Everybody knew. But nobody wanted to say it.

This isn't a theory. It's a case file.

I didn't want to write this. Not because I couldn't, but because for years I hoped someone else would do the work. Someone with the credentials. Someone with the platform. Someone who could drop the evidence and walk away, clean.

But that didn't happen. Instead, the same three names kept getting recycled—Rob Gunningham, Jamie Hewlett, Robert Del Naja—like folklore passed around the internet campfire. Each time a new article dropped, it was the same quotes, the same blurry photos, the same percentage guesses dressed up as reporting. For years, I held out hope a serious conversation would emerge. It never did.

So here it is. Not a rant. A record.

The Three-Card Monte of Banksy Suspects

Let's get real. These three men were never plausible. They were placed. Each one was fed to a specific audience—a controlled leak, engineered to compartmentalize the crowd.

• Gunningham was for his everyman quality, Bristol street cred and graffiti enthusiasts.
• Hewlett was bait for the music-art-cool-kid Venn diagram.
• Del Naja was tossed to the political art theorists who wanted to believe Banksy had a manifesto.

The result? Three belief silos. No cross-communication. No critical mass to drive better mystery solutions. Just a steady churn of Reddit arguments and Guardian headlines. And while everyone was debating who the man in the mask was, the real artist built an empire behind the scenes.

EXHIBIT A: Why Rob Gunningham Is Not the Artist Known as Banksy

1. Legal Paperwork Confirms He's Not the Artist

In legal filings related to Banksy's companies, Rob Gunningham is never listed as "The Artist." Instead, he appears adjacent to filings—sometimes as a known associate—but is explicitly and legally separated from the protected artist identity. The solicitor handling the paperwork goes out of their way to draw a hard line: the artist is someone else. If Rob were the artist, this distinction would be not only unnecessary—it would be legally misleading.

2. Pest Control's Silent Indictment

Between 1999 and 2002, Rob Gunningham actively claimed to be Banksy while selling hand-sprayed stencil work and appearing at events. Pest Control, Banksy's authentication bureau, has never authenticated a single one of these works. If Rob were Banksy, they would be required to validate those early pieces to establish provenance. Instead, they've disavowed them. In one case, Pest Control even traded a verified Banksy on metal to erase Rob's work on the side of a lorry. This is documented in Will Ellsworth-Jones' "The Man Behind the Wall."

3. Witness Testimony: Steph Warren's Description Doesn't Match Rob

Steph Warren, former Pictures on Walls assistant, offers the most credible inside account of Banksy's personality and operational protocol. She describes Banksy as grumpy, invisible to most, and obsessively meticulous about how the work was produced. This profile doesn't match Gunningham, who is widely described as gregarious and socially fluid—seen frequently at street art events and known to brag about his Banksy association. The contrast isn't stylistic—it's structural. One was present. The other hid.

4. Lazarides' Timeline is Broken—by His Own Archive

Steve Lazarides auctioned off his archive in 2023. It included over one hundreds of pieces of assorted Banksy-related ephemera. The earliest legitimate materials in that archive date to late 2003. Everything before that—Lazarides' Sleazenation shoot, the early festival shots, the street crew documentation—is focused on building Rob Gunningham's image as Banksy rather than working directly with the artist since 98 as had been his claim.

In Banksy Captured, Lazarides finally uncrops the photo long used to support the Rob myth. In context, it's clear: Rob was a wall painter, not the artist. If Rob were the artist, this role reversal makes no sense. You don't put your principal at exposure risk to install unsellable stencils hundreds of times unless your brand security is nonexistent. But the Banksy mystery was maintained flawlessly. The takeaway is simple: Rob wasn't protected because he wasn't the artist.

5. Timeline Conflict: Gunningham's Whereabouts vs. the Artist's Activity

Between 2004 and 2006, Rob Gunningham was still appearing in public as Banksy. Meanwhile, the real artist was operating through private instructions and coordinating high-level events—often through intermediaries. Lazarides himself states the artist worked remotely. The operational timelines don't match. You can't be the artist if you're in public while the work is being managed elsewhere.

SIDEBAR: The Strategic Pivot—From Decoy to Brand Control

By 2006, Banksy originals were selling for over $200,000. The shift was underway. Rob's Johnny Bravo moment—posing as Banksy for early showsthrough 2003—was becoming a liability, his decoy rol a brand risk. The operation pivoted. Rob was quietly phased out as a face, and the artist was sequestered entirely. From this point forward, Banksy became a controlled enterprise: limited access, vetted appearances, and strict asset protection. Rob's removal from visible authorship wasn't incidental. It was a necessary firewall.

The same year marked a second shift that would eventually expose Jamie Hewlett as another intentional misdirection that would conceal Banksy’s corporate person from public view for twelve years. Banksy's art and exhibition parent company, Pictures on Walls Limited (POW), had listed Jamie Hewlett as its majority shareholder of record from 2004 to 2016. However, in 2016, UK business reporting regulations changed prohibiting anyone but an attorney from acting as a shareholder designee for beneficial owners, a change that caught Banksy’s managers cold, even forcing the CFO to sign his name followed by esq on an annual return for the first and last time.

The ruse could no longer be shielded by nominee shareholder Hewlett without disclosure. His days of hiding Banksy corporate form as a high-profile proxies were over. The ruse worked for over a decade: a recognizable name up front, no paper trail behind. But when the rule changed, the operation scrambled. In 2017, control of Hewlett's majority 67-share stake was hastily transferred—retroactively—to a California-based attorney dating the transfer back to 2012, well before the regulation change. For 2016, the corporate report was filed with the unusual addition of an "esq." beside POW's longtime accountant's name, a last-ditch nod to legal cover that had never appeared before or since then. It was the first and only time they acknowledged—however subtly—that the jig was up.

Soon after, Hewlett was removed. The print business was shuttered. POW's remaining assets doubled and then quadrupled within a few years despite the only business it ever claimed closing. It was over and they didn’t even try to fake the closure of the front business on the paperwork.

That wasn't a retirement. That was a fire drill.

And it was never about Hewlett. He wasn't Banksy. He was a name on the door, the highest profile front man I’d ever seen

EXHIBIT C: Robert Del Naja – The Final Misdirection

By the time Robert Del Naja entered the Banksy story, the artist's legend was already halfway canonized. Gunningham had done his legwork, Hewlett had helped mask the business, and the brand had went from seizing a London roadway underpass for a show with a boombox and kegs in a van for entertainment and refreshments to Banksy leading a showcase of the art movement they revived over the 00’s at a first tier museum. But to seal the myth? The operation needed someone cool enough, street enough, and credible enough to make even the skeptics go quiet. That someone was 3D.

A founding member of Massive Attack, Robert Del Naja had long-standing graffiti and fine art credentials, genuine UK street art history, and the right political edge. His presence lent weight to the idea that Banksy had always been part of something bigger—part punk, part protest, part scene.

And so, in 2010, Del Naja was flown into LA for a role he never formally claimed: collaborator, mentor, insider. He worked with students from LA's City of Angels school to create the background panel seen in Banksy’s Forgive Us Our Trespassing—a massive mural staged as the emotional centerpiece of MOCA's Art in the Streets, the first major museum retrospective on the street art movement. It was a cameo designed to leak. A no-photo-op photo op. A press trap disguised as outreach.

The timing was immaculate. Exit Through the Gift Shop had just been Oscar-nominated. Banksy was being anointed by the very institutions he once mocked. This wasn't rebellion anymore—it was coronation.

Del Naja's involvement signaled two things at once:

1. That Banksy was still "one of us"—a graffiti head, a music man, a cultural outsider
2. And that he had serious, legacy-anchored friends. It made the story feel round. Closed. Safe to believe.

Except it wasn't.

Del Naja couldn't have been Banksy. He was too famous, too busy, too surrounded by handlers. He couldn't vanish. He couldn't ghost-manage a global art brand while fronting Massive Attack and touring with a full production crew. The fantasy falls apart under the simplest scheduling math.

But the myth didn't need him to be Banksy. It just needed him to walk through the scene like he might be.

When Forgive Us Our Trespassing sold years later for $8.2 million—with Steve Lazarides standing in as the seller's rep—it capped the long arc of Del Naja's usefulness. Whether he was cut in or just helping out an old crew, we can't say. But it doesn't matter.

He was the final false flag. The last decoy. The street-level stamp of authenticity on a campaign that had nothing left to prove.

Robert Del Naja was never Banksy. He was a beat drop. A smoke signal. A cameo with just enough residue to sustain the myth for another decade.

He wasn't the artist. He was the ritual exit cue.

The Smoking Gun: Strategic Timing

Consider this little-known fact that demolishes the standard theories:

On the exact day Banksy's first legitimate art show (co-exhibited with punk artist Jamie Reid) opened in Glasgow, a corporate entity called "Exit Through The Gift Shop Productions" was quietly incorporated 6,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

This wasn't coincidence. This was the moment the entire Banksy operation crystallized—a coordinated effort spanning multiple continents, involving publishing, film, and fine art simultaneously. None of the three usual suspects could have orchestrated this level of sophisticated multi-industry coordination.

The incorporation papers and exhibition documentation exist in public records, yet no mainstream journalist has ever connected these dots. Ask yourself why.

CONCLUSION: The Curtain Call

This isn't a whodunnit. It's a how-they-got-away-with-it.

Three decoys. Three chapters. Each one installed and retired with surgical timing. None of them the artist. None of them the architect. All of them necessary.

By the time the final smoke cleared, Banksy was no longer a person—it was a brand protected by layers of misdirection, frontmen, and proxies. A global operation with enough tradecraft to fool the press, the market, and most of the public for over two decades.

The facts remain:

• Rob's early works are disavowed
• He is separated from "The Artist" in legal records
• He was never protected like an asset
• His role was phased out until an unexpected market surge for Banksy’s works in 2006 made him the first long term deep cover agent in the history of artist brands
• Hewlett was removed when rule changes risked exposing the real owners

That's not the profile of an artist. That's the profile of a plant.

This is your killshot. File it accordingly.

If this clears the record once and for all and means I never have to hear "Rob is Banksy" again, then great. Consider it a public service. If not, that's fine too. I've done what the press wouldn't. I'm not here to convert. I'm just here to close the file.

Because it's Chinatown, Jake.

Some lies are too beloved to unwind. Some myths too profitable to surrender. My purpose was never to be heard. It was to leave the file open just long enough for anyone who cared to read it.

I'm not here to make you believe. I'm here to put a body on the record.

Now roll credits. Float the camera back. Cue the sprinklers. Fade to pool.

I did my job. The rest is on you.