The mystery is no more.

Given any other circumstances, the item from the police blotter wouldn’t have attracted much attention. Three young men arrested late at night, charged with defacing public property. But these were no ordinary circumstances.

This was Borf, the infamous grafitti artist who for months had taken to the streets in the District and Virginia — and even as far as San Francisco — leaving behind scribbles, scrawls, and stencils that seemed both thought-provoking and nonsensical.

His ability to strike anywhere and everywhere, from mailboxes to a sign 20 feet above the Roosevelt Bridge, made Borf an enigma and also fueled interest in his identity. Borf was the man behind what the Raleigh News and Observer called in an article today the “most brazen, neurotically intense stencil campaign in recent memory.”

Rumors claimed Borf was a wanderer who had faked his own death to escape the travails of everyday life, others had it that Borf wasn’t any one person more than a loosely-bound collective or an idea for anyone to adopt. The mystery of Borf became such that one District resident even tailed and snapped pictures, none frontal, of the man himself as he worked his way around Dupont Circle in broad daylight.

Now that Borf has been apprehended, caught red-handed, what are we to make of him and his craft? Was he a well-meaning artistic revolutionary, liberating District minds one stencil and tag at a time? Or was he less than that, a distracted and directionless suburban teenager engaging in petty vandalism?

The image above is from this Flickr photo taken in New York.