Meet Fred Radtke, anti-graffiti crusader. Taggers curse him. Some residents love him. Others aren’t so sure.

One morning a few weeks ago, keen observers walking along Decatur Street might have noted the words "F–k you, Gray Ghost." It was written – plain as day – in black permanent magic marker not far from the French Market.

  By the afternoon, the words were gone, painted over with gray paint.

  It was, like other gray squares on the walls of the Quarter, probably painted by Fred Radtke, president and chairman of the board of the Louisiana nonprofit organization called Operation: Clean Sweep, Inc. Anti-Graffiti Task Force.

  Graffiti writers – both the spray painters and their magic marker cousins, taggers – curse Radtke’s mission in life: obliterating graffiti in New Orleans. Curious residents know him not by face but for the irregular squares of paint he leaves in his path. Critics complain that the gray squares just attract more graffiti. But don’t call City Hall if you have a beef about him. Fred Radtke is not a law enforcement officer. He’s just an ordinary citizen, a freelance event producer by trade, who has, it seems, become an anti-graffiti zealot.

  Across the city, hundreds of times each week, Radtke pulls to the curb in his cream-colored Dodge 600 with thin red pinstripes and a mismatched navy-blue driver’s door. He gets out, opens the sagging trunk and pulls out one of the gallon paint cans – usually gray, but sometimes his other option, a putty-colored beige. (He says those two colors are what he gets for free from Helm Paint and Supply.) He stops, takes a quick photo, runs his roller back and forth a few times, and the job is done. It’s a routine he’s performed almost constantly for the past five years. He’s filled 10 photo albums with snapshots of the graffiti he’s conquered.

  Yet through the years, graffiti artists haven’t been the only ones criticizing his work. "Suppose you have a million-dollar building in the French Quarter and you come out and see someone painting gray paint on it," says a source at the Vieux Carre Commission, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Would you think ‘who the hell does he think he is?’ You’re using Chevrolet, I only use Cadillac quality paint. I only use mineral spirits, you’re using latex. Painting over graffiti with gray paint is defacing property just as much as the graffiti did in the first place."

  The source says Radtke made a commitment with the commission to paint over graffiti in colors that match the building, but he hasn’t kept the promise. Radtke says that he would like to paint original colors, but cannot afford it. "I’m not Mr. Gray Paint, I don’t even like gray," he admits. "I like the 35 shades of paint found in the French Quarter. But you put a Band-Aid on top of a disease that’s happening out there. Once that disease is healed, that gray will go away."

  And, although a few store owners have complained that he painted over graffiti without their approval, Radtke asserts that he always gets permission from property owners and that he’s never been anything but mannerly.

  Of course, conquerors are not a soft-spoken lot, and Radtke is no exception. He has all sorts of theories about graffiti and how it’s tied to crime. Yet, despite his pride in his work, he typically bars observers from watching Operation: Clean Sweep in action.

  "This is not a friendly business," he explains. "I’m out there dealing with gangsters."

Radtke does, begrudgingly, permit an observer to tag along one Wednesday morning at the end of January. The observer will be protected because Radtke is part of a larger effort called the Strategic Information Force (S.I.F.), 60 or so volunteers, police officers, and municipal workers who will, over the course of one day, scour, trim, and scrub a few dozen city blocks. This particular S.I.F. has been planned for a section of the Seventh Ward, roughly north and west of the intersection of Elysian Fields and I-10.

  This neighborhood’s streets will rumble and buzz all day with heavy equipment and city personnel: meter maids, tow trucks, housing inspectors, garbage trucks, municipal trucks and vehicles, supervisors with walkie-talkies, and workers raking, sweeping and running weed whips.

  Radtke, of course, will spend his time painting out graffiti. He’s dressed in white workmen’s pants well-spotted with paint, and a dark T-shirt covered by a thin white jacket.

  There are some parts of town that Radtke works frequently. But, he admits, this is not one of them. "This is only the second time I’ve been through this neighborhood, so we haven’t developed this area yet." Radtke focuses most of his attentions on areas like the zoo, the French Quarter, and the Warehouse District, because that’s where the tourists are and he is "sick of the city getting a bad rap."

  This morning, the first stop is at the corner of Annette and North Tonti streets, in front of the heavily graffitoed wall of Saver Food Store. Among other things, the spray-painted letters read "Phat, R.I.P. 11-21-00, We’ll always love you nigga!" The same message, with a few variations, is spray-painted on the street, the sidewalk, and across the front of a nearby house that has a No Limit shirt hanging from the porch and a shrine made of Crown Royal and other bottles leaning against the house. Radtke scans the corner. "Phat is probably the name of the guy and that’s the day he died." He shakes his head. "Whoever did this graffiti owns this block. This is what you call max-out intimidation."

  Radtke pulls over the Dodge, gets out, and takes off the jacket, revealing a navy blue T-shirt that reads "Strike Force" on the back and bears a breast insignia on the front that says "City of New Orleans, Marc Morial." He walks resolutely into the store and tells owner Trung Nguyen that he’s working with today’s S.I.F. and that he’d like to paint over the graffiti, no cost. He gives her a red, white and blue flyer that, among other things, contains his motto "Don’t be Seedy; Erase Graffiti," and the 24-hour hotline number for Operation: Clean Sweep (486-9694). Nguyen says okay and thank you, and Radtke walks out and heads to his trunk to get the tools of his trade. The store’s wall is white, so he pours the putty-colored primer into a paint tray and pulls out a long-handled roller.

  "Usually these kinds of businesses are owned by Orientals and they’re afraid to do anything," he says. "I must have dealt with about 30 supermarkets owned by Orientals – they run the business inside but what’s outside, they don’t want to deal with because retaliation can come back on them." That’s where Radtke can intervene, he says, using the "we" he typically uses when talking about Operation: Clean Sweep. "If we come in and paint it out, that gives the store owners a little buffer because they can say that ‘the city’ came and did it. I’m not the city, but that’s what they would probably say."

  Typically, Radtke says, he would be hassled if he were painting out a message like this one. "But there’s a lot of law around," he explains. Radtke has already finished painting primer on the side wall and goes around to work on the shorter front wall, giving a long sidewise glance to a few people at the house next door. There, Michael Holmes and Melvin Paul sit on the steps and talk to a young woman. The trio says that, yes, the graffiti was part of a memorial for the guy down the street but that they don’t care if it’s painted over. "It was put up for the second-line, but it doesn’t matter now," says Holmes.

  "This isn’t California, you feel me?" Holmes adds, in a reference to the territorial gang-graffiti scene in Los Angeles.

  The group stands up to watch Radtke, who’s now busy at work waving cars around a wet stretch of putty-colored paint on the intersection. "Why did he paint the street?" one of them asks. "Now he’s painting the sidewalk." Radtke and his roller catch all four corners of the sidewalk and then he heads toward the house with the Crown Royal shrine. Melvin Paul sits back down on the steps. "I’ve lived here in the Seventh Ward for 15 years and I’ve never seen anything like this."

It’s Thursday, the day after the Seventh Ward S.I.F., and Radtke is having a cup of coffee and explaining his tenets of graffiti-fighting.

  He takes a moment to emphasize that there are dozens of kinds of graffiti: "occult, hip-hop, artistic, gang-related, No More Prisons, Stop Police Brutality – everyone has their own agenda. Two years ago, all I saw was occult until we caught the two guys that were doing it, making 11,000 marks a year in the French Quarter. The two guys that were caught brought in a New York attorney and were given a choice of six months in jail or a $3,000 fine. They paid the $3,000 and left town. Who stops them? Who catches them? We do."

  Radtke is emphatic about the connection between graffiti and crime. "Graffiti on blighted property attracts addicts and drugs dealers. If an owner paints it over, it moves these drug dealers somewhere else."

  This issue is so important to Radtke that he worked to create legislation penalizing property owners who don’t take graffiti seriously. "If they don’t take the graffiti off in 30 days, they pay $500," he says. "We did that two years ago." He’s referring to an anti-graffiti ordinance passed by the New Orleans City Council; Radtke was, confirm City Hall insiders, instrumental in making that happen.

  "The ordinance was passed through Fred’s urging, giving us better legal means to fight graffiti," says Julie Schwam Harris, who works in the mayor’s office.

  But that’s just one of Radtke’s stated accomplishments. "Our graffiti hotline saves the NOPD 1,000 phone calls each year; they’re out there now dealing with priority situations instead of spending time on graffiti. We have already painted over 24 trash cans on Magazine Street; for the Mayors’ Conference here we painted 97 blocks by the St. Thomas project." He reels off such numbers readily, but ask him about budget numbers for Operation: Clean Sweep and he gets less clear. He’s financed through something he calls "adopt-a-block" at $150 a year, but he can’t estimate how many blocks are actually adopted. The only sponsor he can name is a local Popeye’s.

  Radtke says that the FBI Gang Task Force considers him an expert on gang graffiti (the FBI says that information is confidential and can’t confirm anything) and that he is supported by the mayor and the chief of police (both say, through spokespeople, that they support Radtke as an individual who is doing good for the community). He also says he applied his graffiti deciphering after last year’s shooting at Carter G. Woodson Middle School. "Colonel Davis called me in on the Woodson School," he says. "I took my camera and took pictures. I determined that the shooting came about because of intimidation through graffiti."

  Radtke and Davis did meet, confirms school district spokesperson Linedda McIver. There were, she adds, other factors that led to the school violence in addition to graffiti.

  Radtke calls graffiti a "welcome mat" for criminals. But he has hope for the city. "In Los Angeles, you can’t get rid of graffiti," he says. "You have gangs making $50 million a year, spending $85,000 on spray cans. You can’t stop it. In New Orleans, it’s economics. It’s not a major city, and we don’t have the organized gangs that they have in L.A. – it’s a neighborhood setup here."

  But, he warns, that doesn’t mean that graffiti here isn’t crime-related: "Fourteen guys on a corner hanging out, they’re wannabes; they wanna be like Crips and Bloods. Like in the rental-car business, they say, ‘We’re second; we try harder.’ These guys want to make a name for themselves."

Radtke turns a final page in an Operation: Clean Sweep photo album and points to some colorful pieces that used to line the 17th Street Canal. The operative phrase here is "used to," because the 17th Street Canal – all one-and-one-half miles of it – is now graffiti-free, says Radtke with pride. "It was called the Graffiti Hall of Fame because the word on the street was ‘Put your stuff down there so you get noticed.’"

  Although some graffiti artists – the late Keith Haring being a prime example – went on to show their work in nearly every famous contemporary art gallery in the United States, Radtke resists the idea that any graffiti can be called beautiful. "How can it be beautiful on someone’s property? It’s still a coral snake, one of the most beautiful in the world. But its bite will kill you." And, he adds, "Remember, New Orleans is an economic town. A can of spray paint runs between four and seven dollars. If you go out and buy 50 of them for a piece that’s 50 yards long, 10 colors, it’s almost an addiction. How are you going to get your next fix, your next spray can?"

  Included in the album is a photo captioned "I-10" that says "F–k you, Fred Radtke" and another one that requests a vulgar act of Radtke. "I know them all," he says, "and they know me, absolutely. They’re not happy with me taking out graffiti. They shoot guns through their cell phones on the hotline. But they understand that I take out everything. It’s not a personal thing."

  He points at another piece of graffiti painted high above ground on the I-10 bridge. The piece, like everything else in his books, now exists only as a square of gray paint. And Radtke feels good about that. "We’re doing something right. Instead of just thinking about graffiti, these guys are thinking about us. I’m glad they’re thinking of us, because we’re going to catch them." .