WHAT IT IS The pinnacle of the bank robber’s craft
WHY YOU WON’T DO IT You should rarely have legitimate reason to practise
Safecracking is one of those things that looks easy when you see a dashing cat burglar deftly twisting a dial back and forth in the movies until they hear that telltale ‘click’ – but what if it’s you that needs to steal evidence from some supervillain’s headquarters (or, heaven forbid, liberate a diamond necklace)?
The principal tool in a safe-breaker’s armoury is time. Whichever approach you decide upon, none of them are speedy. Your first method is to guess the combination: some safes may have well over a million potential combinations, but according to the professionals, people are often remarkably predictable, basing their apparently random codes on birthdays, phone numbers and other easily discovered sequences. Others forget to change the standard combinations set by the manufacturer, and some keep a note of the combination near the safe in case they forget it.
Assuming you don’t get lucky in this way, then drilling through the safe can expose the lock so you can manipulate it with a punch rod. However, many manufacturers employ cobalt plates to counter all but the toughest drill bits, while others effectively booby-trap the lock so that a further set of locks is activated to secure the safe.
Few safes are a match for a controlled explosion. The only problem with this approach is that the contents are likely to suffer just as much as the safe. There are similar problems inherent in using, for instance, an oxyacetylene torch, plasma cutters or a thermic lance.
Safe-breakers in the movies use sound, feel and patience. You need to be attuned to tiny clicks that give clues to the combination. This is a real art, and since it’s also Hollywood’s method of choice, it’s worth exploring in more detail.
Rotary locks found in safes consist of a series of anywhere from two to eight wheels (one wheel for each digit in the combination). The combination dial on the front of the safe is connected to the wheels inside by a spindle, which is also connected to a drive cam. Each wheel has a single notch on its edge. The aim is to position all of the wheels so that the notches line up at the top. This will create a gap into which will fall a small metal bar called the fence. It is the fence that, when the notches are unaligned, sits in the way of the bolt, and prevents the door from being opened.
In 1940, Harry C. Miller came up with a method that remains the basis of lock manipulation to this day. Firstly, the safe cracker needs to work out where the contact points are on each wheel. These are the points where the lever attached to the fence brushes against the notch, and can be identified by a quiet click.
Having found the contact points on the drive cam, the burglar notes the corresponding numbers on the dial. He or she sets the dial to the number opposite the midpoint of the contact point numbers, then slowly turns the wheel to the right and listens for a series of clicks after going through the contact point numbers. The number of clicks tells him how many wheels there are (and how long the combination is).
Next, the dial is set to zero and turned to the left. The breaker listens once more for the telltale clicks of the contact areas and notes the numbers. This process is repeated, moving the starting point a few numbers to the left each time. The contact area numbers will be slightly different each time. Eventually, the breaker has all the figures he or she needs, and will plot them on a graph, one for the left contact points and one for the right. There should be as many points of convergence as there are wheels. Noting the points of convergence, the breaker now has a finite number of numbers to try out. For example, three numbers have six potential combinations, while six numbers have 720 combinations. That’s still quite a lot, but considerably fewer than if you had no reference points.
Yes, it’s a lot more complicated than it looks when George Clooney’s doing it, but then again, getting into a safe is not supposed to be a walk in the park!
DRILLING TECHNIQUES Specialist drills can offer a shortcut into some safes. After drilling from the front at an angle that avoids protective plates (angled drill method, right), the safecracker can use a borescope to see the wheels in motion as they turn the dial. Alternatively (drill method, left), drilling into the back of safe can provide access to the back of the lock to directly manipulate the wheels.
