Master safecracker rates 10 safecracking heists in movies and tv

• Safe technician Charlie Santore looks at 10 safecracking scenes from popular TV shows and movies.
• He breaks down "Army of the Dead" (2021), "Ant-Man" (2015), and "Money Heist" S1E1 (2017).
• Santore looks at burglary movie scenes as well as casino heists and bank robberies.

- Faith.

This is the best, for all the wrong reasons.

[laughs]

Hi, my name is Charlie Santore. I'm the owner of Santore and Son Lock and Safe. I'm a safe technician, meaning safecracker, in Southern California. Today we're going to look at some clips on safecracking in films, and we'll tell you whether they're credible or whether they're garbage.

"The Italian Job" (2003)

[safe clicking]

The clicking dial that Hollywood loves so much. They typically have a bearing surface on it. It's usually very, very smooth. If it was properly installed, it shouldn't be clicking. There's, like, one or two models of a junky safe that you can get at Staples where the dial clicks. It's not really a real thing.

The sort of dialing sequence that she would be doing in order to do so is not how she's dialing here. She's actually working backwards to how we typically would. The principle of it is that wheels are being searched for low spots. And what that involves is parking certain wheels and moving other wheels. And there's a certain repetitive sequence to doing that by people that know how to do this. And she's not doing this here.

Come on, Charlie. You can do this.

There's a difference between people burglarizing things and people opening things the way that we open them to put them back in service. They're not going to be sitting around trying to manipulate a safe open. They would drill it open. Even opening a safe like this, even if you're drilling it, is also extremely difficult. You're not haphazardly drilling holes in something. You're not vandalizing something. When we open safes, the idea is it's like arthroscopic surgery. We're doing it in a minimally invasive way. The whole thing is a very academic study.

[clicking]

[safe clicks open]

We're supposed to believe when that click happened, that final click is the fence of the lock dropping. But here, with vault locks and safe locks, you have to do a final turn to pull the lock bolt back. There's a certain amount of travel that then opens that lock. So she dials the combination, here she stops at 50, the fence drops, she's saying the safe is open, and he turns the handle. But the safe wouldn't be open even if the lock was unlocked because she didn't retract the lock bolt. This notion of somebody creeping around and manipulating a safe open, it does happen and it has happened, but nine times out of 10, it's sledgehammers and wedges or grinders or saws cutting the thing open. So, I want to be generous. It's 3.

Rating: 3/10

"Ant-Man" (2015)

He's taken the fingerprint off the door with tape. It could have been the cleaning lady's print that he pulled off of there. This actually broke my head a little bit. If you pull the print off with tape and you turn it over and put a ring on it and put Loctite in it, aren't you actually making it a cast of the inverse of the fingerprint? This safe is serious.

Luis: How serious are we talking, Scotty?

It's a Carbondale.

Carbondale's a made-up name, but the vault door itself, I looked through hundreds and hundreds of photos of vault doors, and I'm pretty certain that the art directors based this off of a very early Diebold vault door.

This is actually a real tool. This is a StrongArm MiniRig that's used for putting pressure when one's drilling. So that aspect of it is definitely accurate. We'll go do a quick job that winds up being something where you don't have your full tool kit with you. So there's lots of times when we've been running around trying to bend wires and make tools and sort of have to come up with something that we didn't have with us.

Supposedly he's freezing it and it's going to expand and crack this door apart. What they showed us was the bolt work inside of the safe and the door pan. There's a big door pan. If he poured a gallon of water in there, it would spill out the bottom of the door pan, basically. If by chance he froze it and the ice expanded, I mean, obviously water can expand. Glaciers expand over time. The thing about a vault door is, in this case, there's a thin back panel that's like sheet metal essentially on the back of the door. So the idea that that's going to expand is pure fantasy. It would blow the back panel off before it blew the door off.

There's nothing here.

What'd you say?

It's a suit.

I opened up a couple of safes that were at a Blockbuster Video a while and there was Astroglide, condoms, and some dirty photos. So I don't know if a manager was having a fling with somebody, but that was pretty unexpected. On the more valuable side of things, we once opened a safe in an affluent part of Beverly Hills that people had recently moved into a home. The former owner was gone. There were Bulgari necklaces, Cartier necklaces, Krugerrands, GIA certificates. I mean, I can only imagine that it must have been a mid- to high-six-figure lick. But I think that people get traumatized when there's that much left because they're not expecting to have a moral conflict, sort of. You know, "It's technically mine, but this obviously meant a great deal to whoever it was that was living here before."

It's nonsense, but the MiniRig is real. So I'm going to give it a 3.

Rating: 3/10

"Army of the Dead" (2021)

Scott: How would you like to make 250 grand for one day's work?

Oh, my God.

There are certainly a lot of safes that are known among people who do this kind of work that are very, very difficult to open. Very well-guarded locks. So, yeah, there is some truth to that.

But of the world's living locksmiths, do I represent your greatest chance of opening it? I can, with humility, say yes.

The biggest myth I think is that there's some boffin or there's some maven who has the, you know, magic touch to get the thing open.

Dieter: The four locks? You know what that is?

Scott: No.

Dieter: No, of course not. It's a rotating randomization mechanism. If you mess it up again, it locks forever. You understand? Forever.

Las Vegas is overrun with zombies. The idea that they're going to bring some genius to come and manipulate open four locks on a vault door is ridiculous. They would just bring a coring crew. They'd bring coring stuff, and they're bore a hole in the side of the vault and get it open.

How long will it take you to open it?

Dieter: 30 minutes.

The idea that somebody would manipulate open four vault locks in half an hour is pure fantasy.

[lock clicking]

He's supposedly manipulating this open. He's not even looking at the dial, which is where he would be looking for the indications that he would use to manipulate it open. And there's also some hieroglyphs or some scrawling that he wrote on or he drew on the front of the door that really has nothing to do with what he would be doing in order to get this open. The doors are always heavy. You're talking about a multi-multi-ton door. There are compression systems that'd have spinning wheels. Not all vault doors have those. Some have handles. According to him, this vault has four locks on it. When the vault door swings open, we see that there's actually only two vault locks on the back of the door and a time lock with five movements. I've never seen a five-movement time lock. I'm going to give it a 2 as far as the realism goes.

Rating: 2/10

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969)

He's using an autodialer. There are such tools. I mean, they don't look like a vacuum cleaner hooked up to a Xerox machine. It's smaller, it's portable. You hook it up and it runs through, it parks wheels, and it runs through a dialing sequence. The advantage is on some safes that have glass relockers in them or that might be problematic to drill or some people don't have the necessary tools to open some of those safes.

He's reading the paper at one point and he's sitting around. And that's, I mean, that's pretty accurate. It's not an instantaneous process. The much earlier versions sometimes could take anywhere from, like, I think 10 to 30 hours to open a safe. The newer ones are faster, and if one of the numbers is known, then it's even infinitely faster. A lot of times people set them up in their shop and they go off for the day and they come back the following day. We don't use an autodialer. People who are able to manipulate well can usually open something in 30 minutes, 45 minutes.

The weird and wonderful thing now is a tape measurer. A tape measurer is very, very useful. You know, they're telling kids that they don't have to learn math and that there's no right answers to math. You can't do this job without being able to read a tape measurer, that's for sure. But no, as far as high-tech tools go, there's lots of different picks for certain key locks.

People have to think of their safes and their vault doors as the last line of defense. You should have alarms, you should have cameras. Make sure there's no outlets around in close proximity. If it's a smaller safe, if you can stick it in a horrible position where it's hard to get to, sometimes under cabinetry, under furniture. And, truthfully, the best safe is one that no one knows is even there. So that's why in-floor safes are very popular. Wall safe, someone can just cut it out of the studs if they know that it's there. About a 4 or 5, 'cause there are autodialers.

Rating: 5/10

"Batman Forever" (1995)

Guard: My shoes are melting! Aah!

The one element of this that is correct is that oftentimes when there's a vault lockout, a lot of vaults can be opened from the inside, and there's a way to open the door sometimes. But there's not another lock on the inside that somebody would have to crack.

Hey! Hey, that's my hearing aid!

As far as a listening device goes, people do use amps. It usually has a little magnet on it, so it sticks. Or if it's a stainless thing that it won't stick to, you can hold it there, tape it in place, and it's got a little pot on it that the level turns up. And when you're dealing with a metal door, the sound actually travels very, very well. Just to be generous, we'll say 3.

Rating: 3/10

"Money Heist" S1E1 (2017)

The main issue is if he was using a cutting torch to cut that square, the gear that's right in back of there that supposedly he's moving would probably have been damaged, as well as any sort of electrical components. There's lots of metal that comes off. As far as burglary goes, people use torches often. And even earlier on, safe technicians used to use torches and lances because there's certain metals that are very, very hard to drill. Typically, vault locks are a little bigger. Safe locks are a little smaller, but they all work on the same principle, that there's a blocking point. And so that aspect of it, that something small is actually keeping something large locked, that aspect of it is very true. A lot of vault doors use yokes. There's pivoting yokes, but it's still a lock bolt attacked to a lock. I would say, like, a 3.5. I will say that there are certain locks that do have a stepper motor in them that, to open them sometimes when they're being drilled, there's a gear that gets turned a certain way.

Rating: 3/10

"The Thieves" (2012)

The only real issue that I probably have is they're using pneumatic drills. I doubt somebody would use pneumatic lines. This comes closest to what we do on a regular basis. They've drilled into the safe before they hit glass. Normally the glass would be much, much closer to the back of the door, so you wouldn't have this much working space in there. There's 2, 2 1/2, 3 inches of working space.

You see them stick a borescope up. They find the cable loop. She sticks a wire in. She lassos the cable. The only real issue is that they're going to tie this off to a chair with people sitting on it. That's nonsense. That's not necessary. All they'd have to do is take vice grips probably and clamp them right at the door, and that cable isn't going anywhere. It's a spring-loaded thing.

We have to assume that she had intimate knowledge of what kind of safe it was. Somebody leaked the information to her. Nine times out of 10, somebody knows that there was a safe somewhere, and it's not necessarily the person who knew that it was there, but a lot of times, they sell the information to somebody else, they pass it on to somebody else, like Paul Rudd coming into your house with an air mattress and Freon and a jug of water to blow your vault door off. It's, like, probably a 9 or a 9.5 as far as that goes. It's one of the best that we've seen so far.

Rating: 9/10

"King of Thieves" (2018)

This is the heist that happened at 88-90 Hatton Garden, where a bunch of geriatric ex-gangsters cored the vault, and they breached it, and they cleaned out I think 70-plus boxes. When this story broke, I was obsessed with it. I think they're even using the exact gear that was actually used to get into the vault. And my understanding is it happened over a three-day weekend. They wound up using a coring rig. They cored overlapping holes. When they realized that they had to get a pneumatic pump, they built a brace and they put a pneumatic pump in in order to force the boxes away from the wall. The boxes obviously inside of this vault are not the same boxes that were inside the actual Hatton Garden vault, because the photos that we've seen was a hodgepodge of different kind of locks and boxes, different-sized boxes. In this one, they're much more uniform. This really, I mean, is, like, probably, like, a 9.5 or a 10 out of 10, really.

Rating: 9/10

"Cradle 2 The Grave" (2003)

Faith.

This is the best, for all the wrong reasons.

[laughs]

DMX, rest in peace, but all I'll say is that if DMX shows up at your house with a bazooka to open your vault, your problem's getting out of hand. It's so entertainingly stupid. We have to look at this. We're on the fourth floor of a bank building. They're shooting a bazooka through a wall. I mean, it's, we're going to give it a 3. Not based on anything technical at all.

Rating: 3/10

"Thief" (1981)

The tool that James Caan is using is real. The drill bit that James Caan is using in there is about this big, OK? And the kind of bit that we typically use to drill open a safe if we're scoping something is about this big. But if you look at the proximity of how the wheels sit to where that dial is and the way the light is shining on the wheels, my sense is that this is a little bit of a mock-up. There are many, many safes, older safes that utilize a punching technique like that. In this situation, I don't believe that that's what would have been necessary. I mean, especially with the hole that big. The gates could have been dialed up. But, again, I think that we're coming up against trying to have authentic realism and trying to maintain a certain amount of secrecy and trying to give the audience a little taste of what's actually real. I would have to give this, like, a 8.5, probably.

Rating: 8

On a slow year, we open probably 300-plus safes. On a busy year, probably closer to 500. I get to maybe exercise that part of my shadow, and I get to help people in the process. So, I mean, I can't think of a thing I'd rather do.

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