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Authors: Geoff Manaugh
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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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.”
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.”
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