Nearly every night, he says, he would take a bus to the end of the line and walk through a neighborhood until dawn, strategically painting his name in prominent spots along a main artery, busy intersections, or near amusement parks or malls that kids cruised.
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He finished the 11th grade at 17 and dropped out of high school. “Before they’d be saying anything, I’d be out the door.” “My parents didn’t say anything,” he said. He stole cans of spray paint and locked them in closets at home. Lacking a car, he made his forays on bus, collecting a large box of bus schedules that told how far he could travel and how late the last bus ran. He would mark the areas he had struck with one color, and mark future targets in another. He planned his missions methodically, keeping tabs on a variety of maps. The more he tagged, the more he wanted to tag. “It’s no different than an alcoholic,” he said. with a knapsack loaded with 15 cans of spray paint. It was peaceful when he stole away in the dark of night, usually staying out between 11 p.m. It was, he says now, a way out of the apartment where his parents fought and his brother stowed guns, a way out of a neighborhood where he had been mistaken more than once for his brother and shot at. David had already told him that he was not welcome in his gang, and Chaka did not have the stomach for the violence. “And getting away with it-that was too much.” “My adrenaline was pumping it was a thrill,” Chaka said. With bold, deliberate strokes, the 16-year-old boy spelled out in quivering block-like letters: “CHAKA.” Vigorously shaking a can of red paint, David sprayed his street name, “Shaft,” and passed the can to his brother. The vandalism started one evening when his older brother, a known gang member, walked Chaka to a trash bin a block from the neighborhood police station, Chaka said.
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At 10, Chaka-nicknamed by his friends after a cave boy character on a Saturday morning television show called “Land of the Lost"-began smoking marijuana and angel dust. The violence, and the threat of it, were constant.Įarly on, Chaka’s teachers asked his parents to consider after-school art classes for their boy, a request they could not afford. The Ramoses settled into the Aliso Village project in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood claimed by 14 gangs. We blame each other,” said Ramos, 57, a janitor. His wife, he and others say, would often get angry and hit Chaka and his older brother, David. Bernard Ramos, Chaka’s father, acknowledges having a drinking problem that sometimes caused him to erupt at home. “My frustration is that the community never really got paid back and I think he still owes the community,” said Peter Shutan, the former Los Angeles County prosecutor who handled Chaka’s case.ĭaniel Ramos’ parents arrived in the United States from Costa Rica, settling first in Boston and then moving to Los Angeles when Chaka was 4. Although he was sentenced to 1,560 hours of graffiti cleanup, his subsequent arrests and jail time meant that he never carried it out. Many will never forgive Chaka for the thousands of dollars of property damage that he has wrought. I refuse to be like the dog that runs back to eat its own vomit.” “I sure don’t want to go back to that lifestyle again. “I came down to the lowest of the darkest pits,” he said at an outdoor table in the rehab center, speaking softly and haltingly. Now Chaka says he has reformed and found God.
CHAKA TAGGER T SHIRT CRACK
His life dissolved into a grab bag of crack cocaine, LSD and angel dust. This is the story of how a young man from a violent housing project got caught up in the obsessive narcissism of graffiti vandalism, helped make tagging a national phenomenon, and then let his life crash in the streets. Loudspeakers almost constantly blare tapes of zealous religious sermons. There are also 54 rules of conduct at the center, regulating everything from hairstyles to restroom visits during church service. His Eastside homeboys and tagging partners do not know where he has gone. Secular books, tape recorders, radios and televisions are forbidden, as are cursing, alcohol and visitors.
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He lives in an all-male drug rehab center on a dusty two-acre flood plain, awakening every day at 4:30 a.m. During his two-year spree, cut short by arrests and drugs, he was hailed by some as an anti-Establishment hero and reviled by others as a monstrous symbol of urban blight. Daniel Bernardo Ramos, was once California’s most notorious tagger, a Boyle Heights teen-ager who sprayed his moniker in the dark of night on 10,000 walls, bridges, freeway signs and lampposts between Oakland and Orange County, according to prosecutors.
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It was not graffiti that he sprayed, but a biblical scene: Men walking from blackness into a stunning rainbow and a golden yellow sun.Ĭhaka, a.k.a. With the sweep of his right hand, he shot bold black lines on the white surface. Chaka crouched with a dozen spray cans in front of a wall in the blistering heat of the Lancaster desert.