A week after beginning his alleged murderous rampage across Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, Maksim Gelman was indicted in Brooklyn today on four counts of murder. He was indicted on accounts of assault and robbery. This comes a few hours after LTV Squad posted Gelman's apparent Flickr accounts documenting his own graffiti.
It's believed that at some point during his alleged 28 hour spree of violence, Gelman went to his hideout along the LIRR tracks along Ocean Avenue, where he had a shrine to victim Yelenka Bulchenko. According to LTV's Tag Bomb blog:
The story that the NYC press has mostly glossed over though is that this raving lunatic had prior arrests for Graffiti. This is definitely not to say that the graffiti artists of NYC ever embraced him as one of their own. Indeed, Maksim was known mostly as a toy - a wack bottom feeder with no style, little creativity, and an itch to start beef wherever he could. A quick survey of about a dozen writers yielded a universal response: Maksim sucked at life, and if his peers even knew who he was, they hated his wack handywork...
The most common aspect of his graffiti in these photos is that he has applied his tags over other writers, or has been crossed out by other writers. This is fairly unique across all of the photos I took on that day. No one on these tracks was jones for beef as much as Maksim (well, cept maybe another toy, but let's not talk about him). I did no real editing/selecting of photos for this write up: what you see in these photos is how all of his graffiti seemed to appear on the freight tracks - either over someone else's in an attempt to start a battle, or crossed out by people who hated him. For someone to go out of their way to try and start beef with other writers shows a lot of things about his personality. He wanted attention, bad or good. Full of hate and looking for a fight is the usual MO of such people.
