Or perhaps we could talk about the guy who police found hiding inside the wall of a bookstore just before dawn in the corn-belt town of Clinton, Iowa; unsurprisingly, given his choice of hiding place and his delusional belief that a bookstore would have enough money to steal, he was also busted for possession of drug paraphernalia. There’s actually another man who got trapped inside a wall, at a JCPenney in Rhode Island, where he’d been trying to hide from police. He had burrowed deeper and deeper into the building like a tick, first through a ceiling tile, then sideways into the wall, before finally getting stuck there; the local fire department had to be called to dig him out, like pulling a human splinter from the retail subconscious of the world, an archaeological excavation in which a living man was disinterred, extracted from the built environment. Or think of the guy out in Oregon—one of my all-time favorite stories—who dressed up in a ghillie suit, a tangled mass of fake vegetation woven into nets, originally meant to camouflage military snipers by making them indistinguishable from plant life. Disguised as a plant, he then slipped into his target, which, of all things—because you couldn’t make this up, it would be impossible to take this seriously in a work of fiction—was a museum of rocks and minerals. He was after their gold and gemstones. Simulating one kind of landscape, he broke into a museum of another—where he was immediately seen and arrested. Perhaps he should have dressed up like quartz.
Think of the nude boy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who became disoriented and trapped inside the air duct of the veterinarian’s office from which he’d been hoping to steal some tranquilizers. The poor kid had clearly been born unlucky: he was left “naked and trapped in an air vent for more than ten hours,” the local newspaper reported. This clothing-optional burglar had apparently been so frantic to escape that “it looked like a squirrel had gotten in there,” the manager later told police. The metal was dented and the boy’s knuckles were rubbed raw. Unable to find a window to squeeze through, he had thought it would make more sense to enter from above, so he cut his way into the air vent from a hiding spot on the roof; he then removed all of his clothing and slipped, naked as the day he was born, down into the building with a flashlight in one hand and a hammer in the other, like some surreal nudist remake of Die Hard. Until he got stuck.
Such stories are not rare. Think of the guy wearing fake dreadlocks who then magically, almost shamanically, “escaped through the ceiling” of a suburban bank outside Chicago. Like a stage act: one minute he was there, the next he was a pair of feet disappearing through the ceiling tiles. Only he didn’t escape, you see, because police later found him trapped there, at one o’clock in the morning, and they had to cut him free, dreadlocks and all. It’s a fate so common as to be predictable. Consider a burglar down in New Zealand who managed to hide (for a while) by crawling up inside the ceiling like a creature from Aliens. He could’ve stayed there. He could’ve gotten away with it. But when the police arrived, one of the officers spotted “a toe poking out of ceiling insulation.” He nearly missed it, but the toe was there, like some glitch in his peripheral vision. The game was up.
The parade of body parts continues: toes, wigs, legs, arms, whole nude bodies, sticking out of places where they should never have been in the first place. Think of the man in Lyon, France, who was busted because of his ear—his earprint, more specifically, which he stupidly left on almost all the doors of the eighty or so student flats he broke into when he leaned in to hear if anyone was home. An ear here, a pair of shoes slipping through the ceiling there: all these detached human body parts moving around on the periphery of the world, passing through walls and architecture, appearing for an instant then gone, intersecting with our reality like visitors from another dimension.
But they’re just burglars.
Someone walks into one building and comes out another, like some larcenous variation on a Victorian-era parlor trick. People cut into one room only to emerge from the one next door moments later—but they do so on all fours, using doors meant for animals, or they squirm through holes in the floor like worms, like serpents, as if shape-shifting back and forth between species, between minerals and plants, burrowing their way into buildings before disappearing again through the ceiling in ways that architects would never have imagined nor planned.
People usually focus on what burglars take, but it’s how they move that’s so consistently interesting. Burglars explore. They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors—but they make it look as if they do. They have their own tools and floor plans, their own ways to get from A to B. They’ll curl up inside refrigerators, climb through ceilings, use garbage chutes and fall twenty-one floors straight into the emergency room when they could simply have taken the stairs. They’ll slip through porch screens and stow themselves inside clothes dryers till the police come busting in to find them. They’ll open the wrong doors, scamper up shipping pallets instead of ladders only to cut back down through a building’s roof, and they’ll break into one shop simply to get better access to the one next door. They flash in and out of the world like ghosts, like neutrinos, a phantasmagoria of body parts from nowhere, a whirl of unexpected visitors and uninvited guests.
The world, it seems, is infested with burglars. Slice open the city and you’ll find a dozen tucked up inside, like some strange new diorama at the natural history museum. Attics, basements, walls, closets, and crawl spaces; alleys, parks, sewers, streets, and backyards: all of these margins and peripheries, subsidiary rooms and edge-spaces, are put to brilliantly unexpected use by people intent on stealing things. Like disembodied stagehands—removing objects from one scene and placing them down again in another, dismantling and reassembling their sets in different buildings and cities around the world—burglars watch our houses in silence, awaiting their cues, professional moving crews no one actually hired.
We could start with any one of these stories, then, but each of them would take us to the same place—so we might as well trademark the final takeaway: Burglars use cities better.™ Even if, in the end, almost all of them get caught.
This kind of spatial expertise cuts both ways. As burglars have chipped and slithered away at their self-chosen jobs throughout the cities of the world, the FBI have become twenty-first-century breakin artists extraordinaire, controlling the scenography of intrusion to a degree that would stun even Hollywood concept artists. The FBI’s present-day program tasked with making sure that state-sanctioned breakins go off without a hitch is code-named, appropriately enough, Stagehand.
Picture G-men dressed as traffic cops, (mis)directing cars away from certain streets and intersections; parking buses in front of mob-operated shops to disguise the lock-picking operation going down on the other side; even carrying their own collections of dust around with them in envelopes and vials, in case they disturb any dust-covered objects (or floors or tables or any other flat surface) in a target’s apartment. They sprinkle replacement dust as they walk backward out the door, and as if it were fairy tale, no one will ever know they were there.
They call the team Tactical Operations, or TacOps, a distributed crew of government-sanctioned burglars—in the best possible use of that word, masters of architecture, commanders of built space—who have, over decades, developed all-but-limitless techniques for obtaining covert entry into the built environment. They anesthetize dogs, feed cats, walk around on twelve-foot stilts to install bugs in someone’s ceiling tiles, and buy the exact same make and model of, say, a desk lamp that a target might also own, to replace even the most mundane appliances with secretly miked federal surrogates. They’re like rogue shoppers duplicating your every move.