ROAD FROM EUGENE.
Byline: George Schroeder The Register-GuardOccasionally, he tells friends, he still runs. Some evenings when he has free time and feels like it, he makes a few laps around the track.
It's recreation, not competition. And maybe it's reminiscence. David Mack once dreamed of running 800 meters in 1 minute, 41 seconds. Now, time is measured in much larger increments.
Inmate No. 12866-112 is scheduled to be released from prison on May 16, 2010 - after 12 years, four months and 30 days behind bars. It's a long way from Eugene and the 1980 Olympic Trials to Butner Federal Correctional Facility in North Carolina, from the cusp of greatness to the clasp of iron bars.
"A sad story," said Bill Dellinger, the former Oregon track coach.
Or a very bad story. Depends on which version you believe.
David Mack, former University of Oregon standout and world-class middle-distance runner, disgraced ex-police officer, is a convicted bank robber. All these years later, the development still stuns his friends and former teammates, who remember a fun-loving, fantastic talent and wonder how and why he wandered off the right track.
More shocking is the possibility of more and darker twists. Some suspect Mack is guilty of masterminding something bigger, more notorious - the unsolved 1997 murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls, aka Christopher Wallace).
It's a complex tale with myriad subplots: gangsta rap wars, rival gangs, corrupt cops, cover-ups, lawsuits and lies - plenty of lies.
Books have been written and documentaries made. Some dismiss the whole saga as nothing more than juicy conspiracy theories. Others insist two former Oregon athletes had shadowy but starring roles.
Neither Mack nor former Oregon running back Harry Billups has ever been charged in relation to the murder. Officially, they're no longer considered suspects, and haven't been for years. But a federal lawsuit filed by Wallace's family alleges that both were involved. A former lead investigator on the case suspects as much, too.
Billups, who also goes by the name Amir Muhammad, could not be located. Mack responded to a written interview request with a letter, hand-written in pencil:
"I am flattered by your interest in my life. I have a high opinion of The Register-Guard. ... I regret that I must decline your interview request. I consider my life a private matter."
In the past, both men have denied involvement.
"I'm innocent," Mack told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. "I had nothing to do with the murder of Christopher Wallace."
Russell Poole, a former Los Angeles police detective who initially investigated the murder, said plenty of evidence pointed to Mack.
"I think (Mack) was a crook before he became a police officer," Poole said. He added: "These guys got away with a lot of stuff."
The Oregon trail
Mack grew up in the infamous Compton section of Los Angeles. He didn't meet his parents until he was 18. When he was running for Oregon, Mack painted a picture of his childhood as being filled with gangs and guns. He said he'd seen friends shot down in cold blood - and said he was glad to escape that environment.
"I've experienced a lot," he told The Register-Guard in 1982. "A lot that a lot of students have not had to deal with. ... You could get killed for stepping on another guy's shoes, or saying the wrong thing to the wrong people. It was crazy."
But Mack was able to outrun that life. After an outstanding career at Locke High School, he signed with Oregon at the urging of his high school coach. The package deal with another heralded Los Angeles runner, Jeff West, was big news for the UO program.
"I think it can be said they are just as talented as Alberto Salazar and Rudy Chapa were coming out of high school," Dellinger told The Register-Guard in April 1979.
West asked to be released from his commitment to Oregon and instead attended UCLA, where he became a friendly rival. But Mack lived up to the hype.
Register-Guard columnist Blaine Newnham called Mack the most exciting UO freshman since Steve Prefontaine. He was flashy and flamboyant, and self-described as arrogant and aloof. Oh, and fantastically talented: In three turbulent years at Oregon, Mack won three Pac-10 titles and one NCAA title in the 800 meters.
As an Oregon freshman in 1980, Mack won his semifinal heat in the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials at Hayward Field. In the final, he finished sixth.
"He was a ferocious competitor," former teammate Greg Erwin remembered. "Exceptionally talented. Unbelievably talented."
Dellinger said Mack had as much natural talent as anyone he'd ever coached - raw speed combined with strength - and it didn't take long to manifest. Shortly after Mack's arrival on campus, the Ducks held a week-long cross-country camp near Odell Lake. Upperclassmen Erwin and Jim Hill led a group on a fast-paced long run - 13, maybe 14 miles - on mountain trails. Mack's high school regimen had been minimal, perhaps 15 miles a week, according to Dellinger. Erwin didn't expect him to last long.
"Maybe he was absolutely petrified of being lost in the Cascade Mountains," Erwin said. "But he absolutely hung in there for an hour and a half at a pretty good pace. He was one of the most impressive athletes I've ever seen."
It was part of Mack's astounding versatility. His best distance was the 800 meters, which requires a combination of near sprinter's speed and distance runner's stamina. But he ran fast 400s, as well. And Hill remembered watching on television a few years later as Mack paced Sydney Maree to a world-record time of 3:31.24 in the 1,500.
"He ran all the way 'til the last 300 meters," Hill said. "He had a pretty good range."
When he saw that, Hill figured Mack's future might have been at the longer distance. Mack also helped pace Steve Ovett to a world record in the 1,500.
Away from the track, Mack's time at UO wasn't smooth. Former teammates described him as friendly and fun-loving and a typical college student.
"He was a little wild, but not in any bad way," Salazar said. "Nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal college kid."
But he struggled with the transition to sleepy Eugene - and occasionally, with Dellinger's coaching. According to Dellinger, Mack got into a fight on his first day in town, when "somebody looked at him sideways" in a McDonald's. Not too long after that, tipped by another athlete, the coach raced to Mack's apartment and talked him out of leaving school.
"He was out of his environment when he first came here, and it took him awhile to adjust," Dellinger told The Register-Guard in 1999, after Mack's conviction for bank robbery. "And I don't know that he ever adjusted to it, but he tried."
During interviews at the time, Mack admitted to a love-hate relationship with the town.
"I like running here and the training," he told The Register-Guard in 1980, "I'm just not so hot about the rest of it - the social life and everything."
And a year later: "People don't know me. ... I'm not unhappy here, but I'm not happy either. I kind of see this as punishment ... I'm putting in my time."
He briefly left Oregon after his sophomore season, citing differences with Dellinger, his desire to pursue a degree in criminology (Oregon didn't offer the major) and his longing for home. Part of the equation was also his long-distance romance with a young UCLA sprinter named Florence Griffith - later Griffith-Joyner.
But Mack returned a few months later and won his third straight Pac-10 title in the 800 meters. He followed up by winning the NCAA championship, running a 1:48.00 in a tactical race.
Then Mack was gone for good. When Hill bumped into him on campus during finals week, Mack told him he'd done everything he wanted to do at UO and was heading home.
"I fooled myself when I thought I could come back and cope with Eugene last year," Mack told The Register-Guard a few months later. "One man's happiness is another man's sadness. Eugene is just not for me.
"In running I was happy. But that is only a small part of my life."
Potential unfulfilled
For a while, it was a pretty big part. Running for Joe Douglas and the Santa Monica Track Club, Mack shot to prominence.
In 1983, he was ranked the nation's best in the 800 and No. 3 in the world. He competed in the World Championships in 1983 and again in 1987. In 1985, he ran 1:43.35 - at the time, the second-fastest ever by an American.
Douglas compared Mack to runners like Sebastian Coe and Johnny Gray and said he expected Mack to set the world record.
"He'd have broken 1:41," Douglas said recently - fully aware the current world record, more than 20 years after Mack's last competitive race, is 1:41.11.
"He was a Prefontaine in the 800 meters," said Brian Theriot, a former UCLA middle-distance runner and a longtime friend of Mack. "He could be the front-runner or attack from the back. When he was healthy, no one could touch him. No one."
But Mack missed a chance at the 1984 Olympics in his hometown because of a stress fracture in a shin suffered a few weeks before the Olympic Trials; he didn't survive the first round of qualifying. And then, in 1987, a mysterious ailment stalled and eventually cut short his career. Douglas said Mack suffered from a disorder; his body quit producing ferritin, a protein that helps cells store iron.
After several comeback tries yielded significantly slower times than he'd been running, a frustrated Mack retired, telling Douglas: "I'm terrible."
Not long after hanging up his spikes, Mack joined the Los Angeles Police Department, achieving a goal he'd talked about for years. In 1981, he'd told The Register-Guard:
"Ultimately, I might like to work for the FBI. But first I want to be a patrolman and then a parole officer for youth on probation. I know firsthand the problems young people have growing up in the ghetto. It's hard for most of them to see a way of doing anything with their lives. I want to go into the ghetto and help them."
Convicted of robbery
Mack's career in law enforcement seemed a perfect fit. Two years after joining the force, he became an undercover narcotics officer. In 1993, after shooting a drug dealer who allegedly was holding a gun on his partner, Rafael Perez, Mack was awarded the Police Medal, LAPD's second-highest honor.
Mack later left the narcotics bureau and took on a role training younger, less-experienced officers.
But on Dec. 16, 1997, he was arrested and charged with bank robbery. Soon enough, investigators came to suspect it might have been part of a much wider scope of criminal activity.
Forty days earlier, two men had entered a Bank of America branch near the USC campus. They walked out with $722,000 in shrink-wrapped bills, part of a shipment that had been delivered earlier in the day, hopped into a van driven by a third man and drove away.
Investigators suspected the robbers had inside help, and focused on a female teller. She performed poorly during a polygraph test, and during questioning, she finally cracked.
"You know who it is," she told the detectives, and pulled a business card from her purse, embossed with a police badge and the name "David Mack."
Evidence quickly bolstered her accusation.
"Take your best shot," one of the arresting officers reported Mack as saying when he was arrested.
At Mack's home, police discovered $5,600 in cash - all in $50 bills - and receipts totaling almost $20,000 in purchases made since the robbery. Investigators also learned Mack and two other LAPD officers had spent the weekend after the robbery in Las Vegas, where they had rented a $1,500 hotel suite and spent more than $20,000.
When the case went to trial several months later, prosecutors said they'd learned that even before the robbery, Mack had been living lavishly - trips, cars, fancy clothes - spending well beyond the means of a police officer making about $55,000 a year. They painted Mack as a womanizer and said he'd bragged while in jail about being a member of the Bloods street gang.
Defense attorneys and Mack's friends painted a picture of a devoted husband and father. Theriot, the former UCLA runner and longtime friend of Mack's, worked to raise money for his defense. In an open letter to Eugene residents, he wrote, "this is not the David Mack we all know and love."
Two other accomplices were never identified and the bulk of the stolen cash was never located. But Mack was convicted and sentenced to 171 months in federal prison; upon release, he would have to repay Bank of America $722 a month for 1,000 months.
In the months afterward, some investigators began to suspect the robbery might not have been Mack's worst offense. They wondered if his police work might have been a perfect cover for criminal activities - including murder.
A murder unsolved
Investigators had been told by various sources that Mack had been working for and associating with Marion "Suge" Knight, the legendary CEO of Death Row Records and the rap music industry's most feared figure.
Knight, who'd grown up in the same neighborhood as Mack, had a history of affiliation with the Bloods street gang and a long record of felonious assaults and threats. He'd turned Death Row into a $100 million-a-year business, but he'd done it through intimidation and violence.
Although he'd been sitting beside Tupac Shakur when the rapper was shot and killed in Las Vegas in September 1996, persistent rumors connected Knight to the murder.
Six months later, Notorious B.I.G. had been ambushed shortly after leaving a music industry party at the Petersen Automobile Museum in Los Angeles. While the SUV in which Wallace was riding idled at a stoplight, a car pulled alongside. According to witnesses, the driver shot the rapper several times, then sped away. Wallace was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
Various theories were floated, many linking both rappers' deaths. Wallace had been part of Bad Boy Entertainment, Death Row's East Coast-based rival. Many suspected a long-running feud had gone terribly wrong.
Russell Poole, the LAPD detective who'd been assigned as one of two lead investigators, quickly found reason to suspect Mack and his college friend, former Oregon running back Harry Billups, aka Amir Muhammad, Harry Muhammed and several other names.
Months before Mack's name surfaced in connection with the B.I.G. murder, an informant had told detectives the murder had been a contract hit, and the shooter was a Muslim named "Amir" or "Ashmir," supposedly connected with the Nation of Islam.
Ten days after Mack's arrest, Muhammad visited his old friend in jail. Poole said he found that Muhammad's driver's license photo resembled the composite sketch of witnesses' descriptions of Wallace's killer.
"It was almost identical," Poole said. "This was the biggest clue in the Biggie Smalls case."
Another witness, who'd been riding in the car with Wallace, picked Mack out of a photo lineup as having been present when Wallace and his entourage left the party. Still other evidence put Perez, Mack's friend and former partner, in attendance.
Poole came to believe the investigation should focus on Mack, Muhammad, Perez and their ties to Death Row Records. But others in the LAPD disagreed. Muhammad was never even interviewed by police. Both have long maintained their innocence.
"I'm not a murderer," Muhammad told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. "I'm a mortgage broker. ... I had nothing to do with this horrible crime. The police didn't chase this lead because they obviously realized at some point it wasn't true."
Police later said neither Mack nor Muhammad was a suspect; the theory has been officially discounted. But Poole, who was taken off the case and later resigned from the LAPD in 1999 after disputes with superiors, remains convinced that the evidence points to Mack and Billups. His investigation and theories were the focus of a book, "LAbyrinth," written by Portland author Randall Sullivan and published in 2002.
In the book and other articles and documentaries, as well as in a recent interview, Poole maintained he was discouraged from pursuing leads regarding Mack. He said some of his superiors feared it would uncover further, and significant, corruption in the police force.
Sullivan, a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, is also convinced.
"There's overwhelming evidence," he said, "that it was covered up."
It was Perez, Mack's former partner, who set off the LAPD's infamous Rampart scandal. After being charged with stealing drugs from a police evidence room, Perez implicated dozens of officers in tales of crimes and corruption. The resulting scandal rocked the department and led to federal oversight.
But all along, Perez insisted Mack was clean, a good cop. Poole and Sullivan suspect that Perez was afraid of Mack.
Although others have discounted Poole's theories, the family of the late Christopher Wallace has used them - and what they see as evidence of a police cover-up - as the basis for various incarnations of a civil lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, which has featured many twists and turns.
Billups and Mack were initially listed as defendants, but were dropped; Mack claimed the Wallace family's attorneys tried to entice him to testify in order to help their case. Witnesses have provided information to police, then recanted or become forgetful.
The initial lawsuit ended in a mistrial when the judge found LAPD officials had withheld evidence related to Mack's involvement; a new trial is scheduled to begin this fall.
Perry Sanders, the lead attorney for the Wallace family, declined last week to give an opinion on whether Mack was involved. But he said, "I think the record speaks for itself." And in earlier court proceedings his associate, Rob Frank, told the jury, "David Mack was involved in this murder ..." and "the one link between the motive and the opportunity was David Mack."
Attorney Marc Harris, who at one time represented Mack during the civil proceedings, disagreed.
"Based on my understanding, there was no merit to the allegation," Harris said.
Meanwhile, in the 11 years since the murder, various LAPD task forces have been impaneled to try to solve the case. Several years ago, the FBI spent 18 months pursuing the Mack-Muhammad theory, but closed the probe without having enough evidence to prosecute.
And the deeper one digs, the more convoluted the tale gets.
Marking time
Will the mystery ever be unraveled? And if so, will Mack be cleared or implicated?
Douglas, Mack's former coach, doesn't believe any of it. He struggles to reconcile the image of the Mack he knew - generous and kind, a family man - with the portrait provided by prosecutors in the bank robbery trial and the various Notorious B.I.G. murder theories.
Douglas noted that Mack remains married and close to his family. (Mack's wife declined an interview request and asked that her name and her children's names not be used, saying only "it has been difficult, and we're in the healing process.")
"He was part of our family," Douglas said. "He was a good person. I'm not saying he was a perfect person. Did he make mistakes? Probably. But with that background, what do you expect?"
And the bank robbery?
"If he did it - and I personally don't think so - I know he did it for somebody else, not himself," Douglas said, adding he'd often seen Mack help pay bills for less-fortunate track athletes.
Douglas maintains regular contact with Mack through phone calls and letters. He said Mack has told him prison "was one of the best things that could have happened" to him, because he's studied electronics, carpentry, law and philosophy. They talk about Mack's family, or Douglas' runners.
Mostly, Douglas said, the conversation is "just chit-chat about the past." And he doesn't mean the more recent past. Douglas said when Mack is free, he'll find the right time to ask what really happened.
"All I'm interested in is the truth of David," Douglas said. "I'm not interested in all the rumors."
For now - and for who knows how long - rumors are what we have.
Here's what we know: A week ago, the convicted bank robber turned 47. If nothing changes, he'll be free before he turns 49.
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| Title Annotation: | Olympics Track-Field Trials |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2008 |
| Words: | 3393 |
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