How these sorts of tools are developed, tested, and used was explained to me by Special Agent Kenneth Crotty of the ATF during a workshop held on a rainy winter day in New York City. As part of a packed agenda, from canine demonstrations to anti-explosive workshops, Crotty described a series of pop-up training exercises run by the ATF where field agents practice and develop door-breaching techniques. This is known within the field as Tactical Explosive Entry School, or TEES. One of the most common classes could be thought of as Zen and the art of door annihilation; usually a temporary facility is built entirely out of doors, featuring multiple examples of the typical door types, materials, and styles most likely to be encountered during a home raid. Resembling an avant-garde architectural installation, these structures are often nothing but doors and doorframes standing in the middle of open parking lots.
Rapid-entry teams are then supplied with an array of tools that they use to break through those doors as quickly and efficiently as possible; this not only tests each agent’s particular skills, it also inspires innovations and improvements in the tools themselves by way of user feedback. Breaching rams, hydraulic jaws, sledgehammers, even explosive packs that use nothing but detonation cord and water-filled IV bags—everything and anything of potential use is thrown at these surreal labyrinths of doors built in the middle of nowhere to see what does and does not work. Crotty played a few films of various exercises, including an example of repurposed air bags—the same devices that deploy during a car crash—being applied to an inward-opening door; the door is blown out of its frame by the opening of the bag, without any explosives in sight.
Photos of these exercises are proudly displayed on the Facebook pages of groups such as the Tennessee-based Tactical Energetic Entry Systems, as well as a larger umbrella organization called the International Breachers Group. These masters of rapid-entry gather at annual trade conventions like the International Breachers Symposium. Their websites are filled with equipment that would make any organized burglary crew drool. “Built by Breachers for Breachers,” one firm boasts. Another company offers a fifteen-hundred-dollar backpack-mounted “entry kit,” promising, “With this kit, Nothing Shall Stand in Your Way.” Police-product websites offer mini-rams and “break-n-rakes,” torch kits and “Wallbangers,” “edge benders” and even a Thor-like object known as the Thundersledge.
These tools make the very idea of architectural defense seem absurd. You can put half a dozen dead bolts on your front door and a hydraulic doorjamb spreader will make a mockery of all six of them in an instant. You can hammer boards across the doorframe like something from a zombie horror film, but an air bag will blow the whole thing to smithereens. You can even seal an entire doorway with concrete, but a single burning bar—they even come in handy backpack-size units perfect for ATF or FBI rapid-entry teams—will melt through the concrete in minutes.
As should be expected, the overwhelming superiority of these tools has been met by a series of illegal innovations in the field of DIY home fortification. Crotty described a few unsettling examples, such as the house of a drug dealer where the front door opened not into the building’s interior but onto a closed vestibule. Loaded shotguns tied to a trip wire made from fishing line were pointed at ankle height, set to blow the feet off any potential assailants, whether they were federal agents or rival dealers. In other houses, ATF teams had found machine-gun ports in walls and ceilings; in yet others, railroad ties had been set into reinforced concrete to prevent battering rams from breaking through.
Booby traps are illegal—you can wire up as many burglar alarms as you like, but you can’t wire up a shotgun to fire if someone kicks open your front door. Nevertheless, traps are not uncommon. Worse, as the tools for breaking into architectural structures become more and more effective, the shields, traps, and defenses only grow more extreme. It’s all just part of the infinite arms race, the “war that knows no armistice” that Alfred A. Hopkins warned his readers about more than a hundred years ago, waged between “the planners of safes and vaults, and the safe, vault and bank robbers.”
What I didn’t yet know was that the next step in architectural defense—something that could resist not just battering rams but C-4 explosives—had already been designed, and that I would find it in a warehouse in rural New Jersey. But if these, not the delicate instruments of locksport, are the true tools of breaking and entering—the torches, saws, rams, and air bags with which anyone can bash or burst into almost any building in the world—then I would clearly need to flip the story once again.
I had already moved from recreational lock-pickers to ATF rapid-entry teams, but I would now have to turn to the people specifically designing architecture to resist the most aggressive attacks. Because if someone is developing new hydraulic doorjamb spreaders, then someone else is building a defensive structure specifically with those tools in mind.
Panic Room
A little more than an hour’s drive south of Manhattan, amid a rolling landscape of state parks and golf courses in the woods of coastal New Jersey, Vietnam vet and former New Jersey State cop Karl Alizade owns a small warehouse. Pulling into the parking lot of Alizade’s firm, you can’t miss the broken safe placed out beside the driveway, its door wide-open, sitting there exposed to the weather like a peculiar kind of lawn sculpture. It’s as effective a reminder as any that, to a burglar, safes are often just decorative, offering little more than an illusion of security.
Aside from the safe, it is not easy to guess what happens inside this warehouse set back among the pine trees. But here Alizade runs what architects would call a design-build studio; his is a busy workshop dedicated to conceiving and assembling some of the world’s most impenetrable architectural designs. Yet Alizade doesn’t think of himself as a designer, let alone an architect. He actually seemed somewhat taken aback when I explained that I was interested in his work from an architectural point of view. Rather, Alizade works in the niche world of the design of safe rooms—more popularly known as
panic rooms
.
Alizade greeted me at the front door in jeans and a half-zip black fleece sweater. He is built more like a linebacker than a businessman. He is stout, broad-shouldered, and has large hands; he gestured with them often as he spoke, twisting and turning them as if solving an invisible Rubik’s Cube in order to explain how his products were made. Despite his chosen field of security design and his physical resemblance to someone more likely to be leading tours through the Alaskan outback, he is jovial, prone to quick jokes and laughter.
After graduating with an engineering degree from Auburn University, and following a stint in Vietnam, Alizade joined the New Jersey State police force. During his time as a cop, he was struck by the raw, destructive power burglary had on victims’ lives, making it second only to rape, in his view, in terms of its long-term emotional impact. This is supported by much of the sociological literature: that intense feelings of betrayal and paranoia can be expected to follow any burglary, after which even the smallest detail from earlier interactions with neighbors can lead to a debilitating suspicion that perhaps they were behind the burglary. Maybe your neighbor made a now deeply suspicious comment when you mentioned you’d be going out of town for a week, or, in retrospect, a curious observation that you always seemed to be at the grocery store the same time every day—which was exactly when your home was broken into. This can lead to an often paralyzing fear of leaving the house or trusting any of your old friends.
Burglary is a horribly invasive crime, Alizade emphasized, offending the very idea of personal space and dignity. The feelings of embarrassment and violation it can cause are so powerful, he added, that he decided to commit himself to finding a way to help end the crime altogether, dedicating the latter half of his professional career to the design of defensive architecture, devising new and ever-better ways to thwart burglars. Working as a police officer had taught him firsthand that locks don’t work. They slow criminals down, sure—but they don’t really
stop
anyone. Maybe your lock means that a burglar will need a few more minutes to get inside—but they’ll still get inside. If you really want to keep people out of a space altogether—if you want to end the humiliation of burglary—then you need something far stronger than a dead bolt. You need an absolute physical barrier.
After leaving the police force, Alizade began working in the field of safe-and vault-room design. This took him overseas for an intense period of research and apprenticeship, first to London in the late 1970s. There he worked in the safe factories of both Chubb and John Tann, and he studied vaults in the London Docklands—at the time, a brutally rough and industrial part of London—where importers and exporters stored their goods. These were exotic and strong vaults, Alizade explained, sounding almost wistful, and they taught him far more than he could have learned if he had stayed home in the United States, where all the safe factories were still working only with plate steel. Even better, Alizade was beginning to meet—and have dockside drinks with—some of the very people who were targeting those safes and vaults. Everyone there knew he was a former cop, he said, “but I told them I didn’t care what happened in England; I cared about keeping stuff safe in America. They thought that was funny.” He spent many long nights outdrinking English and European burglars alike, learning their tricks of the trade.
After a few more years in the U.K., Alizade left London to work in safe factories in the Netherlands, South Africa, and even Australia, getting a global perspective on the technicalities of vault design, from advanced metallurgy to the thermal properties of concrete. But things were beginning to change: many of the big foundries and factories he had been so enthusiastic about studying were now starting to shut down, their land sold out from beneath them and handed over to developers. The silver lining? As those factories began to close, a new space in the global market was opening up. Alizade saw an opportunity.
Before returning to the United States, and because of his unusually extensive international expertise, Alizade became a trusted fraud investigator for the international insurance giant Lloyd’s of London; this means that, even today, he will regularly be sent out around the world to inspect burglary insurance claims firsthand, analyzing popped locks, broken safes, and even tunnel jobs to verify that they have not been faked. Several times Alizade and I were only barely able to squeeze in a brief phone call before another of his trips to a new site in the UAE or Brazil, two growth markets he spoke about with genuine interest. Customers in Rio, because of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, had begun investing heavily in private fortifications for everything from suburban homes to police infrastructure, and the UAE was attracting in ever-increasing numbers wealth, tourists, and the criminals who prey on them.
These twin interests—physical security and extensive global travel—were fittingly summarized by his office décor. We were sitting in a cozy, wood-veneer room, its windowsills and shelves lined with the spent cases of large-caliber bullets, and a world map on the back wall was dotted with colored pins marking the countries where Alizade had so far traveled or done business. There were a lot of pins.
Since making his way back to the suburbs of New Jersey and founding CitySafe, Alizade has been on a tear of design innovation in architectural security. He has developed new, high-strength concrete recipes, mixing bauxite and metal wire into his concrete to form an intensely abrasive, harder-than-rock conglomerate that can resist .50-caliber sniper rounds and wreck almost any drill head applied to it. He has accumulated an extensive physical collection of destroyed safes, including entire sections of walls removed from crime scenes around New York, in order to study how the burglars broke in.
Early in his career, for example, Alizade had noticed that gold burglaries in Jackson Heights, Queens, were on the rise; the increasingly Indian population of the neighborhood places an unusually high cultural value on gold and had been keeping more and more of the precious metal locked up behind flimsy storefronts, relying on fallible architecture and imperfect safes. Many of those compromised safes and sections of walls completely sliced through by criminals were now here in Alizade’s warehouse, forming a kind of criminal cross section of Jackson Heights relocated to the forested hinterlands of New Jersey.
Seeing these architectural sections and broken safes in one place is a bit like walking into a private museum. Alizade’s collection rather strikingly resembled an avant-garde architectural display reminiscent of the work of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Today, Matta-Clark is known primarily for having cut whole sections out of existing buildings—even chainsawing an entire suburban house in two—then displaying the results in a New York gallery. This was not the first time the field of burglary and burglary prevention would bring to mind the work of Matta-Clark: the physical results of slicing through buildings, whether it’s performed as part of a bank heist or as part of an art installation, are often indistinguishable.
Most important, Alizade designs and fabricates a line of trademarked safe rooms he calls MODUL-X. He had realized during his cop days, he explained, that few people had in those years thought to strengthen anything but the front door of a house or nothing more than a bank’s teller window. People seemed to take it for granted that buildings would be used properly—not sidestepped, punctured, or otherwise worked around. You might have the strongest front door in the world, but if I can hammer my way through your wall in two minutes, what good does a dead bolt do? People were looking at architecture all wrong, he saw, acting as if criminals respect a building or treat it like a precious object.
Once he realized how easy it was for burglars simply to burst down through ceilings, or to slice their way through the drywall of a check-cashing facility to steal thousands of dollars, it also became clear how naïve the existing approach to architectural security had been. Something had to be done, and that meant rethinking where, through the eyes of burglars, the entrance to a building really was. Because it wasn’t the front door. It was a hole of their own making: a new entrance sliced through the unprotected surfaces that held our vulnerable world of doors in place. Burglars refuse to take that world on its own terms. They can go around it, through it, under it, making every crime a kind of tunnel job, worming their way through architecture while the rest of us just stand there, hypnotized. They’ve developed their own tools for this, as well, Alizade saw, not bothering with skeleton keys or lockpicks but misusing or redesigning architecture itself. Burglars are the M. C. Eschers of the built environment, approaching every wall and ceiling as a door-to-be, a connection waiting to happen, then making their vision real with the help of burning bars and Sawzalls.