Quest to identify the artist Banksy uncovers much more than a name

CHAPTER 2: CAUGHT IN THE ACT

NEW YORK: In September 2000, gallerist Ivy Brown gave Steve Lazarides and Banksy an earful about her apartment building.

At the time, Brown represented Lazarides in his photography career. A billboard had been erected on the roof of 675 Hudson Street in Manhattan, an architecturally distinctive brownstone with a triangular footprint similar to that of New York’s famous Flatiron Building.

In an interview, she told Reuters she was “having a meltdown”. September Fashion Week was underway in New York, and the billboard was an advertisement for Marc Jacobs’ clothing. The ad showed a young man’s head alongside the words, “Boys Love Marc Jacobs”.

“I felt it defaced the building,” Brown said.

She took her guests to the roof and hoped for help. “I was, like, ‘Look at that thing!’ You know, it’s like, ‘Yo B, love you to do something up there’.”

Over the next three days, Banksy hung out at a bar across the street. Brown said she often noticed him gazing at the ad. Advertising billboards had long fascinated Banksy. They are, he once argued, akin to how some critics view graffiti: a public statement foisted on people without permission. “Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours,” he wrote in 2004. “It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.”

In September 2000, Banksy was shifting from painting freehand to using stencils, a method suited for repetition and speed. But when he climbed up on Brown’s roof to have at the billboard, he painted freehand.

The half-finished image resembled a billboard Banksy saw in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In his 2023 Cut & Run exhibition in Glasgow, the artist said the movie scene inspired him to get into graffiti. In Jaws, someone doctored a tourism billboard depicting a woman on an inflatable raft in the sea. The vandal added a shark fin and gave the woman bulging eyes and a speech bubble: “HELP!!! SHARK.”

In a painting spree, Lazarides wrote, Banksy “doctored the Marc Jacobs Men billboard so that the model had goofy teeth” and drew a “giant speech bubble” that was strangely empty.

That’s because New York police caught Banksy before he could finish.

In his book, Lazarides mentioned the arrest, though not when it happened or the building’s address. But by geolocating the building in the photos Lazarides published, and by dating the Marc Jacobs billboard to September 2000, when New York Fashion Week was underway, we were able to unearth police documents and a court file from the incident.

The contents of these records have never been reported.

They show that at 4.20am on Sep 18, 2000, authorities found a man defacing a billboard on the roof of 675 Hudson Street. Because damages exceeded US$1,500, police sought to charge him with a felony. Among the documents is the man’s handwritten confession.

“The evening the night of September 17th I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decide to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property on Hudson st. 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.”

Within hours of his arrest, documents show, the man was assigned a public defender. That afternoon, he was released after agreeing to temporarily turn over his passport.

“He got out pretty fast, and he called me,” Brown recalled. “He was like, ‘Ello luvvie!’ I said ‘Yo, B! How did you get out so fast?’ And he said, “Female judge, nudge-nudge, wink-wink’,” Brown said.

SI realised that part of his art was getting out of jail.”

SIGNED BY THE ARTIST

The court file shows he would later post US$1,500 bail in exchange for his passport. The felony charges were reduced to a misdemeanour charge of disorderly conduct. He paid a fine and fees totalling US$310, and by early 2001, he completed his sentence of five days of community service, the records show. On the bail form, he gave his address as 160 E 25th Street in New York, the location of one of Manhattan’s most eccentric hotels.

Before his arrest, Banksy had lived for months at a time at the Carlton Arms Hotel, which over the years has let artists stay for free in return for decorating their rooms. Archived pages of the hotel website indicate that in 1997, Banksy painted a mural at the hotel. In 1999, the site shows, he finished an entire room, 5B.

The work looked nothing like the Banksys of today. It was painted freehand, in a rainbow of colours. The characters were cartoonish. The hotel site attributed the works to “Robin Banks” – a play on “robbing banks,” later shortened to Banksy.

Emma Houghton told Reuters she dated the artist for four years in the 1990s, “just before he was transitioning into Banksy”. In an interview, she wouldn’t reveal his true identity or how they met. But she recounted that in written correspondence with her, the name he used for himself evolved: from his birth name to “Mr Banks” and then “to Banksy.” In 2024, Houghton auctioned a number of these hand-painted and signed cards, which fetched 56,000 pounds.

Robert Clarke, a former Carlton Arms employee, struck up a friendship with Banksy and wrote in a memoir about their time together at the hotel. They bonded because both were from Bristol, Clarke wrote.

The book included a passage that would later strike us as important: Banksy, Clarke wrote, told him he was considering legally changing his name to “Robin Banks”. Reuters was unable to locate Clarke for comment.

When Banksy was busted in 2000, he wasn’t on the New York Police Department’s radar, said Steve Mona, the now-retired lieutenant who ran the 75-member vandal squad back then. The police had no idea they had nabbed “Banksy” because the artist had only recently begun employing the style and pseudonym that would make him famous.

Given Banksy’s celebrity, the name of the culprit now takes on significance. It wasn’t Del Naja who defaced the billboard atop 675 Hudson Street. The man who confessed was Robin Gunningham.

In addition to his signature, Gunningham is repeatedly named in court and police documents related to the arrest.

The Mail on Sunday had been right in 2008 in making the case that Gunningham was Banksy. In hindsight, Gunningham’s effort to hide his identity began falling apart with his September 2000 arrest in New York. Records of the bust existed, and they contained his real name. The books by former manager Lazarides wouldn’t be published until 2019. But the photos and the details Lazarides included about the arrest enabled us to pinpoint where Banksy was apprehended and the ad he defaced.

But how did proving beyond question that Banksy was Robin Gunningham square with what we knew about the murals in Ukraine?

Sources told us there was no record that Gunningham ever entered Ukraine. So who was Del Naja’s painting partner if Gunningham hadn’t been there?

We recalled a detail from Banksy’s Carlton Arms days. As Clarke notes in Seven Years with Banksy, the artist had once considered legally changing his name.