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 breakin 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 breakins 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.