How I went from graffiti artist to police officer
As a rookie cop in Washington Heights, Steven Weinberg patrolled the streets at night, responding to domestic-violence calls and drug crimes, learning the ropes of the NYPD.
It was the mid-1990s, the height of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s war on quality-of-life crimes, when squeegee men and graffiti vandals were viewed as symbols of the city’s decline.
But Weinberg never bought into that philosophy. To the young cop, graffiti was not a public nuisance; it was art.
And he was a graffiti artist.
“I believe in rehabilitation,” he told The Post last week. “I think you cause more problems in society when you give people convictions on something like this, when you could have them contribute to society instead.”
Weinberg’s views on the “art form” were shaped during a youth spent roaming city subways, tagging trains, tunnels and rail yards with his nom de spray paint, “Neo.”
But his past came back to haunt him last month, when the former cop was convicted of slapping his old tag along the Clearview Expressway in Bayside, Queens, in 2009.
He confessed, cops claimed.
But Weinberg still insists “those words didn’t come out of my mouth. I never admitted doing this. I never denied I used to do it, but I didn’t do this graffiti on the highway.
“I don’t know who the hell is doing this stuff,” he said. “Anyone can duplicate someone else’s name.”
Neo was one of the most prolific vandals of the 1980s. He was tagging his Flushing neighborhood by the age of 12 and spent wild teenage nights dodging danger as he “bombed” in all five boroughs.
At the time, graffiti was the scourge of a crime-ridden New York, and Weinberg remembers the lax security that allowed kids to roam the subways “like it was a playground at Mickey D’s.”
He had one close encounter with the NYPD.
“You’re young, you steal your paint,” he recalled. “I got tackled by a lot of employees of the store, and they held me.” Cops arrived “and they Maced the hell out of me. Then they let me go.”
Raised by his father after his mom died, Weinberg would go out once or twice a week to tag.
His late-night habit wasn’t a secret, he said. Assigned an art project, he asked his teacher to hang around a train station with him one day.
“I’ll give you 15 minutes,” the teacher said.
Weinberg’s rolling canvas soon came roaring into the station. He passed the art class.
He craved the thrill but not the hazards, said Weinberg, who recalls seeing graffiti pals get strung out on drugs.
“I saw a lot of my friends die, go to jail,” he recalled. The 44-year-old father of three says he quit graffiti in the late 1980s and never looked back.
He joined the NYPD but only three years into his career suffered a devastating leg injury climbing a fence in a search for a crime victim in Central Park. He survives on a $38,000-a-year disability pension.
At his sentencing last week — where he was given three years probation and a $700 fine — he bristled at the notion he has sacrificed his family to return to his teenage hobby.
“I’m not out there hanging out with graffiti artists,” he said. “[The judge] got it all wrong.”
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