A Burglar's Guide to the City (2 page)

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.