LOS ANGELES — Not so long ago, Cristian Gheorghiu roamed the streets of Los Angeles at all hours, black marker in his pocket, hunting for walls and street signs where he could scrawl his graffiti moniker, “Smear.” These days, he’s working in his garage, splashed in paint and surrounded by canvases, paint cans, markers and odds and ends he uses to fashion abstract mixed-media artworks, which have been exhibited in galleries from California to Europe, fetching up to a couple thousand dollars.
“Painting is a good way to wean yourself off graffiti, get that bug out,” said Gheorghiu, a slightly built 34-year-old with shoulder-length hair. “It’s kind of evolved. I’ve had some moderate success.”
Although he says his tagging days are past, Gheorghiu’s past is now tagging him.
The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has filed a lawsuit against Gheorghiu and nine other graffiti writers associated with the Metro Transit Assassins tagging crew, charging them with violating California’s unfair competition laws because they’re selling artworks on the strength of their outlaw names and reputations.
“They’ve obtained an unfair advantage because they gained fame and notoriety through criminal acts,” said Anne Tremblay, assistant city attorney. “This is unlawful competition.”
The argument is a novel one in the legal annals of efforts to prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes, and it represents a new weapon in the city’s long-suffering battle against graffiti vandals.
But Peter Bibring, Gheorghiu’s attorney, says the city attorney’s lawsuit is a thinly veiled end run around the First Amendment right to free expression.
“This is an extraordinary overreach,” said Bibring, staff attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “The government cannot say who can be an artist.”
The U.S. Supreme Court and other courts have upheld that criminals have a right to free expression, which includes everything from writing about their crimes to painting about them — and profiting.
