What if an architect turned his mind to crime?
That is precisely what Geoff Manaugh, an architect, does in this book. But he starts his story with the tale of another architect who turned his mind to crime in the 19th century. That man, George Leonidas Leslie, formed a gang that one official surmised was responsible for 80% of American’s bank robberies during that period. (He just wanted what most architectural clients had then – a boatload of money – so he could live the life he aspired to.) A lot of his success was due to social engineering – humans being the weakest link, he weaseled his way into gatherings and suckered bank owners into to showing him the blueprints to their bank vaults. Or he deposited money in targeted banks and drew his own blueprints, based on his visits to their vaults. Then he created full-size models of the vaults in a warehouse, right down the furniture, sometimes breaking into a bank at night – not to steal anything, but to validate his work.
Leslie clearly had that Strengthsfinder strength that drives Achievers everywhere nuts – I think it’s Deliberative – because they have an eye for the tiny error that you missed! He was able to find faults in others’ plans that allowed him to get into vaults, plan escape routes, and get away with the loot with no one the wiser. I’m not going to go into Leslie’s full story here – read the book because it’s amazing. In short, when architects look at a built environment, they see the strengths – the buildings, the streets – and burglars see the weaknesses, the cracks that will let them into the building, the crevices that will let them hide when they emerge again.
This book is full of stories like Leslie’s, about how burglars use cunning and patience to break into buildings – and then get tripped up on something simple, like the proverbial burglar in a Santa suit who gets stuck in the chimney. Manaugh also delves into related stories – like spies breaking into embassies and Israeli forces pursuing terrorists through warrens of Gaza*. The author interviewed former burglars and cat burglars, men who had retired from the industry, some working as white hats to help security companies strengthen their defenses. He looks at the police charged with protecting the public against burglars, and the amount of surveillance that we don’t even recognize is happening. He looks at how the internet has made things easier for burglars; he examines the legal system and how burglars and their lawyers exploit loopholes the way that burglars exploit architectural vulnerabilities. He looks at the tools they use – here I discovered a sort of museum of locks in Brooklyn, hidden in a union building** – and lockpicker clubs, and how corporate efficiencies make burglars more efficient, too. (If you’ve robbed one cookie cutter fast food store, you can rob any others that fall in that mold.) On a larger scale of the same, he speaks with another architect, one who studies how the nature of cities, designed to make urban life efficient for people, can converted to misuse, also by humans.
This book is fascinating. It makes you look at things that you take for granted every day from a different perspective: think your home is safe because of all those locks you put on your front door? Is the drywall next to it – or in the closet – something that could be kicked in or cut with an exacto knife? How about the windows, are they easy to open? Do you have a balcony? An attic window? A basement window, hidden behind shrubs? Think your alarm system protects you? Wait until you get to chapter 3. Think your safe room keeps you safe? Chapter 4.
It makes me remember when the store I was managing was held up. Thinking back on it with what I learned here in mind, I reflect on how easily we became victims: a corner location, it had huge plate glass windows on two streets, allowing the robber to spy on us from outside. Scaffolding had been installed over the sidewalks on both sides, making the store “invisible” to customers***, ensuring that no one would notice as he slipped in and conducted his business. He knew what time to hit us – just after 8 am, before the streets filled with commuters and before we went to the bank. He knew how often my employees didn’t show up on time, leaving me to open the store with just the security guard. The only reason that he didn’t get away with more money was that I had broken procedure that day and, knowing my cashier was running late, had placed the deposit and change order in a locked drawer at the cashwrap so I could quickly grab it and run to the bank when she arrived. And then, in the panic of having a gun in my ribs, I forgot about it. So he got the few bills that were in the tills but not the payoff. The only other thing he didn’t know was that my high-ticket sub-tenant on the mezzanine had moved out days earlier, taking their own cash with them.
I also think about the time when, as a child, an older boy in the neighborhood dared me to crawl through a doggy door into a “haunted house” and let him in. It turned out later he was quietly stealing from neighbors on vacation and this was not the first house he had hit. (I found out only because I overheard my mom talking to a friend’s parents; she never found out that I was the kid stupid enough to crawl through a stranger’s doggy door.) Does your home have a doggy door? The portable kind that you insert into sliding glass doors basically negates their purpose as doors, things meant to keep people out. The kind built into walls, like the one I crawled through, are perfect entrances for small burglars (and their inadvertent hench-children).
The other thing that fascinated me about this book was Manaugh’s assessment of the burglar’s mind: a knack for spatial aptitude and pattern recognition; the patience required to plan and to take out bricks one by one or cut quietly through dry-wall; the social engineering skills of hackers and phone phreaks; the showmanship of magicians; and a weakness of overconfidence that causes them to get trapped in the very building-vulnerabilities that they exploit, burrowing further and further, for example, into air-conditioning ducts until they get stuck and have to be extricated by police. When we think of criminals who invade our space, we tend to simplify what they do: they’re bad, sometimes evil**** but they are also complex human beings with skills that could have been turned to some other profession. What makes them choose this one?
I highly recommend this book – it’s a great read and, as I said before, fascinating.
*Prescient. Read that chapter and get a different perspective on what’s happening in Gaza. Not, I will add, a perspective that justifies the magnitude of civilian deaths.
**Open Monday to Friday from 1pm to 6pm by appointment only, admission $10.
***Retailers will tell you that sidewalk bridges and scaffolding have an immediate negative impact on sales. In my case, sales dropped 30% the day the scaffolding went up. Customers who had shopped there for years told me that they couldn’t find the store anymore, much less passersby. So much for impulse shopping.
****In I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara recounts how The Golden State Killer repeatedly breaks into houses and watches people sleep. Or breaks in and moves things, just a little, a foreshadowing of the rape and murder to come, that is a little bemusing to the home owners at the time but takes on more sinister meaning remembered after the fact.
Change+Management 