A Burglar's Guide to the City (22 page)

While going back through his case, including a review of his behavior at the Brown Creek Correctional Institution before he made his escape, Sergeant Scheimreif found that Manchester had apparently spent a lot of time in his cell drawing up plans for his future dream home. Not a mansion on a tropical island or a fantasy castle somewhere in the Alps, his dream house included a maze of trapdoors and what Sergeant Scheimreif called “escape holes.”

Secret passages, “escape holes,” apartments hidden in the walls, and makeshift entrances sliced down through ceilings: this was the architectural world Roofman lived within and moved through, a universe of spatial possibilities tucked away deep inside our own. Sergeant Scheimreif laughed and deadpanned, “He definitely had a different way of looking at things.”

*

It should be obvious by now that burglars have their own peculiar ways of using the built environment, not only in how they choose particular targets but in how they navigate buildings from within. However, the predictability of a building’s interior and the events that take place inside it can also come in handy for the police.

Retired NYPD detective sergeant Michael Codella’s book,
Alphaville
, is a red-blooded police memoir set in the public housing projects of New York’s Alphabet City (named after its avenues: A, B, C, and D) during the heroin days of the 1980s. While it won’t win many awards for political correctness, it includes several interesting architectural observations. The spatial details recounted in Codella’s book make it feel at times less like the autobiography of a retired detective and more like an example of some new, experimental literary genre: architectural criticism by cop, or how easily riled NYPD detectives see and inhabit the built environment.

Codella explains how a special police task force was created in New York back in 1934—originally known as the New York City Housing Authority Police Department, and today as the NYPD Housing Bureau—specifically in conjunction with the inauguration of public housing projects in the city. These were buildings so bewildering—as if the cloning tool in Photoshop had taken on a sinister mind of its own—that, without their own specifically dedicated police force, they would have been all but impossible to patrol. That a new type of building required a new type of police force, with its own techniques of surveillance and its own tactical understanding of the built environment, underscores that an architectural design can present previously unheard-of possibilities for criminal behavior.

The irony here, Codella explains, is that the types of megaprojects most often funded and built by the state inadvertently created pockets of immunity to further state intervention and police control. Public housing became an arena in which the city simply “tried out some new architectural experiment on the mostly immigrant poor,” Codella suggests, confining those residents inside meandering architectural labyrinths where the state could no longer reach them.

Codella describes a monstrous residential complex known only as the Site Four and Five Houses: “Site Four and Five was a multistory poured concrete rabbit warren so sprawling and generic that even seasoned cops would get completely lost in its hallways or not be able to give the correct address for where they were when calling Central for backup.”

If we recall LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette’s interest in clarifying the city’s system of house numbers and addresses, Codella is just describing the indoor equivalent: making state-funded megastructures numerically legible to the police forces tasked with patrolling them. Even navigating their behemoth interiors required tactical innovation. Residential tower blocks require what are known as vertical patrols, for example, during which officers will walk the stairways up and down, often navigating only by flashlight, as dead bulbs can go for days or weeks at a time without being replaced. Codella describes how he and his fellow officers would pass acoustic signals to one another by tapping their nightsticks on the walls and railings of stairwells, echoing out to their colleagues somewhere else in the titanic shafts.

However, all this architectural monotony had at least one silver lining for the police. Codella points out that the “impersonal design” of the housing projects meant that repetitive floor plans were stacked one atop the other seemingly without end, so officers could quickly become familiar with the kinds of apartments they might be called to. These honeycombs of near-identical homes meant that officers could have a relatively good idea of the most likely hiding places, whether they were looking for the subject, the subject’s weapons, or drugs. The police could therefore refine their tactical responses through sheer repetition, meaning that, ideally, they would not be taken by surprise if someone leaped out from behind a closet door—because the cops would have known that closet was there and it had probably happened to them before.

The repetitiveness and similarity of these individual apartments meant that NYPD Housing Police were something like the Jeffery Manchesters of law enforcement, always storming into the same space in different locations on different days, trapped in a loop not of crime but of its interruption. Unlike Roofman, however, who intervened at a precise moment in an established pattern to commit his Groundhog Day–like burglaries, pulling off the same crime again and again across the country, the police were having the opposite experience: seemingly always breaking up indistinguishable incidents, over and over, kicking their way ever deeper into a kaleidoscope of identical apartments for another drug bust that looked just like yesterday—and last week and the month before—as if crime itself were a broken record, a repetition addiction, a compulsion that only leads to more of itself, ticking away behind closed doors all over the city.

Rhythms of Vulnerability

The question of how deep architectural interiors can be monitored and controlled extends far beyond the realm of the residential. Museums, hotels, and casinos, not to mention pieces of urban infrastructure, such as subways, train stations, and even streets themselves, have almost imperceptibly been transformed into unwitting film studios, recorded not by Hollywood equipment but the high-tech gear of the security industry. Surveillance cameras blur the line not just between public and private, but between architectural structures and optical installations, turning entire casino interiors, for example, into carefully designed stage sets specifically meant to steer you in front of the lens.

Jason England is a gregarious expert in sleight-of-hand magic: dexterous techniques for distracting your target and beating the house. He is also unusually insightful about the strategic, rule-based vulnerabilities inherent in certain games—from dice to poker—and how each requires a different kind of security, whether that means electromagnetic sensors, radio-frequency devices, or simply CCTV.

Speaking to me from his home in Las Vegas, world capital of fantasy heists, England opined that the original architects of that city’s iconic casinos “gave almost no thought to security while designing these older buildings. Instead, security managers now have to find a way to retroactively build choke points into the layout and funnel everybody past high-resolution cameras.” The result “might not be great buildings, in an architectural sense—but they are great at taking pictures of you.”

Those cameras are everywhere. ATM cameras are wired directly to the casino’s central security network; check-cashing cameras catch every detail of your appearance (even down to your signature); cameras are on the way to the bathrooms; cameras are at the tops of escalators. Indeed, escalators reveal one of the casino world’s preferred tactics. Subtly guiding people onto an escalator almost immediately upon entering a casino might seem to be an example of bad architectural design, but it works as an ingenious security protocol. Nearly every visitor to the building dutifully lines up to have his or her picture taken, not just once but multiple times, from nearly every conceivable angle, as people are carried from the entrance to the gaming floor.

Recall Bernard Tschumi’s point that architecture is constantly making subtle, even imperceptible, demands of its users, pushing them to behave or inhabit the building in certain ways, and now think of all those casino escalators filling up like cattle cars. “Every escalator ride gives them thirty more seconds to take pictures of you,” England said. The building itself is a camera.

Darrell Clifton is head of security at the Circus Circus hotel and casino in Reno;
Security
magazine has named him one of the “most influential people in security.” Circus Circus is in an old building, designed with anything but security in mind, but Clifton patiently walked me through the many ways he and his security teams can mitigate this. He likes to think of the building in terms of layers, with certain key spaces (cash rooms, retail stores) at the center of concentric rings of security.

At the outermost edge of these layers, Clifton thinks of landscape architecture as a useful security barrier, even choosing certain species and planting regimes not for aesthetics but for their ability to interfere with criminal activity. A thorny plant called trifoliate orange—nicknamed the Rambo bush—is sold as a low-cost living barrier. It is marketed under the name Living Fence. Trifoliate orange is so dense and fast-growing that it can stop speeding vehicles; it is used by the U.S. military to help secure the perimeters of missile silos and armories; and its razor-sharp thorns make it a great fit for domestic security needs. Clifton pointed out that protecting every single external wall and window with its own dedicated security camera is too expensive, which means that something as simple as a thorny plant—even a cluster of rosebushes—can be enough to deter anyone but the most determined criminal from coming near.

That said, it is in the interiors of these structures where security protocols become most spatially interesting. Clifton described the innermost layers of casino security in terms of views and sight lines. Camera placement and interior decoration go hand in hand, as furniture, gaming stations, and retail cash registers are all coordinated for maximum visual efficiency. When you walk across a casino floor or step into a side shop to buy a bottle of Coke, you are actually navigating a carefully calibrated scene assembled not for the eyes of architecture critics but for the optical benefit of security teams, who are watching it all unfold from their command center hidden somewhere else on-site.

Jes Stewart, head of security at the nearby Nevada Museum of Art and a longtime colleague of Clifton’s, also emphasized this point. Stewart led me through the museum one afternoon as he described the various invisible forms of security that have been installed there, hidden in the walls, floors, and ceilings. He explained that even the building’s air-conditioning system can pose a security risk, not by offering devious cat burglars a secret route through the walls but by fluttering loose paperwork left behind on someone’s desk at the end of the day. Memos, receipts, and other papers, if not secured at day’s end, can be blown onto the floor by the HVAC system, setting off motion detectors and making the security team think an intruder is on the loose. Believe it or not—he laughed with frustration—it happens.

We spent some time in the museum’s administrative control room, where Stewart let me operate an outdoor PTZ camera—or pan-tilt-zoom—which was so powerful I could zoom in to read the license plates of cars parked nearly four blocks away. Interestingly, this is also how the intermediary urban zones between downtown buildings can be patrolled and linked together without installing publicly funded CCTV; the building, as Jason England pointed out, is a camera, but it’s also filming the streets all around it. A sufficiently powerful internal surveillance network is also a useful tool for spying on the city.

Stewart explained that museums, like casinos, also use choke points and funnels to help limit the routes people will use to circulate through a building. Even if you manage to lift that Mark Rothko painting off the wall, he joked, you’re still going to have to carry it down corridors or through rooms where the cameras are all ready to film you. Often, he said, these cones of vision are specifically mandated by the insurance companies that underwrite exhibitions or shows. This means not only that the layout of rooms, hallways, and artworks is at least partially orchestrated for the visual benefit of a hidden security crew, but also that the framing and composition of a specific scene as viewed on CCTV is, in effect, paid for by an insurance company.

In all of these examples—the casino escalator revealed as a massive photographic device or the museum interior seen as a series of deliberately framed tracking shots choreographed from afar by the insurance industry—architectural security relies on reinforcing and controlling visitor circulation. It means knowing exactly how someone can move from one room to the next—and then being there waiting for that person to arrive at their next destination.

The response of the spatial criminal would, then, be to operate through stealth: to avoid those cameras, to refuse the building’s suggested paths of circulation, and, in a sense, to beat the house through spatial sleight of hand and architectural misdirection. Unless you are deliberately trying to call attention to yourself for the purpose of distracting the security guards, infiltrating a building’s interior without being detected is central to the successful commission of a burglary. This theme is explored to great effect in the worlds of art, cinema, and gaming.

Take, for example, a project by Canadian artist Janice Kerbel that focuses exclusively on surreptitious movement through architectural space. Called
Home Fittings
, Kerbel’s project consists of nothing more than annotated floor plans that show how a person could navigate the inside of a creaky, old Victorian building without making a sound—stepping only on solidly fixed hardwood boards, for example. Kerbel also notes where a person could stand without casting any shadows. The results deserve comparison to Bernard Tschumi’s
Manhattan Transcripts
: they are architectural plans marked up to show potentially illicit human events in space.