Tony Mack's life has been a story of triumph over adversity. He's found success when failure seemed foreordained. He's a specialist in the comeback.
TRENTON — Tony Mack’s life has been a story of triumph over adversity. He’s found success when failure seemed foreordained. He’s a specialist in the comeback.
On Friday, Mack’s ultimate comeback fell short when he was convicted of all six corruption counts against him by a federal jury. His brother Ralphiel Mack was convicted of three of six counts, and both Macks were judged guilty of using the mayor’s position to solicit bribes.
It was Tony Mack’s lifelong dream to be mayor of Trenton. He achieved it in 2010, but that dream will likely end tomorrow after 1,320 days in office when a Superior Court judge is set to declare Mack in violation of state law because of his conviction and kick him out of office.
It wasn’t always this way.
Not too long ago, Tony Mack was seen as a popular leader who rose from humble beginnings in the city’s hardscrabble Wilbur section to prominence. After he achieved the mayor’s seat, Mack talked about how he viewed his new job.
“My thought process is we’re all one,” Mack said during a June 15, 2011, interview. “What affects you negatively indirectly affects me negatively.”
“I believe that if a mother is robbed at the corner of Passaic Street, I just got robbed,” he said.
And constituents should remember that his reputation and that of Trenton’s were linked, he said.
“I would hope they’re as concerned about me as I am about them,” Mack said.
Tony Fitzgerald Mack was born in Louisville, Ga., on Jan. 8, 1966. When he was 5 years old, his father was found dead, hanging from a rope in a county jail cell. Authorities ruled it a suicide, but the family has always believed Thomas Mack was the victim of something far more sinister in the charged racial climate of the Deep South.
The family, including older brother Stanley, six years Tony’s senior, and newborn Ralphiel moved to Trenton shortly afterward.
Growing up on Tioga Street in the city, Almarie Mack struggled to raise her five children as a single parent, working at Blakely Laundry on Perry Street. Without much money, young Tony Mack had as his outlets pickup football games on the street and Little League baseball sponsored by the Police Athletic League.
“Sports has been the vehicle that has driven me since I was 10 or 11 years old,” Mack said in 1996. “It’s what I lived for when I was a kid.”
His small stature didn’t deter him and even made him play with a chip on his shoulder. Decades later, he still remembered a come-from-behind game to win when he was 10 and on the Trenton Power Eagles football team. The coach of the team they were playing against that day, the East Trenton Bears, had rejected Mack during the first tryout because of his size, Mack said later.
During the game, Mack remembered, he ran in the winning touchdown with only a few minutes left on the clock, carrying the day for his team.
In sports, Mack threw in all his determination to come from behind and win when all seemed lost.
As his older brother Stanley, who still carries the last name Davis because he was born before their parents were married, turned to a life of petty crime, Mack stayed out of trouble. Sports were his guiding light.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t think about it while it’s happening, but you learn so much from sports,” he said during the 1996 interview. “You learn to blend your individual talents into the team framework. You learn to respect an opponent’s efforts. But, most of all, you learn about people.”
When he entered Trenton Central High School, Mack’s athletic prowess made him someone to watch.
He was a star running back on the football team, Mercer County’s first district champion wrestler, and a solid second baseman. He lettered in all three, and his star turns in those sports are topics people talk about to this day.
Graduating in 1984, Mack went to study at Howard University, a historically black college outside Washington, D.C. There he continued his all-star sporting career, again in wrestling, football and baseball. He earned a bachelor’s degree in management with a minor in marketing.
Back in Trenton, Ralphiel Mack followed his older brother onto the gridiron and dominated. Four years behind Tony Mack and a running back like his brother, Ralphiel ended up going further than Tony did in football.
In 1989, Ralphiel Mack had a career year. He ran for 1,020 yards and scored 14 touchdowns, making him the leading rusher in the Colonial Valley Conference and the first in five years to pass the 1,000-yard mark. Upon graduation, Mack went to Temple University in Philadelphia.
He continued his winning ways there, with a standout performance on Oct. 16, 1993, in a game against Virginia Tech where he ran for 56 yards from the line of scrimmage.
Tony Mack returned to Trenton after graduation from Howard in May 1989. With name recognition from his playing days and charisma, he attracted the attention of newly elected Mayor Douglas Palmer, Trenton’s first black chief executive, after Palmer was elected in 1990. Palmer’s administration created the post of recycling coordinator, and within months the 25-year-old Mack was ensconced in the job and making nearly $80,000-per year as a bureau head.
Mack’s star was rising along with his fortunes.
In June 1994, he bought a stately, six-bedroom house in the city’s leafy Berkeley Square section. Success came with a stable family life as Mack married Kara Latrice Deloatch one year later on June 3, 1995.
That same year, Ralphiel Mack graduated from Temple University and was signed to the Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders. But after a brief look, he was released two weeks later. Ralphiel found his way back to Trenton and the next year he was working for the Boy Scouts Urban Emphasis program, focused on mentoring city youth. He coached youth sports in Trenton and came back to Trenton High as an assistant football coach.
Connections between Palmer and Tony Mack continued to pay off when Mack was elected to the Mercer County Board of Freeholders in 1996. Mack was president of a city union and served on the board of directors for the North 25 housing complex. By then, it appeared Palmer was grooming Mack as a successor. And Mack had a growing family with his wife, who had son, Tony Jr., in 1999, and their second child, Carrington, in March 2001.
Then-Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer, waving at center, and then-Mercer County Freeholder Tony Mack, standing second from right, stand on platform at the Trenton Train Station in February 2001 awaiting the annual NJ Chamber of Commerce train. Mack remained at Palmer’s side, but the relationship was headed for the rocks and an event that would upend Mack’s life.
The break between the two men came a month after the 2002 mayoral race, which Palmer won overwhelmingly. Despite perceived assurances the win was Palmer’s last, the mayor was showing Mack repairs in his basement when he gave Mack the news he would run for another term.
Mack was stunned. As he’s demonstrated repeatedly over the last four years, facing opposition he dug in. By the spring of 2003 — a full three years before any votes were to be cast — both men had formally declared their candidacy for mayor of Trenton.
In the run-up to the election, the city outsourced its recycling to the county, a move that left Mack without a job. He lost in 2006 to Palmer, then two years later his freeholder seat was gone too after a loss in the Democratic primary.
Those were Mack’s lean years, as debts piled up and he drifted through several public jobs — one as an investigator for the state Department of Education, another as a business administrator for a school district. The district, Barrington in Camden County, opted to buy him out halfway through his second year of a contract.
By then, he had two more daughters, Madison and Kennedy, to support. With money tight and family expenses mounting, Mack spiraled into a financial abyss. He lost one of his rental properties and mortgaged the others — a total of nearly $400,000 in loans in just one year.
To keep him afloat, he turned to a campaign supporter who has said he provided thousands in unreported cash for the 2006 run — Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni. Giorgianni said during an interview last month he gave Mack cash.
It was these cash calls between Giorgianni and Mack that were the basis for the “Uncle Remus” code the FBI would later allege they used for bribe payments.
Things looked brighter for Ralphiel Mack, however. In 2005, he was promoted from assistant to head football coach at Trenton High. With a job as a counselor in the school district along with the coach’s position, he continued a career of reaching out to city youth.
“Words can’t even explain how I feel about getting to go back to my alma mater and make an impact on these kids and try to make a difference in their lives,” Ralphiel Mack said during an interview after he was named.
The coaching career lasted only three seasons. Mack was fired as head coach after he was arrested in May 2008 and charged with assault. Police said he had thrown an 11-year-old student to the ground and broke the boy’s wrist when he played with a basketball he was not supposed to be using.
But a grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Mack, and he was reinstated to his counselor job the following year. He would not reclaim his head coaching position until the fall of 2011, but the job as leader of the Tornadoes would be snatched away again a year later following his arrest by the FBI.
Despite help from Giorgianni, Tony Mack’s Berkeley Square home drifted into foreclosure twice during his lean years. But as always with Tony Mack, there was another chapter to be written.
Mack never gave up on his dream of being Trenton’s mayor, and even through all his hardship, the clock was ticking toward redemption in the 2010 election. In December 2009, Palmer had a news conference saying he would not seek a sixth term in the election which would take place the next spring. One day later, Mack announced his candidacy.
Tony Mack, right hand raised, is sworn-in as mayor of Trenton, New Jersey during his inauguration ceremony on the steps of city hall Thursday afternoon, July 1. 2010. Powered by the campaign slogan “The Mack is Back,” Mack was immediately seen as a powerful contender to replace Palmer. Sluggish fundraising was boosted with money from Giorgianni and a $20,000 loan from Burlington County tax preparer Lena Brolo, backed by one of Mack’s city rental properties.
He got the most votes of any mayoral candidate in the first round of the election — 2,300 — and went on to dominate then-Councilman Manuel Segura in the June 15, 2010, runoff.
Four years after it seemed he would never rise again, Mack’s lifelong mission was a reality.
From the steps of City Hall on July 1, Mack’s inaugural address admitted the city’s dire straits but sounded a hopeful note.
“Like a true champion, we will not lie down, and we will not go quietly in the night,” he said, in a paraphrase of a poem from Dylan Thomas. “We will fight. We will fight for a better city.”
Mack bounded into City Hall with the hopes of thousands behind him.
Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.
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