Where the Money Is by Gordon Dillow

Author:Gordon Dillow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

And once again I was amazed at the efforts men will go to, the risks they’ll take, to bust into a bank.

It was June 1986, and for weeks employees at the First Interstate Bank in Hollywood had thought something vaguely strange was going on. They kept hearing these noises . . .

It had started one evening the month before, when the branch manager was working late, trying to catch up on some paperwork after closing time, and she heard a kind of low, grinding sound, like somebody drilling something. She walked around inside the bank, trying to figure out where it was coming from, but then the noise stopped, and she decided it was probably just something going on outside. The bank was a two-story brick structure on the corner of Spaulding Street and busy Sunset Boulevard, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills just east of the Sunset Strip. There was always a lot of street work and heavy traffic rumbling along Sunset, and construction crews were putting up a new building directly across the street. The sound probably had something to do with that.

But then a week later the branch manager was working late in the bank, after closing, and damn it, there it was again, that whirring or grinding sound. This time it seemed to be coming from somewhere near the vault.

The vault was a concrete and steel box, 10 feet by 20 and 10 feet high, situated behind the teller counters at the southwest corner of the bank. It was what’s known in the business as a Class I commercial vault, the typical style of vault for a branch bank like the First Interstate on Sunset. Constructed out of poured concrete and 5/8-inch steel rebar and steel mesh, its walls and ceiling were 12 inches thick, the floor 18 inches thick. The vault door was made out of 3 1/2-inch thick steel, with a thin layer of copper sandwiched inside to diffuse the heat if anyone tried to burn through it.

In short, it was a pretty sturdy box, although by no means impregnable. Anything built by humans can be breached by humans, including every bank vault ever made in the history of the world. In fact, the standard of security for any commercial vault is measured not so much by the thickness of its walls or the strength of its steel as by how long it takes to break into it—the so-called minimum time of attack. Under federal bank regulations, class I vaults have to be able to withstand one hour of attack by a knowledgeable person working under optimum conditions with state-of-the-art tools: industrial drills, high-temperature burn bars, and so on. Just one hour.

That may not sound like much time for a vault to hold off an attack. And it wouldn’t be if a guy could simply sashay into a bank, set up his equipment, and start drilling away without worrying about anybody noticing. But he can’t, because the vault has a second line of defense.

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