University Times

No safe is safe from Roy Watters, as he proved again last month.

Watters, a master machinist whose fulltime job for 22 years has been making scientific instruments for Pitt's chemistry department, was named the second-fastest safecracker in the world during a contest at the Safe and Vault Technicians Association convention in Reno, Nev.

The annual competition pits experts (such as Watters) and novice safecrackers against randomly selected safes with combination locks. No drills, explosives or listening devices are allowed. Competitors rely on "manipulation" — safecrackers' lingo for opening a lock without knowing the combination, by detecting subtle clicks, bumps and changes in tension as slip-clutches catch and wheels line up in grooves.

Competing against a clock, safecrackers in the expert division had to open two consecutive locks. "I had the fastest time, 42 minutes, for one lock," Watters says. "The other safe had a so-called 'impossible' lock. Its design was perfect — almost. I opened it in an hour and 45 minutes."

Watters took third place in the 1990 and 1996 contests.

The competition results didn't surprise Pittsburghers familiar with Watters's work. "Roy is the only guy I know who can open anything up," says Larry Sheets, operations manager for Ace Lock security specialists in East Liberty. "He's very, very good, and has done some amazing things over the years."

Such as the time, in 1993, that Watters astonished Pittsburgh police by opening a damaged safe they had recovered in Lincoln Place. The safe's combination dial and handle had been broken off and its hinges mangled. Police special services personnel and city medics attacked the safe with saws and prying tools, to no avail. Police consulted a local locksmith, who estimated it could take hours to drill through the heavy manganese steel.

After reading a newspaper story about the safe, Watters volunteered to open it for free, partly to help publicize his business, Watters Safe & Lock, and partly for the challenge.

Some challenge. A police commander who saw Watters work later told a reporter: "It took me more time to see if we had a contract or an obligation to use a particular locksmith than it took him to open the safe." Police found $1,100 in cash inside the safe and returned the money to its rightful owners, the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Duquesne.

"Keep in mind, I've been doing this since 1977," Watters says today, with a chuckle. "I must have learned something in all that time."

q An engaging 49-year-old, Watters is as quick to laugh as he is to shift from modesty to matter-of-fact boastfulness.

"I've opened the meanest, toughest safes and vaults known to man," he says in response to the question: Is there any bank, university or private safe that can stop him?

"Any safe that goes down here in Pittsburgh, I'm the top dog."

Watters works on safes during evenings and weekends. Many of his customers are jewelry stores, supermarkets and fast-food restaurants that neglect their safes until, one day, they no longer open.

"Safes are like cars," Watters explains. "What would happen if you kept driving your car without ever replacing the oil or filters or taking it in for inspection?

"Most banks have maintenance programs for their vaults and locks. A technician will come in and clean them once a year, at least. There are banks in this area whose vaults are more than a century old, and those vaults are still working fine."

Private safe owners, like small business people, often fail to maintain their safes properly. Private citizens also tend to forget combinations (which safe manufacturers do not record) or die without revealing them to heirs. That's when Watters gets the call. But what he really relishes are extraordinary challenges such as one recent job: opening a state-of-the-art vault fronted by tempered glass.

"You couldn't drill the door from the outside because, as soon as you cut the surface of the glass, it will shatter. And when the glass breaks, it activates a booby-trap that cross-locks the door from inside," says Watters, who wouldn't reveal the vault's owner or location.

To beat the booby-trap, Watters employed a few of what he calls his "McGyver tools," named after TV's ingenious, gadget-happy crime fighter: a flexible drill and a German-made, fiberoptic bore scope hooked up to a TV monitor.

Like a surgeon performing an arthroscopic operation, Watters drilled a small hole in the safe's side and inserted the drill 10 inches inside the safe. Based on what the bore scope (which was equipped with a high-intensity light) showed of the safe's interior, Watters manipulated the drill so it turned left, then angled up 25 degrees and drilled the lock at that point. Next, Watters maneuvered the drill downward, bored another hole in the lock — and popped it.

"Every safe that I open, I plow the proceeds of that job back into my research, so I can buy new McGyver tools or make them at my home workshop," Watters says. "In that sense, I'm like the faculty members I work with in the chemistry department, reading the trade journals [Watters himself writes a monthly column for the journal Safe & Vault Technology] and working to stay on the cutting edge of my field."

Watters plans to do research on "water bombs" such as the one demonstrated in a movie last year, "The Heist," starring Robert DeNiro. In cracking a supposedly impregnable safe, DeNiro's character first burned a hole in it using a 10,000-degree thermal lance drill (Watters owns one), then filled the safe with water and dropped an explosive charge down the hole.

Detonating the charge under water produced a far more powerful blast, and the safe imploded without damaging its contents.

"Physics and chemistry," Watters says. "Basically, that's what safecracking is all about."

Obviously, Watters's craft has come a long way since Wild West outlaws poured nitroglycerin into cracks around the seals of bank safes, or rocked safes back and forth until gravity did its thing and the tumblers settled into their "open" positions.

But while safecrackers' methods and tools have improved, safes probably reached their peak of security in the late 1890s, according to Watters.

To outwit nitro-equipped outlaws, manufacturers created "cannonballs": round, tightly sealed, double-locked safes made of manganese steel. "These were probably the strongest safes ever made," says Watters, who has amassed a large collection of safes and locks from around the world. "The problem was, they didn't hold much and they took up a lot of room. As banks needed more storage space, they started building these big vault rooms. It was common for banks to keep a cannonball safe inside the vault, to store the large-denomination money."

According to Watters, a 17-ton cannonball safe has sat, locked, in the County Controller's office for the last 30 years, ever since staff misplaced the combination. Watters says he offered eight years ago to drill it open, but office administrators balked at his price.

q So much for safes going bad. What about professional "safe technicians" themselves, as Watters and his colleagues are formally titled — do they ever go bad? With all of their expertise and high-tech equipment, isn't crime a tempting career path?

"In my 25 years of safecracking, I know of only two guys who have gone bad," Watters replies.

Could Watters, if he wanted to, rob a bank?

"You're asking me, could I pull off a caper? I'd never answer that!"

But then, after a thoughtful pause, Watters continues: "I do this work because it's something that I like to do, and I'm very good at it. It's the same reason I've been working at this university for 22 years. You don't come here looking to make a fortune, and you don't stay here unless you enjoy being in an environment where the whole theme is education.

"Don't get me wrong," Watters adds, perhaps sensing that he's sounding a bit too idealistic. "I've been making my investments in the stock market and TIAA-CREF, and I can imagine retiring early. And if I do, I'm heading south to the islands. I'll work part-time, opening safes in the Bahamas."

— Bruce Steele