White robber wore lifelike black mask

Alleged bank robber Conrad Zdzierak is said to have used a $650 mask called “The Player” to fool security cameras. Check out a video of the mask here.

Investigators believe Zdzierak likely removed the mask between the robberies in order to confuse the cops who believed they were looking a black man.
The authorities caught a break when they spotted a Volvo with its interior splattered with red dye from a dye pack slipped into a bag used to hold the stolen money.
Police found Zdzierak hiding in a motel bathroom.

White robber nabbed wearing African-American 'Hollywood' mask (Via Steve Silberman)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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octopussoup

I don’t get why he needed to robs stores when he could buy this 600 dollar mask. Unless he used a credit card and had to rob to pay it back.

I would have went for the old man mask myself.
boingboingdave

@octopussoup – he was robbing banks, not stores. large difference in the amount of money one stands to gain.
KremlinLaptop

Huh, that’s pretty smart. I wonder how many other robberies that have gone with the criminal getting away have involved prosthetics (is that the right word? I don’t think it’s the right word…) like this that have been convincing enough.

I mean all you’d need is one disgruntled enough Hollywood guy who does these masks and suddenly you’ve got lots of faces.
palindrome

Indeed, I thought at first: hey, there’s the zombie, and the evil clown. Nosferatu, check, Vampire, etc. They’re all there. Black guy, check. What?

But then I saw that they have old guy, thug, “Sarge”, and inbred (hillbilly?). Oh and old lady. So all the monsters are accounted for. Except bankers. Maybe Nosferatu would work for that (not in an anti-semitic way).
Bucket

All units, all units, be on the lookout for a suspect wearing a prosthetic forehead on his real head. Approach with caution.
- Notary Sojac
  
  Subject is armed with a rock with a piece of string wrapped around it.
- KremlinLaptop
  
  If he’s carrying a Bat’leth we’re really screwed, sir.
- Davidget
  
  If I were a carpenter I could hammer on my piglet, collect the $650 and buy one too.
- Anonymous
  
  everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads!
Christovir

Pretty realistic: http://www.spfxmasks.com/playermedia/player2large.gif

My favorite quote from the maker’s website is “Matching african-american hands (sold seperately)”
greengestalt

Perhaps this is a bit old, but why not just wear a Nixon mask?

Then, as he leaves the bank, proclaim “I am NOT a CROOK!”
- Stooge
  
  greengestalt, because he’d be immediately subject to a DMCA takedown notice for violating the copyright on Point Break.
johnhazard

Waitaminnit- their masks are Nosferatu, Zombies, monsters, Lucifer, the Clown, the Inbred- and a black guy?
HUH?!?!!?!
Brainspore

He would have got away with it, too… if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!
- Anonymous
  
  #31
  LOL’D so hard!!!!
Donald Petersen

Well, it was only a matter of time. The thing that was hardest for me to buy about the old Mission: Impossible (or even Scooby Doo) was how everyone seemed to fall for a rubber-masked villain. Now, 40 years later, you’d think this would have happened hundreds of times… enough, anyway, for someone to have been caught trying it before now.
fluentinsilence

That’s actually quite clever.
ncm

What makes that an “African-American” mask, as opposed to an “African” mask? Do Africans really look different from African-Americans?
- The Chemist
  
  The science backs this up: As someone from the Middle East I probably am closer genetically to most “Africans” than most African-Americans despite my lighter skin tone. How does the difference between African-Americans and “Africans” (whatever the fuck that happens to mean.) manifest physically? Well, it’s questionable, since people from certain Pacific Islands and Australia can look “African”. So why not, in the case of “African-American” use continent of origin? Well, because White people come from Africa too. The distinction is completely arbitrary no matter how you cut it. So you may as well cut it anywhere, no? Race is a social construct.
- Anonymous
  
  Actually, yes. African Americans and Africans look nothing alike. Quite a lot of African-Americans in the 60′s and 70′s “went back”, discovered just how out of place they were in Africa, and wrote extensively on the experience.
  
  My personal favorite is a short little poem, They Clapped, by Nikki Giovanni. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177838
  - MrsBug
    
    Wow, that’s a powerful and fascinating poem. Thanks for linking it.
    
    It must have been a paradigm shift for black Americans to identify with Africa for so long and once there, realize they weren’t really Africans, but Americans.
- Christovir
  
  What makes that an “African-American” mask, as opposed to an “African” mask? Do Africans really look different from African-Americans?
  
  A fair point, but the group we call “African Americans” is ethnically distinct from Africans. “African American” usually means someone of Bantu (West African) origin mixed with more than a little European origin. The old canard about America being a melting pot is certainly true of our genes. Africa itself also has many ethnic groups that are not typically represented by African Americans, such as the Khoisan, Pygmies, and Berber.
  - davidasposted
    
    “African American” usually means someone of Bantu (West African) origin mixed with more than a little European origin.
    
    This is simply not true. See for example the saga of Oprah Winfrey’s DNA testing.
    - Christovir
      
      According to the PBS show you cite, Oprah’s ancestry is mostly from West Africa, with 11% non-African ancestry, which was kind of my point.
- Anonymous
  
  If you go to the site, you’ll notice each mask has a personality to match. “The Player” is a stockbroker on Wall Street – apparently.
Anonymous

some black guys gotta get a sarge/thug mask & start robbin’ banks to balance this out..
BadIdeaSociety

I was going to by that mask myself but didn’t because I needed a British man of African descent mask and not an African-American mask.

I feel bad that the criminal tried to ruin The Player’s reputation as an upstanding “Stockbroker on Wall Street and entrepreneur.”
Goofball Jones

I like their site…expensive masks, but they look really well done.

Maybe next time he should try the Lucifer mask!
bazzargh

that pic on the right looks like the photofit bloke wanted for the jewellery store robbery in NYC featured here before

http://a056-crimestoppers.nyc.gov/crimestoppers/public/publicmwViewfelon.cfm?mwID=678

(just because of the glasses really) he’s still on the most wanted list… you have to wonder if even the little you could see in that picture was a disguise
Tensegrity

They ought to make Middle Class White Guy for black people to wear while driving through the burbs
- Hools Verne
  
  Here you go
  
  Though if you’re short on cash, you might be able to get away with this.
- theLadyfingers
  
  They’ve already got vampires.
- coaxial
  
  FTW
Fred H

I can’t imagine the dangerous lack of peripheral vision in robbing a bank with A) a hood, B) a mask C)with sunglasses on it. Brave, or stupid.
bobk

I recall reading about a bank robber who dressed in drag but was caught right away before he could change.
/shouldn’t have dragged it out? was caught in a dragnet?
blacksquare

What does it say about race in America that the “African American” mask is the only one on the website that comes with matching hands? Weird.
- glaborous immolate
  
  What does it say about race in america?
  
  Not much.
  
  If you’re black, and want the black mask, you don’t need matching hands. If you’re white, you don’t need matching hands so much for any of the other masks.
  
  And since blacks are not the majority of the population in the USA, most of his clients will not need matching hands for any of the other masks. So it seems like a simple business decision, not structural racism.
  
  Also, note that there is a bada$$ white guy non-monster (?) mask, The Sarge.
PapayaSF

So the guy is clever enough to use a convincing mask, but dumb enough to open a dyepack-rigged bag in his car?
Anonymous

really…

i have a line for all ya all… (yeah, i said it that way, makes my point)

the line is: “i am an F.B.I. agent”

any takers?

rubber masks? president already mentioned… the movie is “Point Break”

seriously
Anonymous

I like how Zdzierak is a Polish name that means “someone who rips off”. Both “rips off paint” and “rips off people” senses.
stumo

I’m not sure that it says that much. Especially since it’s not true – they’re also available for “sarge”, and if you go to the shopping cart, also for “elder, zombie and inbred”.

Very cool mask though.
Halloween Jack

So, he spends hundreds of dollars on a mask, but doesn’t know about dye packs? Smooth move, John Dillinger.
Anonymous

A couple of years ago I worked with a man of Asian descent (a korean adoptee)who joked around that the perfect hold up disguise would be to disguise your ethnicity. Two months after he was fired for returned merchandise fraud, he gets arrested for holding up a McDonalds with pink make-up on: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/433177/mcdonalds_robber_gets_four_years/index.html
ZippySpincycle

According to the product description, the mask’s creator “has upped the anty in the world of realistic silicone masks.”

That sounds painful.
- Anonymous
  
  at least they didn’t up the aunty…
StrangeInterlude

Troubling racial issues aside, those masks are creepy, like what the early infiltration-unit Terminators would wear before getting upgraded to Arnold-skin.
Anonymous

This would be 21st century minstrelcy.