Sources: Controversial Wildwood Pizzeria Shuts Down After Bomb Threat
The incident comes days after Franconi's Pizza took down Nazi stickers.
Nazi stickers at Wildwood’s Franconi’s Pizza, which sources say was shut down on Friday afternoon due to a bomb threat. (Photo via Reddit)
On Tuesday, I told you about a controversy that had erupted online after a person visiting Franconi’s Pizza on the boardwalk in Wildwood discovered Nazi imagery hanging on a wall in the kitchen, as seen above. Four days later, the restaurant had to shut down temporarily on a busy Friday afternoon at the Shore after someone reportedly made a bomb threat against the restaurant.
Social media images in various Wildwood Facebook groups show photos of police tape and officers blocking off the entrance to Franconi’s Pizza along the boardwalk and officers speaking with employees and management at Franconi’s on the side street next to the restaurant.
“Everybody is OK,” a Franconi’s employee told me on Friday afternoon when I called the restaurant around 5 p.m. By that time, Franconi’s had reopened.
A representative of the Wildwood Police Department told me they were not authorized to release more information at this time but didn’t deny that someone made a bomb threat against Franconi’s Pizza.
In addition to pro-Trump stickers, anti-Biden stickers, anti-Kamala stickers, and a “Rap Sucks” sticker, the restaurant displayed two stickers on the kitchen wall celebrating the Schutzstaffel, aka the SS, the notorious paramilitary group in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Another represented the Totenkopf, an SS division charged with guarding Nazi concentration camps. Both symbols have been adopted by neo-Nazi and white supremacy groups. All of the stickers were visible to customers at the counter outside of Franconi’s Pizza along the boardwalk.
A Reddit user posted an image of the stickers on Friday, August 1st. Opponents of Franconi’s Pizza took to social media to condemn the restaurant and to Yelp and Google to leave negative reviews. On Monday, someone visited Franconi’s to ask about the stickers, which had been removed by that point. That person recorded their interaction with management, posting a video on YouTube. Someone behind the counter laughed at them and said, “You losers need to find something better to do with your lives.”
More on this as it develops.
