The battle for the soul of lockpicking

“I can try and justify as much as I want: the reality is, you’re not helping,” says 38-year-old property maintenance worker Marty Nardelli, standing outside someone’s front door. Moments earlier, he had opened their lockbox within 15 seconds by applying different levels of pressure to the numbers; a barely discernable change in stiffness revealing which number was the next in the sequence. 

Inside he finds keys, which he holds aloft before returning them to the box. He chuckles as oblivious passersby walk past, now just a step away from breaking and entering into a stranger’s home. He’s not doing that today, though, and he’s keen to stress that he’s not breaking any UK laws.

“And there you go, it’s the key to the house,” he says. ​“As long as I’m not breaking anything, I’m not vandalising anything – I’m just getting a code to a lock, that’s legal. The moment you take something, even if you use the toilet and take the water, that’s illegal.”

He continues, ​“If my intention is to pick a lock so I can go rob the place or kill somebody, obviously that’s illegal. But if I’m just doing it for educational purposes or to test the safety of the lock, I haven’t done anything wrong.”

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For Marty, picking locks is something that needs to be done ​‘in the wild’. Feeling the pressure while looking over his shoulder is exactly the point. He is part of a wider culture of people who pick locks in public, often filming themselves in the process and uploading their break-ins to social media.

But for the wider lockpicking community, the likes of Marty – who pick active locks that people trust to keep their homes secure – are seen as renegades. The disagreement centres on legality and the wider public’s image of the sport, many of whom are quick to judge and often paint lockpickers as aiding thieves and criminals. As social media interest grows – with popular accounts amassing millions of views (LockPickingLawyer currently has 4.68 million subscribers) – it’s led to a battle for the soul of lockpicking, between guardians of the sport and radical, freedom seeking dissenters.

On one side of that divide are the organisations and practitioners who have sought to codify locksport and protect its image. In the UK, online forum UK Locksport defines locksport as the sport of breaking into inactive locking mechanisms without the correct key. Other groups – such as The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers, which originated in The Netherlands and now has groups in the UK and America – aim to improve the public’s knowledge of locks, lockpicking and safety. 

In organised locksport, the emphasis is on picking locks you own or have permission to pick without damaging them. Practitioners can progress through a ranking system similar to karate, called the LPU system. Picking locks that are in use is considered off-limits.

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Richard Jones, known online as The Welsh Lockpicker, moderates UK LockPickers: a Facebook group of around 14,000 members. Protecting the community’s boundaries is central to his role. If someone is locked out of their home, sending an image to the group asking for help getting in will be removed, as no lock currently in use must be the subject. For Richard, the red line is clear: ​“We don’t want to be seen giving people advice on how to break into locks,” he says. 

While the thrill of breaking a lock open without a designated key is often the gateway into the sport, it’s often the connections with other obsessives that keeps people coming back. In locksport, friendships can form after seeing someone’s hands rather than their face, but there is often a level of trust between those who take part. Pricey locks are often passed from one person to another, and sharing is encouraged. ​“I’ve sent a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of locks to someone on loan,” Richard says. ​“I know my postman better [than them]. I don’t know anyone who’s been burnt.”

The sport opened the world up to him too. Richard will often post in the group if he’s in a city, and people will join him for a pint and a bit of lockpicking. ​“I’ve got mates now, pretty much all over the world,” Richard continues. ​“Some work with Michelin-star chefs. Some work for secret military staff. We’ve got top-grade security to people out in the middle of the States – literally every walk of life.” 

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It’s that sense of community that locksport’s devotees are particularly protective over. People like Marty are seen as damaging to their reputation, putting those who play by the rules in the firing line. ​“Anyone who picks other people’s property without consent and uploads a video is doing massive harm to our sport,” Richard says. 

“I’m not doing anything dodgy; I’m not stealing anything. I find it interesting. I love it,” Marty says, from behind his baseball cap and aviators. He justifies it as simply pressing fancy numbers on a lock, but it begs the question of why he couldn’t do it at home, like other lockpickers.

For Marty, the appeal of doing it in the wild is precisely that sense of ​“being somewhere you’re not supposed to be”.

Just a week before, he entered a building site in Piccadilly Circus, posting a video that gained over 2 million views on Instagram. It led to the site manager sending him a series of heated messages, as he now had to change the locks. Marty sees the incident differently. To him, exposing a security vulnerability is a public service.

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Lockpicking didn’t begin for Marty as a thrill-seeking pursuit. It started as part of his job, checking the security of building sites. ​“Every building I work on, I check the security, and I’ll make these videos and show, ​‘Look, this is shit, you need to change this.’ And I’m making good money – more than you’re gonna make thieving. If you know how to do this sort of thing, you’re not going to be thieving,” Marty says. 

The more noble justifications for Marty’s videos seem to fall away when pushed. Asked how he feels about the negative backlash his videos could be causing for the wider lockpicking community, he says: ​“There is no good – there is just so much fun about it, but what good could come, realistically?”

For one of the leading figures in UK lockpicking, Lock Noob, ​“It’s the difference between a sanctioned boxing match and an unsanctioned street fight. They’re both fighting, but it very much blurs the line.”

Lock Noob doesn’t call what he does ​“locksport” either – he prefers the term ​“lockpicking”, since he doesn’t follow every rule the term implies. But even he draws a line that Marty crosses: picking locks in public, in use, on camera. 

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When I use the term ​“locksport” loosely to describe what Marty does, Lock Noob is quick to stop me. It’s not just semantics to him. ​“I’m quite protective over the hobby, because it’s given me a lot of friendships and opportunities over the years. I just want to advise you what terms you use, because they do mean things to people.”

For Lock Noob, it’s more than just online connections, it’s also his career. Since first stumbling across lockpicking over a decade ago in a YouTube binge, he has amassed more than half a million subscribers and 2,000 videos on YouTube, before becoming a business of its own. He has since developed more than 20 locks for the community to try. 

For most, sharing and crafting locks are key to why they engage with locksport in the first place. But for 55-year-old lockpicker Tequila Dave, it’s a refuge. Dave had been around codebreaking and ciphering from a young age, inspired by his father, who was based at secret code breaking facility Bletchley Park during World War II. He first had a go himself at the age of 10, picking his attaché briefcase and his mother’s old, warded padlock with a hairpin. 

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But it wasn’t until 2017 when his girlfriend was diagnosed with severe brain damage that Dave properly immersed himself in it. His counsellor told him he needed to find a hobby: ​“I wanted something I could do by myself, that would just take my mind off things,” he recalls. ​“It’s almost meditation, in a way, something you have to sort of block out the world to actually do.”

It’s an outlet Dave has returned to throughout his struggles. Having lost a friend to suicide just a few days before we speak, Dave found himself back in that moment. ​“The first thing I did, I just picked up a lock, started picking it, and it just took my mind completely off that subject.”

Lockpicking’s soul comes through in these moments. In its purest form, it offers moments of escape – a puzzle that has him tinkering in a meditative state. Dave explains that many people he has met in the community found lockpicking through similar situations, be it disability, grief, or something else.

While Marty is drawn to pushing the boundaries as far as he can, the wider community is more concerned with preserving the relationships and rules that have grown around it. ​“Pretty much the majority of my friends are now somehow related to locksport,” Dave says. ​“The friendliness and the community spirit online have definitely helped me.”

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Jack Dennison-Thompson is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Instagram.

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