Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 11, 2004
Clerk not amused by robber wearing Reagan mask by Gary Rotstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nancy Bane instantly recognized the presidential mask of the man walking into the Econo Lodge Gibsonia around 10 p.m. Wednesday. She thought it was just tasteless, but it was worse than that.
The rubbery mask depicted former President Ronald Reagan, whose casket was on display then in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. Thousands of Americans queued to pay tribute to him there, millions more mourned his death from Alzheimer's disease, and now some joker seemed to be making fun of a national leader whom Bane, 47, a registered Democrat, voted for twice.
"I said out loud to him, 'That's not right, that's a sick joke,' " she recalled yesterday. "Then he pointed the gun and I realized he wasn't fooling around."
Normally a Halloween prop, the mask became a practical tool for a slender, 6-foot man who pulled out a long silver-and-black handgun and approached the hotel counter wearing a black hooded sweat shirt and white gloves.
He silently motioned with the weapon toward the cash register. Bane opened the drawer. The Reagan impostor grabbed its cash and fled, with no impersonation of the late president's soft-spoken folksiness.
"It was less than a minute, very quick," said Bane, who has worked only a few months as night auditor at the hotel on Route 8 in Hampton.
She said it was a high-quality mask, the kind whose character was instantly recognizable. Several stores contacted yesterday said such masks are less available at this time of year than around Halloween.
Costume World in the Strip District had a few other political masks sitting around -- a Nixon, a Carter, husband-and-wife Bushes and Clintons -- but no Reagans. Good ones generally cost around $30, or nearly one-third of what the robber swiped from Econo Lodge.
"They're really not very popular right now," the shop's acting manager, Jamie Smith, said of the masks. "We sold some last week for a thing at the Warhol Museum, some kind of fund-raiser."
The suspect may have made up in guile for what he lacked in taste. Hampton police Detective David Mitchell acknowledged that the use of the full-face mask makes solving the case more difficult.
He said inquiries would be made with local stores about recent sales of Reagan masks, though there's no telling how long the suspect could have possessed it.
"We're thinking it's probably not some older gentleman who had this lying around since the 1980s," Mitchell said.
He asked anyone who comes upon a Reagan mask in the trash or otherwise abandoned to leave it where it is and call 911 to report it.
(Gary Rotstein can be reached at grotstein at post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255.)
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People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!