Herb Pope guilty of bank robbery

Former Seton Hall star Herb Pope (203 cm, Seton Hall’12) has pleaded guilty to bank robbery, armed bank robbery and brandishing a gun during a crime of violence in U.S. District Court this week.

Pope was arrested and charged with the robbery of a bank in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb across the Ohio River from Moon Township, where John Calipari is from, on February 16th of last year. Pope is facing ten years in prison for the crime.

According to Allegheny County police, part of the reason that Pope was caught is that he’s 6-foot-9, which makes him fairly easy to identify, particularly when you consider that he told tellers at the bank that he was a professional basketball player from Aliquippa, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of basketball talent.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when the two men left the bank they hopped into a gold BMW that was registered to Tyler Bridges, Pope’s half-brother and accomplice in the robbery. When the police caught up with the men, they were using the stolen bills to pay for tattoos in a house where the gold BMW was parked on the street outside.

This is a sad twist in the tale of Herb Pope, who was shot four times as a senior in high school. He eventually averaged 15 points and 10 boards for the Pirates as a senior in 2012, but his career was marred by consistent issues. In 2010, he was ejected from an NIT game against Texas Tech for repeatedly punching an opponent below the belt. He would declare for the NBA Draft, but that April, Pope nearly died after suffering a cardiac event on the Seton Hall campus. He spent New Year’s Day in 2013 in jail after getting arrested for pulling a gun on a bar owner.

He also bounced around the world playing for professional teams in Israel, Greece, Ukraine, Columbia, Argentina and Uruguay. He never played a full season anywhere. His last team was Inter Bratislava from Slovakia where he played during the 2015/2016 season and left after only one month.