Toting a portable supply of paint cans, the artist slipped onto the roof before dawn and began mischievously remodeling a fashion billboard.
This was late in the summer of 2000 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, then a proudly transgressive neighborhood. Prostitution and S&M leather bars coexisted alongside food distributors emitting a foul stench into the air and blood and grease onto the cobblestone streets.
The figure defacing the billboard stood out, at least to the two sex workers eyeing him from the street.
“They thought he was doing something anti-gay,” said Ivy Brown, the gallerist who had asked the daring artist, an acquaintance, to deface the billboard. Ms. Brown rented space in the building that the billboard stood on top of.
But before the artist could finish, the police showed up and arrested him for felony criminal mischief.
It was a routine arrest. He was arraigned downtown in Manhattan Criminal Court at 100 Centre Street and signed a handwritten confession detailing his defacing of the billboard after a night out drinking.
The signature on the confession was scrawled so sloppily that the last name was indecipherable. But typed into accompanying court papers, the name was plain as day: Robin Gunningham.
The authorities did not know it, but at least according to a recent investigation by Reuters, they had just caught Banksy, who would go on to become the most elusive and successful street artist of the 21st century, with work selling for tens of millions of dollars. For decades, Banksy’s closely guarded anonymity has captivated the art world nearly as much as his work.
Once his name was entered into New York’s justice system, it became part of the public record and available for anyone to find — but only if someone knew where to look. And after 26 years, somebody did.
The obscure court file was tracked down by Reuters, whose lengthy investigation last week leaned heavily on the arrest as confirmation that Banksy is Mr. Gunningham, born in Bristol, England, in 1973.
By sleuthing out the arrest report and court filing, Reuters effectively confirmed a theory circulating since a 2008 report by The Mail on Sunday and advanced by other investigations.
Banksy’s representatives have long denied that he is Robin Gunningham, or anyone else for that matter. Pest Control, an agency that authenticates his work, said in an email that neither it nor the artist nor his longtime lawyer, Mark Stephens, would comment.
Requests sent to Mr. Stephens’s law office in London were not returned, but he told Reuters that the artist did “not accept that many of the details contained within your inquiry are correct.”
The legal file from 2000 provides the most concrete evidence to date regarding Banksy’s identity.
The arrest was perhaps a rookie mistake.
At the time, he was a fledgling artist still finding his voice. He had only recently begun cultivating the street-art style and image that would make him famous, using a series of aliases that included Robin Banks, Mr. Banks and eventually Banksy.
He had one thing working in his favor, however. At the time of the arrest, the police did not know who he was.
“He hadn’t really made a name for himself, at least not in the States,” said Steve Mona, the commander of the New York Police Department’s Vandal Squad at the time.
“He certainly had not risen to the level of being on our radar,” said Mr. Mona, who is now retired and could not recall the 26-year-old arrest. “Either we weren’t notified, or if we were, we passed on it, which would have likely been because what he’d done wasn’t a tag, something we could ID or tie to other incidents.”
Without that, Banksy’s billboard caper was most likely considered a garden-variety graffiti charge, a bit of booze-fueled mischief.
The initial felony charge was reduced, and after five days of community service, Banksy put the arrest behind him, his anonymity intact.
‘A Humorous Adjustment’
The building at 675 Hudson Street, in the heart of the Meatpacking District, is known as the Little Flatiron Building for its triangular footprint, which is similar to its more famous counterpart on 23rd Street.
The structure is now surrounded by the trappings of tourist-friendly Manhattan: high-end boutiques, sleek hotels and an Apple Store. The High Line and the Chelsea Market are also nearby.
The district was a far less accommodating neighborhood in 2000. The Little Flatiron was smack in the middle of a nightlife underworld — inside the building were the clubs Manhole and Hellfire — and it was surrounded by edgy galleries.
Ms. Brown, Banksy’s acquaintance, lived in and ran a gallery in the building. In an interview this week, she said she had come to know him through a mutual art-world friend.
During New York Fashion Week in 2000, she said she told Banksy about an awful billboard that had recently gone up on the roof of her building.
It was an advertisement for Marc Jacobs clothing that showed a young man’s face with the tagline, “Boys Love Marc Jacobs.”
“The whole thing bothered me,” Ms. Brown recalled. “I thought it defaced the building.” She hated the sign and asked Banksy to paint something — anything — over it.
“I said: ‘Yo, B, I got this thing up on the roof that has really got my goat. Do you want to do something up there?’”
“He said, ‘Yeah, let me check it out,” she said, and he spent the next several days hanging out at the Gaslight Lounge across the street, staring at the sign.
“I thought, this is what he does. He scouts out his location,” said Ms. Brown, who gave him a set of keys and left the artistic decisions to him. “The things he came up with were brilliant. I just trusted him to make it something cool.”
Up to this point, Banksy was focusing on street art; he was less known for the distinctive stencil style that would make him famous. According to Reuters, he summoned a scene for the Meatpacking assignment from the 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a tourism billboard of a woman lying on a raft is doctored to include a shark fin in the water and bulging eyes for the woman.
“Using a key I entered the building where I had been keeping some paints and using a ladder I painted eyeshadow a new mouth and a speach [sic] bubble of the billboard,” Banksy wrote in his confession, which he called “a humorous adjustment” made after “drinking at a nightclub with friends.”
Under the confession is a signature that includes a sloppy first name and an illegible last name beginning with the letter G.
The court filing is a window into Banksy’s early years in New York City. He told the authorities he was staying at the Carlton Arms Hotel, a Manhattan spot famous for letting artists stay for free if they decorated the rooms.
Because damage to the billboard exceeded $1,500 — the legal records put the repair cost at $1,742.82 — the authorities initially charged Banksy with a felony. That was eventually reduced, with the fine and fees totaling $310.
Court records list Banksy’s lawyer as Julian White. Reached this week, Mr. White, now in private practice in Manhattan, confirmed that it was his name on the records but said that he had no recollection of the case, nor whether he represented Banksy after his arraignment.
After all, Mr. White said, he represented some 1,100 people during his three years working at Legal Aid as a young public defender fresh out of law school. He handled mostly misdemeanor cases on the overnight shift at Manhattan Criminal Court, he said.
The way the case was handled for Banksy was “definitely the way I’d go about it at the time,” he said.
“That would have been the goal, to get his case dismissed or plead down,” he said. “With a felony first offender, the whole goal is to avoid a criminal record, getting the charge reduced down to a violation such as disorderly conduct, and that’s what ended up happening.”
Robert Clarke, a night porter at the Carlton Arms when Banksy began staying there, said he befriended Banksy in 1995. “They must have been kicking themselves that they nicked him and he’s that well known now,” he said in a phone interview from Bristol, England.
New York helped the artist develop his distinct style and stealth method, Mr. Clarke said, to the point that he could execute a stenciled piece in seconds and reappear down the block waiting for you to catch up.
After the police caught up with Banksy that summer night in 2000, Ms. Brown said she got a call from a detective saying, “We have someone who says he’s a guest of yours and he’s doing something on your roof.”
The court file shows Banksy had to surrender his passport before posting $1,500 bail. He was in custody only for the morning and was released by midday.
“A few hours later, he’s out, which I found amazing,” Ms. Brown said. “He called and he said, ‘I’m out, and I’m walking up Grand Street.’”
She recalled Banksy’s explanation for getting released so quickly: He had charmed the female judge.
“Part of his art, I realized, was getting out of trouble,” she said.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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