When criminal masterminds plot the ultimate heist in Oceans Eleven or The Italian Job, they are drawing (whether their screenwriters know it or not) form a true-life archetype. According to Geoff Manaugh’s book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, the role model was George Leonidas Leslie, an architect with a degree from the University of Cincinnati who arrived in Manhattan in 1869, the dawn of the Gilded Age. He decided to “use his architectural skills to rob the place blind.”
Most criminals are lazy and none-too-bright; not Leslie, who might also have been a prototype for Professor Moriarty, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliantly sinister counterpart to Sherlock Holmes. Leslie mingled with the rich and gained access to their blueprints; he stole millions of dollars from supposedly impregnable banks and drilled his crew of burglars in recreated life-size versions of his targets.
An acclaimed architectural writer, Manaugh makes the startling if common sense insight that burglary and architecture go hand in hand. “Burglary is designed into the city as surely as your morning commute,” he writes, albeit surely not as intentionally as the traffic patterns engineered by urban planners. “Burglars seem to exist in Matrix space, a world where—to paraphrase that film’s own metaphysics—not only is there no door, but there are no walls, roofs, or ceilings.”
But if crime movies emulated life more than most of us suppose, life (and crime) nowadays are taking many of cues from the cyberspace. “The Internet has been a godsend to burglars,” Manaugh writes. Google Street View is a handy tool for criminals, along with building industry websites that naively stockpile data on bank buildings and other high value structures that enable savvy criminals to plan ahead. Leslie would have loved it. In 2010 a Twitter account called PleaseRobMe appeared, re-tweeting social network status updates of people who announce to the world that they aren’t home. Even a dumb criminal could profit by monitoring the comings and goings of self-infatuated social networkers.
