In the heart of Hollywood, June 1986, unsettling mechanical sounds emanated from beneath the First Interstate Bank’s vault. Despite investigations by the police and bank security, the source remained elusive, dismissed as mere “rats running around.” These noises persisted, accompanied by sporadic power outages and phone disruptions. One unsettling night, the bank’s muzak system activated unexpectedly, unnerving a late-working employee. Jokes about a haunted bank circulated, but the humor vanished when a tunnel was discovered drilled through the vault floor, revealing the theft of $172,000 in cash and $2.5 million in personal belongings. This ingenious heist provides a compelling case study for “a burglar’s guide to the city summary.”
The team, consisting of three or four individuals, navigated West Hollywood’s intricate storm sewer network on Suzuki quad bikes to gain access from below. Using skills possibly honed in mining, they painstakingly drilled a 30-meter tunnel leading directly into the vault. This audacious operation served as the inspiration for Michael Connelly’s detective novel, The Black Echo (1992). The “Hole in the Ground Gang,” as they were dubbed, remained uncaught, cementing their legend.
A retired FBI agent lauded their tunnel as “fantastic,” highlighting the focus of Geoff Manaugh’s captivating book: the subversive misuse of urban infrastructure. Manaugh posits that burglary is “topology pursued by other means,” a novel urban science driven by shortcuts and wormholes. Burglars perceive cities differently, identifying vulnerabilities for illicit entry. They exploit elevator shafts, disable thermal cameras with simple hairspray, and expertly manipulate locks.
They understand that seemingly solid walls are deceptively fragile. “like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air”. Manaugh argues that burglars possess a deeper understanding of urban architecture than most, acting as “dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by laws that hold the rest of us in.” They see the city not as a collection of buildings, but as a network of possibilities.
Manaugh frames his “burglar’s guide” with the story of George Leonidas Leslie, a master criminal responsible for “one of the most spatially astonishing crime sprees in US history.” Arriving in New York City in 1869, the year the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction commenced, Leslie, a trained architect, could have pursued a legitimate and lucrative career. Instead, he chose to exploit his expertise to “rob the place blind.” Before his untimely death in 1878, it was estimated that Leslie and his gang were responsible for nearly 80% of bank robberies across the United States.
Leslie, described as “preternaturally gifted,” meticulously amassed a “burglar’s library of architectural documents” and dedicated months, even years, to casing potential targets. He would break into banks simply to explore their layouts, taking measurements and timing his movements. He believed that “the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.” This information was then used to construct life-size models of his targets in a Brooklyn warehouse, “stage sets on which the art of burglary could be rehearsed to perfection.” As an underworld architectural consultant, advising criminals on their heists, he became, in Manaugh’s words, “both burglary’s patron saint and architecture’s fallen angel.”
Leslie’s story exemplifies Manaugh’s core argument: “burglary is designed into the city as surely as your morning commute.” To illustrate this idea, Manaugh joins the LAPD’s Air Support Division, observing the city from above. He marvels at the “strangely beautiful thermal flare of human life” visible through the helicopter’s infra-red camera and learns about new radar technology capable of detecting individuals deep within buildings. The book delves into the interplay between technology, urban design, and criminal activity.
Los Angeles, with its sprawling 900 miles of highway, became the bank robbery capital of the world in the 1990s, demonstrating that “every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.” Manaugh envisions future getaways orchestrated through city-wide hacking, akin to The Italian Job, but utilizing drones to manipulate traffic lights. He cites the example of a Polish schoolboy who modified a TV remote to control the city’s tram signaling system, highlighting the potential for exploiting vulnerabilities within interconnected urban systems.
Considering the fact that the operating system of New Songdo City, South Korea, is backed up and stored in a secret safe deposit box, Manaugh contemplates the possibility of a “heist of the century.” The thief could steal it because its owner of the operating system to a smart city would possess the digital key to every electronic door lock, surveillance camera and bank vault. The ultimate master key.
Manaugh’s book is replete with captivating anecdotes, including the burglar who inadvertently called the police after becoming convinced that someone else was robbing the house he was targeting. Another burglar cut his way through the plasterboard walls of an entire Baltimore block: “he was the worm in the apple, eating from one unit to the next,” leaving in his wake “a whorled halo of negative space like a vortex through which household goods would disappear”. And then there was the man who was caught after 10 hours crawling through the air ducts of a veterinary clinic in an attempt to steal tranquillisers. He was naked and armed with a flashlight and hammer, “like some surreal nudist remake of Die Hard”.
Manaugh expresses a fondness for John McTiernan’s Die Hard, calling it “easily one of the best architectural films of the past three decades.” He appreciates how the hero, John McClane, subverts the design of Nakatomi Plaza, utilizing it in ways unintended by the architect. McClane’s actions reveal what Manaugh calls “Nakatomi space,” a vast internal structure that can be explored limitlessly.
This appreciation for Die Hard reveals the playful undercurrent of Manaugh’s book, a characteristic also evident in his acclaimed architectural website, BLDGBLOG. While not glorifying burglars as urban superheroes, “dark lords of architectural analysis,” Manaugh acknowledges that they are often simply “assholes” who cause harm. However, he ultimately uses the burglar as a metaphor for a new way of perceiving architecture and the city: as “a spatial puzzle waiting to be solved,” providing a new lens to understanding “a burglar’s guide to the city summary.”
