NosE2
04-25-2007, 12:47 PM
umm i dont know how to type the link or whatever ! but here is the link to the article in the new york times...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion...FdyUeYbTdQTgapg (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion/19grafitti.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1176989070-sTzE1TnFdyUeYbTdQTgapg)
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/6206/19graffiti600fw0.jpg
When graffiti was rampant in New York City during the 1980s, a Brooklyn teenager known as Alan Ket was at the top of his game. In broad strokes of aerosol spray, he slashed brash images on subway cars, branched out to vandalize trains in Europe, and became such a fixture in the flourishing graffiti culture that he was asked to speak at several universities.
Now, as graffiti has evolved into a popular art form, it is drawing both the outrage of public officials and the scrutiny of law enforcement authorities. And for the first time, Mr. Ket, whose graffiti work has been shown in galleries, is facing a serious legal gantlet.
Relying on computer evidence seized from his Manhattan home last October, the district attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens have charged Mr. Ket under his real name, Alain Maridueña, with 14 criminal counts, including trespass, criminal mischief and making graffiti. If convicted, he could potentially face decades in prison and huge financial penalties.
Mr. Maridueña is charged with painting several recent images on subway cars, a form of graffiti vandalism that has largely died out since the early 1990s. But his case, and his recent professional history, underscore how graffiti has been propelled from the shadowy corners of the subway system into a global genre of virtual images circulated on the Internet, and become a powerful influence in design, fashion and graphics.
The case could pose an important test for prosecutors and the police, since Mr. Maridueña was never caught in the act and has no previous criminal record in New York City. Instead, the government’s case appears to be based largely on what prosecutors say is the unmistakable detail of his graffiti signature — his “KET” tag — and the fact that the tag is visible on photographs of illegal subway graffiti that were entered into Mr. Maridueña’s home computer only hours after identical work was discovered on subway cars.
There is apparently no clear precedent for this type of prosecution of graffiti vandalism; graffiti charges usually tie a defendant physically to the scene of a defacing. “I know of no case specifically on this point,” said Michael Brovner, the senior assistant district attorney in Queens, where Mr. Maridueña is accused of defacing a subway car parked near a Queens subway station on March 22, 2006, and of leaving a readily visible tag.
Mr. Maridueña, 36, has pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He maintained in an interview that he was nowhere near the subway trains or stations that were vandalized, and said he believed he was being singled out because of his professional ties to Marc Ecko, the designer, who has championed graffiti as an art form and has tangled with City Hall over graffiti.
Mr. Maridueña said that he had not committed any graffiti vandalism since his daughter was born in 1994, and that the images and tags that prosecutors are now trying to tie to him were the work of copycat graffiti sprayers.
“I do consider myself a good friend of Alain’s,” Mr. Ecko said in an e-mail response to questions, adding, “I will consider using my personal resources to fight” the case against Mr. Maridueña.
It remains unclear what evidence the district attorneys may have beyond photographs of graffiti. None of the cases have reached the point at which prosecutors must show their evidentiary hand through the discovery process.
John O’Mara, an assistant district attorney who is prosecuting Mr. Maridueña in Brooklyn, said, “A tag is not a fingerprint,” and added that he “would not have elected to proceed solely on a tag.” But he said the government could also show that photographs of graffiti on Mr. Maridueña’s computer were entered soon after the vandalism took place.
A legal scholar and an expert on graffiti vandalism differed on the strength of the case, based on the limited information that has been disclosed by prosecutors.
“It sounds like a strong circumstantial case,” said Carol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School. “People are convicted on circumstantial evidence all the time,” she said, citing an example of someone who is convicted of robbery after being found with the victim’s wallet or credit card.
But Tim Kephart, a California entrepreneur who uses computer models to analyze graffiti tags for law enforcement authorities, said the case against Mr. Maridueña appeared weak. Mr. Kephart, the chief executive of Graffiti Tracker, said matching a tag to a vandal was crucial, but better evidence would probably be needed to show that Mr. Maridueña was at or near the sites of the recent subway vandalism.
Mr. Maridueña’s lawyer, Daniel Perez, said his client spent several nights in jail in March as he was being shuttled between arraignments in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, and was released only after his friends and family provided a cumulative bail of $65,000 required by three judges.
“Three district attorneys have ganged up on my client,” Mr. Perez said. “There has got to be something going on.”
While insisting that he has not vandalized property for more than a decade, Mr. Maridueña has hardly disappeared from the graffiti scene. According to a biography he has posted online, he has worked as an artistic consultant to companies like Atari, Moët & Chandon and MTV. His strongest business ties have been to Ecko Unlimited, the company run by Mr. Ecko.
Mr. Maridueña was hired by Mr. Ecko in 2001 to start Complex, a fashion magazine for young men. He later created graphics for a video game, “Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure,” which was designed by Ecko Unlimited for Atari. Public officials condemned the game because it offered players the virtual equivalent of creating their own graffiti.
The release of the game, and a Chelsea block party staged by Mr. Ecko in August 2005 to celebrate it, led to a clash between Mr. Ecko and City Hall. When city officials learned that Ecko Unlimited planned to have 20 young people at the party paint graffiti on metal panels made to look like the sides of subway cars, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “Defacing subway cars is not a joke.”
Then, after the city revoked the company’s party permit, Mr. Ecko’s lawyers won a court ruling from a federal judge who ordered the permit reinstated and scolded the city for overstepping people’s rights to free speech.
In the case against Mr. Maridueña, Mr. Brovner said prosecutors could present a video being marketed on the Internet that shows Mr. Maridueña painting his tag on a subway car. But Carl Weston, the director of Videograf Productions, who said he made the video and has long been an acquaintance of Mr. Maridueña, said the video was made in the early 1990s, long before the cases of graffiti vandalism that Mr. Maridueña is now charged with.
Pieces of the prosecutors’ case are included in an affidavit that was submitted by a detective in October to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Maridueña’s apartment.
The detective, Jonathan Dubroff of the special investigations unit of the police Transit Bureau, describes graffiti that was sprayed in March 2006 in a Brooklyn subway yard. The affidavit says the tag “KET” was clearly visible in the graffiti, but provides no evidence that Mr. Maridueña was at the yard at the time.
The affidavit also provides a short history of how New York City graffiti has evolved, describing a “clean train policy” employed by the subway system since 1989, in which any defaced car is taken out of service and cleaned. As a result, the affidavit says, graffiti vandals began to immediately photograph their work and eventually started circulating the images on the Internet.
When the police searched Mr. Maridueña’s apartment on Oct. 12, they removed his computer, which he said held hundreds of graffiti images that had been sent to him, and 3,000 aerosol paint can tops.
Mr. Maridueña said the paint was a tool of his art trade and the photographs were being stored for a book about the history of New York City graffiti.
“I am a photographer, a sometimes commercial painter and a historian who is totally a fan of the art movement,” he said. “I’m just a geek, but they are trying to fry me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion...FdyUeYbTdQTgapg (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion/19grafitti.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1176989070-sTzE1TnFdyUeYbTdQTgapg)
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/6206/19graffiti600fw0.jpg
When graffiti was rampant in New York City during the 1980s, a Brooklyn teenager known as Alan Ket was at the top of his game. In broad strokes of aerosol spray, he slashed brash images on subway cars, branched out to vandalize trains in Europe, and became such a fixture in the flourishing graffiti culture that he was asked to speak at several universities.
Now, as graffiti has evolved into a popular art form, it is drawing both the outrage of public officials and the scrutiny of law enforcement authorities. And for the first time, Mr. Ket, whose graffiti work has been shown in galleries, is facing a serious legal gantlet.
Relying on computer evidence seized from his Manhattan home last October, the district attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens have charged Mr. Ket under his real name, Alain Maridueña, with 14 criminal counts, including trespass, criminal mischief and making graffiti. If convicted, he could potentially face decades in prison and huge financial penalties.
Mr. Maridueña is charged with painting several recent images on subway cars, a form of graffiti vandalism that has largely died out since the early 1990s. But his case, and his recent professional history, underscore how graffiti has been propelled from the shadowy corners of the subway system into a global genre of virtual images circulated on the Internet, and become a powerful influence in design, fashion and graphics.
The case could pose an important test for prosecutors and the police, since Mr. Maridueña was never caught in the act and has no previous criminal record in New York City. Instead, the government’s case appears to be based largely on what prosecutors say is the unmistakable detail of his graffiti signature — his “KET” tag — and the fact that the tag is visible on photographs of illegal subway graffiti that were entered into Mr. Maridueña’s home computer only hours after identical work was discovered on subway cars.
There is apparently no clear precedent for this type of prosecution of graffiti vandalism; graffiti charges usually tie a defendant physically to the scene of a defacing. “I know of no case specifically on this point,” said Michael Brovner, the senior assistant district attorney in Queens, where Mr. Maridueña is accused of defacing a subway car parked near a Queens subway station on March 22, 2006, and of leaving a readily visible tag.
Mr. Maridueña, 36, has pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He maintained in an interview that he was nowhere near the subway trains or stations that were vandalized, and said he believed he was being singled out because of his professional ties to Marc Ecko, the designer, who has championed graffiti as an art form and has tangled with City Hall over graffiti.
Mr. Maridueña said that he had not committed any graffiti vandalism since his daughter was born in 1994, and that the images and tags that prosecutors are now trying to tie to him were the work of copycat graffiti sprayers.
“I do consider myself a good friend of Alain’s,” Mr. Ecko said in an e-mail response to questions, adding, “I will consider using my personal resources to fight” the case against Mr. Maridueña.
It remains unclear what evidence the district attorneys may have beyond photographs of graffiti. None of the cases have reached the point at which prosecutors must show their evidentiary hand through the discovery process.
John O’Mara, an assistant district attorney who is prosecuting Mr. Maridueña in Brooklyn, said, “A tag is not a fingerprint,” and added that he “would not have elected to proceed solely on a tag.” But he said the government could also show that photographs of graffiti on Mr. Maridueña’s computer were entered soon after the vandalism took place.
A legal scholar and an expert on graffiti vandalism differed on the strength of the case, based on the limited information that has been disclosed by prosecutors.
“It sounds like a strong circumstantial case,” said Carol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School. “People are convicted on circumstantial evidence all the time,” she said, citing an example of someone who is convicted of robbery after being found with the victim’s wallet or credit card.
But Tim Kephart, a California entrepreneur who uses computer models to analyze graffiti tags for law enforcement authorities, said the case against Mr. Maridueña appeared weak. Mr. Kephart, the chief executive of Graffiti Tracker, said matching a tag to a vandal was crucial, but better evidence would probably be needed to show that Mr. Maridueña was at or near the sites of the recent subway vandalism.
Mr. Maridueña’s lawyer, Daniel Perez, said his client spent several nights in jail in March as he was being shuttled between arraignments in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, and was released only after his friends and family provided a cumulative bail of $65,000 required by three judges.
“Three district attorneys have ganged up on my client,” Mr. Perez said. “There has got to be something going on.”
While insisting that he has not vandalized property for more than a decade, Mr. Maridueña has hardly disappeared from the graffiti scene. According to a biography he has posted online, he has worked as an artistic consultant to companies like Atari, Moët & Chandon and MTV. His strongest business ties have been to Ecko Unlimited, the company run by Mr. Ecko.
Mr. Maridueña was hired by Mr. Ecko in 2001 to start Complex, a fashion magazine for young men. He later created graphics for a video game, “Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure,” which was designed by Ecko Unlimited for Atari. Public officials condemned the game because it offered players the virtual equivalent of creating their own graffiti.
The release of the game, and a Chelsea block party staged by Mr. Ecko in August 2005 to celebrate it, led to a clash between Mr. Ecko and City Hall. When city officials learned that Ecko Unlimited planned to have 20 young people at the party paint graffiti on metal panels made to look like the sides of subway cars, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “Defacing subway cars is not a joke.”
Then, after the city revoked the company’s party permit, Mr. Ecko’s lawyers won a court ruling from a federal judge who ordered the permit reinstated and scolded the city for overstepping people’s rights to free speech.
In the case against Mr. Maridueña, Mr. Brovner said prosecutors could present a video being marketed on the Internet that shows Mr. Maridueña painting his tag on a subway car. But Carl Weston, the director of Videograf Productions, who said he made the video and has long been an acquaintance of Mr. Maridueña, said the video was made in the early 1990s, long before the cases of graffiti vandalism that Mr. Maridueña is now charged with.
Pieces of the prosecutors’ case are included in an affidavit that was submitted by a detective in October to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Maridueña’s apartment.
The detective, Jonathan Dubroff of the special investigations unit of the police Transit Bureau, describes graffiti that was sprayed in March 2006 in a Brooklyn subway yard. The affidavit says the tag “KET” was clearly visible in the graffiti, but provides no evidence that Mr. Maridueña was at the yard at the time.
The affidavit also provides a short history of how New York City graffiti has evolved, describing a “clean train policy” employed by the subway system since 1989, in which any defaced car is taken out of service and cleaned. As a result, the affidavit says, graffiti vandals began to immediately photograph their work and eventually started circulating the images on the Internet.
When the police searched Mr. Maridueña’s apartment on Oct. 12, they removed his computer, which he said held hundreds of graffiti images that had been sent to him, and 3,000 aerosol paint can tops.
Mr. Maridueña said the paint was a tool of his art trade and the photographs were being stored for a book about the history of New York City graffiti.
“I am a photographer, a sometimes commercial painter and a historian who is totally a fan of the art movement,” he said. “I’m just a geek, but they are trying to fry me.”