Someone has pissed off California’s rich.
Every few days, a mysterious figure wearing a mask and latex gloves carries bottles of urine into an affluent neighborhood, carefully arranges them on an electrical box, and then disappears into the night.
Known as the “Piss Bandit,” he has made his mark on Pasadena for the past six years with soda bottles, juice cartons and even gallon jugs filled to the brim with yellow liquid.
No one knows his identity and he taunts locals with notes and drawings scrawled on his bottles: “human urine,” crude smiley faces, or sometimes “HIV positive.”
The Piss Bandit sometimes strikes several times a week, with bottles appearing in the morning and disappearing by nightfall.
The bizarre behavior has gone on so long that round rings have been etched into the paint of the electrical box.
The city fitted the box with a pointed metal lid in an attempt to stop the flow, but the bandit simply ripped it off, leaving a fresh batch of bottles for their troubles.
“It’s been a tug of war between the neighborhood and this man,” says Grant Yansura, who, along with his partner, filmmaker Derek Milton, launched a month-long investigation into the perpetrator.
The first video of their research was viewed more than 600,000 times on TikTok. For Milton and Yansura, the bandit is not a disgusting vandal, but a vigilante artist: a Robin Hood figure who has made the city of Pasadena his Little John.
“His dedication to his craft intrigued us,” Yansura told the Post.
But for the neighborhood – an oasis of expensive houses, swimming pools and carefully manicured lawns – the bandit is the biggest threat.
“I thought it was disgusting. Never have I ever considered it an art form in any form,” said Oscar Laguna, who until February owned a house near the perpetrator’s drop site.
Another neighbor posted a handwritten note for the bandit: “If I catch you leaving your piss here, I will make you drink every last drop! … You have been warned!”
Burning for answers, Milton and Yansura staked out the drop site, but their subject never showed up. When they installed an infrared gaming camera near the coffin, the puddle roll footage showed the bandit’s latex-gloved hand reaching over a barrier wall and placing the bottles one by one, like candles on a cake.
They then left a note for the bandit: “I’m a big fan of your installation art… I think your work is on the same level as Banksy + Shepard Fairy.” The note contained a marker and interview questions for him to answer.
Not everyone agreed. As they were staking out the site, a man stopped in anger and asked why the pair were whipping him up instead of trying to bring him to justice. “He said, ‘Stop making it funny! Do something about it!’” Yansura told the Post. “But what do they want me to do if he throws a net over him?”
The bandit himself doesn’t seem to care about his own fans. He not only ignored their note, but also stole their camera. Later, the camera sent something to Milton’s cloud storage account: a beautiful sea view whose metadata was identified as Sunset Cliffs, San Diego – 125 miles from the piss box.
The bandit’s next bottle of licorice contained a full one-liter jug with a drawing of a demonic face. “He was on offense and playing with us,” Milton said in a video.
Finally, the TikTok sleuths placed another camera on the side, this time with a voice intercom function. But the bandit ignored their attempts to communicate and simply stole that camera as well.
Afterwards, the couple decided to flush the matter.
“His dedication to his craft intrigued us,” and we wanted to know why. But we realized he doesn’t want to tell us why,” Yansura said. “Sometimes you just have to let an artist pee.”
