Free A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

hoped his book would inspire the perpetrators to come out publicly and identify themselves. Their crimes are now well beyond the statute of limitations. As Rehder put it, these particular bandits could strut into LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow morning, brandishing all the maps, photos, diagrams, and tools they once used, and they could not be arrested for their crimes. As Rehder jokes in the book, “All we could do is take them down to the Scotch & Sirloin and buy them a no-hard-feelings beer.” Alas, the Hole in the Ground Gang has not been so forthcoming, and Rehder is still itching to solve the mystery of their L.A. bank tunnels. (His offer of a beer still stands.)
    In June 1986, employees at a First Interstate Bank in Hollywood, at the corner of Sunset and Spaulding, in a building that now houses a talent agency, began to report strange mechanical sounds coming from the ground near the vault. Neither police nor the bank’s security team could find any evidence of wrongdoing or attempted entry, however, and crucially, none of the vault’s internal sensors had been tripped. Later, when Rehder conducted interviews with bank employees as part of his investigation, he learned that the police had dismissed the sounds as “just a rat running around inside the walls or something,” and no investigation at all was pursued. Another week went by and the noises continued. The power occasionally went out, as did the bank’s telephones. Then the internal Muzak system abruptly kicked in late one evening, startling a manager who was there alone working overtime. The employees began to joke that the bank was haunted by a poltergeist, a supernatural force short-circuiting the electrical networks, blocking phone calls, and playing music at odd hours of the day. Incredibly, as the bank’s security company still found no breach of the vault itself, the possibility that the bank was haunted seemed more likely than that someone was tunneling up from below.
    In reality those sounds were caused not by the ghosts of transactions past, but by a group of three or four men—no one knows how big the team was—who, several theories now suggest, were at least to some degree professionally trained in mining. This was an apparently close-knit, secretive, and disciplined crew, perhaps from the construction industry, perhaps even a disgruntled public works outfit who decided to put their knowledge of the city’s underside to more economically lucrative use. After all, while their route into the bank was via a brute-force excavation, they also employed a sophisticated retracing of the region’s buried waterways. They had accessed the neighborhood by way of L.A.’s complicated storm-sewer network, itself built along old creek beds that no longer appear on city maps.
    The bandits must have had access to Los Angeles County storm-sewer maps, as the connections were by no means obvious; knowing that a manhole several blocks away from a bank might take you within just a few hundred feet of the vault is not something you can simply deduce from walking around on the sidewalk. But even more interestingly, the sewers themselves were not built haphazardly through the canyons of Hollywood; they were constructed to follow the old streams and waterways of the natural landscape, a landscape now buried, invisible, beneath the streets. The ancient watershed of Los Angeles still flows, but it has been entombed in concrete and forgotten. The most well-known—and still the most extraordinary—example of this is the Los Angeles River itself, a controversially paved landscape now more widely seen as nothing more than an arid speedway, hosting dramatic car-race scenes in films such as Grease . But the surface of Los Angeles actually hides a capillary-like network of lost creeks, almost all of which have been diverted, combined, and encased in huge tunnels we tend not to think twice about. Yet they’re down there, secretly connecting things in the