It’s a sweet deal — except for all the horse manure.
Under a plea struck today, the three teenaged graffiti “artists” who caused $40,000 damage to Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace two years ago will stay out of jail, but must perform 200 hours of community service mucking out the park’s horse stables.
“The Central Park Conservancy insisted that their community service be shoveling sh– in the stables,” said Kevin Canfield, lawyer for the youngest of the group, Victoria Beniaminova.
“At least it beats going to prison,” Canfield noted.
Now an 11th grader, Beniaminova was only 16 when she and her buddies doused the landmarked structure’s delicate, 150-year-old sandstone mosaics with spray-painted streaks of purple, red and black paint in Jan. 2009. Sucking the paint out of the sponge-like stone was a painstaking process requiring the application of heated poultices.
Beniaminova and her pals Sabrina Santiago and Aisha Calo, who were 16 and 18 respectively at the time of the vandalism, will have their felony criminal mischief convictions sealed under the state’s youthful offenders program. They will also serve five years probation.
Their co-defendant, Dave Gonzalez, was 20 at the time of the vandalism, and is mulling a deal in which he’d admit to a misdemeanor, serve community service and five years probation and pay $9,200 restitution.