It’s a cliche of heist movies — that moment when the criminal mastermind runs through his brilliant plan with blueprints and models. Those scenes all owe a debt to George Leslie, one of the greatest burglars in American history. By Geoff Manaugh. (April 10, 2016)

The police and public gasped at the audacity of the Great Hatton Garden heist of 2015, where millions in cash and jewels were taken from an underground vault in London’s diamond district. Mark Seal investigates the unorthodox daring of the perpetrators—and the high-tech investigation that snared them.

“The burglars’ rehabilitation of a quiescent architectural space brings with it a much broader and more troubling implication that we ourselves do not fully understand the extent of the rooms and corridors around us, that the walls we rely on for solidity might in fact be hollow, and that there are ways of moving through any building, passing from one floor to another, that are so architecturally unexpected as to bear comparison to animal life or even the supernatural.” By Geoff Manaugh.