13 Years Later, A Brooklyn Family Finally Sells Their Banksy

Yet another one of the graffer's murals ships out to Connecticut

Perhaps some of you are old enough to remember when Instagram was relatively young, and graffiti artist Banksy used it to announce where his latest works could be found, turning previously unremarkable walls of the city into mobbed-out pay-per-view events. This was just after Sandy in October 2013, and the enigmatic graffer had seemingly taken up temporary residency in New York, tagging at a good clip all over the five boroughs. His posts sent whole masses into mad sprints to observe six and seven-figure etchings on otherwise bland brick or concrete structures. You could spot the crowds from blocks away. It was insufferable.

But that’s just how the Ruocco brothers discovered the artist had left them with an illustration of a barcode-tagging robot, the 2013 art world equivalent of a top-paying scratch-off, blasted across the side of a building they own together at the corner of Stillwell and Neptune Avenues in Coney Island. And when the swarms arrived, the Ruoccos reportedly jumped into action to protect the bag that had just landed in their lap, reportedly installing a retractable gate over the wall and even hiring a security guard at one point, according to The New York Post. But for all their good fortune, the Ruoccos were food guys, not patrons of Chelsea or Chinatown galleries. They ran a catering business in the 80s and 90s out of the ground floor of the building. The capital-A art world might as well have been another planet, and the Banksy craze had cooled precipitously by the time they managed to actually hit the market with the “Tagging Robot,” as the piece came to be known. Buyers, who’d have to figure out how to extract this piece without damaging it, were predictably hard to come by. “Not too many people were willing to buy a brick wall,” said Anthony Ruocco, one of the three brothers, to The Post.

That was until Ruocco caught wind of a Connecticut brewery called Foolproof (we’ll see about that), which had recently acquired and installed an entire section of a wall with a Banksy mural in Bridgeport, similarly pulled from some structure somewhere in New York City. Anthony reached out to broker a deal and successfully sold the piece for some unspecified amount of money, though he does admit it was for “less than half a million bucks,” presumably not quite as much as they’d hoped to get. But it does bring this 13-year Banksy saga to a close with a good check for the brothers, who’ve split the payout evenly amongst their siblings. “We’re a very fair family. I know that’s what our parents would have wanted us to do. We shared everything right to the penny.”

Anyone interested in just how someone relocates a whole mural’s worth of wall can see the entire process unfold, from capturing to fortifying to packing the piece up, in an objectively impressive series of clips from Fine Art Shippers below.