Painting All Taggers With the Same Brush

With an ounce of empathy it isn’t hard to understand why Rudy Medina Jr. started scrawling his “Chato” around his Eastside barrio and beyond. A cop had killed a friend. A railroad wanted to demolish the Medinas’ beloved neighborhood. And the father he worshiped turned out to be a Judas.

“The Message finally came to me, The Message I’d been waiting all my life for,” explains the hero of the 1983 novel “Famous All Over Town” by Danny Santiago. “I don’t need to be any fancy kind of Lawyer or Doctor or Big League ball player to make my mark in the world. All I need is plenty of chalk and some Crayolas, or better, paint cans which I’ll mobilize tomorrow. L.A. may be a monster city but give me a month and I’ll be famous all over town.”

The fictional Chato would never get as far as the factual Chaka, a.k.a. Daniel Bernardo Ramos. Nor would Chato get as far as Gank, the latest graffiti vandal to achieve dubious fame.

Where Chaka went for quantity, Gank went for quality. He left his big blue balloon letters as far away as Vancouver, usually in hard-to-reach places that defy easy removal. He bragged about his illicit deeds on the Internet and once appeared in disguise on a TV talk show. In time the law identified Gank as Timothy John Badalucco, age 20. His latest claim to fame was a plea bargain in which he agreed to pay a record $99,470 restitution and perform 1,000 hours of community service cleaning up graffiti while on three years probation.

Gank wasn’t from the barrio. He was from Calabasas.

Many people today, certainly, would not be surprised at all to learn that Gank, one of California’s most notorious vandals, was a white guy who grew up in affluence. But not too long ago, the news might have seemed stunning, and perhaps it still is to some people. The first graffito appeared millenniums before Kilroy, but in Southern California the dramatic proliferation in the 1970s and ‘80s was most obvious in the barrios. Before the term tag was coined, the pseudonymous signature was a placa. A renegade school of thought celebrated the vandals as guerrilla artists.

The vivid colors, the outlaw mystique, MTV--all helped tagging reach deep into suburbia. “In my travels so far, I don’t think I’ve found one particular culture doing more than anybody else,” said California Highway Patrol Officer Randy Campbell, a member of an interagency task force with the acronym TAGNET.

Campbell’s observation leaves me thinking about a flurry of letters from readers I received two years ago. They were responding to a column about a murky post-midnight encounter in Sun Valley between a white man illegally carrying a concealed handgun and two Latino taggers that left one of the taggers dead and the other wounded. While Latino activists pushed in vain for felony charges against the man, some readers hailed him as a hero.

The raw bigotry of one Calabasas man was memorable. It is easy to imagine him spotting “GANK” and reacting with an ethnic slur, oblivious to the fact that the vandal might be a boy from the nice family down the block.

Graffiti may be a social phenomenon, but the motives are also personal. What drove Timothy Badalucco to become Gank?

The family declined to be interviewed. But before the plea bargain, Badalucco spent 137 days in County Jail, and a court-appointed psychiatrist prepared a report.

Badalucco was not the product of a broken home. Indeed, “the defendant reports that he is closest to his father and has always felt supported by his family.” One problem was that he was always small in stature for his age and described “getting beat up a lot as a kid” and, in later years, felt “picked on” because he was “judged as ‘spoiled’ having grown up in private schools and with a well-to-do family.

He started tagging in elementary school and began psychiatric treatment in the seventh grade. Ritalin and other medications were tried but judged unsuccessful. As a teenager, he reported suffering from depression and thoughts of suicide. In 1992 he joined a tagging crew called Mad Society Kings.

Badalucco reported that tagging “felt good’ to him and improved his low self-esteem, the psychiatrist wrote. “As result he continued to work on his technique to become better and better. He reported that for him tagging meant ‘fame’ and also helped him overcome his feeling of being physically inferior as he had to learn to successfully climb bridges and buildings.”

Badalucco’s task now is to reconcile his ego with his alter ego. The late Dan James could relate. After “Famous All Over Town” was published and Danny Santiago was hailed as a new voice in Chicano literature, controversy erupted when it was revealed that Santiago was in fact the pen name of James, a white septuagenarian with an affluent background who had done social work in the barrio.

“Sometimes I sit here and think of myself as Dan James and I can’t write,” he once explained to a friend. “. . . I have to think Santiago.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.