Direction (Qs.1 to 10): Read the following passage carefully and certain words in the passage are given in bold letters to help you locate them easily while answering some of these questions.

One of the most infamous cold cases in Los Angeles crime history began with a hole in Hollywood. In June 1986, employees of the First Interstate Bank at Spaulding Avenue and Sunset Boulevard opened their vault to discover dozens of emptied safety deposit boxes encircling a fresh, 500 – square-inch tear in the floor. As retired FBI agent William rehder recounts in his 2003 memoir ‘Where the Money is’, investigators on the scene ‘had never seen anything like this. We had a bona fide caper on our hands.’ In proper Hollywood fashion, the police and media bestowed upon the suspects a cinematically appropriate moniker: the Hole in the Ground Gang. The gang tried their luck twice more over the next year, also tunnelling from below, but both times, they were scared off before they could properly empty their targets. All in all, the gang netted a little over $ 2.5 million in cash and goods and more impressively, they were never caught.

For Geoff Manaugh, author of the new ‘A Burglar’s guide to the City’s it’s not the gang’s spoils or fate he’s interested in but their methods; how they used the city’s storm sewer system to drive compact Suzuki 4 × 4s to and from their excavation site where they drilled through 100-plus feet of soil and concrete reach the vaults. The city’s sewer tunnels were never, of course, built with recreational sports vehicles in mind, let alone to create a subterranean drive-through for robbers seeking unauthorized bank withdrawals. However, by exploiting the city’s infrastructure in unforeseen ways, Manaugh suggests that the Hole in the Ground Gang created a ‘topology pursued by other means,’ one that opens up’ a new science of the city’ in which ‘shortcuts, splices, and wormholes’ reshape our understanding of the build environment.

Though A Burglar’s Guide to the City is filled with other colourful exploits, it’s far less a handbook, for would be thieves and instead uses their craft as a springboard into a heady series of interrogations of urban design and architecture. For Manaugh, the burglar may be a morally dubious figure who undermines our “very idea of personal space and dignity,” but he also admires how burglary activates a different awareness of space, exposing the hidden vulnerabilities within well-intended blueprints and master plans. Los Angeles, for example, became known as the bank robbery capital of the United States not only because we have a multitude of banks, but also because so many of them were located near freeways which gave robbers a fast break to escape. Or consider Bill Mason, an ex-burglar Manaugh profiles, who became so adept at deciphering municipal building codes that he could mentally construct the layout of an apartment simply by scanning the placement of exterior fire escapes. As such, Manaugh concludes that, “It is burglars and police, not architects or urban planners, who most readily and consistently show us … these other routes and spaces hidden in some unrealized dimension of the metropolis.” To put it even more simply, he writes, “burglars use cities better.”

Manaugh mixes pithy prose- and occasional dabs of purple – to wax philosophically about how ‘burgalary is the original sin of the metropolis …a deviant counter narrative as old as the build environment itself.” As he repeatedly reminds us, “burglary requires architecture” since the main thing that defines it isn’t the loss of goods but rather, an incursion into physical space. Few other crimes have such an explicity spatial component, leading attorney Minturn Wright III to write in a 1951 legal critique that burglary mostly exists as a legal category thanks to “the magic of four walls.” For these reasons, Manaugh elevates burglars above petty criminal status and instead, characterizes them as “drunk Jedis of architectural space,” “dark wizards of cities and buildings,” and “stowaways of the metropolis, hidden deliberately in the shadows.” A Burglar’s Guide to the City is bestrewn with similar, entertaining turns of phrase but as a whole, its structure is ironically (appropriately?) labyrinthine, filled with tangential side passages and discursive stairways that don’t necessarily lead anywhere specific. Besides the aforementioned profiles of real-life burglars there are also long discussions of surveillance technology and fake “capture houses” that law enforcement uses to entrap thieves. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to pick locks or escape from a wrist tie, Manaugh shares his experiences with both. Your favourite heist flick is likely to get at least passing mention, if not several thousand words, assuming that film is Die Hard, which he praises as “a film about the misuses architecture”. Manaugh is inherently excited at nonlinear explorations of space, and he clearly applies those same principles to writing the book itself.