Posts Tagged ‘safes’
“Clients often ask, jokingly, whether we learn our trade in prison”*…
I spent more than six months shadowing [Charlie] 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…
A fascinating profile of L.A.’s preeminent (lock) picker: “Meet the Safecracker of Last Resort.”
* Master safecracker Ken Doyle in a McSweeney’s interview well-worth a read
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As we twist the tumbler, we might recall that it was on this date in 1773 that a group of colonists known as the Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three British tea ships and dumped 342 chests of tea (worth 18,000– over half a million dollars in today’s currency) into Boston harbor. The provocation was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts— which American Patriots strongly opposed as a violation of their rights. Colonists objected to the Tea Act because they believed that it violated their rights as Englishmen to “no taxation without representation.”
The Boston Tea Party was a significant event in the gestation of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston’s commerce. Colonists up and down the Thirteen Colonies in turn responded to the Intolerable Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts– and probably more impactfully, coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.
The Boston Tea Party, as rendered by Nathaniel Currier
Ocean’s Ten…
One can’t be too careful. It’s something of a relief, then, to find Money Mumbo Jumbo’s “Ten Safes Capable of Protecting the World’s Riches“– from Fort Knox and the Doomsday Seed Vault to Karl Lagerfeld’s tres chic accessories cache.
Still, lest one rest easy, consider the Antwerp Diamond Center’s vault (pictured above): It was considered the safest precious stone repository in the world, protected as it was by 10 layers of security– including Doppler radar, magnetic field locking system, seismic sensors, infrared detectors and a main door lock with over a 100 million possible combinations. One can read here how it was that, nonetheless, a team of thieves made off with over $100 million worth of sparklers from the vault.
As we contemplate life in the Age of Schlage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that the State of Nevada legalized most forms of gambling. Anxious to cash in the the tourist boom that was expected to follow the (then-imminent) completion of Hoover (nee Boulder) Dam, the state legislature in effect simply legitimized what was an already-flourishing (albeit illegal) gaming industry. (There was nothing that the State legislature could do about Prohibition, then in effect; but then, liquor was already flowing freely, if illicitly, in Nevada, as elsewhere in the U.S.)
Ever watchful for ways to attract more visitors, Nevada also eased the threshold for divorce– and became a “divorce haven.” (Prior to the no-fault divorce revolution of the 1970s, divorces were quite difficult to obtain in other states.)
Nevada State Journal
March 20, 1931
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