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Lines of sight, potential hiding places, how shadows were cast at different times of day, routes into and out of a bank vault, even the specific order of streets that led to and away from a chosen target: these were the landmarks Leslie looked for and noted.
He had learned years earlier that architectural expertise is nothing without urban expertise: if you don’t know how to get away from a crime, you might as well not commit it.
Today, security expert Bruce Schneier would call Leslie a defector: someone who has used his access, training, or skills against the very people those talents were meant to benefit. Think of the doctor who becomes a torturer, the IT expert who becomes a cybercriminal, the corrupt cop who becomes a dealer.
In another sense, however, burglars are idiots, incapable of using a door when cutting through drywall for twenty minutes will do the trick. But then they’ll get stuck in the insulation, or they’ll trip and plummet through the roof into the wrong grocery store, or they’ll accidentally set fire to the very place they’ve been trying so hard to enter (it’s happened).
They might not quote Le Corbusier, and they probably don’t know who Walter Benjamin is, but they certainly have something important to say about architecture.
Venerable architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, for instance, suggests in his book How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit that “the first question you ask yourself approaching a building is: Where is the front door?”
This means that, to a surprising extent, the way a city was built can catalyze or help inspire certain criminal acts.
In the 1990s, for example, L.A. became the bank robbery capital of the world, as well as a city globally known for its televised car chases. Could there be a connection between the two?
The man’s subsequent arrest was later disputed in court on the basis that using radar to, in effect, watch him inside his own home was a form of unconstitutional “entry.”
The court did not agree, however, that radar should be subjected to the same limitations, and police use of a RANGE-R remains perfectly legal and does not require a warrant.
Think of The Score, Richard Stark’s classic heist novel from 1964.
“Knock over a city. A whole goddamn city. It was so stupid it might even work.”
cat burglar
Like the fictional “Chinese encyclopedia” of Jorge Luis Borges, Nebraska’s burglary statutes are bafflingly specific—and they do not stop at dwellings. Far from it.
Like Bradbury, the town does not appear on Google Street View. The invasive cameras of the search-engine giant are not welcome on the private streets of either neighborhood,
After all, no less a figure than famed Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero once asked, “What is more sacred, what is more inviolable, than the house of every citizen?” The injunction against breaking and entering is encoded in the very foundations of civic discourse.
a performative mix of off-grid survivalist gear wed with the quirks of urban maker culture.
in the right hands, everyday items have an unexpected secondary function, able to become something like skeleton keys with which we can gain entrance to any building or thwart the world’s most sophisticated security systems.
The goal of his earlier work had specifically been to find a way for architects to reliably visualize the events that might take place inside their spaces; but it never became an accepted technique, just an art project, a series of avant-garde posters and drawings.
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.
As clearly as any example from Hollywood, this otherwise childish prank suggests that the most successful getaways of tomorrow will be achieved by hacking the city.
The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.
The first rule of a successful getaway is not to look as if you’re trying to get away.
