Long before Brian Williams was caught lying about his chopper coming under fire in Iraq, he claimed he’d stared down the barrel of a bandit’s gun as a teenager in sleepy Red Bank, NJ.

In a 2005 interview with Esquire magazine, Williams said a thief drew on him in the 1970s — leaving him “looking up at a thug’s snub-nosed .38 while selling Christmas trees out of the back of a truck.”

He told the tough-to-believe story at least four times, claiming he was trying to help a local church when the thief snatched his money on West Front Street and Riverside Avenue.

“That wasn’t a bad job, until a guy came up and stuck a .38-caliber pistol in my face and made me hand over all the money. Merry Christmas, right? Of course, I suddenly appreciated the other jobs I thought I hated,” he told New Jersey Monthly in 2008.

But longtime Red Bank residents think it’s a tall tale.

http://pagesix.com/2015/02/08/residents-debunk-brian-williams-encounter-with-christmas-bandit/