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. 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.
JA THE TAGGER CRACK
His life dissolved into a grab bag of crack cocaine, LSD and angel dust. Later, he was arrested for possession of marijuana and violating his probation by carrying a marking pen. Twenty-four hours after his release, Chaka was busted again for tagging a courtroom door.
JA THE TAGGER MOVIE
As so often happens in the culture of instant celebrity, his capture catapulted him into the klieg lights: There was talk of art shows, posters and T-shirts bearing his tag and even movie deals.įrom there, though, it was all downhill. His Eastside homeboys and tagging partners do not know where he has gone.Ĭhaka was already an infamous, shadowy figure for his prolific attacks on walls and signs when he was first arrested for vandalism four years ago. Secular books, tape recorders, radios and televisions are forbidden, as are cursing, alcohol and visitors. 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. 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.
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