Like seemingly everything else, locks have gone digital. But you still have to call a locksmith if you get locked out of your digital home security system or voice-activated Mercedes Benz. Steve Speyer owns Bell Lock and Key as well as Abco Lock and Alarm Co. in Hawthorne, and he’s handled everything from movie stars locked out of their luxury cars to working for city officials trying to evict tenants from their apartments. He spoke to Jolie Gorchov about his 22 years in the business.
My father was a locksmith in New York City, in the Bronx. I came out here in 1977. I got a job right away, working in the Valley. Then I got my own van and fixed it up in 1979, and worked out of that. Four years later I bought all of Bell Lock and Key’s phone numbers and accounts.
I do everything from evictions, to keys for cars, to opening safes by manipulating or drilling. Often people don’t know the safe’s combination after people pass away in the family, or they lock the combination inside the safe, or the safe has a malfunction.
I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Three or four times a week, I’ll get night calls. If no one’s available, I’ll do it. If one of my guys needs to work and needs the extra money, I’ll give it to him.
The hardest things are keeping up with the new technology and being in two places at the same time. The (marshals, who are charged with evicting non-paying tenants) never show up on time. It gets to be 9, 9:30 in the morning and no one’s there, and you’ve got someone across town who needs to be let into their car. That’s why you need three vans going, plus someone back at the store answering the phones.
I have equipment I’ve been collecting a long time. The stuff I have, you can’t even find today. I keep up to date with the new systems: computers, smart cards, digital systems. Now you have the side-winding keys for the Mercedes and the Lexuses the cuts are on the side of the key, so you need special machines to cut them. With the digital touch pads, you also need special equipment, and you have to keep extra cards and extra locks so you can go into the system. I haven’t come across one we couldn’t open.
The cards in the hotel are “smart” cards, and you have to program them. You have to know how to go into the brain of the system and reset the lock to a new number. All of this costs a lot of money, plus you need the knowledge, you need to learn how to use this stuff.
I’ve seen everything. I did Joan Crawford’s house in New York once. I had Monty Rock III (the flamboyant 1970s-era pop singer) locked out of his house wearing just a newspaper.
