A Burglar's Guide to the City (8 page)

A particularly evocative example of this phenomenon was pointed out by landscape architect Jessica Hall, coauthor of a blog called
LA Creek Freak
, in a 2006 interview with
LA Weekly
. Hall asked, “Do you know why there’s sometimes fog at the intersection of Beverly and Rossmore?” She was referring to a well-trafficked intersection near the Wilshire Country Club. This is “because there’s a perennial creek that runs through the country club there. It goes underground beneath Beverly, and comes up again on the other side.” This subterranean presence lets itself be known through a diaphanous mist in the air above. The city gives off signals, provided you know how to read them: something as innocuous as an early-morning fog bank might actually be a clue, revealing sewer tunnels or lost creeks in the neighborhood around you.

Thus, if you know the creeks and their routes, even after they have been encapsulated inside storm sewers, you also know clever and unexpected ways into the buildings above them. For a burglar—or bank bandits such as the Hole in the Ground Gang—these surface indications of underground geography can be used for nefarious purposes, to find ways to navigate the city and plan future heists, tracing old, buried streams until you reach your final target.

In addition to all this, Rehder explained, the Hole in the Ground Gang bandits would have needed intimate knowledge of the ground itself, the actual geology of Los Angeles. As LAPD lieutenant Doug Collisson, one of the men present on the day of the tunnel’s discovery, explained to the
Los Angeles Times
back in 1987, the heist “would have had to require some knowledge of soil composition and technical engineering. The way the shaft itself was constructed, it was obviously well-researched and extremely sophisticated.” Rehder goes further, remarking that when Detective Dennis Pagenkopp “showed crime-scene photos of the core bit holes” produced by the burglars drilling upward into the vault “to guys who were in the concrete-coring business, they whistled with professional admiration.”

In Rehder’s file “Tunnel Job” were a handful of glossy color photographs that seemed to have been taken quickly, with less-than-ideal lighting. Sometimes they weren’t even in focus. They showed bewildered FBI agents looking at a ransacked vault, the doors of its safe-deposit boxes torn asunder. Standing next to them were members of the LAPD Burglary Auto Theft Division (BAD), described by Rehder in his book as “an elite unit of fifteen or so detectives who specialized in high-end breakins and property theft: purloined payrolls, jewelry store burglaries, commercial safe-crackings, fine art thefts, high-profile heists of every description.”

The photographs also revealed how impressive the scale of the tunnel was. With its tight, snaking corridor chipped through the sandy ground of subterranean L.A., it bore an uncanny resemblance to the catacombs of Rome or Cappadocia. The tunnel torqued down and around and finally ended at the featureless concrete pipe of the storm sewer. The burglars had driven Suzuki four-wheelers through the claustrophobically tight sewer tunnels beneath West Hollywood, tunnels that were only barely wider than the four-wheelers themselves; the bandits would have been hunched over like horse jockeys, driving nearly blind beneath the city, navigating tight turns and hoping—praying—that they would not bump into any obstructions or hit a dead end.

Those four-wheelers were the workhorses of the entire operation, hauling equipment in and booty out—more than $172,000 in cash and as much as $2.5 million worth of personal belongings ripped from safe-deposit boxes. You can still see the open storm culvert that the crew used as their original point of entrance; it’s found just slightly north of the intersection of Nichols Canyon Road and Hollywood Boulevard. Although the FBI believes that this is where they lowered their four-wheelers into the storm sewer system, you can also follow this culvert north up Nichols Canyon until you get to a Department of Public Works drainage basin; with a sloping concrete ramp that leads straight into the culvert, this also affords a convenient entry point to the subterranean heart of Los Angeles.

In their tunneling, the Hole in the Ground Gang had to get rid of the more than three thousand cubic feet of loosely compacted earth. They achieved this through a quick bit of improvisational hydrology, constructing a small dam at the beginning of their work every night; this blocked the head of the storm sewer and caused even the smallest trickle of water in arid Los Angeles to build up—and up and up—throughout the night, while they dumped all the excavated dirt and sand farther down the sewer line. Then, upon breaking the dam—destroying this rogue plumbing in the darkness beneath Sunset Boulevard—the resulting torrent of water washed away all the debris (and, perhaps even more usefully, their footprints). Finally, explaining the flickering electrical supply in the bank and the shorted phone lines that led employees to suspect an electromagnetic poltergeist had taken up residence in the walls, they tapped into the bank’s own wiring from below, using it to power their tools and lights.

“There was a lot of technical knowledge,” Rehder said wistfully, or perhaps regretfully. “These guys had to be in construction—maybe mining—but they had to know construction. They knew how to construct a tunnel that went one hundred feet underground in L.A., and they didn’t shore anything up. Their tunnel was fantastic.” He showed me the photos again, pointing at details and remembering the strange day of the discovery.

It still ate at him. They had gotten away with it.

*

The methodology of the Hole in the Ground Gang bears superficial resemblance to an earlier heist on the other side of the Atlantic. Over the long Bastille Day weekend of July 1976, a team of burglars successfully broke into the vault of the Société Générale bank in Nice, France, stealing nearly $8 million worth of cash and goods from the safe-deposit boxes inside. They had been tunneling for two months. Led by Albert Spaggiari—who later escaped from French custody by jumping out of a courtroom window, landing atop a parked car, and speeding off on a prearranged motorcycle, never to be seen in person again by European authorities (legend has it, he flashed a peace sign as he sped away)—this spectacular underground crime remains a textbook example of criminals bending a city to serve their own devious needs.

Spaggiari and his team began their tunnel in an underground parking garage, chosen because of its proximity to the city’s deep drain system. Plans of the drainage network were freely available to inquisitive members of the public; all you had to do was ask. Armed with these, Spaggiari then cased the city for weeks, exploring the actual sewers when he could and making a note of any security cameras or other difficulties along the way. These regular reconnaissance routes would have included verifying that the ground conditions beneath the chosen bank were suitable for tunneling. Given accurate geological knowledge of a city, a person could determine right away which banks are worth trying to hit and which are geologically impregnable. Bank vaults built on heavy Manhattan bedrock are not going to see many tunnel jobs; those built on soft London clay, crumbly Berlin sand, or the fertile soil of South America are immediately vulnerable, provided one is willing to get one’s hands dirty. Tunnel jobs—true tunnel jobs, not just drilling holes through drywall but carving your way forward through the earth—are as much about geology as they are about transportation infrastructure, buried creeks, or a lack of CCTV.

Spaggiari soon discovered that the drains beneath Nice were not merely storm sewers, but were an integral part of the now-buried Paillon River. This river, long since covered over by leafy streets in the center of town, was lined with two large underground maintenance roads that mirrored the routes on the surface. As above, so below. These streets beneath the city would let Spaggiari and Co. drive their way to freedom, emerging on the Paillon’s natural riverbed in a different part of the city nearly two miles away.

One great detail from the Nice heist involves precisely that buried river. Once Spaggiari’s team got down into the drains, they had to find a way to ford the waters to reach the roots of the bank itself. The river was almost like an underground moat, a protective serpent coiled around the bank’s foundations. This meant bringing with them a small armada of inflatable plastic rafts and inner tubes. They would use these colorful beach toys as a floating bridge to ferry tools and equipment from one side of the river to the other. Then, like the Hole in the Ground Gang—who tapped into their target’s electrical system to power their digging equipment—Spaggiari’s crew plugged a chain of heavy-duty extension cords into a power outlet inside the parking garage, pulling electricity down into the tunnels and across the inflatable bridge, and powering a few lights along the way.

The eventual discovery of Spaggiari’s bank tunnel in the wake of the successful heist led to a step-by-step revelation of all the spatial short-circuits his team had engineered beneath the surface of the city. Tracking the perpetrators meant following their tunnel down from the bank vault into the city’s drains, following their extension cords out across the buried river to the parking garage, then following the underground roads from beneath the Promenade du Paillon all the way to the gang’s ultimate point of exit. By the time the police got there, of course, the burglars were nowhere to be found.

Forensic Topology

Our sandwiches cooling, our drinks now on their third or fourth refill, retired special agent Rehder revealed one final detail in the saga of the Hole in the Ground Gang. Not only had they succeeded; not only had they utterly disappeared; but they then came back more than a year later to strike again. This time, it was at the intersection of La Cienega and Pico, where the crew were attempting to burglarize two banks simultaneously. Here, things did not go so smoothly. The group actually did make it into one of the vaults—but without all of the preliminary false alarms and the reported poltergeists of the First Interstate Bank up in Hollywood, when they finally tripped the vault alarm, it was taken seriously. The gang were interrupted right before they could make off with their haul, narrowly escaping back down into their tunnel network, where—once again—they rode their trustworthy four-wheelers to freedom. An abandoned Suzuki Quad with its serial numbers filed down would later be discovered nearly seven miles away, at the mouth of a concrete sewer outflow leading into Ballona Creek beneath Dauphin Street.

They remain at large to this day.

The stakes of this second robbery were huge; Rehder writes, “They could have gotten away with a face-value take of anywhere from $10 to $25 million. It could have been the biggest bank burglary in the history of the world.” What is so memorable about this latter attempt—on top of the sheer hubris of tunneling into two banks simultaneously—is the disoriented, almost psychedelic, reaction of Rehder, one of the first FBI agents to arrive on the scene. The presence of two bank tunnels, the second of which was only discovered hours after the first, inspired an uneasy, vertiginous sense that yet more tunnels might—in fact, probably would—be found. Rehder and his colleagues “started getting these nagging mental images of a network of tunnels under every bank in West L.A., of the ground beneath us laced like a prairie dog village with holes and chambers and secret passages, of waking up one morning and finding five or ten or a hundred bank vaults simultaneously breached and stripped, and legions of bankers and boxholders screaming for vengeance and immediate compensation. Every sewer line in West L.A. would have to be searched, every patch job inspected.”

The FBI’s unsettling discovery of a hidden topological dimension tucked away inside the city is a stunning moment—the realization that, on a different plane, point A might illicitly be connected to point B, and that it is the burglar’s role to make this link real. Recall the aerial view of the LAPD helicopter crew, moving through the city freely along the x, y, and z axes and thus seeing connections others have either ignored or simply missed. Rehder’s experience with the Hole in the Ground Gang made it clear that burglars, too, can intervene in the built environment along unexpected paths, turning the city itself into a tool for breaking and entering.

The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. It means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. Burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes.

Gazing in unsettled awe at the streets of Los Angeles and realizing that this apparently solid surface hides holes, tunnels, routes, knots, and other unlawful passages leading from one location to another made Special Agent Rehder almost woozy in adversarial appreciation of what lies below. Policing the city, in that moment, became as much about preventing unauthorized spatial connections from emerging—new and illicit diagonals leading from one point to another—as it was about watching its surfaces for crimes yet to occur. As Rehder recalled, the investigation quickly descended into a giant game of Whac-A-Mole, with federal agents and local cops both popping out of manholes throughout the area as they tried to figure out exactly where they were, lost in the underside of the city, the bandits by then long gone.

*

If George Leonidas Leslie has shown us that burglary is built into the very bones of the modern metropolis, then the Hole in the Ground Gang managed to blow that revelation up to the scale of infrastructure—a shadowy world of buried flood-control basins, storm-sewer outflows, and the very foundations of Los Angeles transformed into the ultimate criminal tool. By burrowing into the ground and riding their 4x4s for miles beneath the streets, they also revealed that it’s not just rooms or floors that can be linked together by a clever criminal; whole neighborhoods sit atop vast switchboards of connection that the manic ambitions of a burglar can make real.