When Prince died in 2016, the superstar left behind a bank vault of unreleased music in the basement of his famed Paisley Park estate.
The drill bit used to open the vault has hit the auction block with a minimum bid of $5,000.
Prince left behind no will and no method for accessing the vault. No living person knew the code. Some say Prince himself had forgotten it. The vault had been known about for years, with Prince’s former sound engineer telling The Guardian she “started the vault” in 1983.
“I wanted us to have everything he’d ever recorded. I called up the studios he’d been using and said: ‘Have you got any Prince tapes’? This is his legacy,” she told The Guardian. “When I left in ’87, it was nearly full. Row after row of everything we’d done. I can’t imagine what they’ve done since then.”
Shortly after Prince’s death, a safecracker named Dave McOmie received an email asking him to open the vault. As he told This American Life, the safe was a Mosler American Century: “No burglar has ever defeated a Mosler American Century, not once, ever.”
Prince’s vault even had an added layer of protection known as the mousetrap re-locker, which makes the door impossible to open — even with the combination — if it senses it’s being tampered with.
McOmie used a strategy called microdrilling, which meant drilling a small hole through the door to look through and see through lock from the inside. His first attempt was thwarted thanks to an upgraded hard plate. Then, he took out another with a diamond tip, and after more than an hour he made it through.
The vault opened to reveal a massive amount of unreleased recorded material.
In 2017, the vault was relocated to Los Angeles where the archiving company, Iron Mountain, would catalog, store and digitize the stacks of music on behalf on the company appointed to administer Prince’s estate.
In the years since, some of the recordings have made it out into the world, including the 1976 self-titled demo tape, which is credited in helping him secure his first contract. It sold for nearly $70,000 in 2023.
The drill bit used to open the vault is being sold at Vintage Sports Authentics by Chad Litherland, who worked on Prince’s security detail in the early 2000s.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.