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.
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.”