A Burglar's Guide to the City (7 page)

As I looked down out of the helicopter window, the beach was nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, with not a human being in sight; but when I peered back at the monitor, lights were everywhere. They were like fireflies, these humans huddled around one another and listening to the sea.

Where the Money Is

My time with the Air Support Division had revealed the extent to which pilots and tactical flight officers can identify and, more crucially, interrupt the city’s illicit routes and hiding places. Back at ground level, however, I’d become interested in how the city’s freeway infrastructure could be used by criminals not just as a possible route of escape from police capture, but as an urban-scale tool for helping them design better crimes.

In an interesting article published by
The New Yorker
, author Tad Friend implies that the high-speed chase is, in many ways, a more authentic use of L.A.’s sprawling road network; by comparison, the daily commute was embarrassingly impotent, an automotively timid use of this extraordinary landscape whose very premise is not safety and convenience but personal liberation. Friend suggests that fleeing from the police—often at lethal speeds—while being broadcast live on local television is, well, it’s sort of what the city is
for
. To focus on L.A.’s legendary traffic is to miss a larger and much stranger point: that crime is often a more effective way to use the fabric of the city.

After all, Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.

In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank-crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every workday. As FBI special agent Brenda Cotton—formerly based in Los Angeles but now stationed in New York City—told me, the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region. Most notable was the “stop-and-rob”: a bank located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp for one of Southern California’s many freeways. This meant it could be robbed as quickly and as casually as a commuter might pull off the road for a tank of gas. As Cotton described it, you could jump off the freeway, rob a bank in West L.A., hop right back onto the 405, and be over the mountains—as long as you hadn’t timed your crime for the height of rush hour—long before a police helicopter could make it to the scene. This was not possible in New York City, she pointed out, where the city’s transportation infrastructure and its pedestrian-friendly streets facilitate a different genre of bank crime in which the perpetrator will flee on foot or even use the subway.

Stop-and-robs are therefore one of those instances where an architectural form—the freestanding bank or credit union—and a piece of urban infrastructure—the ever-expanding Los Angeles freeway network—unexpectedly combined to catalyze something that law enforcement professionals, let alone architects or city planners, had been unable to anticipate. A new kind of crime was now possible—and unsurprisingly, bank crime in Los Angeles began to soar, reaching a spectacular intensity in the 1990s.

In a 2003 memoir called
Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World
, retired special agent William J. Rehder devotes considerable attention to the ways in which the design of Los Angeles facilitates—or even leads to—bank crimes. Like Cotton, Rehder points out that the city’s sprawling nest of freeways, offering what he calls “easy mobility” and ultraconvenient connections to literally thousands of banks and credit unions, helped to turn L.A. into a kind of bank robber’s paradise. The stop-and-rob was just one symptom of this urban-scale design flaw: the city was peppered with innumerable banks so badly placed from a security standpoint that they could be robbed seemingly at will, functioning almost like ATMs for any criminal who needed quick cash.

Many other factors besides urban design contribute to the sky-high incidence of bank robbery in Los Angeles, of course. Not the least of these factors is that many banks, Rehder explains, have made the somewhat peculiar financial calculation of money stolen per year versus the annual salary of a full-time security guard—and the banks have come out on the side of letting the money get stolen. The cash, in economic terms, is not worth protecting. It’s not altogether wrong to suggest that as a conscious business strategy banks outsourced their security needs to already strained local cops and the FBI, who were federally obligated to investigate bank crime. From anecdotes I heard from LAPD detectives and retired FBI special agents, I would say that this was very much the case; the resentment was very real against bank managers and other business owners who sought to save a bit of their own money by not hiring a security guard, knowing full well that some local cop or FBI agent would have to answer their call at 2:00 a.m. and come investigate.

Special Agent Cotton plays only a minor role in Rehder’s account of bank crimes in Los Angeles, but through my connection to her I convinced Rehder that we should meet for lunch and discuss his book. Rehder’s memoir is a compelling example of what might happen if we were to ask an FBI agent how the design of a city might inspire—perhaps even require—certain crimes. I was eager to make a meeting happen.

On a brief trip to Los Angeles, my wife and I met Rehder for lunch at the Santa Monica Airport, at a restaurant he had chosen. Rehder ordered an Arnold Palmer, called the waitress “darling,” and showed us through a small stack of files holding black-and-white photographs, personal notes he’d written to himself in preparation for our meeting, and some newspaper clippings about major cases he’d once worked on. I’ve come to realize after many meetings with retired FBI agents that they often arrive with files, as if unable to fully leave behind the archives and documentary evidence so central to the Bureau’s investigations. These files are encyclopedic: full of data and references for making narrative sense of the events they describe. Between this and our table at the restaurant’s being laminated with aviation charts of the skies around Southern California, our conversation took on a diagrammatic feel, as if we were not only getting an X-ray of the city from a retired FBI agent but also somehow peering into the skies to see the flight paths and holding patterns otherwise known only to pilots and air traffic controllers.

Rehder has stayed busy in his retirement. He now runs a consulting firm called the Security Management Resource Group, which he describes as “a professional firm providing effective and cost-efficient prevention solutions to robbery, violence, and other crimes at financial institutions, stores, and other corporate facilities.” Rehder’s partner there is Douglas Sims, former head of security at Bank of America. Sims brings decades of private-security work to the position, including a fascinating stint helping to plan urban-scale security protocols for all of Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympic Games.

Rehder’s widely known and recognized expertise in all things bank-crime-related led to the surreal accolade of being tapped to serve as an outside consultant on the 1991 film
Point Break
, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze and directed by Kathryn Bigelow. He tends to laugh when telling that story. Keanu “didn’t really ask anything,” Rehder told us, shaking his head. The heists depicted in the film were not unrealistic, he suggested, but the fact that the FBI special agent played by Reeves assists with a bank burglary struck Rehder as so morally absurd and professionally unbelievable as to ruin any claim to veracity the film might otherwise have had. Rehder’s colleagues ribbed him about it for years afterward.

I asked him about the stop-and-robs. If these are an unintended side effect of the design of the city’s transportation infrastructure, do other aspects of city planning inadvertently influence the crimes hatched there? Having started his career in Cleveland, and now spending a great deal of time giving talks or consulting with banks and credit unions in other countries, he has had ample time and opportunity to compare the urban contexts of international criminal activity.

He responded with a rhetorical question: “I’d say, how did the city grow? What are the architectural dimensions, if you will, or spatial aspects of the city itself? Los Angeles, for instance, is basically built on a horizontal level. Everybody needs an automobile—including to commit their crimes.” Compare this to Chicago, he said, or Boston or New York, where a bandit—the FBI’s preferred, albeit amusingly antiquated, term for bank robbers—might aim to get on public transportation, melt into the crowd anonymously, and cross the city as just another citizen or resident. “In New York…” He paused, and I expected some oracular insight into the future of Gotham. Instead, he said, “It’s not easy to park a car in New York City! Getting stuck in traffic there is a major problem. Your bandit needs to find a different way to make his getaway, which means he’ll choose different targets in the first place.”

And cities were continuing to change. With ATMs and cybercrime, the target has shifted. Banks are still hit for their physical resources—cash—but, often, entire ATM machines are stolen or, at the very least, cut open from behind to get into the cash stocks. Unexpectedly, Rehder referred to robbery in biblical times—a historical perspective that I found not uncommon with people working in the security industry, less because of an entrenched cultural conservatism in the field, I would suggest, and more out of a resigned cynicism about the perennial role of crime in human society. But Rehder’s point, as if indirectly citing the title of his own book, was simply that people go where the money is: whether it’s the Jewish merchants Rehder specifically referred to, being robbed on the road two thousand years ago as they transported their stock from place to place, or bank franchises at the bottoms of off-ramps in contemporary Los Angeles. “This is not something new,” Rehder emphasized. “This is something very old, and it will continue.” As long as there is money, there will be bandits—and there will be people like Bill Rehder on their tail. All that changes is the form the crime takes, molded by the need to overcome the legal and spatial constraints of a particular time and place.

One spectacular case came up again and again as we talked: the still-unsolved crimes of the so-called Hole in the Ground Gang from Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Rehder confessed that he was unable to let the crime go, and that he had originally hoped his book would inspire the perpetrators to come out publicly and identify themselves. Their crimes are now well beyond the statute of limitations. As Rehder put it, these particular bandits could strut into LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow morning, brandishing all the maps, photos, diagrams, and tools they once used, and they could not be arrested for their crimes. As Rehder jokes in the book, “All we could do is take them down to the Scotch & Sirloin and buy them a no-hard-feelings beer.” Alas, the Hole in the Ground Gang has not been so forthcoming, and Rehder is still itching to solve the mystery of their L.A. bank tunnels. (His offer of a beer still stands.)

In June 1986, employees at a First Interstate Bank in Hollywood, at the corner of Sunset and Spaulding, in a building that now houses a talent agency, began to report strange mechanical sounds coming from the ground near the vault. Neither police nor the bank’s security team could find any evidence of wrongdoing or attempted entry, however, and crucially, none of the vault’s internal sensors had been tripped. Later, when Rehder conducted interviews with bank employees as part of his investigation, he learned that the police had dismissed the sounds as “just a rat running around inside the walls or something,” and no investigation at all was pursued. Another week went by and the noises continued. The power occasionally went out, as did the bank’s telephones. Then the internal Muzak system abruptly kicked in late one evening, startling a manager who was there alone working overtime. The employees began to joke that the bank was haunted by a poltergeist, a supernatural force short-circuiting the electrical networks, blocking phone calls, and playing music at odd hours of the day. Incredibly, as the bank’s security company still found no breach of the vault itself, the possibility that the bank was haunted seemed more likely than that someone was tunneling up from below.

In reality those sounds were caused not by the ghosts of transactions past, but by a group of three or four men—no one knows how big the team was—who, several theories now suggest, were at least to some degree professionally trained in mining. This was an apparently close-knit, secretive, and disciplined crew, perhaps from the construction industry, perhaps even a disgruntled public works outfit who decided to put their knowledge of the city’s underside to more economically lucrative use. After all, while their route into the bank was via a brute-force excavation, they also employed a sophisticated retracing of the region’s buried waterways. They had accessed the neighborhood by way of L.A.’s complicated storm-sewer network, itself built along old creek beds that no longer appear on city maps.

The bandits must have had access to Los Angeles County storm-sewer maps, as the connections were by no means obvious; knowing that a manhole several blocks away from a bank might take you within just a few hundred feet of the vault is not something you can simply deduce from walking around on the sidewalk. But even more interestingly, the sewers themselves were not built haphazardly through the canyons of Hollywood; they were constructed to follow the old streams and waterways of the natural landscape, a landscape now buried, invisible, beneath the streets. The ancient watershed of Los Angeles still flows, but it has been entombed in concrete and forgotten. The most well-known—and still the most extraordinary—example of this is the Los Angeles River itself, a controversially paved landscape now more widely seen as nothing more than an arid speedway, hosting dramatic car-race scenes in films such as
Grease
. But the surface of Los Angeles actually hides a capillary-like network of lost creeks, almost all of which have been diverted, combined, and encased in huge tunnels we tend not to think twice about. Yet they’re down there, secretly connecting things in the darkness—and they can be used.