https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/professional-safecracker-reveals-his-craft/577897/
By Geoff Manaugh
The Atlantic
Dec 13, 2018
The house was gone, consumed by the November 2018 Woolsey Fire that left
swaths of Los Angeles covered in ash and reduced whole neighborhoods to
charcoaled ruins. Amidst the tangle of blackened debris that was once a
house in the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles, only one identifiable
feature stood intact. It was a high-security jewel safe, its metal case
discolored by the recent flames, looming in the wreckage like the monolith
in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I went out to the burn zone that day to meet Charlie Santore, a
48-year-old safecracker licensed in the city of Los Angeles under the name
Santore & Son. Santore, a lean and towering figure just shy of 6 foot 4,
stood there in his fedora, black jeans, and a Virgin Mary T-shirt,
grinning uncomfortably. He was flanked by two Ventura County sheriff’s
deputies. They had been patrolling the neighborhood that day, in the wake
of the still-active wildfire -- its apocalyptic ash cloud hanging in the
sky south of us -- when they noticed this gangly man crouched in the
ruins, with several drills and extension cords at the ready. Santore’s
car, a 1997 Mercedes so overloaded with safecracking equipment that its
trunk nearly scrapes the ground, was, from a law-enforcement point of
view, not reassuring.
While the deputies confirmed his technician's license, Santore asked one
of them to act like he was under arrest. "Fight the power!" Santore joked.
As he lashed out at me with his long legs, I took a picture. Even the
deputy faking his arrest began to smile.
I spent more than six months shadowing Santore because I wanted to know
what the city looks like through the eyes of a safecracker, a person for
whom no vault is an actual barrier and no safe is truly secure. There are
a lot of safecrackers, I learned, but the good ones, like Santore, live in
a state of magical realism, suspended somewhere between technology and
superstition. The safecracker sees what everyone else has been hiding --
the stashed cash and jewels, the embarrassing photographs. He is a kind of
human X-ray revealing the true, naked secrets of a city.
[...]
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