DANA POINT : Eatery Tries to Track Stolen Rhino Head

OK, who stole the rhino head?

It may be a long shot, but Brian Ephraim, manager of the Rib Trader restaurant on Coast Highway, is hoping a bounty hunter will help him find the answer.

Ephraim has offered a $200 reward for the return of a fake rhinoceros head stolen from the restaurant bar on one particularly raucous Saturday night nearly a month ago. To aid in his search, the restaurant staff is wearing black armbands and Ephraim is distributing T-shirts emblazoned with the question: “Who Took the Rhino?”

“Two hundred dollars seemed like enough to lure the head out of hiding. The head cost us about $500,” Ephraim said. “Actually, all we want is our rhino head back. It can’t mean as much to anyone as it does to our restaurant.”

At the Rib Trader, a restaurant with a hunting safari theme, the life-size caricature of a rhino fit in nicely with the other assorted replicas of hunting trophies, including fish, alligators, crocodiles, sharks and a bust of a gorilla. But a “wanted” poster offering the reward now adorns the corner of the Jungle Bar the rhino once occupied.

“Somehow, during the course of the evening, the rhino head was taken off the wall and people were kind of tossing it around the room,” Ephraim said. “We took it away and put it in the back of the restaurant for safekeeping, but when we closed for the night, it was gone.”

Several days later, an unidentified telephone caller tried to collect the ransom, Ephraim said. A voice on the other end of the line instructed him to take $200 in $1 bills in a paper bag to a telephone booth near the pier in Dana Point Harbor, which Ephraim did.

He was also instructed not to say anything to anyone or the head would wind up in the ocean.

“Sure enough, the phone (in the booth) rang and the guy told me to take the money to another harbor restaurant and tell the bartender to donate it to Greenpeace,” Ephraim said. “He said they would know what I was talking about. But the people there didn’t know anything about it.”

It was when he got the phone call that Ephraim finally called the police and filed a report, two weeks after the head was stolen.

“When I got the phone call, I figured it was getting out of hand,” Ephraim said. “I really didn’t know what to expect when I got to the pier.”

Sgt. Gus Delatorre of the Sheriff’s Department said the case of the missing rhino head is officially on the books. “It’s still being investigated by our detective bureau,” Delatorre said. “We will follow any leads we get.”