1
SPACE INVADERS
The Man Who Knew Too Much
George Leonidas Leslie moved to New York in 1869, the same year the Brooklyn Bridge began construction. The city was still reeling from the effects of the Civil War, which had come to a bloody end only four years earlier; displaced families and internal immigrants with battle-scarred bodies roamed the streets looking for work, and the army’s impenetrable forts and armories still loomed over distant neighborhoods like castles. Away from all the shadows and poverty, in an ever-increasing blaze of artificial light, Manhattan was lurching forward into the so-called Gilded Age, as industrialists, financiers, and railroad barons brought with them a rising tide of brick and limestone mansions, with elaborate private gardens, art galleries, hidden vaults, and ballrooms. The disparities in wealth and privilege could not have been more noticeable—or more of an open dare, an irresistible challenge, for someone freshly arrived in the city intent on leapfrogging all the darkness and dirt, conning his way directly into the comfortable halls of the well-to-do.
At the time, New York was just reaching the delirious pace of acceleration that would make it the global capital of the twentieth century, an icon of American entrepreneurialism and a real-time test bed for what a modern city should be. New technologies were emerging and interacting with one another in ways that had not—indeed, could not have—been anticipated. No one knew what form the puzzle of the city would soon take. The invention of the elevator in 1853 would have urban effects beyond even the most optimistic forecasts, sending buildings soaring into the sky, while an experimental pneumatic underground transportation system prototyped beneath Broadway by inventor Alfred Ely Beach would, years later, inspire the great labyrinth of the New York City subway system.
Leslie had been trained as an architect at the University of Cincinnati, where he graduated with honors. Always with one eye on the buildings taking shape around him, he would stroll past the buzzing construction sites of Fifth Avenue—supermansions built using so much rock, they were more like mountains than houses—and go for long walks along the city’s docks, watching the boroughs knit themselves together as the elegant and monumental spine of the Brooklyn Bridge took shape. He was charismatic, well connected, and could have worked for any of the wealthiest clients in the city, from private bankers to financiers.
But his first thoughts upon arrival were not about joining the parade of design and construction on display, still less about how his own remarkable architectural talents might help to beautify the city for those who could never afford to live like kings.
His first thoughts were that he could use his architectural skills to rob the place blind.
* * *
What followed would inaugurate one of the most spatially astonishing crime sprees in U.S. history. Nineteenth-century New York City police chief George Washington Walling estimated that Leslie and his gang were behind an incredible 80 percent of all bank robberies in the United States at the time, until Leslie’s betrayal in the spring of 1878. This would include the great Manhattan Savings Institution heist of October 1878, which netted nearly $3 million from one of the most impregnable buildings in North America. Leslie had been planning the heist obsessively, continuously, down to the building’s every architectural detail, for more than three years—but he would be murdered by a member of his own crew before he could participate.
Seduced by the lavish lifestyles of his potential clients and future colleagues, Leslie gave in to temptation and began to misuse his professional training. To his peers, he seemed to have a long and successful career ahead of him as a designer of private homes, banks, and offices. To Leslie, this was not nearly enough—and either way, it was far too slow. Leslie was debonair and ambitious, talking his way up the social hierarchy and seeking out the owners of businesses and financial institutions, including John A. Roebling, engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Wall Street financier Jim Fisk.
Leslie would wheedle his way into private gatherings, not just for the cocktails and social camaraderie, but to case the place. Oh, he might say to a wealthy businessman or bank owner at a dinner party, as if he had just thought of something off the top of his head. I’m an architect, you know—I’d love to see the blueprints for your new bank downtown. I’m working on one myself and I’m having trouble with the vault. If I could just take a quick look, I’d be most appreciative. Do you have the plans here? Through good old-fashioned social engineering, Leslie would thus gain access to key documents or structural drawings of future targets—a backstage pass to the entire metropolis—the way a car aficionado might ask to take a peek under your hood. No one thought twice of it—why would they? Leslie dressed well, he had been trained as an architect, and his illicit spatial knowledge of the city only continued to grow.
At the same time, Leslie went to work cultivating contacts on the opposite end of the social ladder: tradesmen of a different kind, and experts in darker undertakings. Leslie’s secret weapon here was a notorious fence of stolen goods, the Prussian-born Fredericka Mandelbaum, widely known as Marm. Her eye for trickery and subterfuge extended even to architecture: she had a dumbwaiter installed inside a false chamber in her home chimney, where she could stash sensitive items in a rush. Rather than opening or closing the flue, a small lever in the fireplace would lift her hot goods to safety. In her own way, Mandelbaum was a Dickensian supervillain, complete with a labyrinthine lair on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her thieves’ den there boasted multiple entrances, unmarked doors, armed guards, and even a disguised access point through a pub on Rivington Street. These all led into a goods yard where deals and trades could be made.
More important, for Leslie, Mandelbaum owned a cluster of warehouses over the river in Brooklyn where she would store, hide, and sell stolen merchandise. On the receiving end of her unpredictable generosity, Leslie was given free rein to use those warehouses as a kind of architectural training ground for future burglaries.
Here Leslie’s spatial skills truly flourished: deep in the vast interiors of Mandelbaum’s warehouses, with almost no risk of detection or exposure, feeling safely isolated from Manhattan by the still-unfinished Brooklyn Bridge, he built his duplicates and copies at full scale. If Leslie could not obtain a set of blueprints, he would simply draft his own, depositing some money in the bank he planned to rob, then using his time in the space to look around and study his surroundings. Beyond his training and charisma, Leslie was preternaturally gifted with an eye for easily missed architectural details. He was able to see blind spots and vulnerabilities where other people might not look at all. Leslie could sketch building interiors and the dimensions of private safes from memory, building up a burglar’s library of architectural documents far more exciting than anything he had studied back in school. He and his gang would then use these bootleg plans to guide their construction of exact models, like stage sets on which the art of burglary could be rehearsed to perfection.
Arguably, Leslie’s gang was responsible for establishing what would later become the well-worn Hollywood trope of the duplicate vault: a detailed replica of the eventual target, assembled in order to practice and implement sophisticated methods of entry. Think Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, or even Inception, with those films’ warehouse scenes full of architecturally ambitious burglary crews tinkering amid models and floor plans. Leslie set the template for this technique way back in the 1870s, constructing life-size, 1:1 mock-ups of bank vaults, buying black-market copies of private safes, and installing them all like a burglar’s showroom in an archipelago of gaslit warehouses scattered around the cobblestone streets of old Brooklyn. Leslie’s obsession with specifics extended even down to pieces of furniture that might get in the way during his gangs’ impending assaults. He would arrange chairs and sofas, work desks and cabinets, in their proper places, then coach his team in the darkness with a stopwatch to make sure they got the sequence exactly right, without bumping a single table.
In short, he robbed the banks of nineteenth-century America by making copies of them, declaring replicant architectural warfare on the moneyed classes of the East Coast.
* * *
Always casing something, either for himself or because other gangs had commissioned him to design their next heist, Leslie inhabited a city of spectacular raids and speculative break-ins yet to occur, a world where criminal opportunities were hidden in the very architecture of the metropolis, just a different way of using its streets and buildings. Lines of sight, potential hiding places, how shadows were cast at different times of day, routes into and out of a bank vault, even the specific order of streets that led to and away from a chosen target: these were the landmarks Leslie looked for and noted. He inhabited a parallel New York, a wire diagram of every potential entrance and connection.
Leslie was so dedicated to detail, so confident in his abilities, that he would often case the interiors of banks both during business hours and long after: before his gang robbed the Manhattan Savings Institution in October 1878, Leslie had already broken into the bank twice, stealing nothing, simply checking out the building for himself and verifying that he had the correct combination for the vault door. This gives Leslie the air of an addict, seemingly unable to resist the lure of an uninhabited architectural space emptied of its workers, unable to turn down the illicit thrill of a bank interior that temporarily belonged to him alone, having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.
Leslie’s gang augmented their rigorous training with clever visual tricks and social camouflage. Upon arrival in Dexter, Maine, for a February 1878 bank heist, he and his crew members avoided each other on the streets and rented rooms in different hotels so they’d never be seen as a group. Leslie then equipped them all with costumes stolen from the New York opera, ensuring that they’d remain unrecognizable during the commission of the crime. He had done this before over the years, once forcing a gang member—the man who would later become Leslie’s murderer—to dress like a woman and serve as a lookout while his team robbed the Ocean National Bank in Manhattan. In Maine, the group’s disguises included new clothes, wigs, and fake beards; a black stage screen was unrolled and carefully held aloft to help hide their burglary from the street. This tendency for flair transformed Leslie’s criminal actions and the loose gang of confidants with whom he burgled into a kind of avant-garde, wandering theatrical troupe, an ingenious production crew whose work combined stagecraft, architecture, and cosmetic subterfuge in their quest to find entrance into the closed spaces of the city.
The group’s peculiar genius for burglary comes across in small but spectacular details, memorably described by Leslie’s biographer J. North Conway in his book King of Heists. In January 1876, Conway explains, the gang made their way to Northampton, Massachusetts, to rob a bank there. Leslie had already taken several trips to Northampton before the actual heist to study the design and layout of the town itself, even walking a variety of potential getaway routes. He had learned years earlier that architectural expertise is nothing without urban expertise: if you don’t know how to get away from a crime, you might as well not commit it.
Here in Northampton, Leslie’s gang turned their attention from space to time. Before they hit the bank itself, they broke into the lodgings of the bank watchman, to incapacitate him during their crime. If he was tied up, the group reckoned straightforwardly enough, then he couldn’t stop them or call the police. However, anticipating the watchman’s future narrative of the heist, which would naturally include details of when the perpetrators arrived, how long they spent in the vault, and, most important, what time they fled into the shadows of the New England night, they also tampered with the watchman’s clocks, stopping or breaking them. The watchman and his family thus sat, immobile and clueless about how much time had passed, as if forcibly removed from the present moment, left to wait in a criminal purgatory. It could have been twenty minutes or it could have been two hours, but by the time they were found and freed, Leslie’s crew was long gone.
Pirates of space-time, dressed in opera costumes, picking bank locks and assembling duplicate vaults in abandoned Brooklyn warehouses, Leslie’s gang and their astonishing success rate set a delirious precedent for future burglaries to come. Leslie thus became both burglary’s patron saint and architecture’s fallen superhero, its in-house Lucifer of breaking and entering. His darkest accomplishment, however, was hardwiring crime into architectural history, making burglary a necessary theme in any complete discussion of the city. Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis. Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself.
Today, security expert Bruce Schneier would call Leslie a defector: someone who has used his access, training, or skills against the very people those talents were meant to benefit. Think of the doctor who becomes a torturer, the IT expert who becomes a cybercriminal, the corrupt cop who becomes a dealer. Leslie, the architect-burglar, the great betrayer, called into question one of the most basic requirements of urban living and of cosmopolitanism itself: the ability to live alongside one another without descending into constant fear or worry. That requires trust. For Schneier, when we lack trust, we need security—in other words, if only we could have faith in one another’s intentions, then we would not need all those door locks and burglar alarms. What is a society like ours left with, then, if the very architects who design our buildings become the people most likely to break into them?
George Leonidas Leslie, the greatest burglar of the nineteenth century, poses a fundamental, perhaps existential, threat to the urban social contract. He implies that none of us understand how buildings really work—how the city operates—and, worse, that someone else out there has a better idea and is fully prepared to use that knowledge against us. By turning his architectural knowledge into a tool not for increasing the public good but for breaking into the city, he became a trickster figure at the birth of the modern metropolis, installing crime in its very structure like a Trojan horse.
Today, nearly 150 years later, burglary and architecture still go hand in hand; if you look closely, from just the right angle, every city implies the crimes that will someday take place there. Burglary is designed into the city as surely as your morning commute.
Pros and Cons
In one sense, burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don’t need doors; they’ll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall (or underneath the floorboards, or up in the trusses of an unlit crawl space). They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only wish we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by laws that hold the rest of us in.
Burglars seem to exist in Matrix space, a world where—to paraphrase that film’s own metaphysics—not only is there no door, but there are no walls, roofs, or ceilings. Burglary, in this sense, is a world of dissolving walls and pop-up entryways through to other worlds (or, at least, through to other rooms and buildings). After all, if two rooms aren’t connected now, they will be soon. If there is no route from one building to another, a burglar will find a way—even if it means digging a tunnel between the two using discarded mining equipment picked up for cheap in California. Burglars reveal with often eye-popping brutality how buildings can really be used—misused, abused, and turned against themselves—introducing perforations, holes, cuts, and other willful misconnections, as if sculpting a building in reverse, slicing open doorways and corridors where you and I would have seen only obstruction.
For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself through meshed gears made of fire escapes and secondary stairways, window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts, everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating their own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar, doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M. C. Escher.
In another sense, however, burglars are idiots, incapable of using a door when cutting through drywall for twenty minutes will do the trick. But then they’ll get stuck in the insulation, or they’ll trip and plummet through the roof into the wrong grocery store, or they’ll accidentally set fire to the very place they’ve been trying so hard to enter (it’s happened).
You’d be excused for thinking burglars have absolutely no idea how to use the built environment. It’s like a perceptual disorder in which certain people can no longer distinguish solid surface from open space, door from wall—so, lashing out against a world they don’t fully understand, burglars knock holes in the sides of buildings, or they rappel through skylights using tactical mountaineering ropes, instead of just opening the front door. They could simply walk inside—but no.
Like someone who doesn’t know how to program a VCR, burglars fumble, curse, and hit all the wrong buttons, mistaking doorknobs for something they’re meant to avoid, breaking glass, crawling through doggie doors, and displaying incredible acts of spatial ignorance, as if they are somehow incapable of getting from one side of a room to the other without injuring themselves or others. But maybe it’s not their fault. Maybe no one ever taught them how to use a building. Maybe it’s just neurodiversity. We could call it burglar’s syndrome, a spatial disease, something that compels you to misuse buildings.
But let’s settle, instead, on a middle ground and say it’s some combination of the two extremes: burglars are idiot masters of the built environment, drunk Jedis of architectural space.
* * *
Think of the guy who used to crawl through pet doors to get inside people’s houses, slithering in through openings no wider than a dachshund to rob Kansas City families blind. He was only arrested after he “emerged” one night, in the words of the local police department, to find an undercover cop car sitting in the driveway. Perhaps someone had seen his legs slipping through the doggie door, like an octopus squeezing through a hole in the hull of a ship, or maybe the fuzz had been onto him all along. Either way, it was over. His architectural adventure was done.
Or consider the man whose ongoing spree of rare-book burglaries at a French monastery “seemed like the work of the devil.” He had found an old map of the sprawling architectural structure in a local archive, noticing one key detail, a feature everyone else had forgotten: a secret passage that led from the monastery attic down to a cabinet in the monks’ library. No one seems entirely sure why the hidden route was there in the first place—perhaps for eavesdropping on colleagues’ private conversations. In nearly two years, this mischievous burglar stole an astonishing eleven hundred books. He was only caught when the local police, not fully convinced these crimes were the work of Satan, installed a hidden camera.
Unbeknownst to the man, he had a kindred soul on the other side of the world in the form of Stephen Blumberg, an obsessive book thief and library burglar who amassed a collection of stolen works that was at one point estimated to be worth nearly $20 million. His many targets included the special collections of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles—which he broke into by shimmying up the chutes of an old dumbwaiter system formerly used for accessing the library’s closed stacks. Deactivated long ago, the shafts were still there, offering an alternative system of movement hidden within the walls of the library itself.
Of course, there was also the guy who pushed himself through the drop-off box of a dry cleaner in the middle of the night in Moultrie, Georgia, only to be caught by the shop’s surveillance cameras. We see a man in his late teens slithering into the store, well past daily business hours, wearing what appears to be a camouflage hoodie. On the video, “bits and pieces of him start showing up inside the store,” the police investigator later explained, as if a procession of disconnected body parts had magically begun appearing from nowhere—a possession, a haunting, a poltergeist.
Or just a burglar.
Think of the man in Dallas, Texas, who wasn’t happy with what he found inside one building, so he broke through a wall of Sheetrock to rob the cash register next door. It became a regular thing for him, a reliable gig: he returned again and again to tunnel from one shop to the other, compulsively. The store’s owners later complained to police that the same man had “broken through the same wall at the store four other times since the summer,” stealing more than $20,000 from the shop in months. It was, from the burglar’s perspective, easy money. At this rate, from one shop alone, he could pull in $60,000 a year. If the only thing standing between him and the middle class was a few pieces of Sheetrock, why not? What’s the point of work when you can just pop through a wall at 3:00 a.m. to collect your pay?
Think of another burglar, back East in Cockeysville, Maryland. Before he was captured, the man became known as the “drywall burglar,” like some architectural bogeyman haunting the suburbs. He would slice his way through the drywall of home after home, once raiding an entire block of town houses without ever coming out for air. He didn’t need to. He was the worm in the apple, eating from one unit to the next—and the next, and the next—carrying TVs, laptops, and cell phones back with him through this makeshift excavation, this aboveground nest of tunnels punched through the suburban world outside Baltimore, a whorled halo of negative space left behind him like a vortex through which household goods would disappear. When police finally arrested him, they found stolen remote controls shoved into his sweatpants pockets.
Then there was a guy in New York who nearly outdid them both. He would break into an apartment next to a restaurant, then chip away at the wall until he could slip through and grab whatever he came for—in one case, some chocolate soufflé cupcakes. And a pork belly. And some ribs and a bottle of sake. When I got in touch with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to talk about the case, I got a wonderfully sarcastic e-mail back from their press officer, who, while asking me not to quote him directly, said something very close to the effect of, if you want to write a book about a guy who knocked a hole through drywall to steal a bottle of sake, then be my guest. He attached the case files, regardless.
Or perhaps we could talk about the guy who police found hiding inside the wall of a bookstore just before dawn in the corn-belt town of Clinton, Iowa; unsurprisingly, given his choice of hiding place and his delusional belief that a bookstore would have enough money to steal, he was also busted for possession of drug paraphernalia. There’s actually another man who got trapped inside a wall, at a JCPenney in Rhode Island, where he’d been trying to hide from police. He had burrowed deeper and deeper into the building like a tick, first through a ceiling tile, then sideways into the wall, before finally getting stuck there; the local fire department had to be called to dig him out, like pulling a human splinter from the retail subconscious of the world, an archaeological excavation in which a living man was disinterred, extracted from the built environment. Or think of the guy out in Oregon—one of my all-time favorite stories—who dressed up in a ghillie suit, a tangled mass of fake vegetation woven into nets, originally meant to camouflage military snipers by making them indistinguishable from plant life. Disguised as a plant, he then slipped into his target, which, of all things—because you couldn’t make this up, it would be impossible to take this seriously in a work of fiction—was a museum of rocks and minerals. He was after their gold and gemstones. Simulating one kind of landscape, he broke into a museum of another—where he was immediately seen and arrested. Perhaps he should have dressed up like quartz.
Think of the nude boy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who became disoriented and trapped inside the air duct of the veterinarian’s office from which he’d been hoping to steal some tranquilizers. The poor kid had clearly been born unlucky: he was left “naked and trapped in an air vent for more than ten hours,” the local newspaper reported. This clothing-optional burglar had apparently been so frantic to escape that “it looked like a squirrel had gotten in there,” the manager later told police. The metal was dented and the boy’s knuckles were rubbed raw. Unable to find a window to squeeze through, he had thought it would make more sense to enter from above, so he cut his way into the air vent from a hiding spot on the roof; he then removed all of his clothing and slipped, naked as the day he was born, down into the building with a flashlight in one hand and a hammer in the other, like some surreal nudist remake of Die Hard. Until he got stuck.
Such stories are not rare. Think of the guy wearing fake dreadlocks who then magically, almost shamanically, “escaped through the ceiling” of a suburban bank outside Chicago. Like a stage act: one minute he was there, the next he was a pair of feet disappearing through the ceiling tiles. Only he didn’t escape, you see, because police later found him trapped there, at one o’clock in the morning, and they had to cut him free, dreadlocks and all. It’s a fate so common as to be predictable. Consider a burglar down in New Zealand who managed to hide (for a while) by crawling up inside the ceiling like a creature from Aliens. He could’ve stayed there. He could’ve gotten away with it. But when the police arrived, one of the officers spotted “a toe poking out of ceiling insulation.” He nearly missed it, but the toe was there, like some glitch in his peripheral vision. The game was up.
The parade of body parts continues: toes, wigs, legs, arms, whole nude bodies, sticking out of places where they should never have been in the first place. Think of the man in Lyon, France, who was busted because of his ear—his earprint, more specifically, which he stupidly left on almost all the doors of the eighty or so student flats he broke into when he leaned in to hear if anyone was home. An ear here, a pair of shoes slipping through the ceiling there: all these detached human body parts moving around on the periphery of the world, passing through walls and architecture, appearing for an instant then gone, intersecting with our reality like visitors from another dimension.
But they’re just burglars.
Someone walks into one building and comes out another, like some larcenous variation on a Victorian-era parlor trick. People cut into one room only to emerge from the one next door moments later—but they do so on all fours, using doors meant for animals, or they squirm through holes in the floor like worms, like serpents, as if shape-shifting back and forth between species, between minerals and plants, burrowing their way into buildings before disappearing again through the ceiling in ways that architects would never have imagined nor planned.
People usually focus on what burglars take, but it’s how they move that’s so consistently interesting. Burglars explore. They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors—but they make it look as if they do. They have their own tools and floor plans, their own ways to get from A to B. They’ll curl up inside refrigerators, climb through ceilings, use garbage chutes and fall twenty-one floors straight into the emergency room when they could simply have taken the stairs. They’ll slip through porch screens and stow themselves inside clothes dryers till the police come busting in to find them. They’ll open the wrong doors, scamper up shipping pallets instead of ladders only to cut back down through a building’s roof, and they’ll break into one shop simply to get better access to the one next door. They flash in and out of the world like ghosts, like neutrinos, a phantasmagoria of body parts from nowhere, a whirl of unexpected visitors and uninvited guests.
The world, it seems, is infested with burglars. Slice open the city and you’ll find a dozen tucked up inside, like some strange new diorama at the natural history museum. Attics, basements, walls, closets, and crawl spaces; alleys, parks, sewers, streets, and backyards: all of these margins and peripheries, subsidiary rooms and edge-spaces, are put to brilliantly unexpected use by people intent on stealing things. Like disembodied stagehands—removing objects from one scene and placing them down again in another, dismantling and reassembling their sets in different buildings and cities around the world—burglars watch our houses in silence, awaiting their cues, professional moving crews no one actually hired.
We could start with any one of these stories, then, but each of them would take us to the same place—so we might as well trademark the final takeaway: Burglars use cities better.™ Even if, in the end, almost all of them get caught.
Operation Stagehand
This kind of spatial expertise cuts both ways. As burglars have chipped and slithered away at their self-chosen jobs throughout the cities of the world, the FBI have become twenty-first-century break-in artists extraordinaire, controlling the scenography of intrusion to a degree that would stun even Hollywood concept artists. The FBI’s present-day program tasked with making sure that state-sanctioned break-ins go off without a hitch is code-named, appropriately enough, Stagehand.
Picture G-men dressed as traffic cops, (mis)directing cars away from certain streets and intersections; parking buses in front of mob-operated shops to disguise the lock-picking operation going down on the other side; even carrying their own collections of dust around with them in envelopes and vials, in case they disturb any dust-covered objects (or floors or tables or any other flat surface) in a target’s apartment. They sprinkle replacement dust as they walk backward out the door, and as if it were fairy tale, no one will ever know they were there.
They call the team Tactical Operations, or TacOps, a distributed crew of government-sanctioned burglars—in the best possible use of that word, masters of architecture, commanders of built space—who have, over decades, developed all-but-limitless techniques for obtaining covert entry into the built environment. They anesthetize dogs, feed cats, walk around on twelve-foot stilts to install bugs in someone’s ceiling tiles, and buy the exact same make and model of, say, a desk lamp that a target might also own, to replace even the most mundane appliances with secretly miked federal surrogates. They’re like rogue shoppers duplicating your every move.
Stagehand agents will hide behind fake bushes controlled with umbrella mechanisms—pop-up shrubbery, like something out of Monty Python. They make it look as if the local phone system needs to be fixed, flipping up manholes and sitting on the street near orange safety cones, all the while doing nothing but conducting a lookout. They pose as health inspectors. They make 3-D models of the insides of locks. They sell ice cream from mobile stalls while actually engaging in deep surveillance. They even send themselves to something called elevator school to learn how they might hijack vertical transport through architectural space for their own crime-fighting ends—sometimes standing atop an elevator car for hours at a time, waiting for office workers or building residents to disappear, before making their move on a suspect’s office or home.
FBI special agents have started their own garbage-removal firms and perfected paint-matching algorithms for touch-up jobs in case they scratch walls or leave marks behind. They put tape down where a target’s furniture currently stands so that they can slide it all back exactly in place when the operation is over. Some even carry rakes—tiny rakes like those you’d use for a desktop Zen garden—to pull their footprints out of a carpet, erasing every trace of themselves, thread by thread, as they exit.
They’ll do whatever they can to avoid snowy nights—think of the footprints—but, if necessary, backup special agents will arrive with shovels and, pretending to be concerned neighbors, clear all the snow from the target location, like a governmentally financed act of God. In fact, why not, they’ll even continue up the street, shoveling snow from driveways and sidewalks as if nothing in the world could be more natural.
Easily one of the more outlandish stories of surreptitious entry I came across while researching this book comes from a book by journalist Ronald Kessler purporting to reveal “the secrets of the FBI.” While breaking into what is described only as a Soviet-bloc embassy, one of the participating agents promptly died of a heart attack. Right there, he collapsed onto the carpet, his heart giving out. Not only did the other agents on the case have to carry him out, but his body relaxed in its sudden death to the grotesque extent that “his bowels emptied on an oriental rug in the office,” Kessler explains. Not only did the team have to remove the entire rug from the embassy in the middle of the night, but they had to find a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner to fix the stain. Then, because the carpet would still be partially wet the next morning, they decided to paint the ceiling above it to make it look as if a water pipe had ruptured in one of the rooms above. Then and only then—improvised narratives piling on top of outright lies, newly cleaned rugs drying below freshly painted ceilings—could the FBI effectively rid the target building of their traces. Go big or go home.
* * *
Even when not acting as part of a federally sanctioned burglary supercrew, FBI bank-crime investigators and other law enforcement professionals tasked with solving burglaries have developed their own interpretive expertise, their own unique insights into the built environment: a body of spatial knowledge cultivated for no other reason than to understand the city more thoroughly and more accurately than the criminals they are trying to track. They will analyze a work of architecture, for example, not for its aesthetics or for its history, but for its security flaws or for its ability to yield forensic evidence—dust patterns on windowsills, footprints in the carpet, a second-floor window left unlocked. This means that they are often astonishingly attuned to overlooked details and vulnerabilities in the design of buildings, whole neighborhoods, and, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, even the transportation infrastructure of a major American metropolis. As any FBI agent can tell you, Los Angeles became the bank robbery capital of the world in large part because of its freeways.
In genre literature, the curious police officer or the detective who pays obsessively close attention to the details of our everyday environment is a mainstay; examples can be found everywhere from Agatha Christie and Alain Robbe-Grillet to whatever thriller is currently topping the airport bestseller list. You see this attention to architectural nuance in nearly every heist film. No other genre gets away with showing characters hunched over floor plans, gesturing intensely at detailed maps of buildings, arguing over precise sequences of hallways and rooms, pointing with incredible drama at the tiniest spatial detail. Even the location of property lines implies high drama. The burglars will unroll a set of blueprints, draw plans on a chalkboard, or scrawl a building’s outlines in the sand, dirt, or snow; and the police will do the same. They’ll consult old maps and talk to building superintendents. There’ll be a close-up of fingers pointing at plans. People will diagram things. Maybe someone will even build a scale model. Suddenly, architecture itself is deeply suspenseful. It’s as if the heist genre had been invented for no other reason than to dramatize the unveiling of floor plans.
In the real-life world of architecture and urban planning, however, altogether too rarely is this point of view—how humans can take advantage of the built environment’s spatial opportunities for crime—taken seriously as a critical perspective on urban form. As we’ll discover time and again in the stories that make up this book, burglars and police officers—that is, cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys, bandits and detectives, that eternal yin and yang of the world, its black and white, its good and evil—pay at least as much attention to the patterns and particularities of built space as architects do, and for far more strategically urgent reasons.
Having reported on architecture and urban design for more than a decade now, as well as having taught design studios on two continents on opposite sides of the world, I’ve found that architects love to think they’re the only ones truly concerned about the built environment. It is equal parts self-pity and arrogance, despair and pride. If architects are to be believed, no one but them pays any attention to the buildings around them. But what became increasingly clear during my research for this book is that some of the most interesting responses to a building, whether it’s a high-rise apartment or an art museum, don’t come from architects at all, but from the people who are hoping to rob it. The people who case its doors and windows, who slink down its halls looking for surveillance cameras, who wait at all odd hours of the day and night to find rhythms of vulnerability in the way a building is used or guarded. They might not quote Le Corbusier, and they probably don’t know who Walter Benjamin is, but they certainly have something important to say about architecture.
One of the most perceptive things I’ve heard anyone say about the built environment came from a man using the pseudonym Jack Dakswin. A retired burglar based in Toronto, Dakswin amazed me with tales of his extensive, homeschooled expertise in the city’s fire code, explaining how the city’s own regulations can be read from the outside-in by astute burglars, turning Toronto’s fire code into a kind of targeting system. Simply by looking at the regulated placement of fire escapes on the sides of residential high-rises, Dakswin could deduce which floors had fewer apartments (fewer would mean larger, more expensive apartments, more likely to be filled with luxury goods) and even where, on each floor, you might expect to find elevator shafts and apartment entrances. He could thus build up a surprisingly accurate mental map of a building’s interior simply by looking at its fire escapes, a virtuoso act of anticipatory architectural interpretation that most architects today would be hard-pressed to replicate.
His spatial knowledge extended far beyond individual buildings. Dakswin spoke in surprisingly granular detail about the timing of postal delivery routes in greater Toronto, of hotel block-booking practices during rare-coin conferences (once a favorite target of his), and even of the minutiae of insurance companies, burglar alarms, and electrical warranties. If there is a true urban expert, Dakswin’s testimony suggests, then it is not a professor at an Ivy League school or even a policy wonk slaving away in municipal government; it is an anonymous burglar so well versed in the legal and spatial marginalia of his or her city that it’s as if every room, apartment, home, and private business there is an open book—or an open plan, one ripe for use when the time is right.
Yet learning to think like a burglar—or a police detective—is very much not the approach taught in architecture school, and it is nothing at all like what is imagined by the general public as “normal” architectural behavior. Venerable architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, for instance, suggests in his book How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit that “the first question you ask yourself approaching a building is: Where is the front door?” But this is by no means the first architectural question many among us will ask; it is altogether too straightforward a query for a segment of the population. Some of us deliberately and strategically seek out, say, an attic window within reach of a strong tree branch or an unlocked storm shelter leading down into someone’s basement, even a badly fit screen door that looks easy to slip through around back. Perhaps you even did this yourself as a teenager, just looking for a new way to sneak out of the house past your bedtime or to avoid the all-seeing gaze of your girlfriend’s parents.
If so, congrats: you were looking at a building the way a burglar would. There’s a bit of George Leonidas Leslie in us all.
A Burglar’s Guide to the City
As the FBI defines it, burglary is “the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft.” Burglary is thus an explicitly spatial crime: it requires a perpetrator to enter an architectural structure illegally, thus differentiating burglary from mere theft, pickpocketing, or robbery. Sensing there might still be some potential confusion here, the FBI quickly adds that their own “definition of ‘structure’ includes apartment, barn, house trailer or houseboat when used as a permanent dwelling, office, railroad car (but not automobile), stable, and vessel (i.e., ship).”
So much for the Bureau’s reputation for being neat and tidy—such a list clearly risks being subject to constant, ever more detailed architectural updates. Is a shed technically a “barn”? Is a dog kennel just a different kind of “stable”? It depends on which lawyer you ask. Oddly enough, contemporary burglary law reveals that some of the most intense—certainly the most consequential—architectural arguments today are not occurring inside the hallowed halls of academia, but inside law offices looking to redefine what a building is. Even the way the FBI tiptoes around its own attempt at definitions makes it clear that burglary involves a fluid yet confusingly specific definition of architectural space: a “house trailer or houseboat” can be subject to burglary, for example, but only if it is “used as a permanent dwelling.”
Nevertheless, to commit burglary you must cross some imaginary border, or invisible plane, and enter another clearly defined architectural space—a volume of air, an enclosure—with the intention of committing a crime there. Without walls and thresholds—without doorways, floors, and window frames, or even roofs, awnings, and screened-in porches—burglary would not be legally possible. It is a spatial crime, one whose parameters are baked into the very elements of the built environment.
To put this another way, burglary requires architecture. Not infrequently, only because of some aspect of a building’s design is burglary even possible. A blind spot, a vulnerability, a badly placed window, a shadowy alcove, an unlocked skylight, a useful proximity between one structure and the next—the burglar sees this opportunity and pounces. Solving certain burglaries thus often has the feel of an architectural analysis. How did the criminal enter? Can we deduce from the method of entry that a person was there to commit a crime? In many states you can be charged with burglary simply for unnecessarily using a side entrance or coming in through the garage rather than the front door: an indirect approach to the built environment is considered legally suspicious.
So I wanted to learn more about how burglars see the city—what a town, a street, a neighborhood, looks like through their eyes, as spaces of seemingly endless possibility. I wanted to learn from cops and robbers both what the built environment can really do, equally fascinated and horrified by the on-again, off-again brilliant stupidity of the burglar’s approach to architecture, with its X-ray vision of secret passages, spatial agents, and the porous world they inhabit together, where everything architects take for granted can literally be undercut, punched through, knocked down, or simply sidestepped.
Burglars, it seemed to me, are uniquely ambitious in what they want from the buildings around them—to walk through walls, to enter through third-story windows rather than through front doors, and to pop up from below, emerging from the city’s sewers like half-dreamed creatures of local folklore. They are as magical and otherworldly as they are so endearingly incompetent, so stupidly unprepared for a world of well-policed walls and ceilings.
Somewhere between absurdity and genius, I thought, there should be a new guide to the city: an idiot’s guide, a guide for people who can’t use floors and ceilings the right way, for people who don’t understand doors or windows, who can’t even let the ground itself rest untouched without trying to dig a tunnel through it.
There should be a burglar’s guide to the city.
Copyright © 2016 by Geoff Manaugh