A true-blue artist is seeing red over the vandal who desecrated his Old Glory mural in Kensington, and he says he won’t brush away the spiteful deed until the unpatriotic perp is slapped with a bias crime.
“This is someone who hates what America stands for,” said Scott LoBaido, whose image of the American flag on a wall on McDonald Avenue near Cortelyou Road was marred with the phrase, “Patriotism makes me sick.”
The incident was caught on camera and LoBaido, a Staten Island-based muralist who has painted more than 1,000 Old Glories across the nation without major incident, hopes it will lead cops to the culprit’s trail.
The grainy surveillance video posted on YouTube shows the bearded hoodlum pulling up in a minivan on May 14 at 1:07 am and posting his scrawling before speeding off.
LoBaido hopes the vandal isn’t a disgruntled 99 percenter.
“I’m hoping that it’s not a radical member of Occupy Wall Street who is using guerilla tactics,” LoBiado said, adding that the mischief-making was a slap to freedom fighters. “I know what those flags represent to those veterans in the community, and it probably made them sick to see it.”
LoBaido said his artwork had been targeted by graffiti vandals before, but their scribblings were harmless in comparison.
“That was a matter of some punk not realizing what he’s tagging,” he said. “This is beyond that.”
The building owner who commissioned the artwork said its defilement made him uneasy.
“It doesn’t leave me with a good feeling about our neighbors in Brooklyn,” said John Gentile.
The NYPD did not return calls for comment.
Reach reporter Eli Rosenberg at erosenberg@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-2531. And follow him at twitter.com/emrosenberg.
