A Burglar's Guide to the City (25 page)

Spoofing can also be used indirectly, to open new, unobstructed routes where a road had been gridlocked only ten minutes earlier. For example, if you know your intended getaway route, you can digitally fake a traffic jam along that same street or freeway; the intended goal would be to make traffic apps report a road impassably clogged with vehicles, thus pushing other drivers—even police—away from your chosen street, shepherding them toward any number of nearby roads. A new line of escape is essentially unzipped down the middle of the city.

This exact scenario was successfully demonstrated by two students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology back in March 2014. To create the digital illusion of real-world traffic chaos, the students registered thousands of fake accounts on Waze, “the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app.” The students then used those fake accounts to report a well-coordinated series of traffic complaints, all the way down to the simulated movement of fake GPS signals, maintaining the illusion that the accounts were indeed coming from gridlock-trapped drivers. The result? Waze fell for this phantom traffic jam and began to reroute other drivers around the area, effectively guaranteeing that the students’ target road became eerily free of traffic, at least for the duration of their imaginary gridlock.

Despite these hacks and spoofs, the power to control a city’s traffic usually lies firmly in the hands of the police, with their arsenal of blockades, traffic stops, and road closures. Police powers are increasingly woven deep into the fabric of the built environment and will only grow more pervasive as “smart city” technology becomes widespread. Cantankerous Belorussian technology critic Evgeny Morozov has written that the surveillance powers of the state are so dramatically amplified by the ubiquitous sensors, cameras, and remote-control technology associated with the smart city that urban space risks becoming little more than an inhabitable police barricade. “As both cars and roads get ‘smart,’” Morozov wrote in a 2014 op-ed for
The Observer
, “they promise nearly perfect, real-time law enforcement. Instead of waiting for drivers to break the law, authorities can simply prevent the crime.”

While these sorts of technologies offer urban authorities powerful new tools to control the modern metropolis, the idea of designing out crime is by no means unique to our era. In nineteenth-century Paris, for example, acting under instructions from Emperor Napoléon III, urban administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann instituted an extraordinarily ambitious series of urban improvements. He ordered the demolition of entire neighborhoods, the erasure of whole streets from the center of Paris, and the widespread replacement of them both with the broad, leafy, and beautiful boulevards Paris is known for today. This was not motivated by aesthetics, however, but was explicitly a police project, a deliberate—and quite successful—effort to redesign the city so that the streets would be too wide to barricade, the back alleys no longer winding or confusing enough for insurgents and revolutionaries to disappear or get away. The urban landscape of Paris became a police tool, its urban core reorganized so aggressively that popular uprisings would henceforth be spatially impossible.

This is not the only police project for which Paris is widely known. As historian A. Roger Ekirch explains in his 2005 book,
At Day’s Close
, the idea of lighting the streets of Paris back in the 1600s originally came from the police. Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.

Morozov warns that we are living through a kind of digital upgrade of Haussmann’s universal street-control project: the inauguration of a smart city that will be able to anticipate—and, more important, interrupt or preempt—certain behaviors, whether that means speeding, committing a burglary, or violating curfew. So-called
predictive policing
has been much discussed over the past few years, whereby authorities use detailed statistics and algorithms—a city’s criminal patterns and rhythms—to “predict” when and where a crime is most likely to occur. Morozov is describing a kind of
predictive urban design
, a geospatial policing project where specific activities become impossible to perform: police can turn off your car engine from miles away or redirect driverless vehicles to clog the road precisely when you’re trying to escape.

It would be the exact opposite of
The Italian Job
: red lights all the way, an impenetrable phalanx of traffic that only the police can control or navigate.

*

As Morozov points out, however, we’re not quite there yet. For now, the art of the getaway is still an analog undertaking, one whose most basic outlines date back to a former Prussian military officer named Herman Lamm. In the 1920s, following his emigration to the United States, Lamm developed something like a mathematical science of bank robbery—an ingenious series of clearly defined steps with reproducible results. Much of our present-day mythology of the high-octane bank bandit comes down from the example set by Lamm and his “Lamm technique.” This called for the meticulous use of a stopwatch based on the absolute conviction that, after a specific period of time, no matter how much (or how little) money his gang had taken, they were to leave the bank and get away, following a carefully devised set of instructions so as to outsmart the city’s traffic as well as any police who might be pursuing them.

Before each heist, Lamm would have spent hours mapping out the best possible routes of escape, specifically recruiting drivers with racing experience and storing an extra fuel tank in the trunk, in case they needed to fill up on the road. As crime writer Duane Swierczynski describes Lamm’s method, a map of the getaway route would be attached to the inside of the car, within view of the driver, including detailed marginal notes, all the way down “to speedometer readings for each block and alternate turns to take in case of emergency.” There would be getaway routes inside getaway routes, each with its own speed and timing. Lamm’s foresight extended even to planning for different weather conditions, noting alternative roads to take (and how fast) if a sudden rainstorm blew in or if the road was blocked by snow.

For Lamm, this well-honed technique seemed unbeatable—but its efficacy could only go so far. In December 1930, after robbing a Citizens State Bank in Clinton, Indiana, Lamm and his group were confronted by a shotgun-wielding vigilante barber before they could get away. Startled by the man’s gun, Lamm’s getaway driver pulled a sudden U-turn and blew a tire hitting the curb—and things went catastrophically downhill from there. Forced to improvise by an obstacle that even Lamm’s obsessive mind had failed to anticipate, the gang stole another car—but a governor installed on the engine meant it couldn’t go faster than 35 mph. So they ditched that and stole a truck—but it didn’t have enough radiator water to drive. They then stole another car—but it barely had any fuel in the tank, taking them just a few miles out of town before running out of gas. Lamm’s previously well-organized gang found itself trapped by the side of the road, surrounded by police. Their getaway was in shambles. Within only a few minutes, Lamm—depending on whose account you read—would either shoot himself dead or be gunned down by police, his eponymous technique having relentlessly failed every step of the way.

Nonetheless, Walter Mittelstaedt points out in his book about Lamm—whom he calls the “father of modern bank robbery”—this kind of militaristic precision and foresight was passed down to a new generation of master burglars, including, most notably, the gang run by legendary bank bandit John Dillinger. Lamm’s influence on the Dillinger gang was particularly evident in their planning of getaways. Dillinger, for example, began to “plant gasoline cans along the getaway route—improving, perhaps, on Lamm’s way of carrying a can of gas in the back of the getaway car.” Dillinger also adopted Lamm’s preference for using “only the best late-model cars,” so that the gang could get away as fast as possible.

If the techniques of burglary such as those developed by Lamm and later refined by Dillinger aren’t scientific, they are at least comparable to a folk art: inherited, improved upon, and always available for others to adapt and use. This is apparently true even for CEOs: bizarrely, the Lamm technique was recommended to business leaders in a 2009 book about corporate management strategies,
The Talent Code
. Lamm, that book claims, “was an innovator who taught with discipline and exactitude. He inspired through information.” Lamm was “a master coach.”

For modern-day descendants of Lamm and Dillinger—those rogue outsmarters of the city, masters of traffic, pioneers of the high-speed getaway—the benefits of new technology extend far beyond a fast car or an extra gas tank, into the dazzling realm of digital camouflage. How can the police track your getaway car if they don’t even know it’s there? The goal post has shifted from simply being able to drive so fast you can’t be caught, to being able to flip a switch and disappear.

GPS jammers are tiny devices you can plug into a car’s cigarette lighter to flood the immediate area—usually about thirty square feet—with a white noise of radio signals pitched at the exact frequency of the satellite-based Global Positioning System. This makes a car, truck, or even container ship impossible to track using GPS—forcing police to rely on direct, visual observation—with the flick of a simple switch. Entire seaborne container ships have had their navigation systems disabled by GPS jammers, and trucks filled with consumer goods have been stolen using this digital assistance. Luxury cars are other popular targets. Such a vehicle simply “disappears from radar,” professor and police expert witness David Last explained to
The Guardian
newspaper in 2010. However, jammers currently reside in a rather laissez-faire legal area. They are illegal to possess or use in the United States and the U.K., for example, but at least for the time being, it is perfectly legal to purchase them in either country. They are easily available online, as even the most rudimentary search will reveal.

Worse than this is the threat of military-grade GPS jammers that can drown out the GPS networks of entire cities. The resulting effects would be widespread and catastrophic, affecting financial transactions—which are time-stamped using GPS—the ability of airplanes to land at regional airports, the accuracy and even functionality of construction equipment, and, of course, the ability of police to track local GPS signals, whether they’re coming from vehicles or from transmitters planted on stolen merchandise. In the case of London, the whole of the Thames estuary could be commandeered, warned Bob Cockshott, former head of location and timing for Innovate UK. Given a sufficiently powerful GPS jammer, gangs could “disrupt navigation in the Thames estuary if they were taking a delivery and didn’t want rivals to be able to trace them”—or if they simply wanted to outwit police. Anyone near London planning a getaway by sea would do well to obtain an industrial-strength GPS jammer. As Marc Goodman concludes in
Future Crimes
, “A confused GPS unit equals a successful heist.”

Even with such tools at their disposal, however, a canny burglar could still smooth his getaway using analog, old-school spoofing. One of the most interesting attempted getaways of the last few years occurred the morning of September 30, 2008, when roughly a dozen men, responding to a Craigslist ad, met near a Bank of America in the Seattle suburb of Monroe. They were each expecting to find a long day of landscaping work ahead of them, and they’d been instructed to dress in a specific way, in a reflective work vest, blue shirt, respirator mask, and protective eyewear.

Among them was Anthony Curcio, anticlimactically described by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a “former high school athlete.” He was dressed the same way and had placed the ad so as to fill the area with all but identical versions of himself. Curcio strayed from this group of unwitting decoys to pepper-spray the driver of an armored truck whose delivery schedule he had carefully researched. Seizing nearly $400,000 in cash, Curcio then sprinted to a nearby creek where, days before, he had installed a steel cable leading downstream. Jumping into an inner tube that he had also strategically cached there—and becoming perhaps the first criminal in history to mastermind an inner-tube getaway—Curcio pulled himself down the cable to escape. It was, we could say, a true landscape job.

Technically, this was not a burglary—Curcio never broke the close of an architectural structure, including the armored truck. That said, if only the bank had put a roof over its loading dock, and if the armored truck had been parked beneath it at the time, prosecutors could have used the legal “magic of four walls,” as Minturn T. Wright III described it, to charge Curcio with burglary. But his Craigslist heist presents social camouflage as a different kind of spoofing: by intentionally blending in with the people around him, Curcio made it almost impossible to identify him as the actual thief.

When the story first broke, Curcio’s actions were widely compared to the 1999 remake of
The Thomas Crown Affair
, directed by John McTiernan, of
Die Hard
fame. The film’s ultimate heist occurs inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where Thomas Crown, played by Pierce Brosnan, disguises himself among dozens of criminal recruits who had all been instructed to dress the same way. Wearing suits and bowler hats, they meander through the museum’s labyrinthine galleries, the police now incapable of keeping tabs on Crown himself, this most original of burglars deliberately lost among his copies and duplicates.

*

Perhaps the most elaborate spoof of all, however, is to get away by staying put. This was the strategy described to me by reformed bank robber Joe Loya. Loya, who served seven years in prison for multiple bank heists before becoming a writer, explained to me that it was during the getaway that he often had the best chance of thwarting people’s spatial expectations. In his case, this meant that what he did immediately after leaving the bank was often the most important decision of all. In robbing twenty-four banks, he had seen that the security guards almost always assumed he had turned left or right after exiting the bank. Further, they had expected to see Loya fleeing in a conspicuous getaway car or running away at top speed. But they almost never checked the cars just sitting outside in the parking lot.