Detective Vic Mackey, portrayed by Michael Chiklis, is a fictional Los Angeles Police Department detective and leader of the Strike Team, a four-man anti-gang unit in the FX crime drama series The Shield. Mackey is a corrupt yet extremely effective police officer; he steals from drug dealers, beats suspects and has committed murder on three occasions. Two of the victims were violent gangsters, though the first was an undercover officer trying to put Mackey and his team behind bars, despite their service to the community. Mackey sees his tactics as a means to an end. Despite his misdeeds, he is a devoted father, a loyal partner to his teammates and will readily protect those he sees as innocent victims. It may be possible that this character is based on two real-life corrupted NYPD detectives named Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, who comitted murders and other various crimes during the 1980s and early 1990s for the New York based Lucchese crime family, before they eventually were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006.
