What Are Safecrackers?

Robert Campbell, a locksmith who owns Advantage Locksmith in New York City, talks about the art of opening safes.

We often get called to jobs to open safes. Although some safes are extraordinarily complex and advanced, any safe can be opened. Safes can vary dramatically in difficulty. Some we can open in 60 seconds and some may take several days. If the safe has a lock, which they all do, it can theoretically be opened.

Reasons for people calling us to crack a safe are as varied as the safes are. You can have a case where someone just forgets to turn the dial. We’ll go to the location, ask for combination, and we find that he just forgot to turn the dial the correct amount of times. We’ll turn it, explain it, write down clearer instructions, charge a service fee and we are on our way.

In other cases, we also do government applications. We are asked to open extremely high-security (what they call red label) safes, which are often on government and military bases. The reasons why they cannot get in the safes can vary here as well. Perhaps the safe was being transported from one place to another and while safe is being moved the relocker went off or the locks are out of alignment. This is a common safety feature in red label safes and it can be triggered by a sudden bump to the safe. These safes contain important government documents and these people need access. They hire us to open the safes and it is technically involved.

You can spend a lot of time on one safe. These are not the type of safes where you can show up with a drill and start drilling holes because if the relocker has been reset, you really have to know what you are doing. You have to have prior knowledge of the safe, you have to have the right tools to open it. And after opening it, you have to do a repair to make sure the safe is functional again. That may involve resetting the relocker, replacing an electric keypad lock, repairing the hinges… you name it and we’ve done it.

So where is the line drawn? Are there any safes you cannot open?

We have not yet encountered a safe we cannot open. For the majority of smiths, they will, at some point, encounter safes they can’t do. For experienced locksmiths that do safe cracking, it may take days but you will eventually get the safe open.

So what are the hardest safes to crack?

The red label safes for government application are definitely the hardest to crack, but we have also had other uniquely difficult jobs. We once opened safe at hotel in Manhattan that was foreign-made and had glass plates built within the safe. Our job was to open it without doing any damage. That was extremely complex work that took a lot of back and forth. We went there several times and were in regular contact with safe’s manufacturers, looking at the schematics, learning what could go wrong and where the relocker might be. That one took us a long time, but by doing it the right way one step at a time, we got the safe open. And about six months later, we got the replacement lock from the company in Germany that made the replacement safe lock.