Joe Scola, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, heard the front door of his restaurant slam. As reported in the Gloucester Daily Times,
When he glanced outside, he saw his waitress returning from a break. She asked him, “Who’s that guy carrying the meat down the street?” Scola recounted yesterday.
The dude was loaded up with 20 pounds of Scola’s frozen meat. So Scola chased him and caught him.
“What are you doing with my food?” Scola said he asked the suspect. “I’m really hungry, man,” the suspect replied.
As Scola began taking the meat back, the dude “raised the 5-pound, frozen solid log of prosciutto above his head, presumably to hit Scola.” Bad move, meat man. What did Scola do?
“I slammed him with the ham in the face,” Scola said from his kitchen yesterday. The would-be thief, stunned and with a gouge on his face, dropped the meat and ran.
He may still be running. The police couldn’t find him. And don’t think that Scola is a coldhearted, greedy guy.
“I felt bad,” Scola said of the suspect’s injuries. “If he had come in and said he was hungry, I’d have given him a breakfast.”
Having once been homeless himself, he gives back to the community by donating leftover food to a local shelter. And it’s unlikely the thief was stealing the food to eat because it takes several days to thaw out. Here’s the Gloucester Daily Times article.