photos by Holly Combs
Wooster Collective posted an edited version of this story. Marc edited it down to focus on the more pertinent details. The following is the original unedited version for anyone who wants to read it.
The real story about controversial Obama HOPE artist Shepard Fairey’s Friday night arrest in Boston is the resulting riot that didn’t happen – the riot that the Boston Police Department may have carefully planned to provoke and hoped would happen that evening, but didn’t.
On January 2, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino proposed a one-year wage freeze for city workers, including the Boston Police Department. The Boston Police Superior Officers Federation promptly agreed to a contract on January 23, after the city dismissed its residency case against West Roxbury Police Sergeant Michael Hanson. In the mix of the deal was an alleged list of more than 25 superior police officers who are living outside the city in violation of their contracts’ residency requirements. Through the use of strong-arm tactics the mayor got his wage freeze and at least 25 of Boston’s Finest got to keep their jobs. The following day two warrants were issued for Shepard Fairey’s arrest.
On Wednesday, February 4, Mayor Menino met with Shepard and was photographed shaking his hand following the unveiling of Fairey’s ‘Peace Goddess’ banner on the North wall of City Hall at a public event to promote his show, Supply and Demand, at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. Thursday night Shepard sat for a Q-and-A talk at the ICA which was publicized by the museum after which he signed autographs for more than an hour. Friday morning, February 6th, Shepard had a late breakfast out in the open at 606 Congress, the restaurant in the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel where he was staying. Shepard was not arrested until approximately 9 pm that evening almost two full weeks after the warrants had been issued and after numerous public appearances in Boston.
The obvious question is: Why did the police take so long after the warrant was issued to apprehend their man? Was it a matter of pure incompetence? As admiring fans of his work were the police giving him opportunity to make appearances and put more art out on the streets of Boston? I don’t think so.
My wife Holly and I were riding in the cab with Shepard and his wife Amanda from the Renaissance Hotel to the museum when the police made their move, and the answer to my question became clear only after replaying the event in my mind several times and re-examining the circumstances over and over again with Holly. It is my belief that the Boston Police Department had carefully planned to serve their warrants in front of an audience of approximately 800 excited Shepard Fairey fans, some of whom had reportedly paid as much as $500 on Craigslist for a ticket to the event. In my opinion, the BPD had at the very least set out to make a public spectacle of the arrest, and at worst were intent on provoking the agitated crowd to riot. They clearly had it out for Mayor Menino, and had engineered the perfect scenario with which to simultaneously tie Menino to a “criminal graffiti vandal” and conveniently show up to be the heroes of their own story.
Two unlikely factors which I will describe in detail worked together to foil their plan, and Shepard was arrested quietly and with no fanfare just outside the entrance to the museum parking lot with only four known witnesses apart from Shepard and the Boston Police officers themselves.
The first unlikely occurrence was that my wife Holly and I were riding in the cab in the first place. Completely unplanned, Shepard spontaneously offered to share the cab with my wife and me since we were leaving the hotel to go to the show at precisely the same time. Holly hopped into the front seat, Amanda remained on the drivers-side, and Shepard made room for me to his right. I squeezed in and shut the rear passenger-side door. One of us quickly told the cab driver we were going to the ICA and the cab driver quickly backed out of the hotel pick-up area and headed up Seaport Boulevard toward the Museum. On the way we all made small talk about the kids, Boston, a common friend, and laughed about the fact that we both knew who Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat was.
The second unlikely factor was that the driver missed the turn for the entrance of the ICA. It seems to me that any decent Boston cab driver would know very well the location of the entrance to such a prominent attraction, but we had to show him where to turn and as we approached the entrance Holly, looking back, noticed that there was an unmarked tan SUV tailgating our cab. She pointed it out to Amanda, who said something like, “Why is that guy riding our ass?”, and in that moment I believe the driver looked in his rear-view mirror. At the same time Shepard said to the driver, “It’s right here! The museum.” and pointed to the parking lot entrance. The driver slowed down to attempt to make the turn but still missed the entrance by just a fraction of a second and we passed it by a short distance. The driver tried to back up or turn around but the unmarked SUV directly behind us was blocking our path. I’ve seen enough episodes of COPS to imagine a conversation inside the unmarked police car at this point, “We’ve been made. Hit it,” or something to that effect. Police officers wearing bullet-proof vests quickly surrounded the cab, and one of them pounded loudly on the driver’s window. “Boston Police, stop the car. Turn off the car.” The officer exchanged words with the cab driver, and one of the officers flashed a badge and asked us each to identify ourselves. I don’t remember exactly which of us spoke first but when their target at last calmly said, “I’m Shepard,” one officer commanded, “Everybody out of the car, now!” We quickly decided to OBEY.
Two officers surrounded Shepard on the far side of the cab in the street and an additional officer herded the remaining three of us over to the curb on the other side of the cab where we stood facing Shepard with our backs towards the museum. The officer asked if any of us were family and Amanda told them that she is his wife. The three of us stood stunned overhearing the officer explain to Shepard that they had warrants for his arrest. Shepard calmly explained that he had already taken care of the warrants, and one of the officers said, “These are new warrants.” More verbal exchange ensued, and at some point Shepard raised his hands in front of himself and from what I could see from the curb, the officer cuffed or zip-tied his wrists. Holly asked, “What’s happening?” Amanda replied she didn’t know. About then one of the officers told us that Shepard was going to jail, and he would be there until Monday morning. They pulled his two black bags out of the cab and asked who they belonged to. “It’s his records and laptop for DJ’ing, but my stuff is in there too,” Amanda replied. The officer put down the bags and said he didn’t want their stuff.
Amanda proceeded to inform one of the officers that Shepard is diabetic and that his insulin pump was low and would need to be refilled very soon. She went over to the other side of the cab where the officers were standing with Shepard and I couldn’t hear what she said to them. She told the cab driver to keep the meter running and wait. About this time the officers were leading Shepard away from the cab and towards their vehicle. As they were taking him away Amanda reminded him that he has rights and he needs to talk to their lawyer. When she returned to the curb on our side of the cab an officer told Amanda the phone number and district where they were going to take Shepard so she could bring his insulin. We had no pen or paper so Holly took down the number into her iPhone, and emailed it to Amanda. Amanda at first asked me to stay there and watch to make sure they didn’t do anything to Shepard, but in the time it took for Holly to get the information from the officer and email it to Amanda they had already gotten Shepard into a marked police vehicle and we couldn’t see him any longer. I remember at one point during all the activity turning around and looking behind us at the museum to see if anyone in the parking lot or in front of the museum could see what was happening out here. Apparently they couldn’t as it was fairly dark and we were pretty far away from the museum. No one was watching us save for the Giant icon above the museum.
We told Amanda that we would make sure she got back to the hotel safely and helped her get the bags back into the cab. Holly climbed in the back with Amanda and I rode up front. We told the driver to take us back. On the way back to the hotel the cab driver who was visibly shaken asked me in broken English, “What the matter with that guy?” or something to that effect. I told him that he was the most famous artist in the world, and that he just had a little problem with authority. “Oh, is too bad,” he replied. I asked him what the fare was and he thought for a second, and said, “Um, ten is enough”. I handed him cash and opened the car door to get out. Holly was smart enough to question the driver and ask him if the police had talked to him before we originally got into the cab. He said “No, I just pull up when the hotel guy call”, also in broken English. For some reason I believe him.
Between the cab and the hotel entrance, Holly or I told Amanda, “It’s going to be OK”. I carried the bags as we went inside the hotel. Immediately after we entered the lobby, Amanda made a quick phone call to Helen Stickler who is filming her second documentary about Shepard. After they spoke briefly, we escorted Amanda up to their hotel room and dropped off the bags. Holly copied down the station information from the police onto paper, and I double checked to be sure it was correct just in case. Shepard and Amanda’s daughter made small talk with Holly and me about movies, and stickers, and she gave Holly a pocketful of OBEY stickers. We asked Amanda if she needed anything at all to let us know, and we left a phone number and our hotel room number on the piece of paper with the other information. She said she needed to do medical stuff, that she was fine, thanked us for our help, and that we could go.
We left the room, got back in the elevator and rode down to the lobby, not really knowing where we were headed. When we got to the lobby, Holly encountered two men who asked her what was going on. She started to tell them the story, and then paused, and asked, “Why am I telling you this? Who are you?” The men identified themselves as the curator of the ICA and one of Shepard’s business associates. So Holly told them the abridged version of this story, they asked a few questions of Holly, and immediately set off to go to the police station with Amanda. Holly and I sat down in the hotel lobby silently for several minutes trying to wrap our heads around the events of the last 15 or 20 minutes. What we didn’t realize is the events were clearly the Boston Police Department’s “Plan B”. Had the two unlikely events I described not happened just as they did, their “Plan A” would have gone something like the following…
Plan A: We successfully make the turn into the ICA. The unmarked SUV follows our cab and drives right up to the front entrance of the glass-façade ICA with 800 of Shepard’s fans inside and outside hyped on adrenaline excitedly watching, waiting for him to arrive. The SUV swoops in and the undercover cops emerge to seize Shepard right in front of all those fans. Now, I was in that crowd later that night, and I can be sure that at least a handful of those guys I met inside wouldn’t have just stood there without doing something. It might have been that they ran out and shouted obscenities at the cops who were arresting Shepard, or they might have simply lost their minds and just mobbed the cops depending on the number of people who ran out, all while the cameras were rolling. Either way, something ugly certainly would have jumped off, and whatever happened it would have played right into the hands of the Boston Police Department and helped them hand the Mayor his ass on a platter. Remember, Mayor Menino was photographed just two days earlier congratulating Shepard and welcoming him to Boston.
When we got down to the lobby Holly, still shaken from what had just happened, pulled out her iPhone, and said, “I got pictures”. She showed me the photos of the arrest in progress, with my right ear in the foreground. As we sat there in the hotel lobby wondering aloud what we should do next, we thought, “What would Shepard want?” We imagined he’d want us to go back to the party and try and have a good time in spite of the situation. We took another cab back to the Museum and we went around the line of people still waiting to get in as our names were on the guest list, and that’s when we realized how many people would have been watching Shepard get arrested if we hadn’t missed that turn. We went inside, and saw the expectant faces of all those in attendance and we were heavily burdened with the knowledge that Shepard wasn’t going to be coming that night. We went upstairs to try to find some friends, and tell them what was happening in order to get some outside perspective while we were surrounded by 20 years of Shepard’s artwork.
Everyone agreed that there was little we could do right now, and that Amanda and the others were taking care of business. Later on we went downstairs to hear Z-Trip as he was keeping up the vibe and carrying the weight of the crowd’s expectations and their emotions about Shepard’s arrest. I didn’t hear the announcement or the crowd’s response when they said he’d been arrested, but with his incredible energy and marvelous skills Z-Trip managed to turn a terrible situation into a rally and unite the crowd to party in celebration of the struggle against the powers that be.
If you can just imagine the energy in a room packed with 800 fans led by Z-Trip in a one-finger salute to the Boston Police Department to the tune of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name of” followed by Bob Marley singing “Get Up Stand Up” to bring it back down you can see how he helped us work out our frustrations with the music, and be able to then chill out and not start that riot after all.
It’s my opinion based on what I experienced, Shepard Fairey became a pawn in an ugly political game in which the Boston Police Department was willing to risk the safety of the citizens it has sworn to protect in order to punish the Mayor for his shady deal. With cops and city government officials like that, who needs criminals? Apparently they do.
Afterthoughts:
Boston Detective Bill Kelly has since denied that the timing of Shepard’s arrest was intentionally planned to create an inconvenience for Shepard and the ICA. However, the Globe wrote that Kelley ended a stakeout by pulling the cab over and arresting him on an old graffiti charge. The obvious problem with that statement is that if the intent was simply to arrest him, why didn’t they do it in front of the hotel before he entered the cab in the first place? While standing in front of the hotel waiting for a cab, Shepard and I had a complete conversation about a guitar pick that he’d left behind at breakfast that morning which provided plenty of time for the cops to make their move.
I still believe that the only reason the arrest was not a public spectacle is that the cab driver missed the turn into the museum parking lot.
The second problem is that I heard the arresting officer tell Shepard that he was being arrested for “new” warrants which also contradicts the Globe’s statement.
In addition, if the police were not expecting something more dramatic to happen, why were they wearing the bulletproof vests to privately arrest someone with no violent history?
I neither understand why a few bloggers have been so quick to dismiss the riot theory. Later that night many of the people in the crowd stood in unison with their middle fingers in the air chanting, “F*CK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!” as a statement to the Boston Police Department.
I think it’s total bullshit that Shepard missed his own party. In the long run the Mayor may lose a few points, Shepard and his work will be more popular than ever, and the city of Boston is the big loser thanks to the BPD.
