Daily News – by DEBORAH HASTINGS
You really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
In this case, the book purported to be “Den of Lions,” the harrowing, first-person saga of kidnapped Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson.
But a worker at a Goodwill store in Maine said the donated book “didn’t feel right,” so he called the cops.
Inside was a gun, a small, .31-caliber pistol that reportedly was made by an Italian manufacturer of antique replicas, The Ellsworth American reported.
There were no pages at all, just simply a hollow box, nestling the gun. A sticker said it was built by a gun-box seller in Arkansas.
ELLSWORTH POLICE DEPARTMENTThe spine said it was former AP journalist Terry Anderson’s book about being kidnapped in the Middle East. But the ‘book’ was really the hiding place of small pistol, Goodwill employees in Maine discovered.Goodwill staff told police the “book” had come from a central distribution site, not an individual donation.
Police are trying to figure out who owned the gun, but have little to go on. They ran the pistol’s serial number through a national database, but got no hits, the paper said.
Anderson was The AP’s Middle East bureau chief Beirut when he was kidnapped in 1985 and held in captivity until 1991.
“But a worker at a Goodwill store in Maine said the donated book “didn’t feel right,” so he called the cops.”
Didn’t ‘feel’ right? What the hell did he think it was, a BOMB?