The Killing of Justin Bieber
Hatched in prison by a convicted murderer with a case of Bieber Fever gone bad, it was a grotesquely twisted plan: Kidnap the then-18-year-old pop star while he played Madison Square Garden, execute and castrate him. If not for one wrong turn, it might have been the most infamous celebrity crime of the century. Inside the plot to assassinate—and desecrate—the world's greatest teen idol.
By Kevin Gray,
Illustrations by Mat Maitland
april 2013 Issue
The kid was under Dana Martin's skin. A convicted murderer serving a life sentence, Martin lay face-down on a prison-issue bed, wincing. Behind him, on a white plastic patio chair, hunched a tattoo artist serving five months for assault.
Grabbing Martin's right ankle, he pressed the buzzing needle of a prison-made inking gun into a pimply white right calf. The gun was improvised using the tiny electric motor of a Radio Shack cassette player, with a piece of guitar string and a pen for a needle—its black ink harvested from the smoke of burning baby oil. The tattooist was finishing up an illicit 15-hour project that had spanned two weeks, putting the final touches on a seraphic face: a young boy with a bowl cut, a hoodie, pouty lips, and a lover's gaze. The kid's name, inked in big, bubbly street lettering, ran up the shin—JUSTIN BIEBER—and beneath that, the date: FEBRUARY 11, 2011. It was a big day for fans of the teen pop idol—Bieber's breakthrough 3-D concert biopic, which Martin had obsessively tracked for weeks on shows like Entertainment Tonight, was arriving in theaters. Martin admired the ink work on the film title, which he adopted as a "Fuck you all" motto: NEVER SAY NEVER.
read more: http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201304/plot-to-kill-justin-bieber
Hatched in prison by a convicted murderer with a case of Bieber Fever gone bad, it was a grotesquely twisted plan: Kidnap the then-18-year-old pop star while he played Madison Square Garden, execute and castrate him. If not for one wrong turn, it might have been the most infamous celebrity crime of the century. Inside the plot to assassinate—and desecrate—the world's greatest teen idol.
By Kevin Gray,
Illustrations by Mat Maitland
april 2013 Issue
The kid was under Dana Martin's skin. A convicted murderer serving a life sentence, Martin lay face-down on a prison-issue bed, wincing. Behind him, on a white plastic patio chair, hunched a tattoo artist serving five months for assault.
Grabbing Martin's right ankle, he pressed the buzzing needle of a prison-made inking gun into a pimply white right calf. The gun was improvised using the tiny electric motor of a Radio Shack cassette player, with a piece of guitar string and a pen for a needle—its black ink harvested from the smoke of burning baby oil. The tattooist was finishing up an illicit 15-hour project that had spanned two weeks, putting the final touches on a seraphic face: a young boy with a bowl cut, a hoodie, pouty lips, and a lover's gaze. The kid's name, inked in big, bubbly street lettering, ran up the shin—JUSTIN BIEBER—and beneath that, the date: FEBRUARY 11, 2011. It was a big day for fans of the teen pop idol—Bieber's breakthrough 3-D concert biopic, which Martin had obsessively tracked for weeks on shows like Entertainment Tonight, was arriving in theaters. Martin admired the ink work on the film title, which he adopted as a "Fuck you all" motto: NEVER SAY NEVER.
read more: http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201304/plot-to-kill-justin-bieber
