HOT DOG CART HEIST LEAVES OWNER IN LURCH.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

Call it a hot hot dog cart.

On Tuesday, 44-year-old hot dog salesman Bruno Bersani arrived downtown to find his old-fashioned, New York-style pushcart with the red-and-yellow umbrella missing. Thieves apparently had stolen the $2,400 mobile hot dog cooker along with the $600 utility trailer he used to store it in.

"I always expected to get robbed," Bersani said. "But you don't expect somebody to steal the whole hot dog cart."

Bersani, who has been selling jumbo-sized hot dogs with bacon to a late night bar crowd at Olive Street and Broadway for close to a year, never did get robbed, but he says thieves stole his livelihood sometime between 3:30 a.m. Sunday and 10 a.m. Tuesday.

"The police think that whoever took it probably thought it was tools," Bersani said. "They probably were disappointed when they saw a hot dog trailer."

Bersani's trailer and cart were secured with three locks and parked at a U-Park lot on Lincoln Street between Broadway and 10th Avenue. The propane-powered cart was adorned with a magnetic sign bearing the name of the business "Brundoggies Hot Dog Hut." There were no sausages in the cart.

To make matters worse, Tuesday was Bersani's birthday. He relied on the income he earned from his fledgling business to pay his mortgage and support his 10-year-old son, Oscar. The cart was insured, but Bersani will have to wait to receive a settlement and order a new cart from a dealer in Florida.

"I'm going to be out of commission here for a while," Bersani said. "I'm just too strapped to do anything else. I've got to sell my house. I'm going to have to consolidate and go into survival mode."

Ty Connor, a longtime acquaintance of Bersani's and a bartender at nearby bars The Horsehead and Jameson's, vented his frustration over the incident.

"It just seems like some kind of cruel prank," he said. "Is somebody going to steal a hot dog stand and open it somewhere else?"

Bersani last saw his stand early Sunday morning. After selling around 70 hot dogs to New Year's Eve revelers, he secured his cart in its aluminum trailer and didn't return until 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

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"I always expected to get robbed," Bersani says. "But you don't expect somebody to steal the whole hot dog cart." Bersani has been selling hot dogs to the late-night crowd at Olive Street and Broadway for nearly a year. His cart was discovered stolen Tuesday morning. Thomas Boyd / The Register-Guard