The Pieman Cometh

The hit man is standing in a Los Angeles office building. His hands are shaking. "This is the last one," he croaks. "I'm so nervous I can't stand it." His accomplice, trimly dressed and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, is chewing his lower lip. "You'd think it would get easier with each delivery," he mutters. "But it doesn't."

A Mafioso massacre? A bank heist? A CIA caper? In fact, the I hired agents are armed with a cream pie. Their mission: to smash the pie into the face of a local office employee who is celebrating his 26th birthday. The two agents, hired by the celebrator's merry-minded boss for $35 (pie included), are operatives of Pie Face International, one of a growing number of organizations across the country dedicated to the silliest U.S. fad since streaking: smashing pies into the faces of selected victims--for a price.

In the past few months Pie Face International has made some 60 successful deliveries in the Los Angeles area, hitting such celebrities as the Rev. Ike, Country Singer Diana Trask and Psychic Peter Hurkos. In Minneapolis, for the same amount of dough, Pie Kill, Ltd., has left more than a dozen victims pie-eyed. In St. Petersburg, Fla., Pies Unlimited has claimed 78 victims, among them the assistant metropolitan editor of the St. Petersburg Times, billing clients from $50 to as high as $300 per job. San Diego's whipped cream mafia, which charges only $20, has scored 20 times, including a celebrated hit of a cable-television executive at a city council meeting.

Lighthearted Havoc. Many of the pientrepreneurs were inspired, and some actually franchised, by Manhattan-based Pie-Kill Unlimited, which has twelve operatives, has been in business for a year, and claims a face count of 178. Pie-Kill's manifesto, composed by Founder Rex Weiner, a pastry-faced 24-year-old, reads as if it had been collectively written by P.O. Wodehouse, James Bond and the Three Stooges. "Our high duty," it announces, "is to 1) stamp out pomposity; 2) uphold the virtues of surprise, randomness and chaos; 3) wreak lighthearted havoc whenever and wherever possible; and 4) get away with it."

For $40 the Pie-Kill client can take his choice of lemon cream, chocolate cream, banana cream and lemon meringue (the hardest to remove) pies, all of which emanate from a Manhattan bakery that, says Weiner, produces edible missiles of "just the right consistency--heavy and thick. Aerodynamically they are perfect."

Pie-Kill does not stop at artificial boundary lines. It has just made its first international hit. As Canadian Newscaster Keith Morrison was reading the headlines one morning last month in Montreal on a Today-style TV program carried live across Canada, Weiner splatted a whipped-cream pie across his face. Morrison was stunned, but quickly recovered and wiped the debris from his face; the creaming was rebroadcast on another nationally televised program a few days later.

More cities may soon feel the splat of the pie killers. For $50, Weiner is offering to any taker a "franchise kit" explaining the modus operandi. In Los Angeles, Pie Face International's Don Murdock is processing applications from potential hit men in Detroit, Chicago and New York, and has already taken on two operatives to service the capital area. "In Washington," he says, "the politicians are so removed from the people it takes a pie in the face to get them back to reality."

Vindictive Females. Hit men seldom encounter hostility from their victims. "When you have pie all over your face," explains Weiner, "it's hard to do anything. You can't see and you can't breathe. So you just stand there and grin." But women, in general, do not react well. "They just don't like it one bit," says Murdock. "They aren't good sports." On the other hand, reports a Minneapolis Pie Kill operative, a majority of the clients are "vindictive females."

Recognizing the potential risk in their jobs, hit men often ape the tactics of their counterparts in organized crime, carefully timing and rehearsing their jobs, using accomplices to distract their victims, noting the nearest exits, and leaving cars at the curb with motors running.

At week's end, however, pie throwers across the country heard some unsettling news. In Minneapolis, Pie Kill Agent Jeffery Carpenter, 19, was arrested and charged with simple assault and breach of the peace for trying to pie a woman in a local doughnut store. Though the assault charge was later dropped, Carpenter was warned that he must stay on his best behavior for a year or face jail and a fine. Or, if justice is to be truly served, he might just be pasted with a lemon meringue pie.

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