A similar tactic worked in February 2006 on the other side of the world, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, police raided a bank where hostages were being held—only to find a hole chipped through a concrete wall in the basement. An iron plate had been bolted across it from the other side. The burglars had not only prepared this escape route for themselves—a tunnel leading down into the city’s storm sewers, then on to a nearby river—but they had sealed it behind them to prevent anyone from following.
However, for the most part, any attempt to track down the perfect getaway is made all the more complex because almost everything we know about burglary—including how they did (or did not) get away—comes from the burglars we’ve caught. As sociologist R. I. Mawby pithily phrases this dilemma, “Known burglars are unrepresentative of burglars in general.” Great methodological despair is hidden in such a comment. Studying burglary is thus a strangely Heisenbergian undertaking, riddled with uncertainty and distorted by moving data points. The getaway to end all getaways—the one that leaves us all scratching our heads—to no small extent remains impossible to study.
Rather than just watch more heist films or read another bookshelf of crime thrillers, if I wanted to learn something useful about the art and science of fleeing crime scenes, I would need to take a different approach.
I flew to Las Vegas.
* * *
“Urban Escape & Evasion” is a three-day tactical workshop dedicated to training the general public—with an emphasis on international business travelers—on how to avoid being kidnapped, how to escape from captivity if you are unfortunately nabbed, and how to navigate your way through unfamiliar urban terrain. Though it was not explicitly aimed at aspiring burglars, I wanted to see what the course had to say about getting away—whether the lessons of escape and evasion might offer new skills for successfully fleeing a crime scene.
We met in a La Quinta hotel on the northernmost outskirts of the city, near the entrance to Nellis Air Force Base. This is far beyond the normal tourist geography of the Las Vegas Strip; gone are the bright lights and ritzy casinos, as a landscape of discount liquor stores and half-empty strip malls trails off into the desert, the towers of downtown Las Vegas barely visible on the horizon. New subdivisions have pushed their way here over the past fifteen years, but they look and feel more like speculative real estate deals still waiting to break even rather than lived-in communities. Unpredictable waves of dust and street litter would whirl up and blow across the hotel parking lot.
The class is run by a company called OnPoint Tactical, which is one guy, Kevin Reeve. He has trained Navy SEALs and police SWAT teams; along with tracker Tom Brown, Jr., Reeve’s former mentor, he also helped prepare actor Benicio Del Toro for the role of a former Special Ops soldier gone rogue in the forests of Oregon for a 2003 film called The Hunted. Reeve’s overall goal with the escape-and-evasion course was to take militarized skills of tracking, camouflage, and evasion, which had previously been seen as more appropriate for wilderness areas, and apply them, instead, to an urban environment. To date, the course has been taught in cities across the United States, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City, to name only a few.
The specific premise of the workshop is that you are traveling overseas on business. You are in an unfamiliar environment that you can’t navigate on your own and where you do not know the local customs. Something goes horribly wrong—you’re kidnapped, there’s a terrorist attack, or maybe the grid fails, plunging the city into multiple days of darkness—and you have to escape. You have to bug out, as it’s known in the peculiar lingo of survivalists. We were repeatedly told that this could happen anywhere: in Phoenix or New York, as much as in Baghdad or Mexico City.
On the first day, Reeve and a co-instructor wheeled in a huge plastic bin full of military gear. We were all given lockpicking sets, handcuffs, bobby pins, and various other bits and pieces, including parachute cord—otherwise known as paracord—and plastic zip ties. Most of the workshop consisted of desk learning: we sat indoors and looked at slide shows, flipped through some instructional papers, and discussed building sieges. We learned how to barricade hotel doors from the inside and how to climb our way to safety through windows and over fences using short bamboo poles known as Kali sticks as makeshift ladders. After a brief lunch break, we turned down the lights to watch kidnapping videos on YouTube, allegedly filmed by agents of al-Qaeda.
Reeve, who has a curious tendency to close his eyes, stop talking, put his hand on the bridge of his nose, concentrate for several seconds in silence as if fighting off a headache, and then start speaking again, spent the better part of an hour enumerating all the obstacles we might encounter in an urban environment. Listening to the ensuing discussion, you would have thought most cities in the United States had already gone feral and that we were perhaps only days away from a civilization-ending event. Indeed, an atmosphere of paranoia was cultivated throughout the workshop, stoked as a motivational fire for getting us excited about the ensuing exercises.
Alongside advice for determining the cardinal directions in an unfamiliar city without using a compass, we were told how to blend in, warned about the difficulty of caching things (that is, hiding or burying goods around an environment for later use, something we briefly experimented with in a Walmart parking lot), and advised where to go for medical treatment if we were injured on the run (think veterinarians, not the emergency room). Not all of this would be useful in getting away from a burglary or bank heist, but a range of spatial tips for evading trackers could be directly mapped onto the postcrime getaway. We constructed caltrops, for example, using nothing more than bolt cutters and some chain-link fencing. Caltrops are small spiked stars, like game jacks, that can be dumped out onto a road, ready to pierce and deflate the tires of any cars driving behind you. They are similar to the spike strips deployed by police for shredding the tires of a suspect’s car.
Then out came the zip ties. Things became literally hands-on at this point as we learned a variety of methods for breaking out of physical constraints, including police handcuffs, plastic zip ties, paracord, and duct tape. Duct tape was by far the easiest, and Reeve’s instructions for defeating the material came with the unexpected benefit of triggering an old memory for another workshop attendee. The only female participant in the group began telling us about an experience from her childhood, in a way that implied all of us had undoubtedly been through the same thing. Her mother, she said, used to duct-tape her and her siblings together into a large knot, then leave them like that for an hour or more at a time. Had the woman known back then how easy it was to escape from duct tape, she said, perhaps she would not have spent so many hours duct-taped to her siblings. Unsure of how to reply, I laughed—then saw the expression on her face and immediately regretted it.
The final stretch of the workshop was an inversion of where we began, looking at how to navigate unfamiliar urban environments and find shelter in abandoned buildings. We learned how to hot-wire cars, how to make improvised weapons out of everyday materials, such as credit cards and hiking socks, and we got down to the brass tacks of how to sneak through a city’s streets without being seen (or at least captured). The advice here was interesting, if also rudimentary. Dress like a local, we were told. Keep your head down. Avoid being memorable or visually unique. Blend in. This was called “reducing your signature.” Reeve advised us to tune in to different parts of the city—in essence, this boiled down to seeing the urban environment the way George Leonidas Leslie would have seen it, as a welcoming labyrinth of shadows and protective blind spots. Reeve urged us to study maps of future destinations long before arriving. Find “workable hide locations,” our coursepack advised, not necessarily by going somewhere alone, but by deliberately infiltrating another group of people. The first rule of a successful getaway is not to look as if you’re trying to get away.