A Burglar's Guide to the City (17 page)
Our evening began with a slide show giving us the most basic overview of what makes a lock function: how it works, what the cylinder is, how to find each individual locking pin, and the purpose of the different lockpicking tools at our disposal. There was no music and the lights were bright. Arrayed before us on heavily worn worktables were padlocks and cylinder locks, the latter labeled with numbers corresponding to their level of difficulty. The most basic had two internal pins only, and these were astonishingly easy to pick; these then went up to six-pin locks, beyond which a range of spooled locks and padlocks awaited us.
The types of picks are seemingly endless. The most commonly found ones are used for opening pin-tumbler locks. There are rake picks and snake picks, hook picks and ball picks. There are full diamonds and half diamonds—also known as triangle picks—but also diamond rakes, hooked diamonds, and offset Deforest diamonds. There are snake rakes and ball rakes. Bogotá triple rakes, Bogotá quad rakes, Bogotá single picks, Bogotá Sabanas, and Bogotá Monserrates. There are long reach hooks and slant hooks. Beyond these larger families of picks and pick types, the tools rapidly diversify, leading to ever-stranger and more specialized one-offs and mutations. There are snowman rakes, half snowman rakes, wave rakes, postal picks, long ripple picks, bogie picks, long reach rakes—the list goes on and on. And that’s before you get into the world of automotive-entry picks, warded lockpicks, double-sided picks, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. There are as many picks as there are keys—in fact, there are probably more.
An individual pick is usually named after its profile. You might consider this to be the pick’s skyline, so to speak: small metal bends and shapes in the metal, when viewed from the side, resemble tiny buildings or hillocks sticking up over the horizon. With the aid of a tensioning tool—a separate piece of metal, used to apply tiny amounts of torque to the lock’s inner cylinder or tumbler—you insert a pick into your target lock. Those little shapes that give each pick its profile—all those ripples and diamonds and waves and half circles and hooks—are then used to locate individual locking pins, each of which is a different height, which you push up out of the way using the pick. When all of a lock’s internal pins have been pushed above what’s called the shear line, the lock can finally be turned. It has been picked.
I’m proud to say I was not that bad, picking my way quite rapidly through the first five levels of a six-lock set, but I was permanently stymied by level six. Along the way, our instructors, disarmingly polite and not at all standoffish despite their advanced lockpicking skills, explained some of the folklore that accompanied the individual tools. The Bogotá rake, the one that I would ultimately use the most throughout the evening, was so named because its waves and bends apparently resemble the mountains surrounding Bogotá, Colombia, where the tool was invented. This made the nickname a no-brainer—but it also means that this widely used lockpicking tool is a portable topographic model of the Andes, a landscape in miniature.
As a host, Jack Benigno was something of a slow-burner. At first quiet, he became more animated and even quite talkative as the night developed. About halfway through the event, Benigno took over the front of the room and began telling us how to make the most effective lockpicking tools. The best sources of metal for these tools were ordinary objects, he explained, things we’d probably never have imagined could be transformed into something that would let us break through doorways: the underwires of bras, for example, or the inner blades of discarded windshield wipers, and, best of all, the rough brushes of street-cleaning trucks. Individual bristles are occasionally knocked loose during operation and left lying on the street. All of our instructors that night admitted, like addicts confessing to extreme behavior, that they had followed Chicago street-cleaning crews around, often for hours at a time, waiting for a bristle to break free. Benigno suggested that, for those of us without the patience to follow a truck all day, a good place to find metal is simply in the Dumpsters of auto-repair shops. Just lift up the lid, grab handfuls of old wiper blades, and be done with it.
As I was beginning to realize, the master tools of real-life breaking and entering are typically just everyday objects, reimagined and transformed for criminal purposes. Consider the shockingly successful Antwerp diamond heist back in February 2003, when more than $50 million worth of diamonds were stolen from a high-security vault in the center of that city’s well-protected jewelry district. To a great extent, the extraordinary ease with which that crime was carried out came down to simple objects bought from the local hardware store. A broomstick, a brick of polystyrene, some black electrical tape, a can of hair spray: these were enough to subvert and neutralize more than a million dollars’ worth of high-tech security sensors, as if a rewards shopper at Home Depot had somehow managed to rob Fort Knox.
Think, for a second, about how frustrating this would be: you install some futuristic motion detector in your underground supervault and a bunch of anonymous strangers get around it by sticking a piece of Styrofoam on the end of a broomstick; stand that up in front of a motion detector while the lights are still off and it won’t see anything move for weeks. It’s embarrassing. You could try to catch the bad guys using your state-of-the-art thermal camera—something space-age and intimidating—but they’ve got a can of hair spray. They uncap it and coat your fine-tuned electronics with a sticky film of aerosolized beauty products and render it useless. So you turn to your light sensor, something so sensitive it can pick up even the glow of an uncovered wristwatch—but your ingenious adversaries have arrived with a roll of electrical tape. They rip off a few inches, wrap it around your sensor, and all that gear is now totally obsolete. The vault is theirs to ransack. They have spent less than fifty bucks at a hardware store, yet they’ve caught your million-dollar setup with its pants down.
Or take Phil Christopher, a self-described “superthief” who explained in a 2006 biography how he and his partners thwarted the exterior alarm bell of a bank in Laguna Niguel, California. Did he have some ingenious spy gear, like something out of a James Bond film, capable of neutralizing electromagnetic circuitry? Nope. Bringing to mind the classic French heist film
Rififi
—in which burglars use fireproof insulating foam to silence the alarm of the store they’ve carefully broken into—Christopher and crew simply filled the alarm box with a squirt of fast-expanding liquid polystyrene, eliminating at least one threat of early detection.
Burglary tools are effectively everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Street-cleaning bristles, broomsticks, electrical tape, liquid polystyrene: 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 dark promise here is that if only you can assemble the right tools in the right combination, you’ll find yourself holding keys to everything around you.
This can be quite literal. A set of master keys to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay back in September 2012, leaving media commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis. These keys promised universal access to urban infrastructure, from subways to skyscrapers—true “keys to the city” that should never be let out into the wild.
After an undercover reporter for the
New York Post
purchased the set, the paper published a photograph of them captioned “What you could do: Take over the subways.” The
Post
suggested that it was “what a terrorist might call a dream come true,” feigning outrage next to their own high-resolution photograph of the key set. Indeed, that very photo could easily have been used to duplicate the keys, and it was removed from their website shortly thereafter.
The newspaper had purchased a cluster of five keys “that would allow control of virtually any elevator in the city,” they explained. The keys “could knock out power to municipal buildings and skyscrapers, darken city streets, open subway gates and some firehouse doors and provide full access to 1 World Trade Center and other construction sites.”
The reporter claimed to have done his due diligence, verifying that “most of the keys did, in fact, work.” Among them was “the all-purpose ‘1620,’ a master firefighter key that with one turn could trap thousands of people in a skyscraper by sending all the elevators to the lobby and out of service, according to two FDNY sources. And it works for buildings across the city. That key also allows one to open locked subway entrances, gain entry to many firehouses and get into boxes at construction jobs that house additional keys to all areas of the site.” Also found on the key ring were city electrical keys that would give access to streetlights, “along with the basement circuit-breaker boxes of just about any large building.”
While these were not hacked together from everyday objects—being, instead, actual keys used by fire departments and city electricians—they fulfill the promise of the key to end all keys, something that makes every door transparent and every building open for entry. Even Jack Dakswin had specifically fantasized about getting his hands on a set like this. In Canada, he explained, they are known as Crown keys. These are issued to Canada Post workers, used to enter (and deliver mail inside) multiunit apartment buildings. Give a burglar a set of Crown keys, and you’ve given that burglar keys to half the city. Dakswin added that obtaining Crown keys is often the suspected goal whenever a Canada Post worker has been mugged.
Superkeys are out there, in other words, whether they’re something we piece together ourselves from other tools and objects, or they’re official city equipment that has somehow ended up on eBay.
*
Benigno, sensing that he’d gotten our attention, began more freely telling stories about how he had taught some of his colleagues at work to pick locks—and that he was now beginning to regret passing on that knowledge. He said that he had come into the office one morning, for example, only to see that one of his colleagues had picked open a cabinet—“but that’s where we keep all the shotguns!” he roared, laughing. Another day, he came in only to find that someone else had picked open yet another cabinet—“but that’s where we keep all the AR-15s!” We all laughed, but I was more confused about what on earth this guy must do for a living, to have so many guns lying around the office.
It turned out he was a cop: a young detective with the Chicago Police Department with an enthusiasm for picking locks (and teaching other people how to do so). On the back of his neck, in solid black letters, with no attempt to disguise or hide it, was the word
PAR•A•NOID
tattooed just above the collar line. If anything would conclusively prove that locksport is unlikely to be a training ground for tomorrow’s supercriminals, it was that the guy teaching me to pick locks was a police officer.
I got in touch with Benigno a few days after the event to learn more about his current job and how he got there. His story was surprising. Improbably, both Benigno and I have a master’s degree in art history from the University of Chicago, where we graduated within only three years of each other. We even studied with a few of the same professors. But, like me, Benigno did not want to spend much time talking about art history, so we quickly got back to the topic of lockpicking.
I dispensed with the most obvious questions first. What does it mean, for example, that he was leading workshops in lockpicking but was simultaneously a Chicago cop? Was there any sort of conflict of interest there? Benigno laughed. Not at all, he explained. Emphasizing several times that he was speaking to me now purely as a civilian, giving me his own point of view, not that of the Chicago Police Department, he reminded me that possessing lockpicking tools is not a crime in Illinois, although possessing bump keys is. A bump key is basically a regular, blank door key that you insert into a lock, then, as you turn it slightly with one hand, you give it a solid bump with a hammer or even with the heel of a shoe; if done correctly, this bounces all the pins up out of the cylinder, and the lock will open. It is disconcertingly easy to do; multiple YouTube videos of bump keys at work will make you question why you put any faith in your home’s locked doors.
Then Benigno asked if I had noticed at the event that when I’d asked if I could use one of his lockpicks, he did not directly hand it to me. Instead, he had set it down on the table and talked to me for a few seconds before I picked it up, as if trying to make me forget that I had even asked to use it. I had noticed this—but I had interpreted it as nothing more than a slight hesitation in letting me, a total stranger, use one of his personal tools. Perhaps I would damage it or even slip it into my pocket. But, no, he said; it is illegal to transfer lockpicking tools to another person in Illinois. This means that he would technically have been breaking the law if he had handed the pick directly to me. If we were to hop into a car and drive over the nearby state border into Indiana, then we could legally hand lockpicking tools back and forth to each other as long as we wanted. We could then just drive back over the border into Illinois—and no one would be the wiser.
The longer we spoke, the more Benigno’s academic background began to emerge. For example, several times he mentioned Michel Foucault, a French philosopher whose notion of “discipline and punish” explored the state’s ability to coerce certain behaviors from its citizens. Foucault’s analysis of law, imprisonment, and state surveillance is well-known among academics and political activists, but it is unusual, if not rather extraordinary, to hear a rank-and-file Chicago police officer quoting critical theory while discussing his work. All of which led me back to the question of burglary: Was it possible that Benigno had been helping out at these lockpicking events as a decoy tactic, acting as a double agent for the Chicago PD? He could simply note who was in attendance, and even what sorts of questions they might ask, and the police department’s central dossier would continue to grow. So stressed-out was he by this dual role, he had been reduced to permanent paranoia—and thus the tattoo …