Veteran Agent Takes Helm at Ventura County FBI Office

It’s safe to say that Robert Mack, the new head of the FBI’s Ventura County office, has paid his G-man dues in full.

He has traded gunfire with a fugitive. He flew a helicopter to the edge of a federal prison in a successful scheme to fool a convict who thought he had hired someone to break him out.

And for nearly six years, he supervised the bank robbery unit for the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

In other words, Mack is a been-there, done-that kind of agent. So why was he talking about studying the bureau’s thick operations and guidelines manual Friday? Just a little brushing up.

“You have to be fluid,” Mack said, explaining his desire to bone up on everything he could encounter in his new job, from defense contract fraud to Internet child pornography to helping Oxnard police investigate street gangs.

“You can’t just focus on one area.”

Mack, 54, took over this month for David Nesbitt, who retired in December after 28 months in the local office.

He oversees a staff of 17 agents and a territory that includes parts of Santa Barbara County on the north and the Antelope Valley, as well as Ventura County.

It’s a large job but nothing the Oxnard resident didn’t see coming when he applied for the post after eight years in the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

“I always want to be challenged,” he said. “A new challenge for me was to work a variety of violations.”

Those who have worked closely with Mack over the years say his ability to manage up and down--to “give and take orders,” as former Ventura FBI office head Gary Auer put it--will serve him well.

“He is a classic example of the types of people who were hired by the FBI in the 1970s--the ex-military officers and Marines coming out of Vietnam,” Auer said. “It’s the type of background the FBI was looking for. The advantage they brought was the command responsibility.”

David Scheper, a former supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, worked with Mack in several bank robbery cases. He worked well with colleagues from other departments, Scheper said, a skill that will serve him well in his new job.

“I don’t mean Bob is smooth in a Bill Clinton sort of way,” Scheper said. “He’s just a nice guy. He was the busiest person in federal law enforcement. Trying to track bank robberies was a demanding job.”

Mack’s decision to become an FBI agent after a decade in the Marine Corps was a natural, considering his roots in law enforcement. He grew up in a blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood with a dad on the job at the New York Police Department. His brother is a retired NYPD homicide detective. And when Mack was a second-grader, he wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover a letter explaining why he, too, wanted to be an agent.

When Hoover sent back a personal note, the deal was sealed, Mack said.

“I wish I still had it,” Mack said of the letter.

Mack and his wife have two sons, both grown. One of them carried on in the law enforcement tradition as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. The other is a chef.

After college at St. John’s, Mack did a 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam beginning in 1970. He spent most of that time flying transport helicopters on and off aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin at the height of the war.

Afterward, he spent time as a training pilot before joining the FBI, he said. His first post, as a field agent in the bureau’s Baltimore office, earned him the FBI’s Medal of Valor and almost got him killed.

A running gun battle with a robber in a Baltimore shopping center ended with Mack holding the dying gunman, shot by Mack and his partner, as they waited for an ambulance. Mack’s partner was shot in the arm. Somehow, with bullets flying in every direction, Mack wasn’t hit.

“It’s something that every officer is faced with,” Mack said of confronting an armed criminal on the street. “You never want to do it, but sometimes situations force your hand. Your job is to come home at night.”

Twenty-three years of experience in a variety of posts will help as he gets reacquainted with white-collar crime, which will make up a good portion of his staff’s cases, he said.

Mack’s time spent leading the FBI’s L.A. bank robbery unit will help him when he has to have meetings with police chiefs, prosecutors and detectives on Ventura County’s multi-agency cases, Auer said.

“Bob has spent the last years working with local authorities,” Auer said.

“These are cases that can be prosecuted both federally and locally. He spent years coordinating federal and local cases.”

Sheriff Bob Brooks, for one, is looking forward to comparing notes with Mack on a number of matters, including coordinated efforts to prevent bank robberies.

“We have always worked very closely on bank robberies,” Brooks said.

“We start the investigations initially and we will hand it over to the FBI. It has been very effective . . . there is good chemistry between us.”