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

darkness—and they can be used.
    A particularly evocative example of this phenomenon was pointed out by landscape architect Jessica Hall, coauthor of a blog called LA Creek Freak , in a 2006 interview with LA Weekly . Hall asked, “Do you know why there’s sometimes fog at the intersection of Beverly and Rossmore?” She was referring to a well-trafficked intersection near the Wilshire Country Club. This is “because there’s a perennial creek that runs through the country club there. It goes underground beneath Beverly, and comes up again on the other side.” This subterranean presence lets itself be known through a diaphanous mist in the air above. The city gives off signals, provided you know how to read them: something as innocuous as an early-morning fog bank might actually be a clue, revealing sewer tunnels or lost creeks in the neighborhood around you.
    Thus, if you know the creeks and their routes, even after they have been encapsulated inside storm sewers, you also know clever and unexpected ways into the buildings above them. For a burglar—or bank bandits such as the Hole in the Ground Gang—these surface indications of underground geography can be used for nefarious purposes, to find ways to navigate the city and plan future heists, tracing old, buried streams until you reach your final target.
    In addition to all this, Rehder explained, the Hole in the Ground Gang bandits would have needed intimate knowledge of the ground itself, the actual geology of Los Angeles. As LAPD lieutenant Doug Collisson, one of the men present on the day of the tunnel’s discovery, explained to the Los Angeles Times back in 1987, the heist “would have had to require some knowledge of soil composition and technical engineering. The way the shaft itself was constructed, it was obviously well-researched and extremely sophisticated.” Rehder goes further, remarking that when Detective Dennis Pagenkopp “showed crime-scene photos of the core bit holes” produced by the burglars drilling upward into the vault “to guys who were in the concrete-coring business, they whistled with professional admiration.”
    In Rehder’s file “Tunnel Job” were a handful of glossy color photographs that seemed to have been taken quickly, with less-than-ideal lighting. Sometimes they weren’t even in focus. They showed bewildered FBI agents looking at a ransacked vault, the doors of its safe-deposit boxes torn asunder. Standing next to them were members of the LAPD Burglary Auto Theft Division (BAD), described by Rehder in his book as “an elite unit of fifteen or so detectives who specialized in high-end breakins and property theft: purloined payrolls, jewelry store burglaries, commercial safe-crackings, fine art thefts, high-profile heists of every description.”
    The photographs also revealed how impressive the scale of the tunnel was. With its tight, snaking corridor chipped through the sandy ground of subterranean L.A., it bore an uncanny resemblance to the catacombs of Rome or Cappadocia. The tunnel torqued down and around and finally ended at the featureless concrete pipe of the storm sewer. The burglars had driven Suzuki four-wheelers through the claustrophobically tight sewer tunnels beneath West Hollywood, tunnels that were only barely wider than the four-wheelers themselves; the bandits would have been hunched over like horse jockeys, driving nearly blind beneath the city, navigating tight turns and hoping—praying—that they would not bump into any obstructions or hit a dead end.
    Those four-wheelers were the workhorses of the entire operation, hauling equipment in and booty out—more than $172,000 in cash and as much as $2.5 million worth of personal belongings ripped from safe-deposit boxes. You can still see the open storm culvert that the crew used as their original point of entrance; it’s found just slightly north of the intersection of Nichols Canyon Road and Hollywood Boulevard. Although the FBI believes that this