It’s been 365 days since Boris Labinov and Nicholas Hughes brought cow tipping to Northwestern.
Today marks exactly one year since the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity members spent a cool May evening severing a fiberglass cow from its hooves and carving out their niche as some of the most notorious pranksters in NU history.
Moo@NU, the full-sized, multicolored heifer inspired by Chicago’s 1999 Cows on Parade, had been grazing outside Norris University Center for just 20 days when Labinov and Hughes used a Stanley handsaw to send it to that big pasture in the sky.
NU administrators, members of the Institute for Learning in Retirement – which donated Moo@NU – and many others who saw the cow were not impressed with the stunt, and University Police took on the task of recovering the missing bovine.
After several weeks of investigation, during which a spirited debate over vandalism and the humor of college pranks played out across The Daily’s Forum page, an anonymous tip led UP to Fiji’s chapter room, where the head and udders of a mutilated Moo@NU were recovered. Labinov and Hughes confessed the next day.
For the first time since the incident, Labinov and Hughes, both Weinberg seniors on the brink of graduating, have agreed to publicly tell the story of what happened that spring night.
They realize their tale of sawing their way through Moo@NU and, subsequently, through the legal system, will amuse some and cause others to, well, have a cow.
midnight cowboys
The night began, as so many tales of NU debauchery do, at The Keg of Evanston.
Although Labinov and Hughes said they weren’t drunk, they do admit to enjoying a couple of refreshing beverages before returning around midnight to Fiji, where they took in some soft-core pornography on Cinemax.
Since its dedication, Moo@NU had offended Hughes, who frequently passed it on his way to his work-study job in Norris.
“I would just see this hideous cow,” he said. “I thought if this was donated to NU, it might as well have had some connection to NU.”
So although stealing the cow was not planned, it was certainly something that had crossed their minds before, they said.
“We kind of like to remove things from places if need be,” Hughes said. “When we did it, we honestly thought it would be hilarious. It’s this goofy-looking cow, it has nothing to do with the university, it’s out in the middle of nowhere; I mean, it’s just asking to get stolen.”
At about 3 a.m. they set off for Norris, armed with a handsaw they had lying around their house (there’s “pretty much one of everything” lying around their house, they explained) and a bright orange sheet to conceal their loot.
No one walked by for a solid hour while Labinov and Hughes took turns with the saw.
“That cow was strong as hell,” Hughes said. “It was durable. We definitely broke a sweat.”
Moving ‘Moo’
Once they had removed the cow from its base, they had to decide what to do with it.
“Like we said, this was not a planned-out process,” Labinov said.
They agreed to herd the 60-pound cow back to their house, but quickly found that fiberglass cows share the stubbornness of their live counterparts.
“This cow is not rectangular, Labinov said. “It’s a full-sized cow – it’s very hard to carry. Carrying 60 pounds, trying to conceal it and walking around trees is very tiring. The walk back kind of sucked.”
And the walk back would have sucked even more if the police officer who drove past them had seen their cargo.
“How he didn’t notice us I don’t know,” Labinov said. “He should have; we didn’t try to hide – we just kind of stopped.”
They struggled to their house, where they managed to squeeze Moo@NU through their front door and up four flights of stairs to Labinov’s room. Success, they thought, was theirs.
“We got it up there and we were like ‘Wow, we got away with this one scot-free,”’ Hughes said.
There were some minor inconveniences, such as the size of the cow relative to the room.
“It’s a big single, but you put a cow in there and it’s the whole room,” Hughes said. “You open up the door and there’s a cow’s ass in your face.”
Then there was the smell. Based on the yellow stains and potent stench of urine, Labinov and Hughes suspect fellow cow-haters had registered their dislike of the cow by relieving themselves upon it.
“Sleeping next to the thing was not pleasant,” Labinov said.
But he only had to deal with the odor for a couple of nights, because once they read in The Daily how upset administrators were about the theft, they decided to dispose of the evidence. Or at least most of it.
They took the cow to a small room near the kitchen in the basement of Fiji, and with a circular saw this time, they hacked the cow into 30 or 40 pieces, which they put into garbage bags and then distributed in trash bins around North Campus.
“We went ‘Goodfellas’ on the cow,” Hughes said.
On all of the cow except the head and udders, that is.
“You’ve got to have a trophy,” Hughes said. “The udders were solid fiberglass, that’s why we kept them. And it’s the udder, which is kind of funny. With the head our plan was to mount it like a deer or something. You know, get a taxidermist, get it stuffed.”
THE COW COMES HOME
But their trophy hunting, and letting others in on the secret, eventually led to their discovery.
A few days after Labinov and Hughes planted the kiss of death on Moo@NU, an officer from UP knocked on Fiji’s door and asked to look around. Labinov answered the door.
“He said he was here about the cow incident and going from house to house,” Labinov said. “It was kind of ironic I happened to open the door.”
Labinov and Hughes had stuffed the head and udders in a hidden wall in a closet on the fifth-floor chapter room of Fiji’s house. The UP officer, who probably was still looking for an intact cow, never went to the fifth floor.
About two weeks went by, and Labinov and Hughes began to relax. They even went so far as to tell someone what they had done. Two days after confiding in two of their friends, they were arrested.
“We told a few select people, and one told his girlfriend who told another guy who had a moral problem with what we had done. It’s Northwestern – I would expect that at Northwestern. If we were at (Ohio University) we would have had an annual cow-thieving party,” said Hughes, who is from Toledo.
Labinov and Hughes were charged with felony theft. The day of their bond hearing they were handcuffed and taken to Cook County Circuit Court in Skokie, where they spent the majority of the day in a holding cell waiting for their appearance before the judge.
“By the end of that day we knew where to buy crack,” Labinov said.
After several court appearances and a few thousand dollars in legal fees, the judge decided that Labinov and Hughes, “the cow guys” as he called them, would have their felony charges reduced and their records cleared if they replaced the cow.
Labinov and Hughes made arrangements to have a fiberglass cow shipped from Switzerland, and Harold Burns, the artist of the original Moo@NU, was commissioned to paint the reincarnation.
On May 2 a ceremony was held to officially dedicate Moo@NU II. This time inside of Norris.
‘a fairly arrogant act’
After it was all said and done, after all of the court appearances, the lawyer fees, the tense meetings with administrators, the long-distance phone calls to Switzerland, Hughes said he would do it all over again.
“It turned out all right,” he said. “I got five of my 15 minutes.”
Labinov was not so sure.
“I’ll take a ‘no comment’ on that,” he said. “We thought it was a simple, silly prank.”
But Norris Director Bill Johnston, who helped organize the cows’ donation to NU, said the prank could have resulted in far more serious consequences for Hughes and Labinov.
“Before they get too lighthearted … had we not interceded, they would have been in for a major fine as well as to have this on their record,” Johnston said. “Obviously we could have made them jump through a few more hoops than they did.”
Labinov and Hughes declined to say how much the incident cost them
. Johnston estimated the cost of the cow was in excess of $12,000.
And no matter how unappealing they found the cow, they had no right to act on their preferences, Johnston said.
“(They) didn’t think very highly of the cow and that put them in a position of being the final arbiter of what’s art and what’s not, what’s worth keeping around and what’s not,” he said. “It was a fairly arrogant act on their part.”
Barbara Reinish, the administrative director of ILR, said that although her group has no hard feelings toward Hughes and Labinov, a lot of hard work went into Moo@NU and many people were upset when it was destroyed.
“I don’t think there’s anything funny about it at all, that the gift was desecrated to begin with,” she said. “Hopefully we won’t have to deal with it anymore.”
Hughes isn’t sure that will be the case.
“Frankly, I think the second cow is going to get stolen, too,” Hughes said. “I think where they put it is just making it more prone to getting stolen again. All somebody has to do is get into Norris after hours, and they’re going to have a nice secluded little room and they’re going to have all night.
“I’m guessing people right now are plotting,” he said. “But obviously we’re not going to do it.”
