Puzzle Cleared Up With a Bang : It’s a Bomb, It’s a Bank, No a Poor Box

Rob not the poor . . . --Proverbs 22:22

Remember the giant “pipe bomb” that Los Angeles Police Department experts exploded earlier this week only to discover that it apparently was someone’s piggy bank containing 51 cents?

Well, as it turns out, it was neither bomb nor bank.

It was a church poor box. It had been missing, along with an estimated $15 it contained, since it was pried out of the vestibule wall of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Echo Park a month ago.

“That’s it,” said Father Lawrence Caruso, associate pastor of the 1,700-member church late Thursday. He was looking at a news photo of the “bomb” snapped minutes after the device was blasted open Wednesday by the police bomb squad.

The suspicious device was spotted by a passer-by Wednesday morning leaning against a retaining wall of the Los Angeles Department of Public Works maintenance building. He called police.

The bomb squad, along with scores of police officers, firefighters and medics, were dispatched to the scene. Streets were blocked to traffic from 8 to 10 a.m. Hundreds of people were evacuated from the four square blocks surrounding the potential blast area.

Working with great care--for as one veteran police officer said, the five-inch-diameter, eight-inch-long steel cylindrical tube was the biggest suspected pipe bomb ever found in the city--the four experts placed sandbags around it, then attached a small explosive charge and covered it with a blast-damping “bomb blanket.”

Then, by remote control while crouching behind a brick wall 200 feet away, they set off the small charge, expecting it in turn to set off a rip-roaring explosion. Instead, there was a small bang!

Happily, when the experts inspected the “bomb,” they found that it contained not explosives but coins, two quarters and a penny. One end of the pipe had a slot in it.

“The bomb,” said police spokesman Lt. Dan Cooke at the time, “was somebody’s piggy bank.”

But Cooke was wrong.

When Carole Wagner, part-time secretary at St. Francis of Assisi, picked up The Times on Thursday morning, read the “piggy bank” story and looked closely at the picture, she immediately recognized it as the poor box stolen from the church July 14.

She called Rampart Division police station to claim the box--and the 51 cents--for the church.

Sgt. Richard Calk checked the records and, sure enough, found a report filed by Father Michael Mahoney, pastor of the church. He had told detectives that the steel-tube poor box had been ripped out of the vestibule. He estimated the damage at $300--and the cash loss at $15. The money was supposed to go to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to help feed the poor.

Not Surprised

Caruso, filling in for the vacationing Mahoney, accepted the fact that the poor box had been rendered useless with the greatest serenity. And he was not at all surprised that the Eighth Commandment had been violated within the confines of his church.

“Theft is a constant problem with poor boxes in churches everywhere,” he said. “We’ve had it happen here before, but it’s not all that common. . . . And sometimes they (the thieves) really need the money.

“Anything,” added the soft-spoken priest, “is forgivable.”

Cooke said the twisted wreckage of the poor box--and the 51 cents--will be turned over to the forgiving Caruso today.