Page 23 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018
P. 23
Bloomberg Businessweek
THE HEIST ISSUE
THE WHOLE
HEIST CATALOG
7 TOOLS FOR DISCERNING BURGLARS
(AND 6 TOOLS TO STOP THEM)
A confident criminal can rob a bank with nothing more than a handwritten note, but a truly ambitious theft
requires specialized equipment and skills. With help from experts in law enforcement, private security,
and safecracking, the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City identifies some of the hardware thieves use
to pull off a break-in—and some things you can use to guard against one.
By Geoff Manaugh Photographs by Hannah Whitaker
50 Everyday hardware Sometimes the handiest burglary
Concrete coring drill tools are the ones that won’t raise
suspicions if your backpack is
Hilti DD 350-CA, starting at $5,519 searched. A roofing hammer can
rip through drywall, stucco, and
shingles. A screwdriver can jimmy
The tools of the break-and-enter Estwing shingler’s open a window or door. “The
specialist are often also those hammer, $30 movies would have us believe
of the construction worker. A it’s all superexciting, Mission:
diamond-tipped coring drill Impossible stuff, with incredible
can bore smooth holes through equipment,” says Scott Selby,
the thick concrete of a building co-author of Flawless, a book
foundation, elevator shaft—or about the 2003 Antwerp diamond
bank vault. A version of Hilti’s DD heist. To abscond with an
350-CA was used by the group of estimated $100 million in gems,
elderly men who carried out the the Antwerp thieves thwarted a
$20 million 2015 Hatton Garden million-dollar alarm system using
jewelry heist in London. electrical tape to blind a high-tech
light sensor, a Styrofoam brick
attached to a broomstick to block
a motion detector, and a can of
hairspray to spoof the vault’s
thermal alarm.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICHOLE SHINN
Hilmor demolition 3M electrical
screwdriver, $11 tape, $2
See it on: YouTube, where workers post videos of themselves drilling July 2, 2018
through thick slabs of concrete, sometimes with heavy-metal soundtracks
