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“Who WAS that masked man?…

… I wanted to thank him.” – Numerous episodes of “The Lone Ranger

(Note added December 22, 2010: Lone Ranger announcer Fred Foy is dead at 89.)

SPFXMasks of Van Nuys, California makes masks that look so convincing that a bank robbery in Ohio by a Caucasian in an African-American disguise resulted in an innocent man being held for the crime, not what the mask manufacturer intended.

The article mentions the 20-year-old Chinese man who sought asylum in Canada using a mask from the same company to masquerade as an elderly white man and slip past airport security in Hong Kong.

Authorities are beginning to believe that a string of bank robberies by the so-called “Geezer Bandit” may have been committed by a younger man wearing one of the masks from SPFXMasks!

The masks made by the company cost from $600 to $1,200 each and are hyperrealistic, but the company owner, Rusty Slusser, is not happy about the fact that they were used in crimes.

The LATimes online article states:

“Conrad Zdzierak, a 30-year-old Polish immigrant, used one of Slusser’s masks to disguise himself as a black man during a series of Ohio robberies last spring. The costume was so good that six of seven bank tellers wrongly identified an African American man as the culprit in a photo lineup, said Det. Keenan Riordan, who investigated the case for the Springdale, Ohio, Police Department.

“We showed the picture to his own mother, and she thought it was him,” Riordan said.

The man remained in jail until Zdzierak’s girlfriend tipped police off after finding money and a mask in his hotel room. Zdzierak pleaded guilty last week to six robbery counts.”

Zdzierak had stashed the mask of a young black man, called “The Player,” and an elderly white man, called “The Elder” in his safe. His computer had videos of Zdzierak modeling the old-man mask and practicing speaking like an elderly person. Zdzierak had also saved news stories about California’s Geezer Bandit. Images in surveillance videos of the Geezer Bandit resemble Slusser’s “The Elder” mask.

The FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth, whose office is investigating the Geezer Bandit bank robberies in San Diego, Riverside, and Kern counties is now investigating whether the Geezer Bandit was, in fact, wearing a mask!

Slusser opened SPFXMasks in 2003 and has a six-person crew that uses silicone that looks and feels like flesh, right down to the pores. The hair is HUMAN hair, and every hair is sewn on by hand. Artists paint the masks to create skin tones. Slusser discovered that if the inside of the mask is smooth, even if the outside of the mask is bumpy, the mask will stretch over most faces and move along with facial muscles.

Slusser moved his sales operation online, and the company projects $500,000 in sales this year and turning a profit for the first time.

-Bill at

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©2010 William F. Hackett. All Rights Reserved.

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