A Burglar's Guide to the City (18 page)

He laughed again, appreciative of the narrative investment—but, no, he said. He just likes lockpicking. He likes the people; he likes the events, such as Locktoberfest, an annual gathering of locksport enthusiasts who hang out over beer, brats, and padlocks. He likes solving technical puzzles, the way other people like solving crosswords or Sudoku.

But he understood where I was going with my questions, and the final moments of my earlier conversation with Schuyler Towne began to replay in my head. Lockpicking is not a gateway drug for burglary. About this Benigno was unequivocal. From his experience as a street cop, burglars simply aren’t out there picking locks—or, if they are, it’s noticeable precisely because it’s such a rarity. Real burglars are breaking windows or kicking doors in; they’re cutting holes through walls and roofs. They’ll slip in through a half-open garage door before they’ll pick a lock in full view of a watchful neighbor. Not even locksmiths are picking locks anymore, Benigno said, repeating something Towne had specifically mentioned. It’s not worth their time.

The only people Benigno knew who picked locks at all were the hackers, tinkerers, and security aficionados who came to monthly meetings such as TOOOL’s—and the other cops whom he had taught to do it. If I wanted to learn about the tools people really use to get into buildings, he said, sensing my disappointment, I would have to look elsewhere.

Zen and the Art of Door Annihilation

The tools of burglary are more varied than one might expect. In his book
The Right Way to Do Wrong
, Harry Houdini described the “sofa game.” This was simultaneously “a confidence game and a first-class burglary job,” employing a hollow piece of furniture. In this game of domestic Trojan horse, you show up at the home of a wealthy family, claiming to have a piece of furniture that they’ve inherited from a distant relative. It’s quite urgent, you would say, as you have to make several other deliveries before the day is over, and the deliverymen are all getting tired—can you let them drop it off? It won’t take a minute. If your story works, you deliver the sofa and depart—before you return an hour later, feigning humiliation. My God, you say, we had the wrong address—it’s the right street, and you even have the same last name, but we’re in the wrong part of town entirely. We have to get our sofa back. We’re so sorry for the inconvenience.

Inside the sofa all along had been a woman—slender, lightweight, and hidden where the springs should be—curled up in “a hollow compartment of considerable size.” The woman would have emerged from her hiding place to pocket as much silver, jewelry, loose cash, and fine art as she could get her hands on. She would then climb back into the sofa—just in time for her apologetic coconspirators to return, hats in hand, begging for their sofa back. Dozens of pounds heavier, it would be hauled down onto their moving cart, and the gang would disappear.

Boom: sofa job. Incredibly, this heist-by-furniture apparently worked.

Trumping sofa jobs in ambition, however, was the “lodging lay.” As Houdini describes it, in a lodging lay the leader of a burglary crew would convince a prospective landlord that a scam artist was a wealthy, worthwhile tenant. Having secured access to a new home or apartment and having forgone payment of a deposit thanks to pure charisma, the tenant would then gut the residence. Marble fireplace lintels, exotic wood cabinetry, and even, in one famous case, an entire carved staircase would all be carted away. If the landlord came by in the meantime, demanding to know what was going on—well, it was just a quick renovation. After all, this mysterious tenant would explain, I’m going to be here for the next ten or twenty years, and only the best will do. Surely you don’t mind if I renovate the place?

A week later, the entire interior of the house has been stolen.

Gaining access to buildings by means other than keys has been refined since Houdini’s day. Indeed, breaking and entering is the explicit specialty of so-called rapid-entry teams, small tactical units sent out by such organizations as the FBI and ATF to forcibly enter a structure in which a suspect might be hiding. Ironically, I would soon get a glimpse of the real supertools used to access architecture—not among burglars at all but deep inside the world of law enforcement.

One name came up again and again during my conversations among the lock-pickers: Marc Weber Tobias. While some people accused Tobias of arrogance—of holding on to potentially devastating knowledge about vulnerabilities in commercially available locks, even while knowing that thousands of people continued to put their trust in them—all admired his legendary lock-breaking skills and his encyclopedic knowledge of the field.
Wired
has described him as the “ultimate lock picker,” a man who “can pick, crack, or bump any lock,” and he has earned this reputation through a number of thrilling, high-profile exploits. These include his most famous feat: the alarming discovery of vulnerabilities in Medeco high-security locks, which are relied upon by the U.S. government to secure military and nuclear sites.

Tobias is also the author of
Locks, Safes, and Security: An International Police Reference
, an exhaustive—at times, exhausting—catalog of doors, locks, and the tools used to break them. This huge, fourteen-hundred-page, two-volume set is priced well out of reach for your everyday reader. In a narrative arc that mirrors my own journey through the world of burglary tools, the book also begins with locks and how to pick them, before scaling up to discuss a much wider range of more aggressive breaching tools.

Part of the book’s length comes from its sheer breadth of reference: Tobias locates locks and lock technology within a long history of human security. This means he stretches back roughly three thousand years to discuss the treasuries of Pharaoh Ramses III as some of the earliest examples of vault architecture and safe-room design. In only a few pages, he moves from a discussion of vaults able to survive nuclear-bomb strikes to a look at the temples and strong rooms of ancient Egypt, to hydraulic tools used by the FBI for breaking into mob-owned warehouses. Roman padlocks, Mesopotamian keys, a possible spring-loaded bolt lock preserved in the volcanic ash of Pompeii, locks resistant to X-ray imaging, Doppler-based ultrasonic sensors, closed-circuit wiring embedded in a room’s wallpaper for detecting any breaches in the walls, seismic alarms—the book’s language may be dry, but its contents are fascinating.

Tobias points out, for example, that older combination locks had a significant vibrational vulnerability—they could be vibrated into opening. “This was such a pervasive problem,” he writes, that during long ocean crossings, these “safes used to open themselves on some ships.” The “constant engine tremors” would simply be “transmitted to wheel packs through the metal of the vessel,” and the safes would just swing open, as if picked by the swaying of the waves.

Later, Tobias introduces readers to the Europlanet line of safes, which use a proprietary pourable plastic known as Ellox developed by safe-maker Chubb. It is extremely lightweight and astonishingly strong, incorporating small fragments of another proprietary material that Chubb claims is harder than a diamond. The plastic also resists fires of up to 1,000ºC—or 1,832ºF—for at least an hour before failing. Better yet, it can be molded into larger, complex shapes, “poured to form strongrooms, safes, hasps, and other special items.” The architectural implications of this—a kind of bullet-resistant pancake batter moldable into any form—have barely been tapped.

Tobias’s advice for architects and building engineers is straightforward but useful: the room next to the actual target is just as important, for security, as the room you are trying to protect. Even the width of certain hallways leading to those rooms should be restricted so as to prevent criminals from using known burglary tools. For example, if a particularly effective breaching tool requires six feet of free space in which to operate, then make your hallway less than six feet wide. Whole classes of attack can be ruled out by architectural design alone.

Tobias describes what he calls a “unique approach” to vault placement: hiding an entire vault in plain sight. In this case, that “involved the placement of a strongroom onto the façade of a high-rise building. The wall that formed the entrance to the strongroom was part of the façade; the rest of the enclosure was constructed to hang in the air.” The vault hung off the side of the building, like a room floating in space. Because of this, “only one wall could be tackled from within the building; all other surfaces were situated in the air and could be seen from every side.” By exposing the vault for all to see, in theory it became all but impregnable.

Tobias’s lists and discussions of the tools used for breaking into the built environment are the most relevant here. What is particularly striking about these devices is that, for the most part, they are off-limits to civilians such as you and me. In almost all cases, when I reached out to companies that manufacture these tools, hoping to learn more about their function and clientele, I came up against an emphatic no: without a connection to law enforcement, I was told, I did not have the right to know anything about the equipment. Their sale is also tightly regulated. Merchants as well-known as Gerber, a manufacturer of camping knives and multitools, also have a “tactical” division where many items are marked “Credentials Required.” This is true across the board; forced-entry and breaching tools are officially controlled items, meant to be available only to first responders, law enforcement, and the military (although a quick trip to eBay reveals that many of these tools will occasionally, like the keys to the city, turn up on the open market).

In a nutshell, if you want to get into a building fast, you don’t mess around with lockpicks—and if you need to breach something truly well fortified, don’t bother looking for a tensioning tool or a Bogotá rake. You have to take things up a notch and use equipment seemingly more appropriate for laparoscopic surgery, including flexible borescopes for peering deep into a lock’s inner gear. Or you get your hands on some drilling templates for specific safe designs—the year, make, and model. These function almost like an acupuncture diagram: just overlay them onto the doors of target safes to reveal the exact order and depth to drill for each place. Such templates are easily available from safe and vault companies and locksmith-supply warehouses. Or get yourself an electric arc welder, which is basically a portable plasma-cutting device—available at any high-end industrial tool shop—with the added bonus that you are technically using the controlled introduction of a fourth state of matter to slice your way through vaults and walls. Or you could also use a so-called burning bar to do the same thing the old-fashioned way; DIY instructions for building these tools are available all over YouTube and even
Make:
magazine.

The burning bar—also known as a thermal or thermic lance—is an interesting piece of equipment. It was originally developed after World War I to help cut through battlefield ruins, dismantle tanks, and demolish concrete bunkers. A burning bar is basically a long bundle of steel rods encased inside a larger steel tube through which oxygen is then blown at high pressure; the steel at one end of the tube is ignited using an oxyacetylene torch, causing the internal rods to begin to melt. Push this sparkling bundle of slowly melting steel rods forward into virtually any obstacle, including solid granite, and it will burn a hole straight through; you can use a burning bar to cut through train tracks, solid-steel industrial machinery, and the walls of safes and bank vaults.

Perhaps you’ve seen Michael Mann’s 1981 film,
Thief
, starring James Caan.
Thief
includes an extraordinary scene showing this tool in use. Toward the end of the film, Caan and his cohorts have broken into the faux-rococo apartment of their adversary, complete with marble floors, ornate furniture, and period chandeliers. After piling all of the furniture in the center of the room, they don head-to-toe, dark, hooded outfits, like high priests of a Satanic cult about to perform a Black Mass, and they ignite a thermal lance. Burning their way forward through the vault door, they produce a frothing soup of liquid metal that bubbles and drips away. The heist has the feel of science fiction—the set looks like something from the end of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001
—as these black-robed astronauts of crime melt their way ever deeper into a locked room they plan to rob.

Tobias singles out a firm called Broco several times for its various product lines. Broco’s website—part of the Broco-Rankin corporate umbrella—is something of a fever dream for anyone who might want to dismantle the built environment; all architects should spend at least a few minutes there simply to see the tools capable of taking apart their most prized creations. Broco runs a specific division for military and tactical products marketed to Special Forces teams, armored units, search-and-rescue crews, combat engineers, and police tactical squads. As with Gerber, these products are off-limits to anyone without security credentials. “Today we offer a full line of forced entry products that follow the natural progression of breaching, ranging from mechanical, to saw, to torch, to dynamic hydraulics,” Broco proudly proclaims.
The natural progression of breaching
. Somewhere, a wishful burglar is flipping through a Broco catalog and making a holiday gift list.

Among many other things, what’s remarkable about much of this equipment is the extent to which it resembles the everyday arsenal of a well-stocked fire department. This includes hydraulic doorjamb spreaders (in a different context, popularly known as the Jaws of Life), so-called Halligans and other pry bars (available on
Amazon.com
), and even circular saws and angle-grinders (stop by Lowe’s next weekend to pick up your own pair) that any fire crew would use to ventilate a structure or rescue people trapped inside a crashed vehicle. The somewhat obvious implication is that firefighters have at their disposal housebreaking technology that could easily be repurposed for burglary—or that, should you want to commit the ultimate act of breaking and entering, you might want to rob a firehouse first and liberate their best equipment, including elevator keys and tactical cutting-torch kits.