The Inspiration Behind Crazy Pepe
Yesterday, the Notable Pepes Project released cards 22–26 of Series 5. Historically, the team releases five new pieces every Friday and sets a two day time limit for people to mint any that they would like. The minting is done via the Manifold platform at a price of 0.069 ETH per mint. The artist sets the maximum number of mints however the quantity is locked forever when the timer hits 0. The curator of the Project — VincentVanDough always gets two copies as does the artist. Meaning there could be as few as 4 of an image or as many as 100 (the typical maximum mint number).
Card 25 titled “Crazy Pepe” was done by the full-time illustrator and tattoo artist known as Darky© of the UK based Dark Inc Studio. It is his fourth piece in the Notable Pepes Project. I was intrigued about the title and image and asked Darky about it. What I learned was that this was his interpretation of a historical tattoo known as the Rough Rider that goes as far back as 1910.
Along with it being a tattoo, the image was also used on the cover of a 1937 novel titled “Death on a Dude Ranch” by Francis Bonnamy.
But the image became infamous in 1980 when a New York newspaper ran an image of a shirtless Sal Desarno after his arrest for shooting and killing a New York Police officer. It was quickly determined that the rough rider tattoo that desarno had on his chest was done by Brooklyn tattoo artist Tony Polito. The image was then dubbed the “Crazy Sal” by locals and became the most popular tattoo in Brooklyn. Polito hated that name and would not refer to it as such. He would only call it the Rough Rider and believed that the image made reference to the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry which was nicknamed the Rough Riders.
Thanks to photo sharing applications and websites, the image has grown in popularity all around the world.
Below is an in-depth interview done by vlogger NYC Crime Spot with tattooist Richfie of R&D Tattoo in Queens, NY where they talk about Sal DeSarno, Tony Polito, and the infamous image. In it Richfie stated that he does his version of the tattoo at least once a week. He calls it “the Queens Cowboy.”
A tee shirt made in memory of Tony Polito after his passing in 2017. His wife has taken over his Instagram account and often writes to Tony there and posts images of his work. Here is a GQ article that talks about the Instagram account and how his wife Bruni uses it.
