A Burglar's Guide to the City (29 page)
Then, perhaps because the afternoon was so relentlessly gray, the temperature so unseasonably chilly, our subject shifted closer to home: What were we doing there? Why had three busy New Yorkers, with plenty of other commitments on their plates, not to mention the plethora of more conventional attractions offered by the city, taken almost an entire afternoon to visit the grave of a dead criminal who made his living stealing things from others?
For Stamp, burglary represented far more than a quest for money, revenge, or newfound wealth. From the instant an architect shapes a space, Stamp argued, people feel compelled to second-guess it, to look for something the architect might have missed or to be the first person to notice a key detail everyone else has overlooked. Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect—and something of a transformative moment in a burglar’s relationship to the built environment. It is the moment at which the burglar has gone from a passive consumer of architecture to an active participant in the world’s design.
That we constantly line up to see new films about burglary—or that we buy so many crime novels featuring ingenious ways to break into bank vaults and buildings—suggests that something is fundamentally lacking in our own relationship to the city, and that there is something universally compelling about the abstract idea of breaking and entering. Indeed, even as I finish writing this book, a long slew of new heist blockbusters is set to hit the big screen, implying a nearly inexhaustible public interest in seeing people subvert security systems or sneak into locked buildings in unexpected ways. This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people
really
want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
Burglary reveals that every building, all along, has actually been a puzzle, Stamp said, a kind of intellectual game that surrounds us at all times and that any one of us can play—in fact, that each of us
does
play, even if that means just sneaking into a girlfriend’s bedroom for a late-night kiss or tiptoeing down the hall to use the bathroom without waking up the rest of the family. In both cases, that means using a building as a burglar would: operating through stealth and silence while sticking to the shadows and blind spots.
For my wife, the appeal was almost more folkloristic: people are always dreaming about discovering a hidden corridor behind a sliding bookcase, she pointed out, or stumbling onto a previously unknown second bedroom lying in wait behind old clothes in the back of the closet. People are fascinated by secret passages, she said; burglary, in a sense, just makes that fantasy real. Burglary’s strange conceptual promise is precisely that the world is riddled with shortcuts and secret passages—we just have to find them. It’s a crime, but it also symbolizes that there are ways of navigating the world that we ourselves have yet to discover.
As we stood there at Leslie’s grave, New York City’s subways, streets, and skyscrapers just over the horizon of a small hill, it became clear that the very idea of the burglar—this mysterious, trespassing figure able to misuse buildings and bend whole cities to his or her will—is the unavoidable flip side of any architectural creation. Burglary, in its very essence, is a crime that cuts down through the outer layers of the world to reveal the invisible grain of things, how cities really work and buildings are meant to function, from quiet side streets to emergency fire stairs and elevator shafts. Burglars are the stowaways of the metropolis, hidden deliberately in the shadows, haunting us like poltergeists, malevolent spirits conjured into existence by the magic of four walls, even if only to reveal those walls’ inherent fragility. For every building designed, a theoretical burglar is somewhere scheming to break into it, undermining architecture’s implicit sense of security.
*
We snapped a few more pictures at Leslie’s grave before leaving the cemetery behind and heading back into the streets of Brooklyn. It was not hard to wonder when anyone had last come to see Leslie’s grave. After all, there had been no evidence of previous visitors. I’d only half-jokingly been expecting to find a set of lockpicks there—or an old skeleton key tucked into the grass as a form of tribute—but there was nothing. Just a twisted, old tree, some heavily worn headstones for people other than Leslie, and the leaden-gray skies that made late spring seem more like the first week of autumn.
In the very definition of what makes a building, in the shadows of our streets, in dark cars roaming our neighborhoods—perhaps even looking down at you now through an air vent, listening to your family’s dinner conversation, counting down the hours till you put away the dishes, turn off the lights, and go to sleep—these secret agents of the built environment lie waiting. Burglars are as much a part of architecture as the buildings they hope to break into.
Parts of chapter 2 previously appeared in
Cabinet
magazine; parts of chapter 3 previously appeared in
Icon
magazine; parts of chapters 3 and 6, originally written for the book, previously appeared in a different form on
Gizmodo
; parts of chapter 4 previously appeared on
newyorker.com
; and various parts of this book previously appeared in a different form on my own blog,
BLDGBLOG
(
bldgblog.com
). Thanks to Sina Najafi at
Cabinet
and to novelist Will Wiles (formerly my editor at
Icon
) for their input.
There is much to read on the life of George Leonidas Leslie. A good place to start is Herbert Asbury’s still-fascinating book
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
(New York: Garden City Publishing, 1927), where Leslie is introduced as “The King of the Bank Robbers,” or George Washington Walling’s memoir,
Recollections of a New York Chief of Police
(New York: Caxton Book Concern, 1887). Leslie’s life was also the focus of a useful biography by J. North Conway called
King of Heists: The Sensational Bank Robbery of 1878 That Shocked America
(Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2009), which describes Leslie’s arrival in New York City, the criminals he associated with, and his sophisticated use of duplicate vaults and architectural surrogates for training.
For more on the life of Marm Mandelbaum, Conway’s book is also a valuable resource; however, specific details in this chapter, including descriptions of Mandelbaum’s fake chimney and her criminal headquarters on Rivington Street in Manhattan, come from “The Life and Crimes of ‘Old Mother’ Mandelbaum” by Karen Abbott (
Smithsonian.com
, September 6, 2011), and “A Queen Among Thieves: Mother Mandelbaum’s Vast Business” (
New York Times
, July 24, 1884).
A great architectural introduction to the Gilded Age in New York City and elsewhere—albeit focusing primarily on the decades after Leslie’s death—is
Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008) by Wayne Craven.
Bruce Schneier discusses his idea of the “defector” in
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive
(Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
Tales of burglaries and heists gone wrong are almost too numerous to believe. The specific cases mentioned in this chapter come from the following news stories: “Burglar May Have Used Pet Doors to Break In” (Tony Rizzo,
Kansas City Star
, February 2013); “Mystery at the Monastery Ends as CCTV Reveals ‘Chamber of Secrets’ Daring Thief” (Paul Webster,
Guardian
, June 2003); “Man Writes Novel Chapter in Annals of Library Thefts” (Laurie Becklund,
Los Angeles Times
, April 1991); “The Doheny Library Book Thief” (USC Digital Folklore Archives, April 2014); “Burglar Squeezes Through Drop-Off Box at Moultrie Business” (Ashton Pellom, WALB ABC News 10, February 2013); “Burglar Breaks Through Wall to Rob Store Again” (Jeff Smith, NBCDFW, March 2013); “Burglar Punches Holes in Apartments to Steal TVs, Electronics” (WBALTV, April 2013); “‘Drywall Burglar’ Set to Appear in Court” (Jessica Anderson,
Baltimore Sun
, July 2013); “Drawn to Food and Liquor, Burglar Gains a Stiff Term” (Wendy Ruderman,
New York Times
, September 2012); “Serial Burglar Who Tunneled Through Walls Sentenced to at Least 28 Years in Prison” (New York County District Attorney’s Office, September 2012); “The People of the State of New York Against Shawn McAleese” (SCI No. 3586/2012); “Alleged Burglar Found Hiding Inside Building Wall” (Shellie Nelson, WQAD8 Quad Cities, January 2013); “Burglar Caught After Getting Stuck in JCPenney Wall” (Tiffany Choquette, ABC6 Providence, July 2013); “Police: Would-Be RI Thief Found Trapped in Wall” (Associated Press, July 2013); “‘Moss Man’ Attempts Rock Museum Break-In” (CBS News, October 2010); “Naked Burglar Gets Stuck in Milwaukee Vet Clinic Air Vent” (Ashley Luthern,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, September 2013); “FBI: Bank Robbery Charges Against Man Pulled from Air Duct in Oak Lawn” (Deanese Williams-Harris,
Chicago Tribune
, June 2012); “Burglar’s Toe Gives Hiding Spot Away” (Maryanne Twentyman,
Waikato Times
, December 2013); and “Thief Caught After Leaving Ear Print at 80 Robberies” (AFP, May 2013).
The incredible story of Operation Stagehand comes from Ronald Kessler’s book
The Secrets of the FBI
(New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011). Another useful resource on this topic is the FBI’s own collection of “surreptitious entry” files, available online as a thirty-part sequence of PDFs called “Surreptitious Entries (Black Bag Jobs).” The FBI’s definition of burglary also comes from the FBI website (
fbi.gov
).
Retired burglar Jack Dakswin—a pseudonym—told me his story over Skype and, to a certain extent, e-mail.
Witold Rybczynski’s question “Where is the front door?” comes from his book
How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
2: Crime Is Just Another Way to Use the City
The specific flights with the LAPD Air Support Division described in this chapter took place in July 2013 and January 2014; quotations or references to conversations with LAPD pilots and tactical flight officers come from my interviews. The NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory study of aerial policing in Los Angeles is called “Effectiveness Analysis of Helicopter Patrols,” published in July 1970. The full text can be found on
archive.org
.
Mike Davis’s
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
(London: Verso Books, 1990) remains a provocative introduction to L.A.
The anthropological study of CCTV control rooms mentioned in this chapter is called “Behind the Screens: Examining Constructions of Deviance and Informal Practices Among CCTV Control Room Operators in the UK” by Gavin J. D. Smith (
Surveillance & Society
2, no. 2/3 [2004]).
Grégoire Chamayou’s essay “‘Every Move Will Be Recorded’: A Machinic Police Utopia in the Eighteenth Century” was published online by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and is available on the institute’s website (mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de).
More information about “stepped frequency continuous wave” radar technology can be found at the website of L-3 CyTerra (
cyterracorp.com
). The court case involving the man in Wichita, Kansas, was covered extensively in the media; in particular, see “New Police Radars Can ‘See’ Inside Homes” (Brad Heath,
USA Today
, January 2015) and “Police Home Radar a Possible Amendment Violation” (editorial,
USA Today
, January 2015).
Kyllo v. United States
was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on February 20, 2001, and decided June 11, 2001.
Tad Friend’s article about high-speed car chases in Los Angeles is called “The Pursuit of Happiness” (
New Yorker
, January 23, 2006). The interview with
LA Creek Freak
blogger Jessica Hall was conducted by Judith Lewis (“The Lost Streams of Los Angeles,”
LA Weekly
, November 2006).
FBI special agent Brenda Cotton spoke to me as part of a symposium I organized while director of Columbia University’s Studio-X NYC, an off-campus event space in Manhattan; the specific event was part of a film festival called “Breaking Out & Breaking In” (April 2012). Cotton appears briefly in the memoir of retired special agent William J. Rehder, written with Gordon Dillow, called
Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Chapter 4, “The Hole in the Ground Gang,” was particularly useful for this book, but I recommend the entire book. The June 1986 heist by the Hole in the Ground Gang was not widely covered in the media at the time. However, see “Burglars Dig Tunnel into L.A. Bank, Take $91,000” (Ashley Dunn,
Los Angeles Times
, August 1987) and “Tunnels to Lucre: Cases of Bank Thefts by ‘Sophisticated’ Burrowing May Be Linked” (David Freed,
Los Angeles Times
, August 1987); more recently, see “Boring Thieves Had Tunnel Visions” (Steve Harvey,
Los Angeles Times
, December 2009). The lunch with Rehder described in this chapter took place at the Spitfire Grill in Santa Monica, in June 2012. The website for Rehder’s new consulting firm run with Douglas Sims, Security Management Resource Group, can be found at
bankrobberysecuritysolutions.com
.
The story of Albert Spaggiari has been told and retold dozens of times. Although he has since disowned it, novelist Ken Follett’s nonfiction book
Under the Streets of Nice: The Bank Heist of the Century
—which is essentially just Follett’s revision of a book originally written by René Louis Maurice—is nonetheless interesting. See also “Albert Spaggiari, 57, Mastermind of Notorious Riviera Bank Heist” (Constance L. Hays,
New York Times
, June 1989). In August 2010, a member of Spaggiari’s gang, Jacques Cassandri, published a book claiming that he, not Spaggiari, had planned the heist; Cassandri’s book,
La vérité
sur le casse de Nice
(The truth about the Nice heist) was published in French under the pseudonym Amigo. Sensational headlines notwithstanding, Cassandri’s role as the true mastermind has not been confirmed. See “Police Arrest Mastermind of 1976 French
Ocean’s Eleven
Bank Heist” (Henry Samuel,
Telegraph
, January 2011). As this book went to press, Cassandri was out on bail.