A Burglar's Guide to the City (16 page)
Victoria Dengel, executive director of the General Society, met us in her office to give Towne and me a brief tour of the space. She told us that when the building was first constructed, it had an outdoor courtyard, which was eventually roofed over, absorbed into the building’s interior to serve as a dramatic location for the society’s library. This had a peculiar effect: the administrative offices, located in an older part of the original building, now look out at the other rooms through glass exterior windows and what appear to be old exit doors. The offices are a building within the building. Smiling out of apparent embarrassment, Dengel said that one day she had locked herself out of her office—but, thankfully, because those glass windows could easily be unlocked and slid open, she was able to break back into her own office, sneaking in like a burglar through the window frame and unlocking the office door from within. Amid all these locks, illegal entry seemed perversely de rigueur.
Dengel soon left us alone to examine the displays, and Towne took on the mantle of temporary museum guide with visible relish. He led me nearly lock by lock through the entire collection, describing the inner workings of each and narrating, step by step, how they were meant to operate. We were not allowed to handle the actual mechanisms, which meant that Towne would look at each device the way a lepidopterist might look at pinned butterflies: he would lean in, concentrate, and, in an assured voice, start describing how something might work, but then—“Oh!” he’d exclaim like a character from a Sherlock Holmes story, and he’d start all over again, with different emphases, speaking faster, amazed and sometimes literally laughing from surprise and delight as he finally figured out how a particular locking sequence would most likely have worked. Towne would then talk me through the exact steps by which that lock could be opened—and explain, in equal detail, how it could probably be picked.
We moved from lock to lock, giving some only fleeting attention, before—“Oh!” Another realization with Towne’s accompanying cry, and we’d both crouch down in front of another case. He was remarkably quick at determining which elements were integral to a lock’s action and which were just decorative metalwork—swirls of frivolous brass added for aesthetics—and he’d launch from there into a series of assumptions about what each lever, tooth, or wheel might do. Sequences would build; it was like listening to someone recount an elaborate chess game, narrating moves and countermoves with one eye always on what would happen a few more steps down the line. He would describe things to me in precisely detailed sequences, hoping I would come to see these intricate geometries the way he could, every metal-on-metal contact and even the tiniest of grooved surfaces invisible within the lock itself. For Towne, each lock could clearly be blown up to the scale of a megastructure, a palace the size of a city block, its inner gates and cylinders like cavernous hallways and rooms his mind could then wander through. He seemed to hold a detailed, three-dimensional model of each lock in his head, and he could manipulate it back and forth, round and round, like a hologram rotating in space.
A catalog of the Mossman locks was published in 1928, written by Alfred A. Hopkins. Like Towne, Hopkins was a true enthusiast for the subject; indeed, his book was called
The Lure of the Lock
, as if he were aware that locks possessed a strange attraction (and that those charms were perhaps something that ought to be resisted). He describes the locks as “handsome,” “remarkable,” and “extraordinary.” Also like Towne, Hopkins was not afraid to admit when he did not necessarily know how a given lock was meant to work, pointing out when his descriptions began to veer into speculation and conjecture. The interior of a lock “seems” to operate a certain way, he’ll write, or he’ll explain that he tried to ascertain how another lock worked but that those attempts were “without success.”
Hopkins also goes out of his way to discuss the burgeoning arms race that had developed, even before his own era, pitting lock designers and vault architects against canny burglars intent on breaking through their most ambitious defenses. As early as the 1920s, and presumably far earlier, a design war unfolded, waged between defense and offense. It was “a war that knows no armistice,” an article in the book’s back matter moans, fought endlessly between “the planners of safes and vaults, and the safe, vault and bank robbers.” Various battles and skirmishes in this ongoing clash were described in the “Mossman Papers”: newspaper clippings, leaflets, and technical papers meticulously filed away by John M. Mossman himself and only partially digitized at the time of Towne’s and my meeting. Mossman seemed obsessed with bank crime, I noticed, having saved articles of even the most fleeting relevance to major breakins, including some that involved George Leonidas Leslie, such as the great Manhattan Savings Institution heist of 1878.
Towne knew the papers well. Toward the end of our visit, Victoria Dengel reappeared to ask how everything was going, and he enthusiastically asked if we could see some of those old books and manuscripts. Dengel was more than happy to oblige—but quickly discovered that the key for those cabinets had been misplaced. Visibly concerned, she joked that she might have to ask Towne to pick the lock—something he said he was very willing to do. Towne began to explain exactly how he’d pick it, down to the specific tools he would need, even asking Dengel if she had the necessary tensioning tool (she did not). I was a bit taken aback by this display of enthusiasm, as the lock was currently in use—an explicit no-no in terms of the moral code of locksport—and, perhaps more important, because Towne would have been breaking New York City ordinances. Thankfully, though, after a short discussion over walkie-talkie and before any moral lines were irreparably crossed, the missing key was located by the building’s maintenance crew.
We spent a little more than an hour looking through some of Mossman’s voluminous private archives. Towne’s eye for editorial detail came out as he sifted through the bound books and loose documents, looking for things he either wanted to show me or to see for himself. He had, after all, once edited a small zine called
NDE
, or
Non-Destructive Entry
, and he was also kicking off a new project, the X-Lock Project. In this entirely archival undertaking, Towne is attempting to recover—in some cases, even reconceive—patents for locks lost in a catastrophic fire at the U.S. Patent Office in 1836. Those lost patents are an obsession for Towne—in public lectures, he refers to it as his “personal mission” to piece back together as many of the forgotten locks of American history as he can, hoping to restore them in the record of the U.S. Patent Office. This is as much detective work as it is speculative mechanical design, as it requires Towne not only to discover impossibly obscure bits of paperwork that might help flesh out what locks existed, when they were invented, by whom, and how they operated, but also to conjecturally reproduce their inner mechanics in the absence of hard historical data.
It felt, not for the first time, like Towne was looking for something far larger than just a complete record of lock patents lost to fire, that he had embarked on something much more metaphoric than a forensic understanding of how certain locks might work. These devices had taken on an almost mystical status, it seemed, becoming more like relics or charms, complex objects that seemed to prove for him that humans are capable of great feats of creativity and invention when they finally apply themselves. Someone once joked on Twitter that Towne was “a machine for turning locks into anthropology.” Locks meant something to him in a literal sense, in that they were mechanical messages passed down across human generations—provided you knew how to read them. No wonder recovering the lost patents of locks was so important to him; they were like hieroglyphs. He was standing in the shadows of history, trying, not always successfully, to interpret this language for others.
I let myself get lost in his descriptions of “x-locks” and patent diagrams, of forgotten documents and papers yet to be digitized, as if listening to a rabbi describe the exact dimensions of the Temple of Solomon—a mythical work of architecture that probably never existed yet is still, even today, a spur for intensely esoteric arguments over its every spatial detail. All the while, Towne and I flipped through the crumbling sheets and cracked bindings of a part of Mossman’s archive normally kept away from public view.
Even Mossman, designer of newfangled vaults, had been fixated on heists and burglaries, I said, pointing to several stories and news clippings saved in his papers. To what extent are burglars the ultimate lock-pickers? I asked. Is locksport, I wondered aloud, something of a gateway drug for people intent on thwarting dead ends or crossing boundaries? I couldn’t quite bring myself to phrase it this way, but what I wanted to know was, is locksport basically a training ground for burglars?
Towne, not one to hide his displeasure, knew exactly what I meant—and he seemed deeply, even morosely, unimpressed by the question. Clearly, he—indeed, almost all locksport enthusiasts—had been asked this multiple times, like heavy-metal fans having to defend themselves against yet another accusation of Satan worship in the suburbs.
In retrospect, I see how naïve a question it was—how naïve all of my assumptions were about locksport—but Towne, to his credit, patiently explained to me how an interest in picking locks was by no means the same thing as an interest in stealing other people’s property. The two are entirely unrelated, he emphasized. It would be more accurate to think of locksport enthusiasts as like an organized puzzle-solving group: people united by a shared ambition to understand and solve specific technical challenges that happened to take the form of locks. It was about understanding how a mechanical object worked; it was not about how to enrich oneself by robbing others. This was morally clear to him, and he reminded me of what he had said earlier, that locksport has a code: again, you never pick a lock that isn’t yours, without explicit permission to do so. Using lockpicking skills to become a better burglar would be a clear and obvious betrayal of the sport—I couldn’t help but point out, however, that there would be little to stop you. You’re not supposed to learn karate to become better at mugging people, but there’s always a risk that the wrong kind of person will sign up for martial arts.
In any case, Towne continued, and this was painfully obvious by the time he said it, a burglar simply isn’t going to sit there listening to every pin and tumbler inside your front-door lock, artfully finessing his way into your house. Even professional locksmiths, Towne pointed out, usually avoid picking any lock to open it; it would take too long. They’ll just drill through your lock (collecting a much higher fee, now that they need to replace it)—and that’s assuming the door they’re trying to get through has an analog lock in the first place. I was reminded of an anecdote from cat burglar Bill Mason, who once convinced an international lock-manufacturing company to send him a digital master key that would work for an entire hotel in South Florida. Faced with digital smart locks and even biometrics, lockpicking is a weirdly anachronistic activity.
Towne wanted me to understand that locks are more like objects to be contemplated: hypnotic knots of gears and teeth that exert a visible spell on people intent on understanding them. It was like appreciating the inner workings of an ornate but, in this era of Apple, obsolete Swiss watch, or geeking out over the internal gears and counterweights of a grandfather clock. Another, harsher way to put this would be that locksport is basically useless: it is less an example of cutting-edge contemporary security research and more a kind of amateur antiques society, more romantic and even nostalgic than it is tactical.
You’ll see, was Towne’s overall message—but not until you start doing it yourself. Pick a few locks, he suggested, and burglary will be the last thing on your mind.
Secret Keys Hidden in the Objects Around Us
TOOOL was founded in the Netherlands by security researcher and lock expert Barry Wels. TOOOL describes itself as “a growing group of enthusiasts interested in locks, keys and ways of opening locks without keys,” and now has a handful of chapters around the world. It runs free monthly workshops at various locations throughout the United States, from Austin to Los Angeles, the Bay Area to Philadelphia. Chicago also has a chapter.
On a windy evening punctuated by mist and light rain, my wife and I drove out to a quiet residential neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest periphery, passing endless low-slung warehouses and new brick lofts. That month’s TOOOL gathering was being hosted in a space called Pumping Station: One, or PS:One. PS:One is a six-thousand-square-foot, garage-like space with a ramshackle meeting room in front. It is furnished with old couches and some worktables. A small warehouse full of equipment stands in back, with the air of a permanent Maker Faire. Scanners, 3-D printers, welding stations, multiple laptop computers, custom-made plywood bunks and shelves, and other random pieces of gear await their next user; these assorted bits and bobs included a half-assembled DIY vending machine, a remade soldering iron that burned images into wood, and some behemoth piece of machinery—more like a stranded whale—in the far background that I was unable to learn anything about. By the time we all left, a little before 10:00 p.m., the back room was still buzzing. Empty beverage cans proudly touting their drink’s caffeine content seemed as good an indication as any that the folks chipping away at their latest projects were used to tinkering well into the early morning.
Our instructors that night were Patrick Thomas, his wife, Krystal, and John—known as Jack—Benigno. The other attendees included two teenage boys who had driven in from the suburbs—apparently more than an hour each way—a few couples in their late twenties, and a handful of enthusiasts who had come armed with their own, self-made picks. At one point, all the action in the room stopped so we could admire a set of handmade, bamboo-handled picks brought in by one of the attendees; we passed the set around to whistles of admiration.
