MARIJUANA FOUND IN LONG-SEALED CITY SAFE

FAIRHOPE -- The event was planned and advertised weeks ago: At the new
Fairhope Museum of History, officials would open a city safe that had
been abandoned and unused since 1971.

What would be inside? Nothing? Old city records?

On Thursday morning, a crowd of nearly 30 Fairhopers watched as
locksmith Nevitt Baker lifted away its heavy, black door. A musty
smell filled the room, and the crowd laughed as news cameras and
curious locals closed in on the open safe. One woman rushed her young
son out of the museum, saying she didn't want him to see what was inside.

A few called out the obvious -- its bottom shelves were filled with
marijuana. The vault apparently had last been used by police
investigators to stash drug evidence.

"Here is somebody's name, somebody I remember, who would be terribly
embarrassed right now," said Donnie Barrett, the museum's director, as
he later examined a label attached to one of several matchboxes filled
with dry, 37-year-old dope. "It looks like a whole bunch of dope is
what we've found here. I wish it was a little bit more than that,"
Barrett said.

The city's Police Department used the building until moving to its
present offices in 2002, long after City Hall had moved in 1971. But
paperwork stored in the safe alongside the marijuana seemed to
indicate that none of it predated 1971, Barrett said.

Why was this evidence left behind or forgotten?

"That's not the sort of historical question we'd wanted to have to
ask," Barrett said. "But it's better than nothing."

Soon, police Cpl. Brett Murray arrived at the museum to confiscate the
old contraband.

"I kind of wish it had stayed closed because I liked the idea of
wondering what was in there," Murray said. He said he and his friends
had speculated about the safe's contents since they were young, when
the building was being used by the Police Department. But its
combination had been lost and its door had been painted shut, he said.

Murray placed the decades-old evidence into a large, brown paper bag.
He said he'd have it placed in the department's current evidence vault
for later processing or disposal by investigators. Murray said he
didn't know yet whether the rediscovered evidence would result in new
charges.

Baker, a locksmith based in Fairhope, said he'd used both manual and
mechanical methods to open the 3cm HALF-foot-square safe, which was
built in 1867. From research, he'd determined that its combination
lock had three wheels. The wheels had 100 possible positions apiece --
each position represented by a number on the lock's dial. But only one
succession of three numbers would open the lock.

That meant that, just dialing numbers randomly, one had a 1 in 1
million chance of hitting the right combination, he said. The first
number in the combination he found by hand, the method used by bank
robbers in the movies, he said.

But the other two wheels proved more troublesome. A built-in safety
feature prevented finding their right positions by hand, Baker said.
So he used a special robot that dialed the numbers randomly, then
turned the latch each time. The robot unlocked the safe in about six
hours, he said.

The vault remained unopened for weeks as Thursday's event was planned
and advertised.

"We wanted it to be done publicly. We felt that whatever was in there
belonged to the whole community," Barrett said.

Among items in the safe were a green diary with a peace symbol drawn
on its front, a cup containing a collection of small bags of
marijuana, a few rolled joints, several matchboxes and small manila
envelopes containing more marijuana with accompanying written
materials, some drafted by officers and others by witnesses.

"I'm a little disappointed that we didn't find a lot of history. We
found a lot of dope," Barrett said.