Sinatra’s vault challenges Camas safecracker

Dave McOmie of Camas doesn’t claim to be a big Frank Sinatra fan. If he was, he might have hummed a Sinatra ballad of longing and uncertainty — “Maybe You’ll Be There” or “If I Had You” — while cracking a spectacularly difficult safe at a Tahoe resort a few weeks ago.

But McOmie, one of the world’s most successful and storied professional safecrackers, doesn’t allow himself to be distracted by celebrities, media scrums, security guards or emotional families desperate to uncover riches when he’s working, he said.

“I am hyper-focused on my opponent,” said McOmie, 68, referring to the safe he’s working on.

Those families are often who hire McOmie to break into a lockbox that supposedly can’t be opened, he said. Spouses or children are often eager to recover long-lost valuables or other unknowns after a death in the family. There are fortune hunters who gamble on mystery safes at auctions or even on Craigslist. And there are jet-setters whose jewelry or other valuables wind up accidently stuck in a hotel safe that refuses to cooperate.

When safes lock themselves down more or less permanently, it’s almost always because of human error, McOmie wrote in his 2021 memoir, “Safecracker: A Chronicle of the Coolest Job in the World.”

People lose keys or combinations and they — or their descendants — wind up baffled. Burglars who try overwhelming force only manage to break delicate interworkings. Even highly competent bank employees get sloppy after years of precision and manage to lock themselves out.

“A timelock is an ingenious device that prevents a bank vault from being dialed open after hours,” McOmie writes. Three redundant clocks are wound by one bank employee and checked by another. Once the clocks are set and the vault is locked, it cannot be opened until the time runs down on at least one of the clocks.

“This ultra-secure method of locking … has deterred potential kidnappers and rogue employees for the past century and a half. Bank personnel can’t open the vault for any reason, not even at gunpoint,” McOmie writes.

“But then one day, perhaps after years without a mistake … too many hours are wound on all three clocks. The person double-checking, who by this time has become more of a rubber-stamper, fails to notice, and the vault is closed and locked. The next morning, it won’t open. This happens somewhere in the United States every week, most often on Monday.”

That’s when McOmie swoops in, sometimes via a chartered flight, lugging suitcases full of tools, including high-powered drills with diamond bits and surgical endoscopes that have been modified to peer inside machinery rather than human bodies.

A call to Tahoe

McOmie was pleased to be able to drive to Tahoe, Nev., for this recent job. That way he could bring a trunkful of equipment with him, he said. He wasn’t exactly sure what this job was going to entail. He just knew it was going to be challenging.

McOmie has been called in on celebrity cases before.

In 2016, he was summoned to Paisley Park, the Minneapolis-area home and studio complex of late pop star Prince, to open a vault with a three-ton door that was last closed by the Purple One himself. The exceptionally prolific musician died earlier that year, and his vault reportedly contained a trove of unreleased music. But its combination had been lost with its owner.

Opening Prince’s vault is the climactic adventure of “Safecracker,” with McOmie rotating dials and listening with an electronic stethoscope before resorting to a diamond-tipped drill. In the end, he was able to open the vault and reveal just what Prince fans were hoping for: library shelves packed with thousands upon thousands of recordings. Another small safe, which was child’s play to unlock, contained a computer with Prince’s personal catalog of the recordings.

When he opened Prince’s vault, the first thing McOmie did was stand back and let others go in. That’s always his policy, he said. He never wants to be left alone with a vault or its contents. McOmie has been accused of theft a handful of times across his decadeslong career, he said.

The first time, he was a teen just learning the trade, he said. McOmie grew up in Vancouver and apprenticed with Vancouver locksmith Gene Corey. He quickly graduated from opening locks to drilling safes.

He was a “scrawny sophomore” in high school and just back from helping Corey change the combination on a local dentist’s home safe, when the dentist called and accused them of stealing a jewelry box.

The dentist called back just a few minutes later to say the box had been found. But ever since, McOmie said he refuses to be the one who physically opens any door or barrier he’s unlocked or penetrated. That job belongs to whoever hired him.

Do professional safecrackers ever go bad and help themselves to those valuables?

It’s been known to happen, McOmie said, but it’s rare.

In “Safecracker,” McOmie writes that one pro he knew wound up selling stolen jewelry on eBay, where it was quickly found. Another expertly tunneled through the wall of a London jewelry store while government agents patiently surveilled the scene, then sprang into action.

“It’s what I call going from professional to amateur,” McOmie said.

Surgical skill

Safecracking is a data-driven business. Repurposed surgical and listening devices and diamond-tipped drills are cool, but McOmie turns first to detailed databases that contain closely guarded secrets about the innards of safes and vaults. Those databases are available only to members of the National Safeman’s Organization — a professional association that McOmie formed and has led since 1992.

“Prospective members are heavily vetted to ensure that the Darth Vaders among us do not have access to such sensitive information,” McOmie said.

McOmie’s son, Justin, 40, a programmer, maintains the organization’s databases and support forums.

When the Sinatra safecracking job surfaced, McOmie researched what he could, but he knew he was facing the unknown. That’s what the first locksmith hired to tackle the job found — and why he turned to McOmie.

“I have never spent more time researching a safe,” McOmie posted on the National Safeman’s Organization members-only blog. “I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with and didn’t want to fall on my face, embarrass myself in front of a crowd and ruin a nearly irreplaceable lock.”

But nobody told McOmie that the storied Cal Neva resort in Tahoe, Nev., once owned by Sinatra, is under renovation and is expected to reopen in 2028.

This job is the only one McOmie has been compelled to do while wearing a hard hat, and the noisy, busy atmosphere rendered McOmie’s sensitive listening devices useless, he said.

“There was pounding, there was welding. And I’m hard of hearing,” McOmie said.

Accompanied by resort officials and a photographer/videographer who documented everything, McOmie and his son and assistant, Aidan, 21, faced what he described as the “thickest” adversary he’d ever seen, he wrote in his blog: “A bank vault inside an extremely beefy fire safe.”

Penetrating those barriers is always a bit like surgery, McOmie said. Along the way, he has to make judgment calls and decisions that are tiny and incremental, yet crucial.

McOmie made educated guesses about the lock he was confronting — what type, what size, what sort of mechanism and even what direction it was facing.

In his blog, McOmie walks readers through a detailed evaluation of the evidence he collected and his consultations with experts on the science and history of safe construction. But, in the end, he guessed wrong about which way the lock was facing.

McOmie discovered the error — which wasn’t ultimately a problem — after Aidan spent an hour drilling a half-inch hole through the safe’s thick door.

Many standard combination locks contain three or even four inner wheels known as tumblers. Looking through the door with a surgical scope, McOmie was able to see Sinatra’s had five.

“It was absolutely a monster,” McOmie said. McOmie and Aidan spent another hour meticulously lining up the inner dials and making way for what’s called the “fence” to drop.

“The fence dropped in and the lockbolt retracted smoothly. Frank Sinatra’s safe was open,” McOmie wrote. “There was a collective groan of disappointment. All the shelves were empty.”

But there was also a super-thick “cannonball” bank vault. Amazingly, it turned out to be unlocked. McOmie stood back and let others open the door.

Again, empty.

Alas, McOmie said, that’s pretty typical.

“The thrill is getting the handle to turn. The thrill is opening that door up,” he said. When that’s accomplished McOmie’s job is done — whether or not there’s anything inside.

As Sinatra sang: “All or nothing at all — nothing at all — there ain’t nothing at all.”

Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525; scott.hewitt@columbian.com