Read Online A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Geoff Manaugh
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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Rehder’s partner there is Douglas Sims, former head of security at Bank of America. Sims brings decades of private-security work to the position, including a fascinating stint helping to plan urban-scale security protocols for all of Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympic Games.
Rehder’s widely known and recognized expertise in all things bank-crime-related led to the surreal accolade of being tapped to serve as an outside consultant on the 1991 film Point Break , starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze and directed by Kathryn Bigelow. He tends to laugh when telling that story. Keanu “didn’t really ask anything,” Rehder told us, shaking his head. The heists depicted in the film were not unrealistic, he suggested, but the fact that the FBI special agent played by Reeves assists with a bank burglary struck Rehder as so morally absurd and professionally unbelievable as to ruin any claim to veracity the film might otherwise have had. Rehder’s colleagues ribbed him about it for years afterward.
I asked him about the stop-and-robs. If these are an unintended side effect of the design of the city’s transportation infrastructure, do other aspects of city planning inadvertently influence the crimes hatched there? Having started his career in Cleveland, and now spending a great deal of time giving talks or consulting with banks and credit unions in other countries, he has had ample time and opportunity to compare the urban contexts of international criminal activity.
He responded with a rhetorical question: “I’d say, how did the city grow? What are the architectural dimensions, if you will, or spatial aspects of the city itself? Los Angeles, for instance, is basically built on a horizontal level. Everybody needs an automobile—including to commit their crimes.” Compare this to Chicago, he said, or Boston or New York, where a bandit—the FBI’s preferred, albeit amusingly antiquated, term for bank robbers—might aim to get on public transportation, melt into the crowd anonymously, and cross the city as just another citizen or resident. “In New York…” He paused, and I expected some oracular insight into the future of Gotham. Instead, he said, “It’s not easy to park a car in New York City! Getting stuck in traffic there is a major problem. Your bandit needs to find a different way to make his getaway, which means he’ll choose different targets in the first place.”
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
Rehder’s widely known and recognized expertise in all things bank-crime-related led to the surreal accolade of being tapped to serve as an outside consultant on the 1991 film Point Break , starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze and directed by Kathryn Bigelow. He tends to laugh when telling that story. Keanu “didn’t really ask anything,” Rehder told us, shaking his head. The heists depicted in the film were not unrealistic, he suggested, but the fact that the FBI special agent played by Reeves assists with a bank burglary struck Rehder as so morally absurd and professionally unbelievable as to ruin any claim to veracity the film might otherwise have had. Rehder’s colleagues ribbed him about it for years afterward.
I asked him about the stop-and-robs. If these are an unintended side effect of the design of the city’s transportation infrastructure, do other aspects of city planning inadvertently influence the crimes hatched there? Having started his career in Cleveland, and now spending a great deal of time giving talks or consulting with banks and credit unions in other countries, he has had ample time and opportunity to compare the urban contexts of international criminal activity.
He responded with a rhetorical question: “I’d say, how did the city grow? What are the architectural dimensions, if you will, or spatial aspects of the city itself? Los Angeles, for instance, is basically built on a horizontal level. Everybody needs an automobile—including to commit their crimes.” Compare this to Chicago, he said, or Boston or New York, where a bandit—the FBI’s preferred, albeit amusingly antiquated, term for bank robbers—might aim to get on public transportation, melt into the crowd anonymously, and cross the city as just another citizen or resident. “In New York…” He paused, and I expected some oracular insight into the future of Gotham. Instead, he said, “It’s not easy to park a car in New York City! Getting stuck in traffic there is a major problem. Your bandit needs to find a different way to make his getaway, which means he’ll choose different targets in the first place.”
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
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