A Burglar's Guide to the City (10 page)

I was reminded of a strange book called
Local Code
by architect Michael Sorkin.
Local Code
was Sorkin’s attempt to design a whole city from scratch—with one big twist. The whole thing had been written as if it were the byzantine, nearly impossible to follow codes and regulations for an entire, hypothetical metropolis. The effect is like stumbling upon the source code for
SimCity
. Sorkin’s exhaustively made point was that, if you know everything about a given metropolis, from its plumbing standards to its parking requirements, its sewer capacity to the borders of its school districts, then you could more or less accurately imagine the future form of that city from the ground up.

What was so interesting about Dakswin’s approach was that he, too, had been poring over the city’s fire codes and building regulations, as if reading a sacred text, and that he was doing so not as a prospective architect or city planner, but as a burglar. The keys to the city were in its code—and Dakswin was determined to find them.

He introduced me to the most common tools he would use for gaining entry to different rooms and buildings. He told me stories of hitting hotels during major business conventions, and how easy it was to spoof the magnetic key reader in each door. The deep interiors of buildings such as hotels tended to be relatively unprotected, in his experience; this meant that once you got past the entrances and lobbies and had wandered farther into a building’s core, you could expect to find fewer people walking around, whether they were guards on patrol or residents taking out the garbage. Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason.

The Internet has been a godsend to burglars, Dakswin pointed out. He had been going online to research different neighborhoods, zooming in to see specific buildings on Google Street View to scope out everything from window heights—and thus potential routes into someone’s home—to the presence of fences and shrubbery that could provide welcome cover. Even more useful, he said, had been the rise of building-industry websites such as Emporis. Emporis describes itself as “a global provider of building information” that “collects data on buildings of high public and economic value.” It’s practically tailor-made for burglars.

Dakswin told me that he would turn to Emporis only when putting together high-stakes burglaries, what he described as jobs “where you need to know what the walls are made of.” You might need to know how thick the walls are, for example, because you have to drill through one, and you want to be sure you bring the right equipment, or you want to be sure that the other walls are thick enough that you’re not going to be heard. Emporis will point you to the specific construction companies who built that high-rise or that apartment block, and “they have records of everything,” Dakswin said. “They basically have it all laid out on paper. They built these buildings. It’s a matter of getting those records from them, either through persuasion or through other means,” even if that means “breaking in to where they keep their records and getting your hands on those.” From Dakswin’s experience, construction companies are not very security conscious. “You’d be shocked if you knew how easy it was,” he told me.

Other times, you don’t need to go to nearly as much effort to get the spatial information you need. Before new buildings begin construction, Dakswin pointed out, they have to be approved by the city. So building designs are filed at city hall or even in the municipal water department. Then it’s just a question of social engineering, of convincing someone else that you need those plans. Dakswin described how essential this has been for him in the past: he actually registered a fake company—he wouldn’t say where, but I had to assume it was in Toronto—with the generic name of a legal services firm. He then contacted a local construction company saying that he needed to obtain a set of blueprints due to an impending lawsuit over broken water pipes in an apartment complex they had constructed. With his legally registered company, Dakswin got his hands on the blueprints—then used them to plan his way into the building.

The longer we talked, however, the more it seemed clear that Dakswin had retired from burglary—or so he claimed—less because he was worried about getting caught and more out of an unexpected professional melancholy. He lamented that, to his mind, burglary seemed to have lost its cultural appeal, its romance, its hold on the popular imagination. Now people just steal PINs or send phishing e-mails. Dakswin is at least quantitatively right: burglary is on the decline. According to the NYPD, it has plummeted nearly 85 percent in the last twenty years alone in New York City. This is true to the surreal extent that international financial magazine
The Economist
ran a feature article in July 2013 asking, somewhat mournfully, “Where Have All the Burglars Gone?”

Dakswin seemed to long for the old feeling that intelligent, complex burglaries were still, if not increasing in number, at least keeping pace with other criminal statistics. He repeatedly claimed to feel that he was the last of a dying breed, someone once surrounded by colleagues—however anonymous or invisible they might have been—only to find himself now totally alone. He wasn’t happy about it.
Where have all the burglars gone?
For him, this was an existential dilemma, as if he had woken up to find himself the last fluent speaker of an extraordinary architectural language that no one else cared about or could even remember wanting to learn.

Then he told me one final story. He said he now owned a small family house in the country, maybe an hour and a half outside Toronto, where, every few weeks, he would install new types of alarm systems borrowed from work. This was both to familiarize himself with how they worked, so that he could troubleshoot any potential problems and answer technical questions from his clientele, but also, he said, so that he could test his skills in beating them. I laughed. Aren’t you retired? I asked, referring to his burglary career. He paused, then said he enjoyed the practice too much.

The Magic of Four Walls

As Mason and Dakswin both reveal, much of the work of a good burglar may already be done before ever setting foot inside the final target. That said, one of the most remarkable aspects of contemporary burglary law is the difficulty of determining when you have, in fact, entered a building.
Inside
,
outside
: these terms are by no means self-explanatory, and the exact moment of crossing an invisible plane from one to the other can be surprisingly hard to identify.

If breaking and entering requires someone to pass from one space into another, then at what point have I actually “entered” your house or office? Is it after I’ve walked fully into the middle of the room, or is it when even the barest tip of my shoe crosses the threshold? Conversely, have I really “broken in” if the front door was left ajar and I just casually stepped inside—or, say, if I’ve reached in through an open kitchen window? What if I grab something out of the passenger seat of a convertible with its top down parked outside on the street? Have I gone “inside” the car? How about if I take a shortcut across your front lawn on a rainy night, and while doing so, I knowingly pass beneath an overhang or walk under an awning—have I actually “entered” a space?

Unless you are Franz Kafka—or perhaps a quantum physicist—inside is inside and outside is something else entirely. Yet one of the peculiarities of burglary law is how it calls into question some of the most obvious and common beliefs we might have about what constitutes architecture—an interior versus an exterior, a private domain versus public space. A house, a shop, an apartment tower—sure, these are buildings. But a fenced-in garden, a houseboat, a backyard shed, even an unattended Jeep Wrangler—do these also constitute
buildings
and can they, too, be burglarized? Burglary has an uncanny spatial power, forcing us to rethink fundamental beliefs we might have about the built environment, from how we define a house to the way we might choose to move from one floor to another within a building.

This is because burglary, as we’ve seen,
requires architecture
: without an inside and an outside, there is no such thing as burglary. There is larceny—even petty theft, robbery, or vandalism—but burglary is a crime only possible in a world that has legally recognized walls and ceilings. This makes burglary spatially peculiar—and it leads to an interesting, if not entirely unsurprising, legal side effect. If to be accused of burglary requires you to have entered a work of architecture, then are we sure we all agree on what “architecture” is? An act apparently as clear-cut as entering a building quickly disappears down a rabbit hole of legal interpretation. Oddly enough, for example, the outermost limits of a private household are not universally established. The seemingly simple question of how a home is defined, and where a private interior ends, has instead led to a dizzying efflorescence of legal documentation, of arguments and counterarguments often hilariously overspecific in their examples and bewilderingly abstract in their imagery.

Burglary as defined by the FBI sounds relatively straightforward. It is “the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft. To classify an offense as a burglary, the use of force to gain entry need not have occurred.” So far, so good.

But at least two factors now complicate this definition. First, this is merely the federal definition of burglary. It is not necessarily the way that individual U.S. states will define the crime. Each state has its own, often highly elaborate, classification of burglary where the FBI’s misleadingly simple “unlawful entry of a structure” is endlessly overdefined, nearly word by word, from what constitutes “entry” to how we might recognize a “structure” when we think we see one.

The second problem is that the FBI’s definition presents us with an unusually succinct and streamlined description of burglary, one that buries the crime’s long and complex history. This is by necessity: overly complicated explanations of popular crimes would be a pointless, even dangerous distraction from the business of enforcement. But according to Anglo-American common law—the cumulative body of decisions and rulings agreed to and expanded upon by judges—burglary was originally only possible in a
household
or
dwelling
; the very word contains an etymological variant on the Latin
burgus
, for “castle” or “fortified home” (from which other words, such as
burgher
and even
borough
, also derive). Common law definitions of burglary also originally required the person to break into a house or dwelling
at night
. Giving historical burglary an oddly vampiric dimension, you could not, legally speaking, be a burglar while the sun was still out.

But let’s start with a car. In the February 2011 ruling of
State v. Beauchamp
, the Illinois Supreme Court was presented with an apparently simple spatial problem: they had to define where the inside began of a car whose rear window had been completely smashed. The contents of the damaged car had then been raided by a thief—or had it been a burglar? Had the person “entered” the car? An intact rear window would have made the distinction between inside and outside legally obvious—and the crime, therefore, clearly a burglary. However, with nothing there to serve as a physical threshold, how was the court to decide where the space outside the car should end and the inside of the car should begin? This would decide whether the case was theft or burglary, with substantial legal repercussions for the accused.

Here the notion of “breaking the close” comes in. Breaking the close means crossing the outer limits of a space, whether it be the private interior of a home or the inside of a parked car. As law blogger Nate Nieman, from the Northern Illinois University College of Law, explained, the Illinois Supreme Court’s answer to this dilemma was almost magical in its simplicity. The court, Nieman wrote, “answers this question by creating an imaginary plane which stretches across the open space of a ‘specific enclosure’ like a spider web.” The resulting imaginary plane would thus reseal the broken window, creating a legally recognized threshold that could serve as evidence in a court of law. Think of it as an invisible geometric shape perceptible only to lawyers—a conceptual pane of glass that might not have kept the rain out but could, for legal purposes, be used to define the original limits of the car’s interior. This is
the close
, and defining it is ultimately just a form of connecting the dots: drawing an imaginary line from the corner of an open window to the edge of a nearby wall to the front gate of a home garden, and so on.

Breaking the close thus constitutes entry into a “protected interior” or “specified enclosure,” Nieman writes, whether or not the close is a physical thing. The close can be a complex and entirely hypothetical mathematical shape—but if you narrate it correctly and if you justify your explanation, perhaps even using clever diagrams covered with arrows and dotted lines, then even purely speculative architectural forms can be admitted in court. The close is a kind of architectural fiction, an abstract shape whose legal recognition can determine whether the accused is guilty of burglary.

Despite offering this definitive explanation of the notion of the close, Nieman seems almost instantly wary of the narrative possibilities opened up by its creation—unconvinced by and deeply skeptical of the elaborate, invisible geometries that hopeful lawyers are now able to cast upon each other’s clients, like crystalline spells of hot air, in a ruthless attempt to win the case. Nieman warns that these spiderwebs of private space, described in minute detail, open the door to useless proliferations of unlimited, otherwise invisible shapes and combinations that might threaten the validity of burglary law itself. Like angels dancing on the head of a pin, this entire system of managing architectural edges, limited by nothing but a lawyer’s for-profit spatial creativity, “could eventually become unworkable when imaginations run wild in trying to draw the boundaries of these imaginary planes.”