A similar tactic worked in February 2006 on the other side of the world, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, police raided a bank where hostages were being held—only to find a hole chipped through a concrete wall in the basement. An iron plate had been bolted across it from the other side. The burglars had not only prepared this escape route for themselves—a tunnel leading down into the city’s storm sewers, then on to a nearby river—but they had sealed it behind them to prevent anyone from following.
However, for the most part, any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve
caught
. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study.
Rather than just watch more heist films or read another bookshelf of crime thrillers, if I wanted to learn something useful about the art and science of fleeing crime scenes, I would need to take a different approach.
I flew to Las Vegas.
*
“Urban Escape & Evasion” is a three-day tactical workshop dedicated to training the general public—with an emphasis on international business travelers—on how to avoid being kidnapped, how to escape from captivity if you are unfortunately nabbed, and how to navigate your way through unfamiliar urban terrain. Though it was not explicitly aimed at aspiring burglars, I wanted to see what the course had to say about
getting away
—whether the lessons of escape and evasion might offer new skills for successfully fleeing a crime scene.
We met in a La Quinta hotel on the northernmost outskirts of the city, near the entrance to Nellis Air Force Base. This is far beyond the normal tourist geography of the Las Vegas Strip; gone are the bright lights and ritzy casinos, as a landscape of discount liquor stores and half-empty strip malls trails off into the desert, the towers of downtown Las Vegas barely visible on the horizon. New subdivisions have pushed their way here over the past fifteen years, but they look and feel more like speculative real estate deals still waiting to break even rather than lived-in communities. Unpredictable waves of dust and street litter would whirl up and blow across the hotel parking lot.
The class is run by a company called OnPoint Tactical, which is one guy, Kevin Reeve. He has trained Navy SEALs and police SWAT teams; along with tracker Tom Brown, Jr., Reeve’s former mentor, he also helped prepare actor Benicio Del Toro for the role of a former Special Ops soldier gone rogue in the forests of Oregon for a 2003 film called
The Hunted
. Reeve’s overall goal with the escape-and-evasion course was to take militarized skills of tracking, camouflage, and evasion, which had previously been seen as more appropriate for wilderness areas, and apply them, instead, to an urban environment. To date, the course has been taught in cities across the United States, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City, to name only a few.
The specific premise of the workshop is that you are traveling overseas on business. You are in an unfamiliar environment that you can’t navigate on your own and where you do not know the local customs. Something goes horribly wrong—you’re kidnapped, there’s a terrorist attack, or maybe the grid fails, plunging the city into multiple days of darkness—and you have to escape. You have to
bug out
, as it’s known in the peculiar lingo of survivalists. We were repeatedly told that this could happen anywhere: in Phoenix or New York, as much as in Baghdad or Mexico City.
On the first day, Reeve and a co-instructor wheeled in a huge plastic bin full of military gear. We were all given lockpicking sets, handcuffs, bobby pins, and various other bits and pieces, including parachute cord—otherwise known as paracord—and plastic zip ties. Most of the workshop consisted of desk learning: we sat indoors and looked at slide shows, flipped through some instructional papers, and discussed building sieges. We learned how to barricade hotel doors from the inside and how to climb our way to safety through windows and over fences using short bamboo poles known as Kali sticks as makeshift ladders. After a brief lunch break, we turned down the lights to watch kidnapping videos on YouTube, allegedly filmed by agents of al-Qaeda.
Reeve, who has a curious tendency to close his eyes, stop talking, put his hand on the bridge of his nose, concentrate for several seconds in silence as if fighting off a headache, and then start speaking again, spent the better part of an hour enumerating all the obstacles we might encounter in an urban environment. Listening to the ensuing discussion, you would have thought most cities in the United States had already gone feral and that we were perhaps only days away from a civilization-ending event. Indeed, an atmosphere of paranoia was cultivated throughout the workshop, stoked as a motivational fire for getting us excited about the ensuing exercises.
Alongside advice for determining the cardinal directions in an unfamiliar city without using a compass, we were told how to blend in, warned about the difficulty of caching things (that is, hiding or burying goods around an environment for later use, something we briefly experimented with in a Walmart parking lot), and advised where to go for medical treatment if we were injured on the run (think veterinarians, not the emergency room). Not all of this would be useful in getting away from a burglary or bank heist, but a range of spatial tips for evading trackers could be directly mapped onto the postcrime getaway. We constructed caltrops, for example, using nothing more than bolt cutters and some chain-link fencing. Caltrops are small spiked stars, like game jacks, that can be dumped out onto a road, ready to pierce and deflate the tires of any cars driving behind you. They are similar to the spike strips deployed by police for shredding the tires of a suspect’s car.
Then out came the zip ties. Things became literally hands-on at this point as we learned a variety of methods for breaking out of physical constraints, including police handcuffs, plastic zip ties, paracord, and duct tape. Duct tape was by far the easiest, and Reeve’s instructions for defeating the material came with the unexpected benefit of triggering an old memory for another workshop attendee. The only female participant in the group began telling us about an experience from her childhood, in a way that implied all of us had undoubtedly been through the same thing. Her mother, she said, used to duct-tape her and her siblings together into a large knot, then leave them like that for an hour or more at a time. Had the woman known back then how easy it was to escape from duct tape, she said, perhaps she would not have spent so many hours duct-taped to her siblings. Unsure of how to reply, I laughed—then saw the expression on her face and immediately regretted it.
The final stretch of the workshop was an inversion of where we began, looking at how to navigate unfamiliar urban environments and find shelter in abandoned buildings. We learned how to hot-wire cars, how to make improvised weapons out of everyday materials, such as credit cards and hiking socks, and we got down to the brass tacks of how to sneak through a city’s streets without being seen (or at least captured). The advice here was interesting, if also rudimentary. Dress like a local, we were told. Keep your head down. Avoid being memorable or visually unique. Blend in. This was called “reducing your signature.” Reeve advised us to tune in to different parts of the city—in essence, this boiled down to seeing the urban environment the way George Leonidas Leslie would have seen it, as a welcoming labyrinth of shadows and protective blind spots. Reeve urged us to study maps of future destinations long before arriving. Find “workable hide locations,” our coursepack advised, not necessarily by going somewhere alone, but by deliberately infiltrating another group of people. The first rule of a successful getaway is not to look as if you’re trying to get away.
By the time I was scheduled to head back into downtown Las Vegas, the sun had set. We had just spent two days sitting indoors with the blinds closed, watching YouTube videos of al-Qaeda kidnappings and sucking down sixteen-ounce energy drinks and chocolate-brownie-flavored Clif Bars. I could escape from handcuffs with my hands behind my back, blindfolded, and I could hide random things in a parking lot so that only I was able to find them the next day. To imply that we all had somehow been transformed into secret agents by this weekend together at a La Quinta would be absurd, yet the urge to double-check all my mirrors for a tail and to engage in gratuitous displays of evasive driving—taking unexpected turns and a much longer, indirect route back to my hotel—was real and hard to resist.
This new sense of power over my surroundings reminded me of a great essay by designer Matt Jones, about pop-culture action hero Jason Bourne. Bourne, Jones explains, moved through a world of densely connected urban environments, cityscapes “that can be hacked and accessed and traversed—not without effort, but with determination, stolen vehicles and the right train timetables.” Jones memorably suggests, “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries, and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body armor.” The city itself becomes a weapon, a multitool—or, in Jones’s words, “Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower. A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn timetable are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities.” Seen this way, Jason Bourne’s superpower is simply that he uses cities better than you and I; he is the ultimate urbanist, a low-tech master of the getaway.
Together We’ll Go Far
When I arrived back home in New York, I was carrying a new pair of handcuffs, a lockpicking set, some paracord, a handful of bobby pins, and something of an obsession. I was daydreaming about what I might do if the grid went down—if my wife and I had to enact our own urban-scale getaway—but more to the point, I started wondering what would happen if I decided to put all my burglary research to work.
Subtly, imperceptibly, I found myself becoming attuned to the presence of surveillance cameras and security guards, studying even the people ahead of me in line at my local bank branch the way an anthropologist might take field notes in an exotic locale, noting who seemed likely to resist if I announced a takeover robbery or how I’d get out of the bank and, if I managed to, what I’d find out there on the street. I noticed that the traffic light outside was timed, for example, and that someone could use it as a metronome or stopwatch to schedule a burglary; one could flee just as it was about to turn through its next cycle, using Manhattan’s in-built traffic patterns and pedestrian rhythms as a screen for a getaway.
One afternoon while taking a break from work, I was standing in line at the ATM when two police officers walked into the bank lobby behind me. I remembered, as soon as I saw them, that I still had my handcuffs, lockpicks, bobby pins, an emergency glass-breaking device, and, on that specific day, a heavily underlined copy of
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief
by Bill Mason stuffed into my backpack. I suddenly felt nervous. What would happen if I was targeted for NYC’s infamous “stop and frisk” campaign or, worse, if I reached into my bag to retrieve the checks I was about to deposit and a jumble of handcuffs and lockpicks spilled out onto the marble bank floor? Surely this weird assemblage of tools—I was standing inside a bank!—would constitute “intent”?
It had become so normal to travel with this stuff—to walk around New York with criminals’ memoirs and burglars’ tools in my bag—that I had forgotten I even had them in my possession. It was so easy to convince myself that everyone else was thinking like this—that every building represented a puzzle to solve or an obstacle course to break free from—that I’d lost sight of the peculiarity of my recent investigations.
Pretending to be looking for something, I pushed the lockpicks aside and shoved my handcuffs farther down in the bag. By the time I was done depositing checks, the police had walked out the door, and I was free to get away however I wanted. I chose the subway.
BURGLARY REQUIRES ARCHITECTURE
Suburban Interlude
While I was writing this book, my in-laws were burgled. The small suburban house in which my wife grew up, in the leafy world of culs-de-sac and roundabouts southwest of London, was broken into by what was later determined to be a group of fourteen-year-olds. They were never caught.
The temptation in writing a book like this has been to root for the underdog, to crown an unexpected spatial antihero who, as my evidence would show, had simply been misunderstood all along. The burglar is just a person—no, a genius!—who happens to use his or her talents in a morally troubling way. But we shouldn’t hold illegality against them—indeed, we should hold that
for
them, I thought I might argue, because we would never have discovered the true potential of the built environment had it not been for someone willing to break the rules. In fact, we should celebrate the burglar, this new archetype, this devil in the details of the built environment, a mythic figure who shows us what architecture, all along, could really be and, more important, how we should have been using it all along.
But that is too simplistic an inversion, and the upside-down ethics of a position like that quickly become impossible to sustain. Burglars, as we’ve seen—and as you probably already suspected from the beginning—are not supermen or wonder women, dark lords of architectural analysis. To say otherwise, even with some of the extraordinary stories we’ve read so far, would be absurd. Burglars are not always stupid—again, think of all we’ve read, think of all we’ve learned—but for the most part, if you’ll pardon my French, they’re assholes. They wreck the lives and security of others for as little as a necklace—often far less—leaving psychological scars no insurance policy can cover.