Confiscated Weapons Wind Up as Sculpture

How to dispose of tons of weapons confiscated from criminals has stymied law enforcement for years.

Twenty years ago the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department dumped the estimated 5 to 7 tons of weapons confiscated each year into the Catalina Channel. When that was deemed ecologically troubling, the weapons were crushed at a Carson hammer mill, then melted.

In 1974, Leonard Potashman, first an artist and art professor for more than 10 years and then a detective for the Sheriff’s Department for 29 years, came up with what he thought was a better solution.

Potashman, who at the time was one of the United States’ top two art theft detectives, persuaded former Sheriff Peter Pitchess to allow him to create a 15-foot-high, 10-ton sculpture out of molten steel and the mounds of pistols, rifles and machine guns.

Dubbed “Monument of Futility” by Pitchess, the sculpture, which took Potashman and a crew of workers from 1975 to 1977 to create, was “misunderstood” by Los Angeles officials and so infuriated the National Rifle Assn. that the powerful group lobbied against it being placed downtown, Potashman said in a recent interview.

“The NRA was just a little on the paranoid side,” Potashman said. “They felt it was in open support of gun control, so a plan to place it near the Civic Center fell through.”

After disappearing for five years due to the demolition of the steel company where it was created, the sculpture turned up in the Montebello Police Department’s confiscated vehicles warehouse.

“A member of the work crew demolishing the company and carting off the waste was a reserve member of the Montebello Police Department, and obviously a forward-thinking fellow,” Potashman said. “He persuaded the captain at least to let it stay in the warehouse until they could figure out what to do with it.”

Montebello city officials were not aware of who had created the sculpture, but it and Potashman were reunited after an article about the art theft detective was published in The Times mentioning the project.

The soaring, elegant monument--with its severe angles featuring panels of smashed rifle barrels that take on a serpentine quality and ghost images of pistols--is now on permanent display at the Montebello Civic Center.

It is the most public work by Potashman, 62, who was trained as an artist at the Chicago Art Institute, the American Academy of Art, the Academy of Fine Arts in Los Angeles and the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.

“I was an artist and an art professor, but I had a family to support, so I took a 29-year temporary job with the sheriff’s department,” Potashman said.

From 1953 to 1982, Potashman performed a variety of duties for the department, including establishing the first law enforcement art crime detail on the West Coast and creating the first dimensional sculpture of a murder victim.

During his law enforcement career, he continued to work as an artist, exhibiting at galleries across the country and having his works included in several group shows.

An exhibition of his works was opened in December at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks.

The works on display combine painting and sculpture, utilizing parts of the human anatomy attached to canvases with lines of paint running directly from the human heads and arms onto the canvas.

“In no way is Leonard’s work macabre or strange; it is extremely personal,” said gallery director Robert Giro. “Combining the two media, sculpture and painting, he bridges illusion and reality.”

Although retired from police work, Potashman works full-time as an artist.

“The Sheriff’s Department truly indulged me. They thought I was an oddball, but we found practical work that benefited everyone,” he said. “Now my work is more philosophical, and hopefully for the viewer, provoking.”