Winnipeg bus driver crowdfunds his way to Baltimore to crack a 75-year-old safe
Rick Ammazzini spent 10 hours cracking the lock. He says it was a team effort
When a Baltimore bookstore launched a competition to see who could successfully pick a lock to open a safe that had not been opened for years, the last person they expected to do it was a Winnipeg bus driver.
Rick Ammazzini, a Winnipeg Transit driver and hobbyist safe-cracker, spent 10 stressful hours over three days at the Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse to pick the lock on a safe that store staff estimate dates back to the 1920s.
Ammazzini says the safe was challenging to unlock, but he was determined to pull through because people were counting on him.
To get to the bookstore, Ammazzini raised $1,300 in four days through a crowdfunding campaign to cover the airfare to Baltimore.
"I had people counting on me, people paid for me to be there, and I had to give it every last minute that I could," Ammazzini, who has been cracking safes for 12 years, told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.
The competition
The safe has been in the bookstore's possession since they bought the property, and decided to build their cafe and bookshelves around it, says Ken Brown, a worker/owner at the bookstore, which operates as a collective.
In July, a store employee posted a "tongue-in-cheek" invitation on social media to lock pickers to compete to crack it open, he said.
The competition had three rules: individuals had to make sure they were not causing any destruction to the safe; all efforts to open the safe had to be during the store's business hours; and items inside the safe depending on what they were, could be split 50-50 — "unless it is gross or cursed, in which case you can have all of it," the store said.
The employees, none of whom had ever tried to open it, were surprised by the amount of publicity and curiosity they received from the invitation. More than a dozen people attempted to open the safe, without success.
That's where Ammazzini comes in.
Cracking the safe
Ammazzini says he relies on what he hears, feels and sees when trying to crack a lock. "We're listening and we're looking for these defects in the manufacturing of the lock and other things were happening in this lock that shouldn't have been happening," he said.
Throughout the process, he reached out to fellow safe-cracking and lock-picking enthusiasts on Facebook for advice.
"This group I'm in was able to send me some pictures and documents of the possible locks we were dealing with, because you never know what kind of lock is actually in the safe. We have ideas based on what we're feeling," Ammazzini said.
When the lock finally cracked, Ammazzini says he felt relieved.
"Finally, she listened to me, and she clicked, and she opened up for me," he said.
However, he said he felt even more suspense as he waited until the next morning to open the safe with the bookstore staff present.
According to Brown, the safe contained three items: a jewlery box, a lock box that contained nothing but old paper clips, and an old employee pay stub.
Ammazzini was not disappointed — or even surprised — with the haul, regardless of the time and effort put into opening it.
"I don't really care about what's inside the safe. As a matter of fact, as soon as I opened the lock, my interest shifted from what was in the safe to: 'I want to see what's wrong with that lock,'" he said.
He says he can't really explain the hobby's appeal, but likened it to recreational fishing.
"I have no problem sitting in front of a safe for eight hours, just like [a] fisherman has no problem sitting on a boat for eight hours and catching nothing," he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Interview with Rick Ammazzini produced by Sarah Melton
