Bail Denied for Officer Charged in Bank Holdup

With nearly $700,000 still missing in one of Southern California’s biggest bank holdups, a federal judge decided Friday that a veteran Los Angeles police officer should remain locked up pending his robbery trial because there is too great a risk that he could flee with the money.

“The thing that bothers me the most [is] . . . where’s the money?� federal Magistrate Judge Robert N. Block said in rejecting 36-year-old David A. Mack’s motion for bail. “So long as the money is unaccounted for, I think flight risk exists.�

The attorney for Mack, a nine-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, argued in court that he is an honorable family man who can be trusted not to skip out on the court--or his wife and two children. But the prosecutor had a biting rejoinder: Mack, he said, was “romantically involved� with his co-defendant, 26-year-old Errolyn Romero, a Bank of America branch supervisor who allegedly helped execute the robbery last month from the inside.

Romero, it turns out, had also been exposed to law enforcement work.

She took part through the early 1990s in the LAPD’s Explorer Scout program for young people, reaching the rank of sergeant and supervising other youths as they learned about police work and assisted officers in security at public sites, officials said. “She was basically a very good worker, a good Explorer,� said LAPD spokesman Lt. Anthony Alba.

Mack was never assigned to work with the Explorer program, Alba said. Assistant U.S. Atty. Stephen Wolfe said in an interview: “We don’t have information whether [Mack and Romero] met then or not.�

What is known, Wolfe told the court at the bail hearing, is that Romero acknowledged to investigators this week that she “had been seeing� Mack. After her family members disapproved, Romero “lied� to them and said she and Mack had broken off the relationship, Wolfe said.

Mack’s public defender, Mary Kelly, said that the relationship wasn’t relevant to whether the former track star should be allowed to post bail. She added that numerous witnesses could attest to his strong ties to the community and his family. But Wolfe argued that those ties were tarnished by evidence that he was “carrying on with his co-defendant.�

Mack and Romero are alleged to have conspired in robbing a USC-area Bank of America branch on Jefferson Boulevard on Nov. 6.

Authorities say that Romero, who supervised the bank tellers, made sure there was far more cash on hand that day than was normally authorized and let Mack into the vault area once he showed up with a pistol. He and two other men allegedly made off with three bags of money, still in shrink-wrap packaging. Investigators are trying to determine the identities of the two accomplices.

Authorities say that Romero admitted her involvement this week after she was told she had failed a polygraph test, and she implicated Mack as well, handing investigators his LAPD business card. Mack was arrested Tuesday, and authorities found about $5,600 in cash at his home, all in $50 bills, along with a statement for a $7,000 deposit on the day of the robbery and receipts for $20,000 in recent purchases.

The seriousness of the allegations suggests that Mack may have “violated his oath to protect the public,� Block said. That, combined with the disappearance of nearly all the money in the bank robbery, compelled the judge to reject the possibility of bail.

One of Mack’s family members sobbed as she left the courtroom and another supporter bristled: “It’s not true. I know it’s not.�