A Burglar's Guide to the City (26 page)

Loya realized that he could jump into his car and wait a few minutes, effectively hiding in plain sight, before calmly driving away. “I’d go straight across the parking lot toward the Rite Aid or the CVS or whatever, where my car was actually parked. I’d literally be thirty-five feet away, looking at them. If they had just looked straight ahead into the parking lot, they would have seen me,” he told me. “That’s mostly how I got away.”

Loya is an architectural enthusiast. In our conversation, he spoke at length about the design of building interiors, including a series of intriguing observations about prison floor plans. Loya described the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles—the same jail seen on the cover of Mike Davis’s
City of Quartz
—as a paragon of architectural disorientation. It is built in the shape of a V angled across its site, which means that as you walk around inside, it can be extremely difficult to maintain a sense of direction or even to know how you are positioned to the larger city outside. Even your official entry into the prison deliberately seems to have misalignment and confusion built in.

“When they first drive you in,” Loya began, “you go around in circles underground before you get put into an elevator at the center of the building. When you finally get out of the elevator—and, remember, the building is at an angle to the street—you are so lost!” He laughed as he said this, as if amazed by the spatial ingenuity of the prison’s designers. “I’m really good at keeping track of orientation. I’m really good at knowing where I am—north, south—even indoors. But every time I got moved, I was so turned around. It was like my interior compass was just spinning.
Where am I in this building?
But they’re designed that way.” It’s as if the jail’s original architect had been aware of burglars’ spatial superpowers, Loya suggested, and had sought to disarm them by any means necessary. “It’s just another level of anxiety, of you being off your game, of them making it challenging for you to navigate and orient yourself in that space. It’s part of the intention of prisons to make you feel incidental. They want to make it as tough as possible. You’re not grounded, and you don’t know where you are.”

For Loya, linguist George Lakoff’s book
Metaphors We Live By
took on an unexpected spatial resonance, revealing ways in which the built environment could be read or understood as a series of metaphors or signs. He said that after being released from prison, he spent a lot of time taking long walks around the suburban landscape of Southern California. He began noticing that every twenty-five feet, he would hit a driveway; he’d then walk eight feet across the driveway before hitting another stretch of grass; then another twenty-five feet to the next driveway, and so on, seemingly forever, “and the uniformity of that totally echoed the uniformity of the prison environment,” he said to me, “where I had my cell and my seven feet of wall and then a door. And I remember thinking, ‘
Oh my God, man.
’” He laughed at the utter despair of it all, having gone from one system of containment to another. How would you get away or escape from this?

Urban Escape and Evasion

“You can’t get away from the aircraft,” LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette explained. The police use helicopters for a reason, he reminded me, and you’re not going to outrun them on the ground, whether you’re on foot or you’re driving a Ford Mustang. The Air Support Division has tracked fleeing suspects halfway to San Francisco, he pointed out, before the drivers simply gave up, whether due to exhaustion or an empty gas tank. There’s no realistic outer limit for a chase, he said; you can’t just leave Los Angeles and expect Air Support to throw up their hands and turn around at the city border. They’ll follow you to Arizona if they have to.

Burdette used this point to launch into a long discussion of how helicopter crews successfully track people who try to get away on foot. Most people don’t realize the kinds of trails they leave behind them, he said, let alone the ease with which their probable routes can be deduced from above. He lumped this under the idea that even cops flying around the city in a helicopter need to be street-savvy: they have to be able to think like a perpetrator, to predict what he or she might do next. You have to be able to see what they see and you have to imagine what sorts of decisions they might make—whether they turned left or right at a certain corner, or if they ducked behind a tree or maybe even slipped into another building. Occasionally something altogether new happens. Think of the bank bandits who, while fleeing Los Angeles police back in September 2012, started throwing handfuls of cash out the windows of their SUV, hoping to clog the road behind them with local residents running out to collect free money. That sort of behavior can be hard to predict.

To illustrate his point, Burdette told me the story of a recent night flight. A burglary had been reported; the burglar was last seen standing in someone’s driveway. By the time Burdette’s helicopter got there, the burglar was nowhere to be found. So where did he go?

Next, in a series of spatial deductions, Burdette had to study the built landscape below and guess what most likely occurred down there. Writer Nate Berg has described L.A. as “a vast landscape of pursuit potential,” with getaway routes and police surveillance details all colliding to form complex knots on the ground. Burdette’s narration of this from the helicopter’s point of view sounded more like someone trying to beat the next level in a computer game, outthinking the terrain from above.

“We could see the driveway,” Burdette began, “which was the spot where this guy was last seen. Now, you look at the size of the fences on either side of the house. That’s almost like a tunnel for him. It would make no sense for him to try to make it over one of those walls. It would slow him down too much, and it would be too hard. But, now, if you run into the backyard and you’re feeling stressed—if you follow that tunnel—what are you going to see? The first thing you’ll see is there’s a doghouse right there. If you run and hit that doghouse, you could probably make it over that fairly short fence out back. So now you’re in the next person’s yard. Okay—let’s look and see what we have here. Look at that abandoned garage out back, the one that looks like it was on fire a few years ago. It’s only got three sides on it; that’d be a pretty good spot for him to go.”

As Burdette and his pilot zeroed in on this abandoned garage, based solely on spatial reasoning, the radio buzzed: a nearby homeowner had just called 911, having seen someone slink into a half-burned garage behind their house. Bingo: Burdette had the right place. He turned on the FLIR—the helicopter’s forward-looking infrared camera—and sure enough, there was a heat signature, a white blur crouched inside among the wood framing. When a patrol car arrived seconds later and officers were in place to contain the area, the game was up.

It’s all about containment, Burdette emphasized: “If we have an aircraft overhead, it really limits their abilities. It doesn’t mean that they can’t still move or that they won’t try to run, but it’s much more of a challenge now. We try to shrink down the size of their world. We try to contain it and to control it.”

For Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the
Los Angeles Times
, stories such as Burdette’s also signal a spatial and conceptual shift in contemporary urban policing. It is moving, Hawthorne explained to me, from the
chase
to the
manhunt
. He meant that while the widely televised arrest of O. J. Simpson had been a chase, albeit conducted at little more than walking speed, the search for LAPD officer Christopher Dorner—or even for the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—had been a manhunt. In a chase, the suspect’s location is clearly known; the police simply have to stop, intercept, and capture him or her. In a manhunt, however, the suspect could be anywhere; what’s required is an intensive search through the landscape, a literal hunt with a human being as its target.

To Hawthorne, the chase and the manhunt are fundamentally different ways of using the landscape. One is the active pursuit of a suspect moving through the environment, usually at high speed but more or less continuously visible to the pursuers; in the other, someone has deliberately made him-or herself invisible to view, hidden somewhere in the city or terrain, leaving the police to deploy advanced forensic expertise and new technologies of visibility to discover them. Getting away in the former case simply means moving through the built environment more effectively than the police; think of the example set by Herman Lamm. In the latter example, getting away means blending in so well that you successfully avoid detection.

The Dorner case provides a particularly chilling example. Christopher Dorner had been fired from the LAPD in what he claimed was racially motivated revenge for his having reported a case of police brutality. After publicly declaring, in a rambling and often incoherent manifesto posted on his Facebook page, “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the entire L.A. police department, Dorner ambushed two separate teams of police officers in their patrol cars, killing one of them and murdering two civilians. Then he disappeared. His actions sparked a massive, nationally televised manhunt, including a surveillance drone, stretching nearly from the U.S./Mexico border to the mountains outside Los Angeles. Dorner was eventually located hiding inside a cabin—a structure he had technically burglarized—where, surrounded by SWAT teams, he shot himself in the head. At no point was Dorner really chased, however; instead, it was a manhunt, spatial detective work, an urgent attempt to find one man amid the Rhode Island–size landscape of Greater Los Angeles.

Finding both Dorner and Tsarnaev required the activation of every territorial aspect of urban police authority, from preemptive roadblocks and unmanned aerial vehicles to FLIR-enabled helicopter patrols. One of the most memorable moments in the Tsarnaev manhunt came when the Boston PD released FLIR footage shot by a police helicopter; the heavily zoomed-in shot depicted the strange, flickering white light of Tsarnaev’s circulatory system glowing from within his hiding spot beneath a boat cover in the Boston suburb of Watertown. This was as much about police bragging rights as it was an open taunt to anyone else who might try to get away. Its message: if you have a circulatory system, the police can see you.

No sooner does one side develop a new technology or technique, however, than the other side ups its game, in an endless arms race over who controls the built environment. Criminals are quickly developing ways to stay ahead of the game even against FLIR, with a range of DIY techniques of thermal camouflage. Burdette explained some of this to me, focusing on methods he had recently seen (these techniques failed, as Burdette would not otherwise have noticed them): “People are definitely catching on. They’ll rub mud all over themselves, like that movie
Predator
, or they’ll wrap themselves up in pool covers to mask their heat signature.”

I laughed. “Does that work?” I asked, highly skeptical.

I was expecting him to laugh along with me, but after only a slight hesitation, he said, “It does work—except a little bit of light starts to shine out of each end. Once they’ve been in there for a while, the temperature builds up, like it starts to cook a little. That’s how we find them.” Remember that when Burdette says “light” here, it is just a metaphor: he is talking about heat generated by someone’s circulatory system being given a visual signature by advanced technology. This vision of criminals wrapping themselves up in pool covers like human burritos to avoid police helicopter patrols seemed almost too absurd to be real. But Burdette insisted he had seen this; it was just part of the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between cops and the people who flee from them.

Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city, he explained. The heavily restricted airspace around LAX has made the area near the airport a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. LAPD helicopters cannot always approach LAX due to air-traffic-control safety concerns, Burdette said; it is surrounded by what he called “very challenging airspace.” All those planes streaming down into the city, dropping off tourists and air cargo, exert a kind of geometric effect on crimes in the city: their flight patterns limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the getaway routes of criminals. Next time you fly into LAX, save a thought for the crimes your flight might be affecting far below.

I had gone into these conversations—with Joe Loya, with Christopher Hawthorne, with the LAPD, even with many of the figures we met earlier in this book, including Jack Dakswin and Special Agent William J. Rehder—expecting to find something like a Top Ten Tips for the Ultimate Getaway waiting for me at the end. But what I learned instead should have been obvious from the beginning: the best getaways are often the Hollywood ones—which are as unrealistic as their fictional context would indicate. In real life, getaways are not so tidy. Different techniques work at different times, for different reasons. Sometimes you have to drive away as fast as possible. Other times you don’t need to go anywhere at all; you can just sit in your car until the pressure fades away. You can wrap yourself in a pool cover. You can convince your judge and jury that you never set foot in the building—or even that the type of structure you broke into falls outside your state’s burglary laws. You can escape through tunnels or you can jump through bedroom windows; you can get away on foot or by public bus. It varies.

Some successful getaways do leave a trace. Think of an ingenious June 1995 bank heist in Berlin, Germany, where, unbeknownst to the bank’s managers or the city’s police, burglars had dug an escape tunnel for themselves beneath the target vault; rather than enter the bank through this tunnel, however, they saved it for the getaway. Taking over the bank the old-fashioned way, they locked down the business and held a group of hostages upstairs in the lobby. After the burglars received $3.6 million in ransom money, they headed downstairs into the basement, as if to have a meeting and discuss their next steps—but the hostages began to hear “an odd clamor, like pickaxes chipping at concrete,” the
Washington Post
reported. Only moments later, police raided the bank. When the authorities, prepared for a possibly fatal shoot-out, descended into the basement, they instead found nothing but an empty room with a hole bashed through the floor. “The hole led to a 384-foot tunnel,” the
Post
explained. “Running about 10 feet beneath the surface, the tunnel had been shored up with timber and steel plates. It emerged in a garage, where police assume the robbers had a getaway car waiting.” Sure enough, they got away.