Burglars seem to exist in Matrix space, a world where—to paraphrase that film’s own metaphysics—not only is there no door, but there are no walls, roofs, or ceilings. Burglary, in this sense, is a world of dissolving walls and pop-up entryways through to other worlds (or, at least, through to other rooms and buildings). After all, if two rooms aren’t connected now, they will be soon. If there is no route from one building to another, a burglar will find a way—even if it means digging a tunnel between the two using discarded mining equipment picked up for cheap in California. Burglars reveal with often eye-popping brutality how buildings can really be used—misused, abused, and turned against themselves—introducing perforations, holes, cuts, and other willful misconnections, as if sculpting a building in reverse, slicing open doorways and corridors where you and I would have seen only obstruction.
For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself through meshed gears made of fire escapes and secondary stairways, window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts, everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating their own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar, doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M. C. Escher.
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).
You’d be excused for thinking burglars have absolutely no idea how to use the built environment. It’s like a perceptual disorder in which certain people can no longer distinguish solid surface from open space, door from wall—so, lashing out against a world they don’t fully understand, burglars knock holes in the sides of buildings, or they rappel through skylights using tactical mountaineering ropes, instead of just opening the front door. They could simply walk inside—but no.
Like someone who doesn’t know how to program a VCR, burglars fumble, curse, and hit all the wrong buttons, mistaking doorknobs for something they’re meant to avoid, breaking glass, crawling through doggie doors, and displaying incredible acts of spatial ignorance, as if they are somehow incapable of getting from one side of a room to the other without injuring themselves or others. But maybe it’s not their fault. Maybe no one ever taught them how to use a building. Maybe it’s just neurodiversity. We could call it burglar’s syndrome, a spatial disease, something that compels you to misuse buildings.
But let’s settle, instead, on a middle ground and say it’s some combination of the two extremes: burglars are idiot masters of the built environment, drunk Jedis of architectural space.
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Think of the guy who used to crawl through pet doors to get inside people’s houses, slithering in through openings no wider than a dachshund to rob Kansas City families blind. He was only arrested after he “emerged” one night, in the words of the local police department, to find an undercover cop car sitting in the driveway. Perhaps someone had seen his legs slipping through the doggie door, like an octopus squeezing through a hole in the hull of a ship, or maybe the fuzz had been onto him all along. Either way, it was over. His architectural adventure was done.
Or consider the man whose ongoing spree of rare-book burglaries at a French monastery “seemed like the work of the devil.” He had found an old map of the sprawling architectural structure in a local archive, noticing one key detail, a feature everyone else had forgotten: a secret passage that led from the monastery attic down to a cabinet in the monks’ library. No one seems entirely sure why the hidden route was there in the first place—perhaps for eavesdropping on colleagues’ private conversations. In nearly two years, this mischievous burglar stole an astonishing eleven hundred books. He was only caught when the local police, not fully convinced these crimes were the work of Satan, installed a hidden camera.
Unbeknownst to the man, he had a kindred soul on the other side of the world in the form of Stephen Blumberg, an obsessive book thief and library burglar who amassed a collection of stolen works that was at one point estimated to be worth nearly $20 million. His many targets included the special collections of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles—which he broke into by shimmying up the chutes of an old dumbwaiter system formerly used for accessing the library’s closed stacks. Deactivated long ago, the shafts were still there, offering an alternative system of movement hidden within the walls of the library itself.
Of course, there was also the guy who pushed himself through the drop-off box of a dry cleaner in the middle of the night in Moultrie, Georgia, only to be caught by the shop’s surveillance cameras. We see a man in his late teens slithering into the store, well past daily business hours, wearing what appears to be a camouflage hoodie. On the video, “bits and pieces of him start showing up inside the store,” the police investigator later explained, as if a procession of disconnected body parts had magically begun appearing from nowhere—a possession, a haunting, a poltergeist.
Or just a burglar.
Think of the man in Dallas, Texas, who wasn’t happy with what he found inside one building, so he broke through a wall of Sheetrock to rob the cash register next door. It became a regular thing for him, a reliable gig: he returned again and again to tunnel from one shop to the other, compulsively. The store’s owners later complained to police that the same man had “broken through the same wall at the store four other times since the summer,” stealing more than $20,000 from the shop in months. It was, from the burglar’s perspective, easy money. At this rate, from one shop alone, he could pull in $60,000 a year. If the only thing standing between him and the middle class was a few pieces of Sheetrock, why not? What’s the point of work when you can just pop through a wall at 3:00 a.m. to collect your pay?
Think of another burglar, back East in Cockeysville, Maryland. Before he was captured, the man became known as the “drywall burglar,” like some architectural bogeyman haunting the suburbs. He would slice his way through the drywall of home after home, once raiding an entire block of town houses without ever coming out for air. He didn’t need to. He was the worm in the apple, eating from one unit to the next—and the next, and the next—carrying TVs, laptops, and cell phones back with him through this makeshift excavation, this aboveground nest of tunnels punched through the suburban world outside Baltimore, a whorled halo of negative space left behind him like a vortex through which household goods would disappear. When police finally arrested him, they found stolen remote controls shoved into his sweatpants pockets.
Then there was a guy in New York who nearly outdid them both. He would break into an apartment next to a restaurant, then chip away at the wall until he could slip through and grab whatever he came for—in one case, some chocolate soufflé cupcakes. And a pork belly. And some ribs and a bottle of sake. When I got in touch with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to talk about the case, I got a wonderfully sarcastic e-mail back from their press officer, who, while asking me not to quote him directly, said something very close to the effect of, if you want to write a book about a guy who knocked a hole through drywall to steal a bottle of sake, then be my guest. He attached the case files, regardless.