Thrill of a Grand Opening Is the Reward for Safecracker

He squats in front of the 10-foot-tall metal box, beads of sweat matting the slightly too long hair on his forehead. An incandescent bulb hanging overhead provides little light as he listens for sounds only he can hear.

Jeff Sitar is about a minute into working his magic, studying the dial of the cold metal safe in a warehouse when the almost imperceptible tremors reaching his trained fingertips tell him he’s already matched the first number of the combination.

Fourteen minutes later, without the aid of an earpiece or electronic listening device, he unlocks the 20-year-old safe, which was left behind by the building’s previous owner.

The 39-year-old locksmith is the reigning world champion safecracker--a title he has won seven times. He is the Michael Jordan of safecracking, able to get inside most any safe using nothing more than his hands.

Unlike the clothed-in-black, mask-wearing jewel thieves of TV and movie fame, Sitar is strictly legitimate. He has worked for police departments, the FBI, even the Pentagon, which hired him to open a balky but highly classified safe aboard a ship during the Gulf War.

“I love my job,” Sitar said. “I’ve dedicated my life to perfecting this. Even if I won the lottery, I’d still be doing this.”

Actually, Sitar doesn’t have to win the lottery. He simply needs to find the safe of the guy who did.

Although a few people have jokingly asked him to help them do a bank job, Sitar doesn’t think anyone has seriously tried to get him to commit a crime.

A summer job at age 13 in a locksmith shop got him interested in locks, and by age 15, he had taught himself how to crack safes, using his senses of touch, hearing and sight. Occasionally he will use an earpiece that helps him better hear the soft clicks as the tumblers fall into place, but such devices are barred in safecracking competitions, so Sitar works without them when possible to stay sharp.

“He’s unbelievable,” said Bob Rutherford, a Rochelle Park locksmith who calls Sitar to handle the cases he can’t crack himself. “He gets so intense with what he’s doing, I don’t want to make a sound to disturb him. I’ve seen other fellows open safes, but no one has ever matched Jeff.”

He won the world championship of safecracking--again--in May for his seventh title, a feat no one else has approached. The competition, held in St. Louis, pitted 500 safecrackers against each other. In the expert category, which Sitar dominates, contestants have two hours to open the locking mechanisms of two safes, which have been removed from vaults and mounted on tables for easier viewing.

Sitar needed only 83 minutes to open his safes; his closest competitor took well over two hours.

At the warehouse in northern New Jersey, the wiry fingers of his right hand spin the dial, feeling for what he calls “contact points,” areas on the dial where he can feel slight resistance. In this way, he is able to discern the three numbers of the combination out of a possible one million options.

He spins the dial a few times, rocks it back and forth, and in less than a minute learns the first number is 77. It takes him about three more minutes to determine the second number is 35.

“The last number is just process of elimination,” he said. “We call this ‘Dialing for dollars.’ ”

Soon, he has the final number: 53. He grabs the safe’s lever and swings the heavy steel doors open, his face a mixture of pride and relief.

Fourteen minutes, and that included time he spent explaining to a reporter what he was doing.

“What takes him 14 minutes would take another locksmith two or three hours, easily,” Rutherford said.

With his black muscle T-shirt, black wristbands and modified Keith Partridge haircut, Sitar could easily pass for the drummer of a 1970s rock band. But there’s nothing else he’d rather do.

“He’s quite a character,” said Mark Miller, a safe technician with Lockmasters Inc., the Nicholasville, Ky., company that founded the safecracking championships. “He’s a great technician. He’s one of the best there is in the world.”

Sitar might someday break into the ranks of Hollywood stars. He’s been approached twice about bit parts in movies, but neither panned out. He recently hired an agent.

He has opened bank vaults, commercial safes, even safes hundreds of years old, though some of them involved the use of drilling tools. He gets anywhere from $90 to $2,000 to open a safe, depending on the degree of difficulty and how far he must travel to get there.

“People ask me if it’s like safecrackers in the movies, where there’s safes full of jewels or money,” he said. “Actually, I almost never look at what’s in a safe. I don’t care what’s inside it. I’ll open the safe, then look away. It’s up to you to see what’s inside.”

During the Gulf War, for instance, the Navy hired him to open a safe on the Bellatrix, a tank and heavy-equipment transport ship.

“I think they had some kind of classified plans or documents in there, but I turned my back as soon as it was open,” Sitar said. “You know that saying, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you?’ I wasn’t about to try it.”