. He is basically a gang member. He has taken on the role of being a gang member in jail." While serving his sentence, Mack apparently was involved in a gang-related confrontation while in prison that resulted in him being stabbed.
Mack was released on May 14, 2010.
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
Rampart Division
LAPD Rampart Division
The Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department serves communities to the west and northwest of Downtown Los Angeles including Echo Park, Pico-Union and Westlake, all together designated as the Rampart patrol area. Its name is derived from Rampart Boulevard, one of the principal...
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH)
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, usually known by the acronym C.R.A.S.H., was an elite, but controversial special operations unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was established by then-chief Daryl Gates to combat the rising problem of gangs in Los Angeles, California...
officer. He is one of the central figures in the LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
Rampart police corruption scandal
Rampart Scandal
The Rampart scandal refers to widespread corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department Rampart Division in the late 1990s. More than 70 police officers in the CRASH unit were implicated in misconduct, making it one of the most...
. Mack was arrested for masterminding the November 6, 1997, robbery of $722,000 from a South Central Los Angeles
South Los Angeles
South Los Angeles, often abbreviated as South L.A. and formerly South Central Los Angeles, is the official name for a large geographic and cultural portion lying to the southwest and southeast of downtown Los Angeles, California. The area was formerly called South Central, and is still widely known...
branch of Bank of America
Bank of America
Bank of America Corporation, an American multinational banking and financial services corporation, is the second largest bank holding company in the United States by assets, and the fourth largest bank in the U.S. by market capitalization. The bank is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina...
. He was sentenced to 14 years and three months in federal prison. Mack has never revealed the whereabouts of the money.
Early life
David Mack grew up in the same ComptonCompton, California
Compton is a city in southern Los Angeles County, California, United States, southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The city of Compton is one of the oldest cities in the county and on May 11, 1888, was the eighth city to incorporate. The city is considered part of the South side by residents of Los...
neighborhood as Suge Knight
Suge Knight
Marion "Suge" Knight, Jr. is the founder and CEO of Black Kapital Records and co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records. Death Row Records rose to dominate the rap charts after Dr. Dre's breakthrough album The Chronic in 1992. After several years of chart successes for artists including...
.
A remarkable athlete, Mack ran for Locke High School
Locke High School
Alain Leroy Locke High School is a Title 1 co-educational charter high school located in Los Angeles, California, United States, and is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District/Green Dot Public Schools. It is named after Alain LeRoy Locke....
and was champion at the CIF California State Meet
CIF California State Meet
The CIF California State Meet is the annual championship track and field meet for the California Interscholastic Federation. The meet was started in 1915 for boys and 1974 for girls. Every athlete in every high school in California has a direct qualification path that can reach the state meet...
at 880 yards, two years in a row. Mack earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon
University of Oregon
-Colleges and schools:The University of Oregon is organized into eight schools and colleges—six professional schools and colleges, an Arts and Sciences College and an Honors College.- School of Architecture and Allied Arts :...
, where he ran track and after finishing 6th in the Olympic Trials
United States Olympic Trials (track and field)
The United States Olympic Trials for the sport of Track and Field is the quadrennial meet to select the United States representatives at the Olympic Games. Since 1992, the meet has also served as the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. Because of the depth of competition in some events,...
in 1980, eventually made the United States national team running the 800 metres
800 metres
The 800 meter race is a common track running event. It is the shortest common middle distance track event. The 800 meter is run over two laps of the track and has always been an Olympic event. During indoor track season the event is usually run on a 200 meter track, therefore requiring four laps...
in the 1987 World Championships in Athletics
1987 World Championships in Athletics
The 2nd World Championships in Athletics under the auspices of the International Association of Athletics Federations were held in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, Italy between August 28 and September 6, 1987.-Track:1983 | 1987 | 1991 | 1993 | 1995...
. Mack won three Pac-10 conference titles and an NCAA championship in the 800 meters. As of 2008, Mack is still the third fastest American in history at 800 meters with a personal best of 1 minute, 43.35 seconds. A leg injury kept him out of the 1984 Summer Olympics
1984 Summer Olympics
The 1984 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIII Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Los Angeles, California, United States in 1984...
and eventually cut short his track career.
Mack joined the LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
in 1988. He was married with two children. Before the scandal, Mack held the rank
Police rank
- Australia :Generally, all police forces of Australia follow this rank structure with some individual state police forces have ranks differing slightly.Insignia of rank displayed on epaulette in italics and brackets...
of Senior Lead Officer (two chevrons above a star).
Early career
He started out on patrol duty in the department's Southeast and Rampart Divisions but soon was assigned to the Narcotics Bureau as an undercover narcotics officer. Soon after that, Mack gave up his assignment to the Narcotics Bureau to work the graveyard shift in West Los Angeles. He allegedly needed to spend more time with his wife, son and daughter. The flexibility of his new schedule also allowed Mack to devote more hours to his extracurricular activities. Among these was his relationship with Errolyn Romero, who was a nineteen-year-old ticket taker at the Baldwin Theatre when Mack began a relationship with her in 1990.Medal for Heroism
In 1993, Officer Mack was awarded the LAPD's second-highest medal, the Police Medal for Heroism, for shooting a drug dealer who had drawn a gun and taken aim at the head of his then-partner, Officer Rafael "Ray" PérezRafael Pérez (police officer)
Rafael Antonio "Ray" Pérez , is a former Los Angeles Police Department C.R.A.S.H officer and the central figure in the LAPD Rampart Scandal. He was involved in the coverup of a $722,000 bank robbery, shot and framed Javier Ovando, and stole and resold at least $800,000 of cocaine from LAPD...
during an undercover drug operation.
Bank robbery
Mack was involved with Errolyn Romero in August 1997, when Romero went to work at the Bank of America branch at Jefferson Avenue and South Hoover Street, just north of the USCUniversity of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
campus. Normally the bank kept about $350,000 cash in the vault, but slightly more than double that amount had just been delivered by armored car on the morning of November 6, 1997, when a black male (Mack) wearing a three-piece gray suit, sunglasses and a tweed beret, walked into the bank and headed for the bulletproof door that separated the tellers from customers. After the man in the suit (Mack) told a security guard that he wanted to get into his safe deposit box
Safe deposit box
A safe deposit box or wrongly referred to as a safety deposit box is an individually-secured container, usually held within a larger safe or bank vault. Safe deposit boxes are generally located in banks, post offices or other institutions...
, Romero buzzed him through the first gate, then left her window and unlocked a second security door that opened into the vault area. Mack immediately shoved Romero to the floor, opened his suit jacket to reveal a Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol hanging from a shoulder strap, pointed it at two women counting money and threatened them. By the time Mack and his two accomplices abandoned their white van a half-mile away, they had pulled off one of the largest heists in Los Angeles history.
Gang membership and alleged role in the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.
Mack was a member of the BloodsBloods
The Bloods are a street gang founded in Los Angeles, California. The gang is widely known for its rivalry with the Crips. They are identified by the red color worn by their members and by particular gang symbols, including distinctive hand signs...
, a gang with ties to Death Row Records
Death Row Records
Death Row Records is a record label founded in 1991 by Marion "Suge" Knight Jr., Andre Young , Tracy Lynn Curry and Michael Harris . It is known to have been home to many popular West Coast hip hop artists such as Dr...
. Mack was hired as an off-duty body guard for Death Row Records by Death Row founder Marion "Suge" Knight, also a Blood. Investigating LAPD detectives Russell Poole (Ret.) and Brian Tyndall (Ret.) both believe David Mack was involved in the conspiracy to kill rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
The Notorious B.I.G.
Christopher George Latore Wallace , best known as The Notorious B.I.G., was an American rapper. He was also known as Biggie Smalls , Big Poppa, and The Black Frank White .Wallace was raised in the Brooklyn borough...
What helped to make Mack a person of interest in the case was the black seventh generation (1994–1996) Chevrolet Impala SS parked in Mack's garage next to a wall decorated with Tupac Shakur posters and memorabilia; detectives described it as a sort of "shrine" to the slain rapper who was murdered when an unknown number of assailants in a white, four-door, late-model Cadillac killed him.
"As soon as I learned that David Mack owned a vehicle that matched the one used in the Biggie Smalls killing and that Mack had used it in the bank robbery, I asked to have it tested by our forensics people," Russell Poole, the lead investigator in the Shakur murder investigation, recalled in 2001. "But the brass said they didn't want to step on the FBI's toes. What they didn't want was to find out that one of our officers was implicated in Biggie Smalls' murder."
Mack did not become the primary focus of Poole's investigation, however, until the detective learned that the first person to visit the officer in jail was former Oregon teammate Harry Billups aka Amir Muhammed, who at the time was also suspected in the murder.
Mack was named in the April 16, 2007 wrongful death lawsuit filed by the rapper's family against the city of Los Angeles.
Prison sentence
Mack has refused to cooperate with police, and was known to brag to fellow prisoners that his $700,000 bank score was invested in such a way that it would have doubled in value by the time he concluded his 14-year sentence. While in prison, Mack severed his ties with the LAPD and became an avowed member of the BloodsBloods
The Bloods are a street gang founded in Los Angeles, California. The gang is widely known for its rivalry with the Crips. They are identified by the red color worn by their members and by particular gang symbols, including distinctive hand signs...
street gang. Mack's jailers reported he used a red toothbrush, wore red socks, and wore as much red as could be attained in a federal prison. According to former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, "It appears he has completely divested himself of all relationships of his life as a police officer. He is basically a gang member. He has taken on the role of being a gang member in jail." While serving his sentence, Mack apparently was involved in a gang-related confrontation while in prison that resulted in him being stabbed.
Mack was released on May 14, 2010.