Back in March, the Joe Strummer mural, on seventh street in NYC, was tagged by some idiot signing ‘LAROC’ with a green can of spray paint.
Honestly, I have seen far worst than this in the tagging business (I will not even talk about how the Elliott Smith’s wall looks right now), but it is disrespectful no matter what.
But on Saturday, theclashblog.com announced that the tagger was caught! He was the well known graffiti artist Angel Ortiz, who goes under the moniker LA II, and who went on a tagging spree on some of NYC East Village best murals. He was caught while tagging, and the judge sent him in jail for 45 days.
His stay in prison scared him enough to say he will not do anymore spray painting in the streets, but will continue to paint just for galleries. He declared to the Local East Village blog:
‘I went there for graffiti and got transformed into a gladiator. They got all the gangs in there: the Bloods, the Latin Kings.”
‘A lot of people I knew have died, but for some reason I’m still here. Keith [Haring], Andy [Warhol], Basquiat, I was running with them when I was 16 — it was a privilege.’
You can go to the blog if you want to read the whole story, but I guess the NYPD is much more efficient than the LAPD because graffiti are everywhere here, buildings murals are defaced all the time, and I have never heard of a story like this.
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