99% Invisible - 116- Breaking the Bank

Episode Date: May 27, 2014

When I go into a bank, especially if I have to stand in line waiting to make a deposit, my mind wanders. And one of the first place it wanders to is: how I would rob the place. How could … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The only time you should really rob a bank is on a Friday afternoon. There's still need to be a way to steal something and get it out of the bank. The guiding principles you do not want to get caught. When I go into a bank, especially if I have to stand in line waiting to make a deposit, my mind Wonders and one of the. My mind wanders. And one of the first places it wanders to is how I would rob the place. I look at the exits and the entrances, the layout of the building. How could it be done?

Most of the time, buildings are our friends. But it's fun to recast the building as the enemy, the obstacle we have to overcome. Well, I guess it's a good thing we made our last Kickstarter goal. That's producer Katie Mingle. The puzzle of how to get the money out of the bank is one that our culture has been obsessed with for a long time. The first recorded bank robbery took place in the 1860s, and basically ever since we've been seduced by the idea of the heist and the people that do them. Today we'll meet three people who all tried in their own way to beat the bank, with designs

that go from the spectacularly complicated to the deceptively simple. Oh, and one of them actually pulled it off. Several times. full-time. So I'm a Loneganer and I'm a designer and artist I'm based in London. My work relates to the idea that design can be a plot and I think what I'm fascinated by is the fact that it never has to happen so you have absolute freedom to fantasise about whatever you want. And with this in mind, Gainer set out to make her heist as big and complicated as possible, a sort of go big or go home style heist. And she was interested in the interplay between Hollywood movies about heists and real life Heists. This is really weird.

Feedback loops that happen in Hollywood. Hollywood being the intrinsic pull on everything that relates to the iconography of a Heist. So of course, her Heist had to take place in LA. There were years, mostly in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when LA was accurately dubbed the Bank robbery capital of the world. In particularly bad years, there were as many as 2,600 bank robberies in LA.

That's roughly one robbery every 45 minutes of the working day. People have conjectured about why this is, gain or things. It may be the pull of Hollywood or the physical layout of LA. The way LA is constructed due to, though, obviously all the highways, it's actually very easy to get away. Oh, as long as you're not trying to get away during rush hour. To be fair to LA, their bank robbery stats are way less jaw-dropping now. According to the FBI, there were only 212 reported bank robberies in 2013.

But let's get to Gainer's Heist. CHAPTER 1's called the distraction at one wheel show. Gainer ran a Kickstarter last year to fund her work. This is from the video. Picture this. Plane takes off from Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday morning at precisely 9.46 a.m. It's assignment to deliver a full-scale replica of a 7.47 commercial jet to a film set.

Whilst flying over downtown LA, the cables holding the replica snap, dropping the plane 10,000 feet, crashing into the government building, one Wilshire. One Wilshire is a 28-story building in downtown LA. Most of it is filled with computer servers and telecommunications equipment. The goal of it is to draw crowds of passes by and preoccupy police from what's really going on. And what's really going on is that while every emergency responder in LA is busy with the destruction at one wheelchair, five different banks in the surrounding area are being robbed.

But Gainer's plan involves stealing the actual safes or vaults because that's where the big money is. It's become LA law now that they're only allowed to hold $2,000 at once, so if say for example they were ten tellers. Behind each cubicle you'd need ten people and the only amount that you'd ever get is a limit of two thousand dollars in each of those cubicles. Gainer's plan was to drill large concentric circles into the banks and pull out the vaults and then load them on a truck. We could carve circles that get smaller in size as you reach the vault and as you pull the goods

backwards it rips the building in part so that the building could collapse on its own weight after you've left, leaving no traces or trying to diminish the amount of evidence possible. Gainer did a ton of research trying to figure out the size of the vaults, the layout of the buildings. She was working with a group of students from the Art Center College of Design in LA. And we had them ask questions in the buildings, you know, kind of playfully, we're architecture students who want to find out how deep the building goes and so on. As of now, she knows the sizes of all the vaults, but one.

The fifth one, we're still trying to work out. We've contacted a cleaner that has worked in one of the banks, but entering the vaults but one. The fifth one we're still trying to work out. We've contacted a cleaner that has worked in one of the banks, but entering the vault holds is very difficult. Not all of the research has been difficult though, like watching lots and lots of haste movies. The only thing the one you want to have in scene ironically is inside man and people keep telling me to watch it and I keep meaning to and it's one I'd like to savor because I'm told it's very good Heist to mastermind Russell Gowerts location New York City, New York

Hello, my name is Russell Gowerts. I'm the writer of the film inside man starring Jodie Foster Clibow and in Denzel Washington in the early 2000s sight man, starring Jody Foster, Clive Owen and Denzel Washington. In the early 2000s, GoWords was living in New York City. He wasn't a screenwriter, he had nothing to do with Hollywood. I hadn't gone to film school, I hadn't read a book on screenwriting or anything. He was just a guy working in real estate, that like me, and apparently a lot of other people, liked thinking about the best way to rob a bank. Part of my daily commute was that I'd walk for my apartment to my car a few blocks and

I'd walk past an empty bank. And every day when I was walking past this bank, that's what would pop into my head. So it was sort of like this. It was just this few minutes of my day every morning and every evening where I would end up working on this sort of fantasizing about this story in my mind. In fact, for about three years, Gowards constructed the perfect heist in his mind before he ever wrote down a word.

For most of that time, I don't think I ever really intended to write a movie. It was just, you know, just daydreaming. He knew he wanted his heist to take place in Manhattan, but it took him a while to figure out what kind of bank it would be. If you think about it, the story is dependent upon the architecture, if you will, or the structure. As I was writing it, I had to have a sense of, okay, is this a modern bank with glass? Can the cops see everything that's going on? Or is it old? And it just has smaller windows? And can they, you know, sometimes, you know, can they only see a little?

Because that was going to determine how, you know, a lot of the action in the film. So the fun of it, the great part is that, as I'm writing it, I really get to build the bank, however I want it to be. The bank that Gorts ends up building is a classic old one. High ceilings, marble floors, elegant and uncomfortable in the way that big city banks used to be. And it has no windows in front, so the police have very little idea about what's going on inside with all the bank robbers and hostages.

CBS2 News outside Manhattan Trust Bank, where we have just been told by investigators, the bank has been robbed. An okay spoiler alerts ahead, but the heist that he designs is really clever. A group of masked robbers enters the bank and takes everyone, all of the customers and all of the bank employees, hostage. Everybody get down on the floor! Down!

The robbers make all of the hostages take off their clothes and put on the same outfits that they, the robbers, are also wearing a kind of blue jumpsuit like a painter would wear in a mask. I need all of you to put on one of these suits on these masks. So you can't tell who's a hostage and who's a robber, even the hostages lose track of who's who. Toward the end of the movie, the hostages and robbers all come out with their hands up. But because they're dressed exactly the same,

the police have no idea who was a hostage and who was a robber. They question everyone, but they still can't figure it out. And eventually they have to let them all go. Kind of brilliant. But there was still one problem. It became clear to me that as clever as it was to hide them, you know, dress themselves up like the hostages, there still needed to be a way to steal something and get it out of the bank. You know, I couldn't, I couldn't sneak it

out in, you know, with the hostages. So, in the end, I decided one of them had to stay behind. And from there, it became well. If he stays behind, he has to be hiding. And if he's going to be hiding, it's got to be really clever. And it has to be something that is hinted at. Throughout the entire movie, while the robbers are in the bank, they're doing something in a back room, building something, digging something. It's unclear what's going on.

You think that maybe they're digging a tunnel. What they're actually building is a room, a tiny cell with a false wall hidden behind some shelves in the basement of the bank. They use the building itself as an unwitting accomplice. One of the robbers, the one who actually has the stolen goods, has to stay behind until all the police are gone, until they're done gathering evidence at the bank. He has to stay in this little room for an entire week.

You know, it's funny, it's hard for me to know exactly how much of my intention actually came through, but when they're hacking through the concrete floor, they're building a toilet. Because if you're hiding in a tiny cell for a week, well, you're going to have to go somewhere. And that's the thing about this heist. It feels pretty believable.

There are no black boxes in this movie. And if you're watching a movie and a bunch of crooks get to the safe, and somebody just pulls out a piece of equipment from a backpack and sticks it on the lock and the lock opens, that's called a blackba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba-bibba reality of how most bank robberies take place. According to the FBI's own statistics, most bank robberies are done by just a single person who presents a note to the teller and walks out without a lot of fanfare. Which is a fundamental principle of design. If you want something to work and work well, keep it simple.

Heist 3. Mastermind. Tom Justice. Locations. California. Illinois. And Wisconsin. So all of the other people I'm talking to for this show, designed, bank robberies, or bank heists as kind of a creative exercise, but that's not the case with you. Oh, that's correct. I have unfortunately been convicted of 26 bank robberies in three different states. In my case, they called me the choir boy robber. The FBI gave Tom this name because during the robberies, he would stand with his hands folded on the counter and his head bowed. When I can't see someone's hands, that makes me very nervous.

So in order to sort of make myself calm and, you know, a bank teller calm, I would just put your hands folded nicely, just put them right there, put everybody at ease. Tom always worked alone and he always used a note. The note always read, this is a bank robbery, put all of your money in the bag, thank you. And you have to be prepared for the teller to think the note is a joke. It's interesting, it breaks your stride a little bit because you're sort of in this zone. And then the teller, she looks at me like, are you serious? Yes, serious.

Because if you've never experienced this before, and who has, you think it's a joke. And like a loner-gainer, the artist that we heard from earlier, Tom did his research, especially at the beginning. Probably took three, four months of research and a lot of observation. The guiding principles you do not want to get caught. And as such, you want to envision all sorts of different scenarios.

Someone might engage you in the bank, a bank employee, a bank customer, what will you do? If you reach an altercation, what is your escape route? Because it might be different from your standard route. Everything has to be highly thought out. Tom's getaway vehicle. What's his bicycle? So the first thing you do was figure out where he was going to leave the bike parked while he was inside robbing the bank from there. I actually physically walked it through in terms of the steps.

I would actually count the steps. I would count the moves. I would actually count the steps. I would count the moves. I would practice literally hundreds of times. I had a small notebook in which I wrote down every single detail. Would you leave footprints, police patterns, possibilities, high pedestrian traffic areas?

Tom spent a lot of time observing police patterns and completely unintuitively. He came to believe. Banks closest to cop stations make for the softest targets. Tom thinks this is because when cops go out on duty they tend to drive out a ways from the station, which means it takes them longer to get to the scene if they're called back for a robbery. And he tended to rob banks in middle to upper-class neighborhoods so that it would look like it would support somebody riding away on a bicycle. If you were in it to be in a really tough area, a really working class area, that would stand out. Now I did not lock up my bike. Honestly, I was only away from that site two to three minutes.

Over the course of four years, Tom stole close to $130,000. So that's about $5,000 per robbery. He never used a gun, and no one was ever physically hurt. Toward the end of his bank robbing career, Tom got careless and stopped putting as much time into the planning. Did all of the standard steps of what is the escape route and what is the alternate escape route

but I did not really pay attention to like the police you know will hang out and watch police patterns. I just got a cocky. Tom Justice was eventually caught and spent nine years in prison. Design matters. and spent nine years in prison. Design matters. Hey, you want to know what else matters? What? Heat. We want to hurt no one.

We're here for the bank's money, not your money. Your money is insured by the federal government. You're not going to lose a dime. The 1995 movie, Heat, from director Michael Mann, set in LA, of course, it influenced all three of our heist masterminds. Heat to me is, you know, one of the most perfect films I've ever seen. I kind of have seen lots over the years. My favorite being heat, Michael Mann's heat. In prison, heat is the number one movie amongst convicts. Whenever say we're all hanging out on a Saturday and heat comes on TNT and it's on at an odd time.

Whatever it is you're doing, you sort of set down. I'm going to watch at least an hour of this. Craft projects, shankings, you put it all aside for heat. And the Heist designers in our story aren't the only ones influenced by heat. There was a real heist in LA in 1997 dubbed the North Hollywood shootout. You can actually watch and listen to parts of it online. It's about three questions out there.

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It seems when it comes to heists, life often imitates art. And all of these plans are only good as art, I cannot stress this enough people, crime doesn't pay. But if you must embark on a life of crime, remember this. Don't let yourself get attached to anything you're not willing to walk out on at 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. 99% Invisible was producedced This Week by Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produced are the

offices of Arc Sign, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California, around the corner from the Chase Bank, which has a wall of inch thick loose sight between you and the tellers. So you ain't getting in there. Don't even think about it. You can follow along with this show and all the people who make this show on Facebook, and Twitter, and Tumblr, but I think your mission this week is to describe your perfect heist in great detail in the comments at 99p i dot org.

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