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Boise, Idaho- The Harlem Globetrotters stole a woman's purse in the
middle of one of their performances this week. The woman who says she was mugged, Beatrice Anderson (right), says that the crime occurred with four minutes left in the third quarter. At this time the captain of the Globe-
trotters, Paul "Showtime" Gaffney (below), approached Anderson and sat on her lap (bottom right). "Everyone got a big kick out of that one," says Ander-
son grimly. "Then he motioned under my chair to obtain the purse. I attemp-
ted to stop him, but my husband yelled that it was a part of the act and that I

should just play along. I reluctantly
obliged." Gaffney then reportedly draped
the purse over his right shoulder, walked
around in an effeminate fashion, and carried on with the game. "I was so afraid that when he was running back and forth across the court that my big black dildo might fall out of the purse for all to see," cries Anderson. "I got up out of my seat to go retrieve the purse, but my husband angrily shoved me back down into the chair. He was so embarrassed by the way that I was ac-
ting that he said that he should have brought the woman he was having an affair with to the game instead of me."
With two minutes left in the game, referee Earl Patrick asked Gaffney whom he obtained that purse from. Gaffney re-

plied, "From some white lady." Patrick emphatically yelled at Gaffney that everyone in the audience was white, which led to polite snickers and applause from the crowd. "My husband said that the purse bit was their bread and butter schtick, that they do it every game," Anderson says. "But when the game was over and they hadn't returned my purse, I knew something was wrong. Dead wrong." Mrs. Anderson futilely waited for half an hour after the end of the game in the stands hoping that Gaffney would come out of the locker room and return the purse. Anderson decided that she was going to take matters into her own hands by storming into the Globetrotters locker room to order the team to give back her purse. When Mrs. Anderson asked her husband if he was going to help her, he scoffed and stated that he would wait for her in the car while he had phone sex with his mistress.
Once Anderson located the locker room, she was shocked to see what had transpired between the Globetrotters and her possessions. One of the more bizarre occurences chronicled in the police report was that the entire squad had applied Mrs. Anderson's blush, eyeliner, and lipstick onto their faces. Another was that the team was attempting to spin one of their trademark red, white, and blue basketballs on Mrs. Anderson's big black dildo while the song "Sweet Georgia Brown" played in the background. "I went up to Mr. Gaffney and demanded that he give me back the purse with all of its original contents," Anderson says. "He just broke down into tears and crawled into some sort of fetal postion. It was a pretty odd sight, especially since he's like six and a half feet tall."

When questioned by police, Gaffney said that the Globetrotters had
resorted to purse snatching because they are in serious monetary debt to arena owners. With attendance for Globetrotters games at an all-time low, arena owners have been threatening to cancel their scheduled dates if they do not pay for seats not purchased by the public. "People don't come because they're tired of seeing the same old shit," Gaffney is quoted as saying in the police report. "We got so good at taking purses for

entertainment purposes that we started doing it for real to help pay our bills." The entire team was placed in the
Boise City Jail for three nights until their $750,000 bail was posted by their lawyer, Johnnie Cochran (right).
"This is an outrage," declared Cochran, who will be representing the Globetrotters at their ordered court appearance in two weeks. "These upstanding diplomats

of international peace are being framed by the Boise City Police. Every member on that force knew that the Globetrotters were the only black people in the entire state of Idaho at the time, so they had the team's number, I think that's clear. And that purse is obvious-ly planted evidence. How could Mr. Gaffney get a purse of that size around one of his massive shoulders anyhow. If it doesn't fit, well you know the rest. Anyway, this matter has to be rectified as soon as possible, or my name isn't Johnnie Cochran, lawyer extraordinaire."

As a result of the controvery, the current Globetrotter sponsor Burger King is considering ending its support of the team. Former Globetrotters sponsor Denny's issued a press release that reprimanded the team for their recent actions. "We just put money into the team because everyone thought that we were racists," said Jim Adamson, CEO of Advantica Restaurant Group, Inc., parent company of Denny's. "Now that this dirty little incident has occured, I think there's proof in the pudding that we were justified in being suspicious of serving blacks at our restaurants. As a result of this messy affair, I just hope and pray that we can resurrect the glorious Denny's tradition of segregation without fear of litigation."