A Burglar's Guide to the City (15 page)
The great temples, Toner explained, would have attracted a lot of criminal attention. Temples served a role not unlike the banks of our day; those institutions were not just used as a place to conduct religious activities but as communal holding spots where valuable items, civic gifts, and even personal property could all be stored. They were like building-size safe-deposit boxes for the wealthiest members of society—and, thus, perfect targets for an enterprising troupe of burglars.
In fact, he added, the looting of temples—albeit at a military scale and perpetrated by heavily armed and well-trained soldiers, not small criminal gangs—was quite often the climactic and deliberately humiliating end to intercity warfare. A metropolis such as Rome or Jerusalem would be sacked of its belongings, its most prized possessions paraded away on the shoulders of triumphant enemies. Sacking a city was nothing more than militarized burglary—breaking and entering applied to an entire metropolis. Look at Troy, for example, its walls breached, its soldiers deceived by a hollow horse. In retrospect, it’s not entirely inaccurate to suggest that the Trojan War was decided by an ingenious act of burglary now enshrined in popular mythology through the metaphor of the Trojan horse—the original and most consequential burglar’s tool in Western history.
Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from my conversation with Toner was the implication that the fear of being burglarized while everyone was away from home at the chariot races helped to catalyze the growth of a metropolitan police force. Without all those quiet streets and empty homes to protect, armed guards on specifically timed, routine patrols would not have become such an urgent necessity then in urban history. It’s as if the city itself, and the behaviors and institutions through which it was regulated, coalesced around the activities of criminals, like irritating grains of sand around which an oyster gradually grows its pearls. Burglary, placed in the expanded context of thousands of years of urban development, helped to catalyze a kind of evolutionary cat-and-mouse game through which cops and robbers inadvertently collaborated, reacting to one another and shaping the legal, fictional, and literal dimensions of the built environment.
Picking the Bridge
On a Saturday afternoon at the end of summer, a loose group of recreational lock-pickers met halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge to help “save” hundreds of love locks. One hundred and fifty years after construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge—150 years after George Leonidas Leslie arrived in the city—the bridge was now the target of a mass lockpicking attack, a kind of burglary flash mob in clear view. Their plan was to remove hundreds of old padlocks that had been attached to the bridge’s rails before the city’s cleaning crews could dispose of them; then to store those locks in red, Valentine’s Day–colored nylon bags and to reattach them later to a future public sculpture, a specially made “tree” on which all ensuing love locks would be latched. The group called this “love picking.”
Love locks are padlocks, often with names, initials, or messages of love written on them, that have been clipped onto pieces of urban infrastructure as a public sign of romantic commitment. Some have been expensively laser-etched; others have simply been written on with a Sharpie. “Carrina, will you marry me?” “Zach + Julie, Always + Forever.” The result can be quite beautiful—lush, multicolored, roselike clusters—but they’re also doomed. In nearly all cases, love locks will be removed by city workers.
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Over the last decade, locksport—the organized recreational picking of locks by amateur enthusiasts—has grown tremendously in countercultural appeal. Participants, by definition, are not professional locksmiths. This puts what they do in a legal gray area that they are quick to discuss and defend; in addition to possessing nimble fingers and impressive attention spans, locksport enthusiasts try to remain fluent in local burglary law. Indeed, while emphasizing that they “are not lawyers and this page is not offering legal advice,” TOOOL (The Open Organization Of Lockpickers) maintains a webpage linking to broad summaries of individual state laws.
Almost all of these come down to the question of
intent
—of what you were planning to do with those lockpicks. This is often deduced using a loose and far from rigorous constellation of factors. In addition to your lockpicking set, for example, do you also have a crowbar, sledgehammer, flashlight, or balaclava in the trunk of your car? If so, that combination of objects might imply clear intent to commit a crime—even if you were just heading over to a friend’s house to help fix his deck on a dark winter’s day—and you could be facing arrest. Perhaps you have lockpicks in your backpack and nothing else—except for a well-worn map of a certain neighborhood, complete with handwritten annotations detailing the times of day someone won’t be home. If so, you could be legally suspected of intent to commit burglary—even if the lockpicks had been sitting unused in your bag for six months, and the map was to remind you of what days you had to go feed your aunt’s cat. Or perhaps it’s the time of day that makes you seem a bit suspicious—for example, being seen walking behind a closed Walmart at 2:00 a.m. with a set of lockpicks in your back pocket. No matter that you were only taking a shortcut home through the local shopping mall after a long birthday party at a friend’s house where you were given a set of lockpicks.
The vagaries of determining criminal intent—or the willingness of a police officer to listen to and believe your story—can be extremely hard to predict. No matter what your own state laws or city statutes might be, any reader would do well to consider the consequences of being caught roaming the streets with a set of lockpicks (or, at the least, to have a good lawyer on call). These are lessons many members of TOOOL have learned the hard way.
Several weeks before the event on the Brooklyn Bridge, a Facebook page was created. Messages of support were sent and forwarded. Then, as the day drew near, a change of tone set in: the group’s e-mails went from high-spirited anticipation of an outdoor lockpicking party hosted in the late-summer sun to a slightly stunned, what-have-we-done? careful consideration of legal specificity. The group’s lawyer was cc’d. Interested attendees were urged to “be polite”—even to stay at home if they had any open warrants. They were advised to arrive sober, to be well behaved, and to pick locks, not fights: no arguments with cops or curious bystanders would be tolerated.
The group was not easy to find. Despite the suggested 4:00 p.m. kickoff, it was nearly 4:30 before it became clear that anyone had shown up. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for an introverted tribe of technical specialists, the lock-pickers had dispersed along the bridge, their backs turned away from tourists and other walkers. They stood, hands at waist level, fidgeting unobtrusively with tiny objects on the outer rails. It was like watching a strawberry harvest as hands delicately popped the locks and moved on, foot by foot, toward Brooklyn.
I introduced myself to the group’s ostensible conductor for the day, a well-known lockpicker and author of several books on hacking and security who calls himself Deviant Ollam, or Dev. He had driven up from Philadelphia that morning with his partner, who goes by the nickname Lady Merlin. Dev is on the board of directors of TOOOL. He was dressed in a black polo shirt, a TOOOL logo prominently displayed on his chest, with dozens of laser-printed “love picking” leaflets slipped neatly into the pockets of his cargo shorts. Wrapped on one wrist was a magnetic bracelet to which he could affix his picks, swapping one tool out for another in an instant, a performative mix of off-grid survivalist gear wed with the quirks of urban maker culture.
“Love picking,” as I was shortly to learn, is by no means universally sanctioned among the lockpicking crowd. A vigorous and far from polite discussion had been developing on the social news website Reddit for the past month. The event on the Brooklyn Bridge had initially been proposed as a kind of antigraffiti gesture by an otherwise anonymous Redditor called Bobcat; Bobcat is a get-off-my-lawn, gun-rights type who had been roused to anger by what he considers a blatant misuse of city infrastructure. Love locks accelerate rust, he railed. They’re ugly. Bobcat is not a romantic. Only later was he able to secure the support and interest of Deviant Ollam and TOOOL—but even then, it wasn’t easy. After all, for an anarchic group of fringe hobbyists keenly aware that most people see what they do as illegal, stealing these tokens of public love would only make things worse. Everyone already thinks we’re criminals, they complained; now everyone will think we’re assholes.
Some New Yorkers did stop to watch, and a few even interrupted to ask why a small group of people had suddenly appeared, picking locks on a Saturday afternoon. A couple walked by, getting their photograph taken for a wedding album; families strolled slowly down the middle of the bike lane, snapping photos of each other on iPads. Who were these mysterious people, dressed mostly in baseball hats and black T-shirts, hunched over alone by the pedestrian rails, picking love locks?
Schuyler Towne, one of the earliest popularizers of locksport in the United States, got in touch with me soon after he saw my photos of the day popping up on Instagram and Twitter. He seemed exasperated. Locksport has two primary rules, he emphasized to me, and everyone is meant to follow them. Think of these as pledges of locksport chivalry. One is, never pick a lock that isn’t yours. The only exception is when you have the clear and specific permission of that lock’s owner. The other rule is, never pick a lock that’s actually in use. Even if it’s your own lock, you might damage it—and you don’t want to incapacitate your front door or some other lock you rely on for everyday safety. Seemingly embarrassed by his belief in the poetry of it all, Towne insisted that all those Brooklyn Bridge love locks
are
being used—admittedly not in the traditional sense. But couples are using them to symbolize something, Towne emphasized, and it shouldn’t be up to a group of out-of-state locksport hobbyists to decide otherwise.
Worse, he added, TOOOL had informed its members of New York State law only; but according to New York City Administrative Code 20-301, it is “unlawful for any person other than a licensed locksmith to open any lock for which a key or combination may have been lost.” Thus, Towne explained, each participant had unknowingly been “marching out onto that bridge to commit a crime, and for no particularly good reason.” This is worth repeating: in New York City, possessing lockpicking tools is not, in and of itself, evidence of criminal intent—unlike, say, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, where, as of this writing, it is illegal to possess lockpicks. However, in New York City, if you are not a licensed locksmith, using your tools to pick someone else’s lock—even if you’re just helping a friend get back into his or her apartment for the night—is against the law.
By the end of the day, the group had removed nearly eighteen pounds of padlocks, lightening the infrastructural load of the bridge by approximately the weight of an infant and, as Bobcat enthusiastically emphasized on Reddit, reducing the future threat of rust and patination. However, within a week, shiny new padlocks were already appearing on the bridge like little buds of steel fruit, undaunted either by this rogue locksport crew or by the bolt cutters of the NYC Department of Transportation.
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What brought me out onto the Brooklyn Bridge that day wasn’t an interest in love locks; I went because I wanted to learn more about the tools people use to subvert barriers, slip through openings, and gain access to architecture without waiting for a key to the front door. I wanted to know more about the specialty equipment that enables people to pass through the built environment like fog through a forest—like ghosts, like neutrinos. Indeed, the very existence of a legal category of object known as the
burglary tool
—a strangely compelling phrase with an air of mystery to it—implies that a whole parallel class of hardware exists, unavailable for sale in the aisles of Home Depot. What were these tools and who made them? Whom would you have to talk to, to get hold of some? Naturally, I thought, if I wanted to learn about burglary, I should follow the tools—and that meant talking to lock-pickers, a whole crew of whom would be gathered together in one place that Saturday afternoon in New York City.
In the popular imagination, no self-respecting burglar could operate without a set of lockpicking tools, to the extent that these tiny metal picks that look like something a dentist might use to clean your teeth have become all but synonymous with the crime. Indeed, the heavily worn lockpicks used by President Richard Nixon’s burglary crew to break into the Watergate Hotel in 1972 are on display even today as nationally important artifacts in the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. The Watergate lockpicks not only came to represent an era, with all of its conspiracy, paranoia, and betrayal; they also seemed to prove, once and for all, that burglary requires lockpicks.
Following my afternoon on the Brooklyn Bridge, I set up a meeting with Schuyler Towne at the John M. Mossman Lock Collection at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen in Manhattan. John Mossman had grown up the son of a safe and lock manufacturer and would later become a vault designer during the heyday of George Leonidas Leslie’s gang. Mossman’s extensive personal collection of locks was slowly assembled over his professional career, forming a kind of greatest hits of global locking mechanisms.
Under high ceilings inside a nineteenth-century building that originally housed a boys’ school, dusty glass cases today host hundreds of delicate instruments. At times, the fluorescent lights of the room catch their polished brass and steel at just the right angle, and they glint like pieces of jewelry. The locks span thousands of years of human history, from ancient Egyptian door locks made of wood to the world’s first time locks, by way of magnetic locks, Chinese padlocks, and some of the first modern cylinder locks, encompassing samples up to the early 1900s—yet few people seem to know the museum even exists. In the few times I have since been back to browse the collection, I have not seen another visitor.