So instead, the defendants settled the case with Caltrans, which also has authority to pursue illegal billboards that crop up next to freeways. Under that agreement, the defendants paid $218,000 to the state.
Last month, a judge threw out the city's lawsuit, ruling that its claims had already been settled thanks to the state fine. Trutanich's office has vowed to appeal. But as it stands, the city seems likely to end up with nothing.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Carmen Trutanich pledged to serve eight years as city attorney before running for Congress or the district attorney's office. Three years later, he's running for DA.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Trutanich has slapped 50 Occupy L.A. protesters with criminal charges.
Related Content
More About
Rocky Delgadillo's signature issue was gang violence. When Trutanich took office, he looked for a way to make the issue his own. The result was a crackdown on graffiti, which nicely combined two of Trutanich's obsessions: counterculture and signage.
Where others saw a nuisance — or even an art form — Trutanich saw a threat to public safety. He added graffiti cases to the gang section's duties, putting experienced gang prosecutors on the trail of street artists.
The move coincided with growing appreciation for street art in the mainstream art world. Some street artists were giving up illegal graffiti in favor of gallery shows. A clash was inevitable, and it came last year, during "Art in the Streets," a landmark show at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
"I have no problem with legitimate art. ... I have a problem with graffiti," Trutanich said in a documentary about the show. "If somebody in that show has an outstanding warrant, chances are they won't finish the show."
As it happened, one of the artists did have an outstanding warrant. Revok, whose real name is Jason Williams, says he stopped doing illegal graffiti in L.A. several years ago, when he launched a professional art career. But he says the Sheriff's Department and Trutanich have continued to harass him anyway, looking for technical offenses to violate his probation and send him back to jail.
"He's not gonna allow any of us to have a legitimate career," Revok says.
He adds that the Sheriff's Department has followed him on Twitter, shown up to his art shows and raided his home several times. On one occasion, he was arrested for possession of graffiti tools, which counted as a probation violation even though, in his case, they're also tools of his trade. (While he was in custody, he says, investigators pressed him for information on other street artists — Roger Gastman and Shepard Fairey — who have successful legitimate careers.) When Revok failed to show up to court or pay restitution on the charge, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
About a week after the opening of "Art in the Streets," Revok was planning to leave Los Angeles to complete a commissioned work in Ireland. Sheriff's deputies arrested him at LAX, booking him on $320,000 bail.
He was sentenced to 180 days in jail. He ended up serving 45 days due to overcrowding.
"Every day you're in jail, your life in the real world is falling apart," Revok says. "It fucks your life up. I'm not gonna sit here and piss and moan and cry for doing time for a crime. But I didn't commit any crime."
He calls it "absolute harassment."
Revok has since moved to Detroit to avoid further run-ins.
"Revok is not a dangerous, violent felon. He's an artist," says Saber, a fellow graffiti artist. Saber believes he's putting himself in jeopardy by criticizing Trutanich. "This man specializes in intimidation, focuses on low-hanging fruit and has no problem using city funds to facilitate his personal vendettas."
Trutanich boasts of pursuing a "first-of-its-kind" injunction against the MTA tagging crew, which is most famous for a quarter-mile-long tag on the banks of the L.A. River. Modeled on gang injunctions, which are civil court orders aimed at keeping gang members from controlling particular neighborhoods, the MTA injunction seeks $4 million in restitution for cleanup costs.
Smear, an MTA crew member accused in the complaint, says he has given up vandalism in pursuit of a gallery career. But Trutanich's injunction seeks to make that impossible.
If a judge signs off on the injunction, it would bar Smear from selling photos of his work to collectors, on the grounds that his so-called criminal behavior gives him an unfair business advantage over other artists. The injunction also would prevent MTA members from meeting with each other or possessing spray cans.
The ACLU, which is fighting the injunction, calls it "unquestionably unconstitutional."
Many fear it will get worse if Trutanich becomes DA. Says Revok: "I really hope this bastard doesn't get elected."
Yet even as Trutanich has gone full-bore after street artists, he has eased off on actual street gangs.
In the last two and a half years of Delgadillo's administration, the city obtained 10 gang injunctions. During the first two and a half years of Trutanich's term, the city has obtained just four — two of them mostly completed on Delgadillo's watch.
"We're not doing as many gang injunctions as we used to," Carter, Trutanich's chief deputy, acknowledges. "When you have limited resources, you can't devote your prosecutors to writing injunctions."
The office also is prosecuting fewer gang members. Trutanich is running for DA on a promise that he will "never back off" on gang crime. But since he took office, gang convictions are down 31 percent.
