A Burglar's Guide to the City (9 page)
Spatial thinking at the scale of the city can reveal a universe of unexpected, secondary uses—potential crimes (and ways of foiling them). To truly understand the built environment, we might say, even the most law-abiding citizen can stand to learn a thing or two from the urban-scale cat-and-mouse game of cops and robbers, who share this one fundamental strategy: not just to see the city as it is, but to see the city as it could be—then forcing those possibilities to happen. It is burglars and police, not architects or urban planners, who most readily and consistently show us these unseen possibilities, these other routes and spaces hidden in some unrealized dimension of the metropolis.
However, if all cities already contain the crimes that will occur there, then, taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests there might be a kind of Moby-Dick of crime, a White Whale of urban burglary: a town or city so badly designed that the entire place can be robbed in one go. The stakes would be massive. I spoke to an urban information technology adviser, for example, who has worked on several new “smart city” projects under construction around the world, primarily in northeast Asia. When I asked him what burglary might look like in these cities of the future, his answer was shocking. Requesting that he remain anonymous due to the nature of his answer, he explained that the operating system of New Songdo City, Korea—or what he described more specifically as the software that supports the technical fabric of the city, allowing communications between buildings, urban infrastructure, and portable devices—was legally required to be backed up and held in a safe-deposit box (alas, he would not tell me where). If one of the city’s founding partner companies went out of business, or if an act of God wiped the city of its digital innards, this backup would be in its bank vault, waiting. You could then reboot the city.
Or rob it.
Consider for a minute the implications of this. By breaking into just one safe-deposit box, you could steal the code to New Songdo City—the operating system of an entire metropolis. In a scenario straight out of science fiction—the heist of the century—the digital engine behind every electronic door lock, every elevator, every streetlight, every fire alarm, every subway tunnel, every bank vault, and every surveillance camera would be under your control. You could rob every building in the city. It’s enough to make even the most hardened burglar swoon.
Think of
The Score
, Richard Stark’s classic heist novel from 1964. A character known only as Edgars introduces his fellow burglars to a small town in North Dakota called Copper Canyon. He uses a slide projector and old mining maps, as if giving a university lecture, and he seems almost too excited by the outrageousness of his plan to say what it is out loud. However, as more maps of Copper Canyon fill the projection screen, a stunned burst of realization passes through everyone seated around the table.
There’s only one road in and out of the place, Edgars explains. There’s only one small police station, and it can easily be commandeered. There’s the fire department, but it can be avoided. Edgars means the
entire city
is the target. They’ll simply drive in at midnight and “pop every safe in town,” he says. Parker, the novel’s antihero, pretends to consider the job with reluctance and sobriety—but, smiling and clearly swept up in the sheer mania of the idea, he thinks to himself, “Knock over a city. A whole goddamn city. It was so stupid it might even work.”
“I Liked Buildings”
At the height of his career, self-proclaimed master cat burglar Bill Mason was an excellent watcher of buildings. He kept an eye on the people, of course, to see who was wearing what—which meant scanning the wrists and necks of strangers for expensive jewelry. But, for Mason, it was the buildings those people lived in that held all the appeal.
After the publication of his memoir,
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief
, in 2003, Mason appeared on CNN to look back at his long and successful career. When asked by Wolf Blitzer why he did it—what had motivated Mason to become a jewel thief in the first place—his answer was almost entirely architectural, a modern-day spin on George Leonidas Leslie. “Well, Wolf,” Mason began, as if this fact alone would explain it all, “I was in the real estate business, and I knew apartment buildings.” While working as a building manager, he “started thinking about crime,” Mason explains.
“I liked buildings,” he finally states, especially high-rises. Buildings meant that “you could go in and achieve something, bypass a lot of security. And it was a game, it became a challenge, sort of an adrenaline rush that I got addicted to.” No matter where the heists took place—Mason broke into hotels, apartments, and high-rise towers from Ohio to South Florida—every heist and the structure it took place within was an elaborate spatial puzzle waiting to be solved. Each caper was like a new level in the game, with its own rewards and obstacles, its secret pitfalls and watchful guardians.
“Once I began thinking about how to pull off a dangerous and difficult heist,” Mason writes in his book, “I wasn’t much different from a research scientist or an inventor: Hell or high water, I would find a way to solve the puzzle and then I’d do it.” The buildings drew him in, as if the jewelry was almost secondary.
On the prowl for new places to hit, Mason would often go out alone at night casing private homes and high-rises, looking for such things as conveniently placed balconies, ledges, or rooftops easily accessed by rope or ladder. He would then zero in on little details that most people might miss, like the exact spot at which a drainpipe might supply a solid handhold or the way an overhang didn’t quite protect the terrace below, thus offering a safe place to drop down from the roof.
But why this obsession with buildings? Mason explains that, as a kid, he “became friendly with a lot of maintenance men and building superintendents,” learning from an early age the literal ins and outs of different types of structures from the people who knew them best. Not residents, architects, or landlords. “People who take care of apartment buildings,” Mason suggests, “are underappreciated masters of many arts. They do the work of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, painters, locksmiths, glaziers and machinists, often all in the same day.” They knew how buildings actually worked, but also that buildings consist, for the most part, of sprawling back labyrinths of maintenance rooms and side corridors that residents—even the most dutiful of apartment owners—never visit or realize exist.
For a burglar, these spaces on the outer margins of architectural consciousness are like the dark matter of the built environment. Laundry rooms, fire escapes, employee staircases, emergency exits, rooftop boiler rooms; the list goes on and on. An overlooked hinterland nonetheless central to any building’s ability to function, these sorts of facilities permeate hotels and apartment complexes. From a burglar’s point of view, these sorts of spaces are temptations: secondary passageways and points of entry over which few people feel they have responsibility. Connect them together just right and these kinds of spaces can be the difference between a sack of free jewelry and a year’s salary in one take, or a long night of frustration spent tossing and turning in bed, visions of impregnable buildings interrupting your sleep.
Those early mentors also taught Mason perhaps the most important thing of all: if you give it enough time and thought, you can figure out any building. Even better, you can learn to feel that you belong there. To feel comfortable. Calm. You don’t need to panic as you look for whatever impediment or problem might hold you up next—whether it’s the location of the safe hidden in an apartment’s master bedroom or the way the alarm system works (in Mason’s experience, alarm systems were rarely turned on). If you just go about your business, you can reach a kind of architectural Zen, just letting the spaces around you reveal their secret workings. Give it enough time and attention, and any building will expose itself to you from within.
Or from without. Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors. He “liked buildings”—that we already know—but what sorts of things was he looking for? Why would he hit one building and not the one next door?
His book includes scene after scene of his checking out buildings from the parking lots or walking paths nearby, looking for hiding places or handholds, for signs that someone might be out for the night at a party or expensive dinner. Mason’s memoir opens with his trying to find a way into multimillionaire Armand Hammer’s Florida condominium, from which Mason hoped to steal a trove of valuable jewels. Mason stands outside, optimistic despite the building’s doormen; he takes his time, sometimes feigning sleep on a lounge chair on the beach while secretly watching the building, or even, he jokes, just smiling at the bikini-clad women walking by, his actual target looming large behind them. That’s when he notices a tiny ledge on the outside of the high-rise, one that seems just wide enough for a grown man to stand on. It wraps all the way around the building, he sees, leading from balcony to balcony, each with a set of sliding glass doors promising easy (and most likely unlocked) entry to the pickings within. It was really that easy: he sat on the beach, plotting the perfect burglary, a daring and ultimately successful heist for which he would never be arrested, while getting a nice tan.
Another example shows how this peculiar form of architectural criticism, conducted with a burglar’s eye for detail, really worked. Another year, another heist, and now we see Mason contemplating how he might break into the complex in which retired actor Johnny Weissmuller owned an apartment. Weissmuller was most famous for playing Tarzan, and swinging into his apartment from a ledge outside had a wild irony, like some new Tarzan of the concrete jungle updating the character for an urban age. Mason goes through the motions all over again, scanning the building for hints, playing the game. “It looked to me as though it would be an easy task to climb up one corner of the building and then walk from patio to patio until I got to Weissmuller’s,” Mason writes, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world to be considering. Try it yourself, just to get a hang of it, and see how it feels: go for a walk around your neighborhood and select your targets. Look for well-placed windowsills and tree branches, or for lintels and ornaments that might make clever handholds. Or just go to a real estate website, such as Corcoran or even Curbed, and search through exterior photographs of apartments for sale. How could you get into that building without using the front door? What details stand out to you?
All those little architectural minutiae then need to be strung together in a sequence as you plot your burglary, like choreographing a dance or anticipating your forward route as a rock climber. This phase of the planning is all about timing. “It was just a matter of making sure there was nobody home in the correct combination of units,” Mason recalls, as if describing an advanced level of
Donkey Kong
. As this suggests, one of the biggest risks of choosing a multitenant building is all those neighbors, always on the verge of popping out into the hallway, coming and going at odd moments, stepping off the elevator or just jogging downstairs with the evening’s trash as you emerge, bag in hand. There you are—busted. But “that was easy, too,” Mason drily quips, his sense of humor emerging, “all I had to do was hang out on the golf course and watch the interior lights. To top it all off, there was excellent parking available.”
It was as simple as that: just park on a golf course and watch the apartment lights, as if the building’s exterior is a giant LED screen broadcasting the presence or absence of people within. Then—when the sequence is right—go for it.
Cracking the Code
Midway through researching this book, I received an e-mail from someone calling himself Jack Dakswin. He introduced himself as a burglar—or a reformed one, at least, someone who had given up on crime despite himself and now worked in, of all things, the security industry. He lived in Toronto. He explained that the name he had given me was a pseudonym, to help protect himself from any legal ramifications and because his current employer was not aware of this criminal background. What followed was one of the most interesting conversations I had during my two and a half years of immersion in the world of breaking and entering.
Dakswin’s interest in burglary was even more explicitly architectural than Bill Mason’s, and it came down to a close reading of building exteriors and a detailed understanding of the regulations that shaped them. Dakswin had learned to use the city’s fire code as a kind of inadvertent burglary tool: a targeting system for determining which specific building to hit next.
As Dakswin explained it, he had spent so much time studying the city’s fire code that he could now anticipate, to a remarkably accurate degree, what awaited him inside a given building. He had begun to notice patterns. He explained, for example, that the location of an external fire escape or emergency door, including how many of each a building had, were burglary clues hiding in plain sight and were the easiest signs to look for. These would indicate everything from how many apartments you might find per floor, to how big you might expect those apartments to be. Knowing the maximum legal distance an individual apartment could be from the nearest emergency door meant that you could also deduce the building’s layout from the placement of those exits. You could then judge, in advance, where the entryways to different apartments might be on one floor, then plan your path through the building accordingly. All this could be done before setting foot inside the building: Dakswin could all but sketch a floor plan simply from looking at a building’s fire escape system from the street. “I don’t know how many guys go through as much detail as I do,” he admitted.
These urban fire codes also govern which internal emergency exit doors in a building are meant to be left unalarmed. For example, in high-rise buildings, such as multiunit condominiums and even offices, the emergency fire-exit stairs will not be alarmed on every floor. “Sometimes it will be the first floor, the fifth floor, the ninth floor—it will go up in a pattern,” he pointed out. If Dakswin had just broken into an apartment on the fifth floor of a building and he now needed to get outside, fast, he could just open the unlocked emergency-exit door and flee down the stairwell—without setting off an alarm. On the fourth floor, however—or the sixth floor, or the seventh—he would not have been so lucky. This also means that residents on those floors would do well to learn whether their emergency-exit door is one that remains alarmed at all times; if not, they might want to invest in a little extra home security. “Understanding the fire regulations has been extremely helpful,” Dakswin said, “because the last thing you want to do when you’re leaving a building, or even going down a floor, is to set off an alarm.”