A Burglar's Guide to the City (20 page)
The next obvious step would be to fortify those walls and ceilings—but why stop there? Why just reinforce—that is, be held hostage by—the mistakes of the original architect? Why not insert
an entirely new room
—a strongbox, a bullet-resistant command center complete with bottled water and emergency phone lines at the ready? Assemble this new space inside an existing home or business, and voilà—say goodbye to the brute-force thuggery of takeover robberies and late-night home invasions, and say hello to a place of refuge away from the risk of harm. It would be a literal safe room.
Before I visited Alizade, I spent a long time looking through a handful of patents he has filed for the modular defensive structures his firm now constructs. Those patents are for high-security safes slotted together piece by piece, or panel by panel, assembled almost like three-dimensional puzzles or magic boxes. What’s so brilliant about Alizade’s subsequent work is that he has effectively blown these safes up to the scale of small buildings, simply by adding more—and more, and more—panels until something the size of a jewelry safe has the dimensions of a functional living room. Because of the modular nature of their construction, these rooms have no realistic upper limit on their size. Finally, install all this inside someone’s house—near the master bedroom, for example, behind a fake wall, or maybe next door to the home office—and you have a panic room. Even better, if you move to a new house, you can unbolt the whole thing from inside, pack up the panels, and take it with you.
Two main strategies are at work in Alizade’s MODUL-X line. The modular assembly of the walls themselves—what one of his patents refers to as “a plurality of interconnected panels”—means that they can be bolted together without gaps along tight seams. Additionally, each panel joins up with the others along unusual right-angled edges. Think of a square of chocolate popped into a grid, where each square has a double right angle, like a small staircase, cut along its edges. Those doubled angles mean that you cannot slip any burglary tools through the cracks between the panels—not to mention any orthoscopic cameras for spying inside. Finally, the walls are not only designed to resist simple burglary tools; they can also only be assembled or dissembled, bolted or unbolted, from the inside. Even if intruders have days and days of uninterrupted time, they cannot take the room apart without first gaining entrance.
The spatial premise of David Fincher’s 2002 film,
Panic Room
, plays on this promise of true invulnerability.
Panic Room
depicts a burglary gone wrong, as three men break into a brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—only to find that a mother and her daughter have locked themselves into the home’s eponymous panic room. The problem? “What we want,” the burglars write on a piece of paper, shown to the mother and daughter by way of a surveillance camera, “is in that room.”
The conundrum here is obvious: What kind of heist is possible when the room you’re targeting is impossible to enter? Ironically, this reveals what is perhaps any panic room’s fundamental flaw: the people who turn to it for protection have effectively entombed themselves there, locked into a space of inescapable claustrophobia. Refusing to believe in the panic room’s impenetrability, however, two of the film’s burglars begin discussing various ways to get in—despite the fact that, as we learn in an early plot twist, the leader of their crew was responsible for the room’s design and installation. “I spent the last twelve years of my life building these rooms specifically to keep out people like us,” the man mutters at one point, shaking his head. “It’s all so ironic and amusing,” another burglar trills—
but how do we get in?
The designer laughs at him. “We can’t. You can’t get into a panic room. That’s the whole point. We have to get
her
to come
out
.”
Achieving this kind of stopping power brings us to Alizade’s other signature approach: brute strength. The concrete he uses is remarkable. CitySafe has settled on a slow-curing, proprietary mixture. It resists sledgehammers and drills and is also impenetrable by .50-caliber, high-velocity sniper rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, and, incredibly, C-4 shape charges. This means that even professional demolition teams and small insurgent armies would have trouble getting inside a MODUL-X safe room. Further, because the concrete mix includes a matrix of metal fibers, the panels will dissipate—that is, neutralize—the directional heat of a thermic lance.
It doesn’t seem entirely out of the question to suggest that these rooms, built to resist even the explosives used to demolish high-rise buildings, old casinos, and obsolete sports stadiums, could well be the last architectural structures standing after the collapse of civilization. Among the ruins of human culture, alongside the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Great Wall of China, Karl Alizade’s safe rooms, surrounded by wastelands of collapsed towers and twisted rebar, would still be intact, their doors still locked from within, impenetrable to future archaeologists and grave robbers, with skeletons of the wealthy sealed in silence, enthroned among their gold and jewels. It’s as if Alizade was so concerned about eliminating the threat of burglary from the world that he inadvertently designed an architecture that would outlast humanity altogether.
Of course, his safe rooms are not
truly
impenetrable, and Alizade was clear about this (without sharing any tips for how to defeat their defenses). He emphasized, instead, that impenetrability is the wrong way to think about personal safety: you’re not trying to build a pharaonic tomb that will survive to the end of the world. You’re trying to buy time. “Any safe can be penetrated,” he pointed out, and that applies equally well to any safe room. If the owner of a safe dies and no one else has the key, or if someone locked inside a safe room is for any reason incapacitated and can no longer open the door, you need at least some way to get in. “But that’s not the Holy Grail of safe design,” he said. “It’s
time
—time and the fact that you’re making them bring lots of different tools to the scene. That’s the Holy Grail. Difficulty. The longer you keep them on that site, the more nervous they get.” And the more nervous your attackers get, the more likely they are to lose their nerve, make rookie mistakes, or just run out of time and be caught.
We left the main office and walked back into the attached workshop to see one of Alizade’s contraptions standing in the center of the warehouse. The unrelentingly gray, bunker-like box consisted of several dozen two-foot-square panels bolted together like a cubist armadillo. It was pieces attached to pieces attached to pieces. If ever a structure seemed to have been designed using
Minecraft
, this was it. Alizade was clearly happy with his product, as well as delighted by the visible scars left on its side from unsuccessful attacks by prospective clients. He even urged me to pick up a sledgehammer—several were lying about—and try it out myself, to drive home how pointless such an attack would be. It was like kicking a mountain.
These rooms don’t only resist all of the major tools used by rapid-entry teams, from sledgehammers and Halligans to burning bars. One of the most interesting things Alizade explained to me was how he tests his products (videos of these tests can be found on his website). Emphasizing the strange asymmetry of global weapons availability, Alizade ships his panels off to be field-tested on a Russian military air base against weaponry, including AK-47s and rocket launchers, designed in the former Soviet Union. This is because, he says, these are the weapons the bad guys have: Cold War munitions have flooded the global marketplace through official and unofficial arms deals, finding their way into the hands of criminal gangs, child armies, and terrorist insurgents.
As Alizade reasons, in addition to standard housebreaking tools and U.S.-made munitions, his products must stand up against these weapons in particular. The MODUL-X system is certified for use by the Department of State and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, he reminded me, and it has been used to protect not only wealthy businesspeople temporarily posted overseas but U.S. ambassadorial staff stationed in foreign, often highly volatile, countries. If loosely defined groups of terrorists, thieves, gangsters, seasoned criminals, drug-fueled warlords, religious extremists, political separatists, and other stateless movers and shakers of the global black economy are going to use off-market, hand-me-down Soviet military gear against a target, then that target needs to be built to withstand that constellation of weaponry.
This is one of the clearest examples of the
Spy vs. Spy
mentality animating many of the innovations in both protecting and violating private space. To physically build into the architectural productions of his firm resistance to the specific damage profiles of old Soviet machine guns and sniper rifles is to make explicit the arms race between one side and the other, between those who design for security and those who design to defeat it. Architecture, in this context, is just another word for this tug-of-war.
I asked Alizade about his clientele, and he was necessarily cagey. Giving away any recognizable details about who had had a safe room installed would defeat half the purpose of owning one, and it could indicate to a determined observer that something inside must be worth stealing. Alizade did say that several CEOs of pharmaceutical companies had had his rooms installed inside their homes (one of the peculiarities of New Jersey is that its well-forested roads often lead from pharmaceutical giant to pharmaceutical giant).
But, once again, the business landscape is starting to change. Alizade explained that he was restructuring CitySafe, looking for investors, and preparing for a potential move west to Nevada, where the security market was expanding. He also admitted that he had been growing a bit bored with domestic security over the past few years. He wanted to continue working with the State Department and the Department of Defense, and to expand the business accordingly. The home fortifications and safe rooms offered by his competitors made him laugh, they were so easy to defeat. He seemed restless.
As Alizade walked me through his model panic room, pointing out every detail, I was reminded of something Jerry Toner, the Cambridge classicist, had told me. During our wide-ranging conversation about crimes and burglaries in the ancient world, Toner had pointed out that the House of Menander in the destroyed city of Pompeii had apparently featured a kind of safe room: a private underground vault that nonetheless offered no protection from the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius. The home’s owner, Quintus Poppeus, had constructed an elaborate villa for himself, the size of an entire city block, complete with a fortresslike safe room belowground. This subterranean chamber appears to have been designed for carefully controlled access, its walls thickened and seemingly impenetrable against any bandits trying to undermine or tunnel through them.
This architectural feature, Toner suggested, indicated that the walls of the private home and the legal cobweb surrounding it, even in the ancient world, would not have been enough to keep intruders at bay—indeed, that human civilizations of all known eras have produced their own Karl Alizades, we might say, people whose interest in the built environment lies in strengthening it and redesigning it to help keep the rest of us safe against intrusion, theft, and humiliation.
Groundhog Day
Before they knew his name, they called him Roofman. He would cut holes in the roofs of chain stores and fast-food restaurants—usually a McDonald’s—then drop down through the ceiling to rob the startled employees. Sometimes he’d come in through the back wall, slipping in through a hole of his own making, only to pop out in the kitchen or storeroom; but it was mostly the roof and so the name quickly stuck.
The employees he held up were usually teenagers paid minimum wage working the morning shift or wearily closing up shop for the night, getting the day’s take ready to be counted. They didn’t have much to gain from trying to stop Roofman from doing his job; the risks of being a hero seemed to outweigh the potential gains. In any case, Roofman was known for his gentle demeanor, without fail described as polite—in one oft-repeated example, even insisting that his victims put on their winter coats so that they could stay warm after he locked them all in a walk-in freezer.
An official spokesperson for McDonald’s offered perhaps the simplest explanation of the ongoing crime spree: Roofman was just “very brand loyal.”
But there was more to it than that. Hidden inside the repetitive floor plans and the daily schedules of these franchised businesses, Roofman had discovered a kind of criminal Groundhog Day: a burglary that could be performed over and over in different towns, cities, and states, probably even different countries if he had gone international, and his skills—his timing, his movements—would only get better with each outing.
For Roofman, it was as if each McDonald’s with its streamlined timetable and centrally controlled managerial regime was an identical crystal world: a corporate mandala of polished countertops, cash registers, supply closets, money boxes, and safes into which he could drop from above as if teleported there. Everything would be in similar locations, down to the actions taking place within each restaurant. At more or less the same time of day—whether it was a branch in California or in rural North Carolina—employees would be following a mandated sequence of events, a prescribed routine, and it must have felt as if he had found some sort of crack in space-time, a quantum moment stuttering in a film loop without cease, ripe for robbing. It was the perfect crime—and he could do it over and over.
*
Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a
sequence
: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Tschumi’s idea rests on an architectural truism: that, for example, you probably wouldn’t convene a weekly congregation inside an underground parking garage. Why? Because it’s designed for parking cars, not for prayer. Or you wouldn’t graze a herd of cows inside a church. Traditionally, a building gives clues as to how it is meant to be used—thus all those empty, perfectly car-size parking spots.
