Spray Paint The Walls: Marc Ecko Has Blood On His Hands

If you ever wondered whether there was risk associated with tagging, know that there is:

The brutal death of a recently Bar Mitzvah-ed Rego Park teenager has once again brought the controversial issue of illegal graffiti into the public’s eye. Ari Kraft, 13, was hoping for fame by “tagging” signal boxes near the LIRR’s Forest Hills station last Friday evening. In the end, he got more recognition than he, his family or friends could ever have wanted for him.

Over the weekend, local and national media were full of the news that Kraft had been struck by a Jamaica-bound train while trespassing on the tracks in between the Woodside and Forest Hills stations. He was with several friends who immediately called the police, but dental records will be necessary to definitively identify him, because his body was scattered by the 45 m.p.h. express train full of over 1,000 commuters.

Cue Peter Vallone, Jr.:

“This incident was a tragedy,” counseled Astoria Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr., who publicly lambastes so-called graffiti artists regularly. “Young Ari was hit by a train, but next time one of these kids could fall off a bridge or be mugged at 4 a.m.” According to Vallone, Ari’s case is another example of an otherwise good kid gone bad. “This is even more proof,” he told the Ledger/Star by phone, “that all types of kids can be affected by the commercialization of graffiti.”

Interestingly, some agree:

“I understand why he’s saying that,” said one practitioner of the illegal art, who goes by the tag TRACE, when informed of Vallone’s recent comments. “He’s trying to get mothers on his side.”

Vallone’s comments about another kid possibly falling off a bridge hit home with TRACE, who years ago lost a close friend to just such an accident.

“Getting to a spot that nobody else can get to because it’s dangerous,” he said, “is definitely a part of graffiti culture. It gets your blood running, going into a train tunnel or climbing onto a roof.”

TRACE himself nearly died once when he was scaling a pole to get up to a billboard.

“I was going up real fast like a monkey,” he recalled, “and my hand hit a live wire on the other side and I got electrocuted.” The current caused his muscles to contract and he was stuck, involuntarily gripping the pole harder than he wanted to. “If my friend hadn’t been there to help me down,” he admitted, “I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

“It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes”:

At this point in his life, TRACE is beginning to see, as he puts it, “the other side of the coin.” After a rebellious youth he was lucky to survive, the somewhat settled down tagger says he still doesn’t respect private property, “but I can understand what a guy like Vallone is saying. These companies really do glorify graffiti and kids do get hurt doing it.”

Honestly, Who Hasn’t Dreamed Of Ringing In The New Year By Smoking Crack In A Staten Island Cemetery?

Some Staten Islanders take the personification of “Father Time” literally with a New Year’s Eve party at a local cemetery:

Plastic chairs, an empty keg and discarded liquor bottles littered the grounds of Ocean View Cemetery in Oakwood yesterday, the remnants of a New Year’s Eve party held near a crypt close to Amboy Road.

“It was just disgusting,” said Jim Coffey, a 41-year-old computer programmer from Great Kills who went to the cemetery yesterday with his wife to visit her brother’s grave. “You go to visit a person’s grave and you see all this stuff.”

Coffey took photos of what he saw — a dismantled fence, discarded cups, several chairs and a headstone that looked like it was turned into an open bar. He also said he spotted some “glassine envelopes,” the type used to hold drugs. “The most disgusting thing was the bottles lined up on the headstone there.”

No gravestones appeared to be toppled, Coffey said.

Coffey and his wife visited her brother’s headstone at about 3:30 p.m., and were on their way out when they found a broken plastic chair thrown into the middle of the exit road, leading to Amboy. Then they looked around.

“First we saw the headstone had all of those bottles, and then we looked up the hill at the crypt, and the rest of the party was up there,” he said. “Just the audacity of them. They brought plastic lawn furniture. . . . They did it with impunity. They absolutely didn’t expect anyone to happen upon them.”

(Perhaps El Nino is to blame?)

Bringing Gritty Back

And here you assumed Times Square somehow lost its former lustre:

It’s unclear what caused 45-year-old Joseph Regno’s death inside the tiny booth, which charges $1 per two pornographic minutes, source said.

But when an employee at Gotham City discovered his body Saturday night, he left to call for help, the sources said.

Guy Montgomery, 25, then allegedly made his move. He rummaged through the dead man’s pants and grabbed cash, the sources said. He then opened the booth — one of 20 at the parlor — and darted toward the door.

Cops arrived just in time to arrest Montgomery as the he made his exit from the Eighth Avenue peepshow palace.

The Bronx man, who has prior robbery arrests, was charged with grand larceny.

Times Ledger Newspapers Come Out Against Ritalin

The new owners of the Times Ledger newspapers (ahem) should probably intervene here. A fluff piece on Scientology? Is Rupert Murdoch a Scientologist or something? I can’t even fathom what they were thinking*:

A Bayside native has been appointed to lead the Church of Scientology’s anti-drug campaign in New York, a drug education effort that the group says is the largest in the world. Meghan Fialkoff of Bayside will run the New York “Say No to Drugs, Say Yes to Life” campaign, part of the secular nonprofit Foundation for a Drug Free World. Although the campaign is run by Scientologists, Fialkoff said they do not promote the religion, only their anti-drug message.

“In our church basically we’re helping people go free,” she said. “It’s all about helping people live lives where they can be free, and if you’re doing drugs, you’re not. You’re a slave to whatever your buying and how you’re going to get it.”

The campaign will distribute millions of booklets about how to prevent drug use, Fialkoff said. The information covers drug use in general. There are pamphlets tailored to information about specific drugs, everything from crack to painkillers to ritalin, which the campaign calls “kiddie cocaine.”

*What a bad week for the Queens weeklies.

Motherfucking Slumlords

First he was attacked by intruders and paralyzed. Then his building’s elevator went on the fritz. Then he ran short of money for the $80 to get four men to carry him down the stairs. And we forgot to mention the cancer:

Not only is Willie Freeman a prisoner in his own body, he is now a prisoner in his own home.

Freeman, 59, has been paralyzed from the neck down for almost 20 years, but that wouldn’t necessarily trouble him at this point if his elevator worked.

And that wouldn’t be a complete disaster if he wasn’t suffering from colon cancer. Since May, he hasn’t received regular chemotherapy or radiation treatment because he can’t get out of his home, he said.

“Cancer is eating away at me, and I can’t get out to save my life,” said Freeman, who used to install carpets before an attack by intruders in his home left him handicapped.

He’s only been able to afford the $80 it costs to pay four men to carry him up and down from his third-floor apartment a few times, he said.

The owner of the Bedford-Stuyvesant building at 300 Putnam Ave., Bedford Throop Housing Development Fund Corp., abandoned repairs last year. Neither city officials nor the new manager could say why, and the owner did not return calls seeking comment.