ENEMY OF THE STATE: THE HUNT FOR INTERNATIONAL GRAFFITI QUEEN UTAH AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSIT GRAFFITI
Transit graffiti has its roots in the public name-writing tradition that emerged from a growing urban subculture in the late 1960s. New York writers were the first to take the activity to subway trains. From 1973 to 1983, thousands of writers accessed Metro Transit Authority (MTA) yards and tunnels, painting on trains with considerable ease.
In 1984, MTA introduced a new approach to combating what many considered acts of vandalism (Felisbret, 2009). The Clean Car Program, the hallmark of which was keeping trains painted with graffiti out of circulation until cleaned, also included increased security measures such as higher fencing, razor wire, video monitoring, and the creation of an MTA/NYPD Vandal Squad to investigate and learn the identities of writers. As a result, these measures kept most writers out of the yards for the next five years and the MTA was able to remove writing from thousands of trains, erasing the practice’s brief history. However, these efforts were not completely foolproof, as evidenced by authorities’ ongoing battle with transit graffiti in the privacy of their maintenance yards and lay-ups.
The conflict between authorities keeping trains clean and writers’ infiltration of their yards continues to this day, although now with much higher stakes. In post-9/11 America, officials around the nation--once charged with only the maintenance of mass transportation systems--have joined the frontlines concerning national security. As confirmed in one of FEMA’s public documents, “FY 2009 Transit Security Grant Program,” such systems now receive millions of dollars in annual funding from the Department of Homeland Security to upgrade their security measures. Despite increased funding, during the eight years since the September 11 attacks, transit authorities have faced a resurgence of illegal transit graffiti, which continues to sweep across the country. The presence of graffiti throughout mass transit systems, particularly on trains painted within so-called “secure” yards, has prompted federal officials to focus their resources on spray-paint-wielding youths, who flagrantly expose cracks in our national security system.
This uptick in security officials’ attention towards graffiti writers is best illustrated by the story of Danielle “UTAH” Bremner, a 26-year-old New York writer. Her arrest in 2008 was the result of a two-and-a-half-year MTA investigation that appears to have employed thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of public dollars. During this time, investigators followed the exploits of one of the most prolific transit graffiti writers of the day. Although many other writers have been subject to police scrutiny, Bremner’s case is unusual because of the sheer amount of resources authorities expended while hunting her down, bringing her to trial, and incarcerating her. Overall, the costs of tracking and trying her were disproportionate to the relatively small cost of the damage she was accused of creating. As Brendan Brosh notes in a 2009 article in the New York Daily News, for only $6,000 of alleged damage over three years in Queens, NY, Bremner had to pay “$10,000 in restitution to the MTA, prosecutors said.”
Ultimately, Bremner’s case is unique because it has allowed authorities to introduce a new approach to anti-graffiti campaigns, one that no longer considers writers as pesky vandals, but more so as criminals akin to domestic terrorists. This new approach allows authorities to employ investigative tools usually reserved only for those posing an imminent danger to the citizenry, such as the National Crime Information Center database, inter-departmental information sharing, and extradition. All this for an offense once described in the graffiti documentary, Style Wars, by New York City’s former mayor, Ed Koch (one of transit graffiti’s staunchest political enemies during the late 1980s) as simply, “a quality of life crime. … like littering, pickpocketing, and Three-card Monte.”
The name UTAH first came to national attention in the background for The Beastie Boys’ “Ch-Check It Out” video. As Mike D and Ad-Rock battled it out in full Star Trek regalia, UTAH’s soft letters stood out against the rough building facade. The song was the first single for the group’s “To the 5 Boroughs” which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart in July 2004 and the subsequent video played in constant rotation on MTV stations around the world (Billboard.com). For an aspiring graffiti writer, this sort of exposure is gold. At the time, UTAH was actively street bombing in New York City and her name was painted on thousands of surfaces throughout the five boroughs.
In 2005, she began focusing her attention on painting subway trains, and after a few successful missions, she took her show on the road. For the next few years, Bremner traveled the United States, connecting in most cities with the prominent writers of the area, as well as playing hostess to several writers and crews in New York. Soon, the name UTAH dominated the landscape with tags appearing on transit trains across the country. As the New York Daily News noted, “Between January and May 2007, vandals trespassing in dark subway tunnels and rail yards ringed with razor wire carried out 98 major spray-paint ‘hits’” (Donohue, 2009). This explosion included a whole 10-car train painted with a Monopoly board game theme (SASTER, 2007). Authorities began investigating the surge, starting with several trains painted with UTAH’s work. A handpicked group of retired NYPD detectives, MTA supervisors, and retired Marine Corps officers called the “Eagle Team” was contracted to lead the investigation (Donohue, 2007). By this time, UTAH had begun painting with crews of traveling writers who specifically focused on painting trains in major U.S. cities, a movement with its roots in Chicago. These missions required writers to research and coordinate painting on trains inside transit system depots and lay-ups for lengths of time. Not since the early 1980s had so many subway trains been painted. However, unlike the 1980s, this new wave of painting was not confined to the region of New York City.
During the Eagle Team’s investigation, which included monitoring social networking Web sites, informant interviews, video surveillance, and stakeouts, they identified Bremner as a suspect in the transit train paintings. After conducting surveillance on her home, investigators learned she was dating Clay “ETHER” Harper, a member of the Chicago-based M.U.L. graffiti crew, which was thought to be responsible for painting the Monopoly-themed train cars. Over the next year, the Eagle Team built a case against both Bremner and Harper. The evidence they collected was used to obtain a search warrant on UTAH’s apartment in Queens, which resulted in the confiscation of over 450 cans of spray paint, drawings, and photographs linking Danielle to the UTAH graffiti in New York and other cities (Brosh, 2009). Bremner was not in New York during the raid, but her mother, a public school teacher, and her father, a former NYPD police officer, tipped her off while she was traveling in Europe with Harper. There, where most vacationers take in the sights, the duo painted in more than ten major European cities including Paris, London, Madrid, Frankfurt, and Hamburg.
Three months later, the couple made plans to return to the States. Through information gathered from the raid, the Eagle Team was able to pinpoint Bremner and Harper’s U.S. re-entry. In an attempted ruse on August 21, 2008, the two returned to opposite hometowns, Harper through John F. Kennedy International in New York and Bremner through O’Hare International in Illinois (Gregorian and Li, 2008). Despite their efforts, they were both taken into custody by authorities upon arrival. Harper was released the next day without bail, and Bremner sat in a holding cell awaiting transport to New York. While she waited, a flurry of media reports circulated stories about the high-profile arrest of the intercontinental graffiti “Bonnie and Clyde.” Soon after, other jurisdictions, including Boston and Pittsburgh, began to show interest in bringing Bremner to trial.
After being taken to New York, Bremner pleaded guilty to a single count of felony -- criminal mischief -- for vandalizing six subway cars in Queens in 2005, causing more than $6,000 in damage. She also faced similar charges in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. In sum, UTAH was suspected of causing more than $100,000 in damage throughout the city. Bremner was able to cut a deal with prosecutors from the four boroughs by pleading guilty and accepting a six-month prison sentence for each borough to be served concurrently, which began in April 2009 at Rikers Island. This sentence allowed lawmakers to proclaim a public victory against illegal graffiti on the streets and in the subway system.
In October 2009, prosecutors in Boston, eager to proclaim a similar victory, brought Bremner to trial for an outstanding warrant stemming from an arrest on May 24, 2006. In addition, charges were brought against Bremner for UTAH graffiti documented in the historic Back Bay section of the city, and on trains in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Orient Heights rail yard. Boston authorities had been made aware of Bremner and her connection to UTAH graffiti before her arrest in 2008. They had been contacted almost two weeks prior by the Eagle Team with information about her identity. This sort of inter-departmental information sharing is typical in drug trafficking cases. That same information was relayed to Boston Police Department Detective William Kelley and MBTA Police Lieutenant Nancy O’Loughlin, who heads a task force committed to catching and incarcerating graffiti writers.
Detective Kelley, the lynchpin of the group, is known for collecting information on writers from a variety of sources. These include his admitted shakedowns of teenage informants he meets through a falsified MySpace page from which he contacts writers who have displayed their work on the site, as noted in Chris Faraone’s 2008 article in The Boston Phoenix. Kelley is assigned to the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, where he primarily works on cases concerning homeland security. O’Loughlin’s expertise relates to her documentation of illegal graffiti, of which she has over two hundred books cataloging the greater Boston graffiti scene going back over two decades. Those resources have been used to imprison several high-profile street bombers, including Cayper, Spek, and Shepard Fairey, creator of the notorious “OBEY” brand.
Almost two years after her initial Boston arrest in 2006, Bremner was taken back into custody. She pleads not guilty to 33 counts of felony vandalism. Prosecutors were able to attain guilty verdicts on 13 counts. For those charges, she was handed another six-month jail sentence and a $15,000 restitution bill. She was also ordered to serve five years of probation to be supervised by New York officials, to stay out of Boston during that period, and to undergo mental health evaluations and treatment.
While surveillance, arrests, jail time, and sanctions are nothing new to graffiti writers, UTAH’s case sets precedents. It marks the first time a female graffiti writer has been charged and found guilty of felony vandalism resulting in incarceration. Bremner may also be extradited to face additional vandalism charges overseas. Authorities have expressed interest in bringing her to trial in Toronto and Paris for transit graffiti violations. As these cities attempt to show some public victory in the fight against illegal transit graffiti, Bremner could find herself a worldwide trophy kill for vandal squads. In the process, authorities are creating alarming new models for tracking and prosecuting graffiti writers on a global scale.
More disturbing still is the possibility that these new models for policing transit graffiti could easily become commonplace. Transit security officials have been quick to cite illegal transit graffiti as a sure indicator that terrorists, too, can easily access domestic rail systems. During a recent roundtable discussion with the Department of Homeland Security, Daniel Hall, vice president of the Chicago Transit Authority said:
“If graffiti vandals can get into your rail yards and put graffiti on the trains, then the terrorists can get in and put a bomb on them. … It’s the same thing” (Hilkevitch, 2009).
At the center of the matter is an attempt to shore up the perceived holes in the security strategies of transit agencies, many of which are documented in photos and videos that circulate via the Web and graffiti publications. These images show writers infiltrating subway yards, lay-ups, and train tunnels. If this rise in transit graffiti continues, instead of having to fear local vandal squads, writers may soon find themselves in the crosshairs of government agencies.
In their investigation of UTAH, authorities uncovered a renewed movement dedicated to continuing the tradition of painting names on subway trains. This movement, not confined to a particular locale, has put authorities on the defensive as public scrutiny over safety and inflated maintenance budgets continue to hound these agencies. The idea of individuals and groups worldwide with the ability to conduct surveillance on, and enter undetected into mass transportation systems for “bombing,” “striking,” and “burning,” calls into question the security of these facilities and highlights the flaws in their 20-plus-year graffiti abatement models. To compete with this challenge, it appears investigators intend to use the arrests and trials of Bremner as a prototype case for future investigations of members of the graffiti community. This new investigative model catapults transit graffiti from a municipal issue into the sphere of national security. Moving forward, writers must be cautious; these distinctions could soon transform the nature of charges typically associated with local transit graffiti to mirror charges indicative of larger threats to national security.
