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Peanut Butter Lover Suing LaGuardia TSA After Arrest For Bomb Joke
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 8, 2013
Modified Feb 8, 2013
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By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 8, 2013
Modified Feb 8, 2013
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The TSA might seem like a jolly bunch of inept iPad-stealing perverts, but they're not too cool with people making stupid comments about things that blow up: a former New Yorker says he was arrested for joking about explosives after LaGuardia workers confiscated his gourmet peanut butter, and now he's suing the agency.
According to court documents, a former Harlem resident and self-proclaimed "peanut butter snob" Frank Hannibal was traveling through LaGuardia with his wife and six-year-old daughters when screeners became suspicious about a layer of oil sitting atop a jar of Crazy Richard's peanut butter he had purchased for $6.99. Hannibal, 50, says he was pulled out of line, and when his family asked what was going on he told them, "They're looking to confiscate my explosives."
Hannibal says he was being sarcastic, but his flippancy didn't sit too well with an airport worker who overheard him, and he was arrested by Port Authority police for falsely reporting an incident. Hannibal spent 25 hours in a lockup, where he says he was humiliated, and ate a really bad peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “The jelly looked like pus, the peanut butter like God knows what and the bread was hard as a rock," he told the Daily News. Hannibal wasn't charged, but he's suing both the TSA worker who ratted him out and the officer who arrested him for $5 million, so that sandwich must have been pretty terrible. But there is a happy ending to this sad tale: Hannibal was eventually reunited with his jar of peanut butter. "I ate it," he told the Daily News, and the world spun madly on.
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bomb jokes
frank hannibal
laguardia
peanut butter
queens
tsa
Rebecca Fishbein
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