As for why this is news, it's because they are the ones responsible for this:
Authorities say the Metro Transit Assassins created the city's largest tag -- a three-story-high, half-mile-long scrawl of its moniker along the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River.
By Richard Winton
January 29, 2009
In the macho, braggart, narcissistic world of Los Angeles tagging, no one can match the Metro Transit Assassins crew.
Authorities said the group is responsible for some of the city's most notorious acts of vandalism, most notably L.A.'s largest tag: the giant, half-mile-long "MTA" scrawl that appeared last year along the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River near downtown.
But on Wednesday, authorities said they finally had arrested the MTA crew, including "Smear," a well-known "graffiti artist" whose work has been sold in some downtown L.A. art galleries.
These are not kids from the streets.
Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said one of the suspects drives a $60,000 BMW while another wore a diamond-and-ruby-encrusted Metro logo pendant valued at $27,000.
"These individuals are responsible for tags not only in Los Angeles, but Las Vegas and San Francisco," said sheriff's Cmdr. Dan Finkelstein, chief of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority police.
Authorities have long been frustrated by MTA, which they said is responsible for thousands of tags on businesses and public spaces, as well as transit buses and trains, which has been the taggers' particular target.
The crew allegedly also defaced freeway overpasses and signs as motorists whizzed by below them.
During raids Wednesday morning, Finkelstein said, investigators found customized, high-pressure fire extinguishers that, when filled with paint, allow taggers to shoot paint on the underside of a freeway overpass and produce tags.
But officials said the taggers outdid themselves when they hit the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River in downtown's industrial district.
Authorities estimate that it took about 400 gallons of paint -- 300 gallons of white and 100 gallons of black -- to create three block letters that cover a three-story-high wall and run the length of several blocks between the 4th Street and 1st Street bridges.
The tag has been an eyesore visible from downtown high-rises and freeways for months. But removing it is proving difficult -- and costly.
The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that removing the MTA tag from the river alone will cost $3.7 million because hazardous materials crews must create an elaborate dam to capture all the paint and runoff water so it doesn't get into the riverbed.
On Wednesday, deputies arrested Smear, whose real name is Cristian Gheorghiu, 32, at his home in the east Hollywood area, said sheriff's Sgt. Augie Pando.
Authorities also arrested Shaun Alexander, 27; Sergio Ayala, 25; Eduin Miramontes, 23; Nicholas Rem, 28; Juan Rocha, 22; and Ryan Swenson, 27, at their homes in the Los Angeles area.
Roger Gastman, author of several graffiti books who is working on a history of graffiti, said MTA -- also known as Melting Toys Away and Must Take All -- has been generating buzz in the graffiti art world for several years.
Smear in particular was able to sell "street art" to collectors.
"There is so much demand for street art right now," Gastman said.
He said the L.A. River tag is the taggers' calling card.
"It is definitely a statement," Gastman said. "To do something that big and bold it takes organization. . . . They were working on a slant and they got all the proportions right."
These guys are going to get it a lot harsher than they deserve given how many felonies it is talking about, and a whole hell of a lot harsher than other people who deserve it get. Jesus that thing took a lot of paint to pull off, I want to know how long it took them to paint that thing. 3.7 ****ing MILLION dollars to remove THAT? Why even bother at that kind of cost? It doesn't even look like graffiti.
Master Tailor Toprem Spaztastic, level 75 Drizzlecaller of Karana. Member of Clan Ta Veren
This kind of stuff amuses me. There's such a budget deficit in Cali that they are now thinking about taxng golf yet they feel the need to remove this graffiti. Here's a few things wrong with this:
1. Its not on a building or home or anything like that - its on a concrete wall facing the LA "River".
2. Its not ugly, offensive to anyone, etc. so who is complaining? The homeless people washing their clothes in the river?
3. Its reads MTA. For all anyone knew, the LA MTA did this themselves. Its next to railroad tracks. Its basically a free advertisement.
But yeah, lets drop the $3.7mm to get this cleaned up. Lets also risk the chemical runoff into the river. Sounds like a great idea guys....
As a graffiti writer ( who also was arrested for it) they do these "raids" all the time. Most of the time it amounts to small fines even with the felony charges they throw around. I was in college at the time and was living in NYC. I was out all night painting the town red, literally and figuratively, with my roommate. He didn't paint but he liked to come and watch me paint and would play lookout for me too. Long story short, end of the night on my way back to my dorm I decide to hit one more spot - a real nice completely blank wall. Well it turns out it was a building owned by the federal reserve bank. Its kinda freaky to have an unmarked dodge caravan roll up on you and a uniformed guard jump out with an M4 machine gun trained on you.
I wound up getting ACOD (adjournment in comtemplation of dissmissal) since I had never been in any trouble before. As long as I stayed out of trouble for a year the charge would be expunged from my record. I got to spend an interesting weekend in NYC Central Booking (it was actually a very interesting experience. i can't tell you how many people spent a weekend in jail for public urination) and that was it.
These guys most likely wont get off as easy as me - their damages are much higher monetarily - but I doubt they see any jail time. Most likely 500 hours community service and some sort of a fine.
As an aside - the DA or ADA that was handling my case when I was brought before the judge was exactly like the lawyer Vinnie's cousin's friend decides to go with in My Cousin Vinnie - complete with the stutter and all. Good times.
As for why this is news, it's because they are the ones responsible for this:
These guys are going to get it a lot harsher than they deserve given how many felonies it is talking about, and a whole hell of a lot harsher than other people who deserve it get. Jesus that thing took a lot of paint to pull off, I want to know how long it took them to paint that thing. 3.7 ****ing MILLION dollars to remove THAT? Why even bother at that kind of cost? It doesn't even look like graffiti.
As for how long it took them - my guess would be days of painting, even with rollers, special paint sprayers etc. The one liners you see (which most people consider "tagging") are quick obviously. The outline-bubble letters can usually be done in five-ten minutes. Bubble type letters with color on the inside and outlined in another color are a little longer - 20 - 30 mins. Some of the more elaborate designs can take up to 30 hours total time. Hell, when I draw on a normal letter size sheet of paper it takes me around 30 hours from start to finish to do even a single piece (the big elaborate works are called pieces). So with ten people working on theirs I would say at least 15 hours broken up over a few nights.
i hope they know they made that entire crew about 1 million dollars richer. now people know their names, so collectors of "street art" will be knocking down there door. which i guarantee was one of the purposes behind painting that possibly world record worthy tag.
Zzz. Philistines get with the future! This is art, and these guys are freedom fighters.
That being said, if "Nasty" tags my fence again with his Sharpie, and I spot him, I'm going to be selling some "art" of my own - photographs of his well-beaten body.
As for how long it took them - my guess would be days of painting, even with rollers, special paint sprayers etc. The one liners you see (which most people consider "tagging") are quick obviously. The outline-bubble letters can usually be done in five-ten minutes. Bubble type letters with color on the inside and outlined in another color are a little longer - 20 - 30 mins. Some of the more elaborate designs can take up to 30 hours total time. Hell, when I draw on a normal letter size sheet of paper it takes me around 30 hours from start to finish to do even a single piece (the big elaborate works are called pieces). So with ten people working on theirs I would say at least 15 hours broken up over a few nights.
nah they did this in one night, now the planning part took longer but look at the pic, each letter is already framed by those power lines (or whatever they are) so all they would really need is a couple of pics, draw out the design they wanted. there were several members so if you give each letter 2 guys working opposite sides of the letters you could bust that thing out in a few hours, and if you think about it on some thing that large you could use a friggin push broom for your brush. slop a gallon of paint on the wall and have 3 or 4 guys sweeping paint around and you could cover most of it in short order leaving the edges to fill in with more regular means.
Life...is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there's nothing else to eat while you're watching the game. Sure, once in a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it's gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you're left with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth shattering nuts, which if you are desperate enough to eat leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper wrappers.-- Cancer Man.
nah they did this in one night, now the planning part took longer but look at the pic, each letter is already framed by those power lines (or whatever they are) so all they would really need is a couple of pics, draw out the design they wanted. there were several members so if you give each letter 2 guys working opposite sides of the letters you could bust that thing out in a few hours, and if you think about it on some thing that large you could use a friggin push broom for your brush. slop a gallon of paint on the wall and have 3 or 4 guys sweeping paint around and you could cover most of it in short order leaving the edges to fill in with more regular means.
No way they did this in a couple hours. If they did it in one night as you say, I would say it probably took them almost from dusk til dawn. A lot of people think spraypainting is easy - go grab a piece of wood from your garage and a can of paint and see. Even with the huge rollers that these guys prob used, thats a lot of area to cover.
And DP - if its the same guy that i kinda know from around the graffiti scene, he's actually pretty good. Although if all he's doing it using a sharpie on your fence it prob isnt the same guy.
If anyone wants to read up on graffiti or just look at pictures from millions of different writers from all over the world go to www.graffiti.org.
No way they did this in a couple hours. If they did it in one night as you say, I would say it probably took them almost from dusk til dawn. A lot of people think spraypainting is easy - go grab a piece of wood from your garage and a can of paint and see. Even with the huge rollers that these guys prob used, thats a lot of area to cover.
And DP - if its the same guy that i kinda know from around the graffiti scene, he's actually pretty good. Although if all he's doing it using a sharpie on your fence it prob isnt the same guy.
If anyone wants to read up on graffiti or just look at pictures from millions of different writers from all over the world go to www.graffiti.org.
Read the article they had modified fire extinguishers that they used to blast wide areas with paint. I'm pretty sure that if I can unlead 2.5 gallons of paint in about 30 seconds it wouldn't take that long to do what they did. Hell it would probably take longer to refill, and charge their cannisters that it would to empty them. Even if you're going low tech, a simple garden sprayer will hold about two gallons of paint, and can cover a huge area with paint in very little time. I just think these guys have moved way beyond a can of Krylon a long time ago, to create their art.
And DP - if its the same guy that i kinda know from around the graffiti scene, he's actually pretty good. Although if all he's doing it using a sharpie on your fence it prob isnt the same guy.
Nothing artistic about the Sharpie scrawls - I actually love looking at the GOOD tags that I can see while I'm riding the train to work. It's like being in some sort of moving urban museum.
Read the article they had modified fire extinguishers that they used to blast wide areas with paint. I'm pretty sure that if I can unlead 2.5 gallons of paint in about 30 seconds it wouldn't take that long to do what they did. Hell it would probably take longer to refill, and charge their cannisters that it would to empty them. Even if you're going low tech, a simple garden sprayer will hold about two gallons of paint, and can cover a huge area with paint in very little time. I just think these guys have moved way beyond a can of Krylon a long time ago, to create their art.
They've been using the sprayers and modified extinguishers in the graffiti world for a long time. I know what im talking about here - ive been doing graffiti for close to 15 years now. Just to sketch out the simple design on the wall and get the proportions right, most likely in the dark, would have taken a couple hours. You're also talking about time needed to refill the cannisters (think of how many times they had to refill with the amount of paint used). Also, one coat of paint is no where near enough to have their work look like it did. Its at least 3 coats of paint.
They also didn't have all seven people painting either. At least two of them were lookouts - no way they did it without lookouts.
Nothing artistic about the Sharpie scrawls - I actually love looking at the GOOD tags that I can see while I'm riding the train to work. It's like being in some sort of moving urban museum.
If you have some free time, take ride on any of the NYC subways that go through the bronx. Once they pop up onto the elevated tracks in the bronx you can see some of the best graffiti ny has to offer. Tons of legal walls - artists spend weeks and weeks doing these murals - as well as pretty much every building facing the tracks covered in the usually illegal graffiti. The 4, 5, or 6 train are good for this.
Just to sketch out the simple design on the wall and get the proportions right, most likely in the dark, would have taken a couple hours.
again, what moron would show up on the scene without the design already planned out?
you snap a few pics and go home to work out the designs, damn near everything is a straight line, with a snap line or 3 you could have the outlines done in well under an hour, and again who the hell would even consider using spray paint for something that large? like I said you could use a push broom to do much of that work.
why do you think people would start something that large and come back over a period of days to finish it? the cops would be all over that site the next night if it was an unfinished piece of that size.
Growing up here in Southern Cali. with the gangstas and all the little boys trying to be gangsta you learn real fast just what those boys can do with 5 min. and a can of spray paint. I bet the 3 hour rang not much longer though... Now that I am grown up and own a house and junk I told a the little tagger that was the manual labor at my work if I caught his crew tagging my fence I would shoot him and claim self defense. It is super expensive for home owners to continuously paint over, and tax payers pay for the paint o cover the junk on the roadsides. The San Diego Metro system allowed a set of taggers to do a large scale art installation along our trolley here a few years ago (like 20 now) and no one has ever tagged over it... It is quite pretty though, not just words but pics.
And on a side note when I go to Ventura on the train to see Nymm when he away from home, the train goes down this track. Last fun thing I saw was LA road crews "flushing out the homeless" They build colonies in the overflow tunnels down the LA river and then when heavy rain hits there is no where for the water to go...
It may be vandalism, but man, that is one UUUUUGLY long slab of concrete they vandalized. See over here, if they just tagged **** like this no one would care, but no, they have to tag houses and even other people's art. Heck, I've seen some little dipshit's tag on a 70 year old house art (the entire side of one of the old houses had been painted with a nice painting) that had been left alone for 60 years up until that tag appeared. Personally I don't mind that big L.A. one since well, blank concrete on a non-residence... hard to care, while someone scribbling their stupid tag on a beloved old house can get run over by one of those LA trains for all I care and then have their remains tagged.
One of the problems is that we don't know what kind of paint they used, and contrary to popular opinion the LA river isn't always empty. If it's any of a number of kinds of toxic to fish paint then the next time it gets wet that **** will run off to the ocean and make our coastline a little more toxic than it already is.
My first thought when I saw that story was that you could probably squeeze them far, far worse with civil penalties, everything from environmental damage to code violations, than you could with a vandalism charge.
again, what moron would show up on the scene without the design already planned out?
you snap a few pics and go home to work out the designs, damn near everything is a straight line, with a snap line or 3 you could have the outlines done in well under an hour, and again who the hell would even consider using spray paint for something that large? like I said you could use a push broom to do much of that work.
why do you think people would start something that large and come back over a period of days to finish it? the cops would be all over that site the next night if it was an unfinished piece of that size.
You're still not understanding. Im not sure how you're gonna argue with someone who has done this before when (im assuming) you've never done graffiti. I never said they used spray paint. I know they didn't use spray paint to do it. And i never said they didn't have the outline sketched on paper - I said to transfer the sketch from a piece of paper to a wall takes a long long time when you're trying to get the lines and spacing perfect. Most serious graffiti artists (like these) are perfectionists and to get an outline of this size upscaled from a sheet of paper - its a lot of work.
And graffiti artists do their thing over multiple nights all the time. I've done it. My friends have done it. They have graffiti videos where they show the progress of the piece over the course of a few nights of work. Cops don't really care. Every once in a while they'll do one of these high profile raids and thats it. Unless they catch you in the act, the cops aren't coming to look for you. Hell there's a few NYC artists that have caused hundreds of thousands in property damage throughout the five boroughs - one of them owns a store he named after the graffiti word he writes. The guys been doing graffiti throughout the tri-state area since the late seventies and the cops haven't done a damn thing to him.
Trust me on these things - this is stuff i've done for the past 15 or so years. Theres a good chance I know what im talking about. Since I have a career now I don't go out and paint the public anymore but I draw at least every other day, spend hundreds a year on graffiti magazines and videos, and even sketched out my monicker and tattoed it on my back. This is a big part of my life so you can say im kind of an expert on things.
not a huge graf artist but I've done my fair share for the size of town I live in. couldnt they of just used some of that construction chalk that comes in a roll? that would cut down on the time it takes by quite a bit I'd think.
also would you mind showing a pic of that tatoo? I love graf art and tattoos. it be most appreciated.
Sure. I have one somewhere I just have to find it. I drew it and I had another graffiti artist named Pon to the inking. He works at SeenWorld in the Bronx (if you know graffiti then you should def know who Seen is).
I still wanna add more to it but im not sure what yet. I'm decent at graffiti but unfortunately I can't draw for ****. I might have one of my other friends draw a character for me and put it below the current one, centered on my back. Im a little nervous about that though cause im real skinny (5'7'', 120lbs) and im not gonna lie, it hurt like a bitch when they did the spine area on my current one. A character right on my backbone is gonna be torture.
