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

is where they lowered their four-wheelers into the storm sewer system, you can also follow this culvert north up Nichols Canyon until you get to a Department of Public Works drainage basin; with a sloping concrete ramp that leads straight into the culvert, this also affords a convenient entry point to the subterranean heart of Los Angeles.
    In their tunneling, the Hole in the Ground Gang had to get rid of the more than three thousand cubic feet of loosely compacted earth. They achieved this through a quick bit of improvisational hydrology, constructing a small dam at the beginning of their work every night; this blocked the head of the storm sewer and caused even the smallest trickle of water in arid Los Angeles to build up—and up and up—throughout the night, while they dumped all the excavated dirt and sand farther down the sewer line. Then, upon breaking the dam—destroying this rogue plumbing in the darkness beneath Sunset Boulevard—the resulting torrent of water washed away all the debris (and, perhaps even more usefully, their footprints). Finally, explaining the flickering electrical supply in the bank and the shorted phone lines that led employees to suspect an electromagnetic poltergeist had taken up residence in the walls, they tapped into the bank’s own wiring from below, using it to power their tools and lights.
    “There was a lot of technical knowledge,” Rehder said wistfully, or perhaps regretfully. “These guys had to be in construction—maybe mining—but they had to know construction. They knew how to construct a tunnel that went one hundred feet underground in L.A., and they didn’t shore anything up. Their tunnel was fantastic.” He showed me the photos again, pointing at details and remembering the strange day of the discovery.
    It still ate at him. They had gotten away with it.
    *
    The methodology of the Hole in the Ground Gang bears superficial resemblance to an earlier heist on the other side of the Atlantic. Over the long Bastille Day weekend of July 1976, a team of burglars successfully broke into the vault of the Société Générale bank in Nice, France, stealing nearly $8 million worth of cash and goods from the safe-deposit boxes inside. They had been tunneling for two months. Led by Albert Spaggiari—who later escaped from French custody by jumping out of a courtroom window, landing atop a parked car, and speeding off on a prearranged motorcycle, never to be seen in person again by European authorities (legend has it, he flashed a peace sign as he sped away)—this spectacular underground crime remains a textbook example of criminals bending a city to serve their own devious needs.
    Spaggiari and his team began their tunnel in an underground parking garage, chosen because of its proximity to the city’s deep drain system. Plans of the drainage network were freely available to inquisitive members of the public; all you had to do was ask. Armed with these, Spaggiari then cased the city for weeks, exploring the actual sewers when he could and making a note of any security cameras or other difficulties along the way. These regular reconnaissance routes would have included verifying that the ground conditions beneath the chosen bank were suitable for tunneling. Given accurate geological knowledge of a city, a person could determine right away which banks are worth trying to hit and which are geologically impregnable. Bank vaults built on heavy Manhattan bedrock are not going to see many tunnel jobs; those built on soft London clay, crumbly Berlin sand, or the fertile soil of South America are immediately vulnerable, provided one is willing to get one’s hands dirty. Tunnel jobs—true tunnel jobs, not just drilling holes through drywall but carving your way forward through the earth—are as much about geology as they are about transportation infrastructure, buried creeks, or a lack of CCTV.
    Spaggiari soon discovered that the drains beneath Nice were not merely storm sewers, but were