Every now and I again, I take a break from reading books around my normal interests to read something totally out there. Usually, as you’ll have noticed, I read books about economics, technology, philosophy or the self.
Once in a while I read a book like GEOFF MANAUGH’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City to draw a breath from heavier books.
My interest in this topic, as with many topics, was sparked by two podcasts. The first, was a reference to A Burglar’s Guide on an episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. At that point, I bought the book and forgot about it. But it’s not until I heard this episode of This American Life a few months afterwards that I remembered I had a whole book on the topic.
In the episode I linked to above, a man with no criminal record decides to go on a spree of robberies with his unusual ability to climb into unexpected openings in city buildings. A church going, upstanding member of the community by day. A gambling-addicted, building-breaking criminal by night.
I have a great love for odd criminality.
Picking up the copy of A Burglar’s Guide which I had bought several months earlier, I was greatly impressed by the ingenuity of people on both sides of the law as they tried to engineer ways to overcome the failures of architecture that are all around us.
My favourite (as detailed below) is the French man who was caught by police on the basis of his ear print.
Enjoy,
Marc
P.S. Last Sunday’s edition of Adam Westbrook’s newsletter was totally brilliant and fascinating.
SNIPPETS
Leslie was so dedicated to detail, so confident in his abilities, that he would often case the interiors of banks both during business hours and long after: before his gang robbed the Manhattan Savings Institution in October 1878, Leslie had already broken into the bank twice, stealing nothing, simply checking out the building for himself and verifying that he had the correct combination for the vault door.
I totally love the detail of heists:
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.
Imagine this criminal in prison explaining how they were caught to their cellmates:
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.
Farcical
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.
It’s good to know that people have the interests of landlords at heart. Someone has to look after those guys, right?:
While most Brits are convinced they’re living through the rise of an all-pervasive surveillance state, being filmed from every conceivable angle at every time of day, the reality was far more diffuse and disorganized. In a particularly stark example, one security-room supervisor admitted that he would arrive at work each day and, first thing, train one of the cameras away from the building he was being paid to protect in order to watch his own car out in the parking lot. He would make himself a cup of tea, read the morning’s sports pages, and spy on his car against possible break-ins.
Again to reference Adam Westbrook’s work here, he’s just made a great film on this topic for the New York Times:
if you step into an abandoned mine “or any underground portion thereof” with no plans to steal anything, but instead simply intending to shoot an unlicensed handgun (a felony), you are legally guilty of burglary. Why? Because it took place inside a legally recognized artificial structure (the mine).
This genuinely sounds like a pitch for a film:
Consider the case of a fourteen-year-old boy who used what security expert Bruce Schneier described as a “modified TV remote control” to take over an entire tram system in Łodz, Poland. According to the city’s police, the boy turned his home remote control into an electromagnetic supertool that gave him command of every tram switch and junction in Łodz. The boy even “wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change,” police explained. While he did not use this homemade magic wand for anything resembling a bank heist, it would have come in quite handy during a crime spree. As clearly as any example from Hollywood, this otherwise childish prank suggests that the most successful getaways of tomorrow will be achieved by hacking the city.
A truly spectacular factoid to retell at your next small-talk opportunity:
This is not the only police project for which Paris is widely known. As historian A. Roger Ekirch explains in his 2005 book, At Day’s Close, the idea of lighting the streets of Paris back in the 1600s originally came from the police. Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.
BONUS
Cartoon, Urbanism and Crime
A short reflection on the glamour of crime and urbanism in cartoons.
Is it a reflection on my disdain for authority structures or organised society that my greatest disappointment was that the bad guy never got away with the crime? As a child, I was left frequently bored by shows like Secret Squirrel (despite its phenomenal and oft-repeated theme tune).
Why must it always be so hard for the bad guys? After all, they are people too with interests and families to provide for. An important distinction, I feel, must be made between villainy and simple badguyism. I so rarely feel pity for any supervillain whose expressed aim is simple domination and subjugation of others. See any Marvel film (although I also feel little sympathy for the heroes who continue to make poor moral interventionist choices in pursuit of American imperialism).
One notable exception to this rule, is the original version of the recently reproduced Carmen Sandiego. A truly global game and cartoon series, Carmen Sandiego’s franchise explores what it might be like if the villain’s are already in power (a theme which feels infinitely relatable) and the bad guys are really the heroes.
Carmen makes use of the architecture of global metropolises to escape and evade the law in order to give back to the communities. A robin hood character in quite fantastic style.
More villains like Carmen, pls.