by Seamus McGraw
(Continued)
Custody was at the heart of bitter divorce battle
But others have a different view of Mack. Among them is Dean Tong, a Florida-based consultant and author who advises parents on custody matters, and who was retained by Mack to help him win sole custody of his daughter.
Tong, who argues that Mack was "simply out-lawyered," in his difficult bid to wrest custody of his daughter from his estranged wife, says Mack is a man who has "problems with authority."
According to Tong, the divorce, already fractious because of the battle over marital assets, was made even more so by Mack's insistence on keeping up his alternative lifestyle, a lifestyle that included swinging. "There's no doubt in my mind that when they got married in '95, my guess is that shortly thereafter, he wanted to engage in this alternative... swinging type of life and she acquiesced... I guess through his goading her to do so," Tong said. "But when the child was born in '97... she saw it as an unhealthy thing for the kid and she demanded it to be stopped. He wouldn't." In fact, by all accounts, Mack continued to troll the Internet for potential partners, including setting up a Web page at MySpace.com, a site generally frequented by far younger users.
That, among other things, led to the deterioration of the marriage, but it was the battle over custody of the child that turned things ugly.
Although Charla Mack had been granted temporary residential and physical custody of their daughter, usually almost an insurmountable obstacle to a father gaining custody rights, Darren Mack filed for sole custody.
And he hired Tong to help him win it. It was, by no means a simple case. True or not, the child had come to believe that Mack was a domestic abuser, and there was also the matter of Mack's penchant for women to deal with. Still, Tong said, he believed that the case could have been won if Mack had hired a lawyer Tong recommended, and followed Tong's advice. Mack did not.
And that, Tong said, may have had as much to do with Mack's character as anything else.
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| Darren Roy Mack |
"I met this guy for two hours because I was on vacation with the wife for my 49th birthday last July in the Golden Nugget and he came and met me for breakfast," Tong recalled. "He had just retained me... and in fact he had just gone to see my board-certified psychologist for testing. He struck me as a Las Vegas guy who was living in Reno."
"He looked like a player to me, a handsome guy, very attractive life, but a guy who wanted more," Tong said. "I mean, come on, look at the MySpace.com ad.... [which says] 'too much fun.' "
"The guy was a millionaire player apparently who liked the relationship with his wife, he liked to be married but he liked to delve on the side," Tong said. "And he just hated authority; he just always had to be in control."
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