A Burglar's Guide to the City (28 page)

You hear the same thing, over and over: that being burglarized can destroy any feeling of trust or safety a person might have, replacing it with a crushing, near-omnipresent sense of paranoia about your friends, your family, your next-door neighbors. Those kids up the street. The local FedEx driver. The guy who fixed your refrigerator last week. Your building’s new cleaning crew, who have their own keys to the downstairs lobby. That friend of a friend who came around for drinks one night—didn’t he specifically comment about the very thing that got stolen? Had he secretly been casing the place? You can’t trust anybody—or at least you struggle to try. Irreplaceable family heirlooms are sold for fifty dollars on eBay—a fraction of their value—which is then probably blown on drugs or strippers. On beer and cigarettes. Your hobbies and habits led you out of your house at certain times, until a total stranger—or a dishonest friend—took advantage, slipping into your patterns like Roofman, when the rhythms of vulnerability were just right. These were the inner details of your life: studied, dissected, peeled open, used against you.

What is there to celebrate in this, or to be spatially thrilled by? Something so pointlessly destructive, often done on a whim, for a rush of adrenaline, on the spur of the moment, to sustain some idiot’s high? Seductive visions of Cary Grant slinking across rooftops in
To Catch a Thief
are replaced by the sight of underage gang members too stupid to know what your jewelry’s really worth. In his canonical work of eighteenth-century legal theory,
Commentaries on the Laws of England
, Sir William Blackstone points out that burglary is considered so invasive, so offensive to the idea of private dignity and public order, that burglars fall outside the sphere of legal protection and deserve death. Burglary, he explains, “has always been looked upon as a very heinous offense; not only because of the abundant terror that it naturally carries with it, but also as it is a forcible invasion and disturbance of that right of habitation which every individual might acquire even in a state of nature; an invasion, which, in such a state, would be sure to be punished with death.” Can all those bank tunnels and well-sawn holes in hotel walls, all those annotated floor plans and cool tools, cancel that out, offering something so aesthetically and strategically interesting—everyday life transformed into a thriller, even if you’re the victim of the crime—that we’re somehow meant to forgive the world’s burglars?

Burglary loses any sense of architectural glamour when you call it home invasion or when you witness the violence of a smash and grab. Both the cops and the robbers I spoke to warned me about this; but still, it was all too easy to be seduced by mystic visions of slipping into buildings in ways no architect had ever imagined.

The burglars who hit my in-laws’ house thankfully did so when no one was home. They came in through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house—and the embarrassing thing about crime prevention is how predictable it all should have been in the first place, how you should have trusted your gut and made those changes, added those extra locks years ago, not because locks are unpickable but because they might have slowed the burglars down just enough to make them look elsewhere. My in-laws have an underlit backyard that is well fenced and heavily vegetated; it offers perfect cover to a group of burglars. Yet the house is also on a cul-de-sac (usually a deterrent), it backs up onto a frequently traveled road (another deterrent), and it is not located on anything like a grid, but deep in the winding streets of suburban England. All of that should have canceled out the high hedges and the sliding glass doors. And yet.

Absurdly, because the kids were exactly that—kids—they didn’t drive there. It’s England, after all, and commuter trains run right to the heart of this neighborhood from any point in London. The train station is also just a short walk from my in-laws’ house. I have walked it many times. This was finally it, I ironically realized: the perfect getaway. Not some jacked-up act of urban-scale hacking or a subterranean expedition leading halfway across Greater London: they just got on the train and went home again.

Because of their age, these burglars were also small. Some fourteen-year-olds are strong, of course, but not many want to carry, say, a plasma television or a large piece of framed art for several minutes through the center of town on their way to the nearest train station. Then to get on board the train, holding a bunch of unboxed appliances or a set of silverware, sweating, acting nervous, having to explain to anyone who asks where they got it all from. It might be a short ride back to London, but then you have to get off the train and start walking all over again—or hop on a bus, perhaps hike down a set of stairs or escalators to get on the tube, and it’s all too much to handle. It’s Kafka’s paradox all over again, but replayed with idiot teenagers incapable of figuring out how to bring their stolen goods home.

This means that nothing of real value was stolen from my in-laws—good news—just some random euros unspent from an earlier trip to the Continent and whatever else would fit into a backpack or pocket. But the angering pointlessness of it all doesn’t go away: the feeling that these kids—or others—will someday come back, the haunting unease that it might now be come one, come all for the region’s burglars. Your house is now a target, once and forever. Because of their age, you could not have done much about it even if you had caught them red-handed inside the house, perhaps just inflicted a few weekends’ worth of community service while they laughed and wondered about which house they might hit next.

Burglars, then, far from being interdimensional John McClanes of the built environment sliding through the many unseen topologies of Nakatomi space, are more like human mosquitoes: irritating, seemingly pointless, and unending in number. If only they really were the heroic explorers that this book seems so badly to want them to be. If only they really were Dr. Livingstones of the architectural world, hacking new paths through the dark continent of walls we’ve watched helplessly accumulate around us.

When Sky Thief Comes

I was not, however, alone in my delusions. Burglars have played a role as trickster figures in the public imagination for millennia, always finding unexpected ways into locked spaces or devilish new uses for objects in our midst. Visions of the ultimate burglar—an omnipotent, nearly supernatural bandit who can break into any building, pick any lock, slip through any barrier using ingenious tools indistinguishable from magic—ultimately serve as a kind of shared global folklore. Pop culture and urban myths around the world are already filled with such characters, as the sheer quantity of films referenced in this book makes clear.

The thirteenth-century German poem “Meier Helmbrecht,” for example, is a kind of
Ronin
tale from Old Europe in which corrupt knights form a thieves’ brigade—a medieval burglary crew—and amass their ill-gotten gains by conducting raids on foreign homes throughout the countryside. In the poem, we meet a man called Wolfsrüssel, a proto-superhero of Bogotá rakes:

Wolfsrüssel, he’s a man of skill

Without a key he bursts at will

The neatest-fastened iron box.

Within one year I’ve seen the locks

Of safes, at least a hundred such,

Spring wide ajar without a touch

At his approach! I can’t say how.

Stranger still, consider the pervasive medieval fear that witches armed with severed hands stolen from corpses—surely the eeriest burglary tool in this book—might try to break into your family’s home. As scholar Richard Kieckhefer points out in his history of magic in the Middle Ages, “using the hand of a dead person to break into a house” was seen as a talismanic way of warding off arrest or capture. Kieckhefer points out that entire spells, ceremonies, and ritual incantations were developed specifically for burglars to perform before approaching a house and breaking its close.

For example, the eleventh-century
Book of Stones
, written by Bishop Marbode of Rennes, advises how to use magnetized rocks and hot coals almost as a remote-control device for convincing people to leave their houses. Expose the coals to magnets in just the right way, and your targeted residents will simply abandon their homes in short order; you can walk right in and ransack the place. That Kieckhefer’s examples are sometimes a thousand years old—and that, even at the time, Bishop Marbode had suggested he was compiling much older folk traditions—speaks volumes about the enduring presence of burglary in Western society.

Even Kafka, we could say, bucking generations of literary interpretation, was really an author of heist novels. Two of his most famous pieces of writing—“Before the Law,” a short parable originally published as a chapter in
The Trial
, and the entirety of his novel
The Castle
—are focused on the specific challenge of obtaining entrance to a work of architecture. They are stories about breaking and entering. Whether this is achieved through long arguments of logic with a gatekeeper in “Before the Law,” or through conspiratorially gaining access to the city’s main palace in
The Castle
, Kafka’s characters are, in a technical sense, failed burglars.

It’s as if we cannot imagine a building without also imagining someone who wants to break into it, endlessly speculating on the city’s impending misuse. Every new technology comes with an accompanying threat—or perhaps promise—of new crimes. Consider the case of the airplane bandits. In an article published on September 11, 1910, the
New-York Daily Tribune
predicted that silent airplanes would be the next big thing in burglary tools. According to the article, “those who have watched the growth of aviation most closely are speculating upon the probable appearance of the aeroplane burglar, or ‘sky pirate,’ as he might be called.” This is presented matter-of-factly, as if anyone would see an airplane and immediately speculate as to its potential for robbing the city.

The author of the piece rapidly gets carried away, describing a lengthy fictional scenario in which a New York City mansion has been robbed from above by the pilots of a silent aircraft. “The easiest access to a locked house is to be had from overhead,” the author writes, “as any city dweller can see for himself if he will go up and look at the door in his own roof.” Accordingly, the article suggests that a private corps of “wealthy amateurs” should be formed, volunteering en masse to serve as a new neighborhood watch on the rooftops of Manhattan’s fanciest towers and hotels.

The accompanying illustration looks like something out of
Batman
, with a shadowy airplane swooping down over a Gothic roofscape; the pilot’s accomplice leaps up from a skylight to grab a rope ladder dangling precariously from the plane’s fuselage. The article’s subtitle is “When Sky Thief Comes.”

As long as we have had houses, we have had burglars on the brain.

Today, even robots are getting in on the act. If we’re not scared of silent airplanes, perhaps we’ll learn to fear children’s toys. A security research team led by Tamara Denning and Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington suggests as much. They have explored the criminal potential of wireless electronic toys being turned into semiautonomous accomplices to burglary.

In a situation as notable for its comedic potential as for its criminal ingenuity, Denning and Kohno suggest that belligerent hackers might take control of your “household robots” before ever stepping inside. Writing back in 2009, they chose toys known as the Rovio, Robosapien, and Spykee, pointing out how these specific products could be used together to obtain private information about your house—things such as room layout, the location of motion sensors, whether you locked the back door before going to bed at night, if anyone is at home in the first place, and, more important, where certain things—jewels, cash, pharmaceuticals, car keys, even a handgun—might be kept.

Interestingly, Denning and Kohno point out that certain combinations of robots could make different types of crime possible. You might own, say, a Rovio and a Robosapien, but only on that fateful day when you come home with a Spykee is their disastrous cabal realized: working together in criminal synchrony, coordinated in ways their manufacturers had never anticipated, this specific combination of robot toys can now act.

From rocks to robots, the tools of burglary surround us: they are adversaries in waiting.

George Leonidas Lazarus

Nineteenth-century superburglar George Leonidas Leslie is buried in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery under the name George Howard, one of his many criminal pseudonyms. “George Leonidas Leslie, alias Western George, George Howard, J. G. Allison, George K. Leslie, C. G. Greene, etc., ad infinitum,” retired New York City police chief George Washington Walling lists with clear exasperation in his memoir, referring to a man for whom identity was as fluid and easy to pick as a combination lock.

A “large crowd of curious spectators” was on hand to witness Leslie’s funeral,
The New York Times
reported back in June 1878, yet Leslie’s grave today is unmarked by any headstone. On a cloudy spring afternoon threatening rain, my wife and I drove out to visit the grave with a friend of ours, fellow true-crime enthusiast Jimmy Stamp. Stamp studied architecture at Yale and has worked for firms on both coasts. He and I had talked so many times about true-crime burglary stories, not to mention our mutual love of heist films, that I thought he might get a kick out of seeing where one of the most notorious architectural criminals of American history had been interred.

The grave was not easy to find. We were given a photocopied map at the cemetery’s administrative office, as well as a series of ever more specific coordinates—section, division, block, grave number—yet even then I had to use my cell phone to call the superintendent a few times and confirm that we were in the right location. It felt like triangulating ourselves through a supernatural variation on GPS, a macabre manhunt, reading the names off nearby headstones and radioing in for confirmation that Leslie’s grave was nearby. It probably took us half an hour to find the grave, and we were probably there for another forty-five minutes, talking about Leslie’s life and trading several stories from the strange-but-true world of modern burglary.