Bin Laden costume gets man arrested

SOUTH PORTLAND – The lawyer who divulged President Bush’s drunken driving arrest days before the 2000 election was arrested at gunpoint Tuesday after he was seen on a highway construction site carrying a toy gun while dressed in an Osama bin Laden costume.

Tom Connolly, 49, of Scarborough was charged with criminal threatening after he stood at the site visible to commuters on Interstate 295 while wearing the Halloween costume and waving a sign.

Police officers responding to motorists’ calls found a man wearing a white robe and carrying a fake assault rifle.

Before he was arrested, Connolly walked toward officers as what appeared to be plastic grenades tumbled onto the ground, an officer said. The costume included plastic dynamite, grenades and a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle.

“The whole thing is just incredibly bizarre,” said South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins. “It just crossed the line.”

Connolly, who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1998, met with reporters briefly after posting $500 cash bail to secure his release from the Cumberland County Jail in Portland. He said his case is scheduled to come up in District Court in December and he intends to plead not guilty.

“There was a First Amendment this morning when I woke up. I don’t know how it evaporated with the dawn,” he said.

Connolly, a Portland lawyer, has been known for wearing costumes to make political statements, typically donning a George W. Bush mask and dancing herky-jerky style for passing motorists. His wife, who arrived at the jail with their 31/2-year-old son to pick up her husband, has described him as “marvelously eccentric.”

In 2000, Connolly acknowledged that he tipped off reporters about Bush’s 24-year-old misdemeanor drunken driving charge at Kennebunkport. Republicans said the release of the information before the election was a Democratic dirty trick.

But he took it too far with the terrorist outfit, Googins said.

Connolly was carrying a sign that said “I love TABOR,” a reference to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights on the ballot next Tuesday. But at least one of the people who saw it thought it said “I love the Taliban,” Googins said.

Connolly said his costume and sign were “an attempt to equate the impact of TABOR with selective bombing of facilities and bridges and meals-on-wheels programs, Medicaid and Medicare.”

Officers who arrived on the location of a future ramp at the Westbrook Street exit didn’t know what they were dealing with. “There’s no way of telling from a distance whether the gun is real or a fake,” Googins said.

Police want to make sure charges are pressed. “For someone to think this is an innocent prank, this is not the case,” he said.

Connolly said he purchased the bin Laden costume a month ago from England over the Internet for $44.95. He said he had no quarrel with police but believed that the squirt gun would not be viewed as a threat.

“It was so clearly nonthreatening, with an orange tip and plastic and small, it was clearly a prop and no threat to anybody,” he said.