One of the nation’s best-known safecrackers lives in Camas. But he’s not a thief looking for big scores and takedowns.

Off the job, Dave McOmie, 64, leads a quiet life. He’s soft spoken, hard of hearing and married to his college sweetheart. But the father of six children is sought out by individuals and companies to open safes and vaults across the country. He’s written a book explaining how a 15-year-old kid obsessed with locks became a star in the esoteric world of professional safecrackers.

“He’s the guru,” said Richard Colwell, a safe technician for Portland’s Atlasta Lock & Safe Co. “He’s forgotten more than most of us know. Dave’s the person someone flies out to New York City for the tough job that no one else can do.”

McOmie’s most famous contract, which he details in — “Safecracker: A Chronicle of the Coolest Job in the World” — took him to Minnesota in 2016 to open the vault where Prince kept tapes of his unreleased music. McOmie was told that Prince, who died that year, was the only person who had the combination for the three-ton vault door.

“A Mosler American Century,” said McOmie. “It was a full-blown bank vault and he’d paid for every upgrade possible.”

McOmie said it was a “tough job.” He signed a nondisclosure agreement and could not discuss his fee, or details about what was in the vault.

“I’ve been in thousands of bank vaults,” said McOmie, “but his vault room was as large as I’ve ever seen.”

McOmie, who was born in the Portland, discovered his passion as a boy when someone stole a neighbor’s purse, which contained the keys to her house and car. The woman had a locksmith come to her house to make new keys.

“I struck up a conversation with him,” said McOmie. “He never had a son and invited me to his shop. My parents drove me there after school and on Saturday. I worked for him all through high school.”

McOmie moved from locks to vaults and safes, learning how they are made, how they can be damaged and how to open them. Word about this man in Camas spread and clients began seeking him out. He’s written 24 technical books on safes and vaults. All, he said, are industry best sellers, but he adds a caveat.

“This is a small industry,” he said. “When a book in this industry sells a hundred copies, that’s a best seller.”

For more than 30 years, McOmie wrote a column for the National Locksmith Magazine. Since 1992, he has run a safe-cracking club where industry professionals share ideas and technical support about opening vaults and safes. And for the past 35 years he has traveled the country teaching advanced safe opening classes to locksmiths.

He said individuals and company executives come to him because of four scenarios: A family inherits a safe with no combination. A company employee damages a safe, making it impossible to open. Then there are the crooks. Some attack an ATM, using everything possible to get the cash, but rendering the machine inoperable. In some cases a burglar messes with the hinges, sometimes removing the dial and the handle in a failed effort to open the safe of vault. Or they damage it, causing anti-theft devices in the safe or vault to activate and freezing the door closed.

“Then we have bank vaults, user error where the vault can’t be opened,” said McOmie. “That happens every week at a bank vault in this country.”

McOmie, who travels with a bag of tools, said opening a safe is nothing like it’s portrayed in the movies, the thief pressing his ear to the door to listen for the tumblers to click. If McOmie messes up a job, the door may never be opened. He said he’s traveled to every state in the country hundreds of times for jobs.

He avoids calls from customers undergoing a divorce — “I don’t want an ex-husband to come home and mistake what I’m doing” — and people who say they have a safe in the trunk of their car that needs to be opened.

“That happens from time to time,” said McOmie. “I tell them I’ll meet them at a police station parking lot and open the safe. They tell me they’ll meet me there and they never show up.”

McOmie had never planned this career.

He spent his freshman year at college at Western Washington University before transferring to the University of Washington, where he met his future wife, another member of the college debating team. He earned a bachelor’s degree, and later a master’s degree, both in philosophy. His plan was to teach, but the job market had cratered, forcing him to return to his first love — locksmithing — to earn a living. He worked for Allied Safe & Vault in Portland before going out on his own.

While a “good guy” now, McOmie admits in his book — to his “eternal dismay” — that he used his skills in a different way his freshman year in college. When he and his friend realized they were not prepared for midterms, McOmie picked the lock to a professor’s door and he and his friend searched the office and found the test answers.

McOmie continued picking locks the rest of the school year. He could open most within 20 minutes, but one night he ran into trouble with a tricky lock, unable to open it until 3 a.m. He and his friend then discovered the test would be an essay, and they had to stay up for hours researching the subject so they could each turn in different answers.

That brought an end to McOmie’s capers.

“Some kids mature as teens and are ready for college,” McOmie writes in his book. “Clearly, I was not. And I was lucky not to have gotten caught — it would have altered the trajectory of my life.”

He has no cross-country trips jobs planned in the coming weeks.

“At my age, I’d rather do easy jobs in the Northwest than jump on planes for crazy hard ones,” he said. “I currently have safes to open in Lincoln City, Vancouver, Beaverton and Gresham.”