The New Yorker Presents (2015) s01e09 Episode Script

They're coming back, huh? Would you like something a little wider? See, I dance a lot.
I don't want something going to fall out.
Oh, it won't-- If you dance a lot, this will work perfect for you.
You guys got nice hats here.
You've been here a year? Yep.
What do you think of that? I think that'll do it.
Well, there you are, my good man.
Thank you.
The meticulous engineer types.
They're dreamers solving the problems of time and space.
It's like the physics of the universe for them.
How often, how many floors, how many people? You know, you walk around New York, they just see it as, like, this series of elevators.
The buildings are just window dressing to cover up what is actually important, which is the elevator inside.
Elevatoring is something that a lot of us do every day, several times a day, and something we don't think about.
Without the elevator, we wouldn't have the modern city.
It's the elevator that enabled there to be cities with tall buildings, and therefore, you know, they make density possible.
Density leads to more people from different places transacting, interacting, sharing ideas.
They make civilization work.
Is that overstated? Elevators have been around since the ancient times.
People would not ride elevators because it was not perceived as safe.
At the Crystal Palace in 1854, Elijah Otis showed to the world the safety elevator, which immediately stopped an elevator platform when the rope broke.
The demonstration really showed to the world that we can go tall.
Anywhere where they're putting in elevators means they're putting in buildings.
Where people are building means that economy's usually growing.
I mean, really, you don't have to follow the money.
Just follow the elevators.
Elevators are designed to make you forget that you're in an elevator.
In fact, you know, elevator music, which is sort of the first Muzak, really, was, you know, designed to put you at ease when you're in an elevator.
To obscure the fact that you're, you know, basically in this dark shaft, hovering on a rope, you know, above 70 stories of space-- you know, hovering over an abyss, basically.
The door close button is a placebo.
It's just there to make you feel better, to give you an illusion of control.
They may think it works.
Apparently, people who have elevator phobia-- you know, it's like claustrophobia-- they're not afraid so much of being stuck in the elevator as they are afraid of being afraid of being stuck in the elevator.
Nicholas White works at Business Week magazine.
One night he went out to have a cigarette.
Got back on the elevator.
On the way back upstairs, it stopped.
He rang the bell for help.
He screamed.
He pounded on the walls.
He spent the next 41 hours in that elevator.
There he seems like a-- like a bug in a box.
When they finally did get him out, he's a mess.
The thing about the elevator is you just get in it, and the world is one way, and then you get out of it, and it's slightly different.
If we look at the world before 1970, there were two megacities: Tokyo and New York City.
In 1990 there were ten of them.
By 2030 there will be 37.
Urbanization will probably move 2.
6 billion people from the countryside to a city.
There are projects in the Middle East-- 3-400 elevators-- central China with over 2,000 elevators.
If there's any hope for the human race to live with the kind of numbers we're talking about, we're going to be living at a hundred stories.
Then there's going to be sort of interconnectivity at that level.
We'll be able to sort of keep piling on toward the sky.
That's-- That's elevators.
That's all elevators.
If you were being chased by a bear, you might not really say "Gee, that was fun.
" Try to do this out of sequence.
All right, there was Newport, Rhode Island, and there was Greenwich, Connecticut.
There was Baltimore.
There was Palm Beach, Florida, Wilmington, Delaware, Allegheny County, PA.
There was Grosse Point, Michigan.
You had Trump's house, Curt Gowdy, the sportscaster, Steven Spielberg, Mark Twain's house.
It could be up to a thousand, it really could be.
Tens of millions of dollars very easily.
He's never been caught during the act of the commission of a burglary.
It's a top shelf crime.
Blane is your consummate serial burglar.
And we're not talking about Cheerios.
How's that? Blane was really one of my first bigger cases, and everything I learned about Blane Nordahl I pretty much learned from Lonnie.
I'm Lonnie Mason.
I've investigated Blane Nordahl for the last 30 years.
Live in Avon-By-The-Sea, New Jersey.
Born and raised in the house next door, and I've lived here-- it'll be 62 years on Sunday.
When burglaries were committed here in town, I would take them personally.
At age 18, I graduated high school, and that night I began working as a police officer in Avon.
And when I first met Blane, I was investigating a burglary right down the street from our house here, and I went in and interviewed him.
That lasted about seven minutes because he had no time for me.
Um, but because of his technique and his chippy attitude, I knew he was an up-and-coming star.
Arrogant, pompous, full of himself, confident as hell.
And he always, you know, thought outside the box.
Initially he was going to be a Navy SEAL.
He looked like a gymnast, somebody that was on one of our Olympic teams.
He's in good shape, he's athletic, and can identify with, say, To Catch a Thief.
I thought you might like to see a real live burglary in action.
The first time I met Blane-- honestly, the first thing I said was "This dude is short.
" I'm telling you, he's not over 5'2".
If you look at him, you'd say, "Oh, what's this guy going to do?" He's very easy to underestimate.
Your typical burglar from the time I came on the job until I met Blane was your nickel-dime burglars.
They'd crash a front door, nothing sophisticated.
But Blane, he was very different.
He's a meticulous thief.
He just wants his piece, and that's the Sterling.
It was just the Sterling silver.
He would explain to you what different silver stamps meant on the bottom of the Sterling silver.
He could tell you where it was produced, the era it was produced.
Blane told me years ago that he always wanted an original Paul Revere forged silver.
Because everybody equates Paul Revere with the midnight ride.
They don't realize he was a silversmith.
Even if Paul Revere had never made his famous midnight ride, his fame would have been secure as the foremost silversmith in Colonial America.
And he told me that one of his lifetime goals was to track down this stuff and steal some of Paul Revere's silver.
Because he's obsessed with it.
It's like an addiction.
He's not an alcoholic.
He's a silverholic.
Blane came from a broken home.
Never had those close family unit that a lot of us have enjoyed.
He took that hard.
Whenever you bring that up to him, he will not discuss it.
His father is a well-known artist.
And if you ever saw any of his work, it is phenomenal.
His forte, so to speak, are, like, these Apache scenes.
At one point he was commissioned by Michael Jackson to do a painting for him.
So the guy's, you know, he's a top shelf artist.
And, uh, you know, the son just chose a different path.
Blane knew that silver denoted a closeness in families.
Silver was always left down throughout the families for decades.
Your silver is your one possession sure to become an heirloom, to be forever as beautiful as springtime.
He resented that fact.
It was kind of a personal thing with him to destroy what he didn't have.
You've got high-end people, legacy silver, someone who doesn't leave a trace, not a trace of himself in what would seem to be normally impossible situations.
They say he is a master at his craft.
His M.
O.
was always the same: case a mansion, quietly steal the silver while the homeowners were asleep in their beds.
He keeps a standard practice.
He doesn't deviate.
He'd look for a Victorian or Georgian mansion.
He would travel 3 and 4 miles straight through the woods to the crime scene.
He had to have come through the woods in this direction and crawl through that opening.
Crawling through spaces no bigger than 12 inches by 19 inches-- A dog door.
I've never, other than Blane, never had a burglar go through a dog door.
Then he went over here.
Was smart enough to know that this was for silver.
About 1785.
He raised that up and took the entire Sterling silver set.
He knows how not to, uh, allow his scent of fear and adrenaline emit from his body so that dogs would pick up on it and attack him.
He has consistently baffled these brilliant detectives.
How he could get into a location protected by sleeping dogs and get away with a bag of silver and ride off into the night.
He would take the silver, crash it with a dumbbell, smash it all down, all the silver that's priceless, then he would take it and ship it to the refinery.
And in turn he would get a percentage of the weight of the silver.
They're heirloom objects.
It's most likely to be the white upper-class individual who is devastated by the loss of Grandma's silver.
I mean, let's face it.
Some people look at this as, like, almost like a Robin Hood figure.
The only trouble with Blane is, instead of giving the money to the poor, it goes in Blane's pocket.
And he is a cancer that needs to be treated.
And his personality is "Catch me if you can.
" Lonnie's linked to him, like, in a weird way.
- Ooh.
- There is a respect there, but I think there also is a mutual hatred.
Because I ruin his-- his, uh, his thrill.
I'm the-- I'm the bottom of that roller coaster ride, you know? I convinced my boss to give me a surveillance team.
16 officers were there overnight.
We had hoped to set up surveillance and catch him in the act.
And, uh-- that didn't work out so well.
I get home, get a call from my chief to get in his office.
I get in, and he said, "I authorized this overtime.
Can you tell me why?" And I said, "Because we prevented him from hitting last night because--" "Really?" He said, "He hit.
" I said.
"I could tell you the area he wasn't in: this two-block radius.
" He said, "That's the area that he hit.
" Three times, and we never saw him.
Needless to say, my next couple of requests for surveillance teams weren't always approved.
It's tough to pin him down.
The guy is pretty spooky.
I knew at that point that he was living in a motel.
We called from the adjoining room moments before and said, "We're with the hotel.
Are you checking out tomorrow?" And he said yes.
It was something out of a cartoon.
The fuchsia team went in.
They look like the Philadelphia Eagles.
They were gigantic.
Everybody's rushing around.
They're saying he's not in here.
I had my gun out, and I looked at the crack of the door.
He sucked it up.
He was behind the door.
I reached around with my left hand and grabbed him by the hair.
He grabbed my hand, and now we're struggling.
And I just flipped him.
The two of us went over the TV stand.
The TV was on.
It was smoking.
He went up on the floor - and me on his back.
- Yee-ha! And I rode him for about 4 feet.
When he got up, he had a rug burn down the side of his cheek, which gave me some satisfaction.
I was a cop from the '70s, you know? Let's get out there.
Let's wrestle.
Let's-- Let's go to jail.
And let's move on.
After he got out of jail, I said to him, "Come see me.
I'll help you.
"We can work something out.
"I'll get you a job, "whether it's with an insurance company or a silver company or an alarm system company.
" And I don't think it was three seconds.
He goes, "No, I don't think so.
" He could have said, "Oh, sure, sure, sure," you know, but, uh, no.
That's not Blane.
Cornell would call me: "We think he's out, and we think he's in this area.
" That pit would start to churn and churn.
I couldn't let go.
I couldn't let Blane be Blane.
There are cases that essentially haunt detectives, but usually those are unsolved cases.
It's silver thefts.
Why does that live in your mind forever? People were like, "You're retired.
Why? "You're not getting paid.
You're not getting anything for this.
" Through his arrogance, it kept me going.
I started going online and checking where Blane was.
And once I figured out that laptop, I was golden.
It's like a chess match.
You have to try to put together a pattern but it wasn't a pattern that was just in your jurisdiction.
I started getting inundated with photos from South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, I called down to Atlanta and said, "I know who's doing your burglaries.
" So we formed a task force of all the Southern communities, and we went to work.
And that's why we actually intercepted a shipment.
He shipped over 729 pounds of silver.
All he did was turn it over, except for some silver in his last march through the South, and he actually stole teaspoons that were produced by Paul Revere.
And that's like a trophy for him.
And years later he found it.
Stranger than true.
Because I'd dealt with him since the '80s, I knew his idiosyncrasies, and that's how I tracked him to the motel.
We had the phone records, speeding ticket.
I kept tracking his whereabouts, his girlfriends.
One of his girlfriends, she knew his comings and goings, and she flipped and was part of our prosecution, so to speak.
He at that point knew that I was on to him.
I accept challenge.
And once a challenge becomes you or me I have to win.
I want to tell you about the arrest of one of the country's most notorious thieves.
Police have arrested 51-year-old Blane Nordahl, the burglar to the stars.
Three decades after his burglary career began, his taunting of investigators may finally have come to an end.
They called me immediately, and they said, "We got him.
" The detective said "Blane, you know who we have on the other end of this phone?" And he goes, "No.
" He said, "Lonnie Mason.
" And he just buried his head, and they told me that Blane said hello.
The theft of silver-- whatever emotional ties people might have to these objects, it's things.
It's stuff.
It's silver.
We don't have any fingerprints.
We don't have him at the scene.
We don't have any videos.
We don't have any statements.
We don't have any confession.
We don't have anything.
Let's rock and roll.
Drum roll.
Boom.
They always look like they're having the nicest time.
There's no guilt.
There's no shame.
It's just indulgence.
That harmless cartoony quality.
He's very difficult to grasp.
He was such an amazing drawer.
If he had drawn his mother, he would be a great drawer, too.
He just happened to draw large dicks.
Tom of Finland was born in a small village in rural Finland in 1920.
His birth name was Touko Laaksonen.
He signed his work as Tom, but gay artists were taking pseudonyms, and they were, like, "Lon of New York," "Bruce of L.
A.
," so he was Tom of Finland.
He projected a fear-free, angst-free, uh, idea of gay sexuality and that sex is nothing to be scared of or discriminated against.
He was an illustrator for McCann Erikson, the biggest and most global advertising firm in the world.
He made ads for refrigerators and food.
During the day, he was projecting the happy suburban family.
During the night, pretty much the opposite.
When no one was looking, behind closed doors, he would draw what he called his dirty little pictures.
He said, "If I don't have a hard-on, it probably won't be a very good drawing.
" Spring of 1957, his work was published on the cover of Physique Pictorial.
Yeah, I shoplifted it in a store called Sherman's when I was 16.
They were pinup magazines for men that pretended they were magazines for bodybuilders, but they weren't.
I discovered him when I was 26 on the wall of a bar, and it was almost like this guy said, "Hey, come on over here," you know.
"Let's-- Let's get sexy together.
" I didn't tell most of my friends in high school that I had a Tom of Finland drawing.
They were for jerking off-- what all pornography's for, and they were great for it.
As a young politically engaged activist, it did have an impact.
Am I as butch as they are? I want to be.
Tom of Finland made every man, even straight men, feel nelly.
And one forgets historically that gay men, till about the late '50s, were largely depicted as effeminate.
I mean, he was responsible for stimulating so many of these young boys to go to the gyms.
I mean, even today, the bear movement, I question, really-- are they just Tom of Finland guys that got tired of working out? His Tom of Finland outfits became a classic.
The tight jeans, the boots, the leather jackets.
Peter Berlin, I think, personifies it more than anybody.
He is a human being that Tom of Finland almost thought up.
I saw myself like a living Tom of Finland: young, beautiful, and erotic.
Tom had a vision that a man is a sexual object, and that is what is called obscene and bad and pornographic.
He thought of himself as a pornographer.
We have to continue to think of him as a pornographer.
But I think they are far more complex than to be just reduced to gay erotic art.
If it's really well done, then it becomes art that just happens to have a subject matter that is sex.
Pornography largely works in private.
Something that is displayed publicly probably doesn't become pornography anymore.
My young female interns today are looking at it wide-eyed and saying "Did they really have orgies like this? Did they really put their fists up other men's assholes?" I'm, like "Yes, yes, children, they did.
" They take to the Tom of Finland images for the same reason everyone does: is the Disney quality of them.
They're round.
They're cute.
The one that I really am, like, crazy about right now, it's this big muscular cop, and he's pointing at his ass.
He's got a smile on his-- "Come on, guys," you know, like "Give me a poke.
" Well, I bought a Tom of Finland drawing which is two policemen.
One's rimming the other one, and you can tell that it had one, the dick up, but he erased it, so it's great.
so it's like the de Kooning-- you know, the erased de Kooning drawing.
You have two prisoners making out with two prison guards.
The perspective changes, and the guards become the prisoners.
Tom of Finland's work reminds us that gay liberation is not only joining the conservative forces of Western society-- the army and getting married.
A different economy of sexuality can lead to a different idea of community and a different idea of the self.
If you look at it superficially, it's just all these cocks.
But if you go into it, then you actually discover it's so much about humanity.
It's about loving, and it's about taking care of each other.
He is a national treasure now in Finland.
He's on the national stamp.
Can you imagine that happening in America? It was porn, but I knew it was more than porn.
To me, nothing was just porn if it changed how you thought.