Century-old safe no match for Winnipeg man

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This article was published 14/08/2023 (1022 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg safe-cracker felt the pressure to “feel the wheel” of a mysterious metal safe at a bookstore in the U.S., believed to have been placed there in the 1920s.

The owners of Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore had issued a challenge for locals to spin the dial to crack the safe’s code, and take home 50 per cent of its contents if they were successful.

Rick Ammazzini, a Winnipeg Transit bus driver who opens safes as a hobby, heard about the challenge through a Facebook group of safe-crackers.

“Someone in the group said, ‘Hey, you should go and do this’ as a joke,” said Ammazzini, who has cracked more than 100 safes in Winnipeg since 2011. “As a rebuttal, I said, ‘Well, if you pay for it, I’ll go and do it.’”

He created a crowdfunding campaign through GiveSendGo and raised $1,300 to cover his airfare within four days.

About 20 people had taken a shot at cracking the dial before Ammazzini got his hands on it.

He arrived at the bookstore on Aug. 10 and worked on the lock for a total of 10 hours before unlocking the safe Thursday evening – 10 minutes before closing.

“The lock was covered in dirt and dust, making it difficult to break through the noise, but after some tricky manoeuvres, she opened for me,” he said.

“Usually, these locks take about an hour, maybe two hours. This one had something wrong with the lock that kept tripping me up.”

Ammazzini said it came as a relief to finally open the safe. As he expected, nothing of value was inside: the safe contained a few wooden drawers and a pay stub from 1924.

He said if a lock works, it’s a pretty good indication the safe was emptied when it was last opened.

Different locks have different mechanisms, and it takes years to learn how a dial communicates with the lever of a safe.

The strategy lies in exploiting different defects in the manufacturing of the lock and turning the dial to “feel” whether the number lines up with the right wheel.

“This is one of those hobbies that is really hands-on because reading doesn’t teach you what you’re feeling,” he said.

Unlike a professional locksmith who must provide immediate results to a paying customer, Ammazzini has the patience to sit for hours as he tries to crack a code.

“People don’t understand that when you have a hobby, sometimes you go through great lengths to do it.”

The Baltimore case was the third time he opened a safe during his travels. The first time was in Kamloops, B.C., in April 2022 and the second time was in Las Vegas in May.

tessa.adamski@freepress.mb.ca