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A SAFE THAT'S HARD TO CRACK

Trenton Times

By Jeff Trently

May 18, 2008

PLAINSBORO— Ah, yes, opening the vault.

Jim Medalia knows all about opening the vault. How it's made of 230,000 pounds of concrete and steel. How it took workers five days to build the 1,000-square-foot bunker. How it sounds when you turn the four-point handle -- a faint click -- to get inside.

It takes two people to unlock the vault's door.

"You don't want to get in the way of this. This is basically two cars smashed together," Medalia says as he opens the two-and-a-half-ton door -- slowly, perfectly balanced -- to where the treasures lie. And inside?

Medalia doesn't know.

No one does.

Row after row after row of shiny silver-and-gold boxes line the walls. What's inside them is anyone's guess.

Gold? Cash? Antiques?

Or maybe just a birth certificate or two.

That's the mystery of being the state's first private safe deposit company.

"I don't know what's inside," Medalia says.

The whole idea of safety deposit boxes is that you don't know what's in them, Medalia says.

"I shouldn't know and not only that, I don't want to know. That's not my business," he says. "What we provide is privacy for people."

Privacy -- and 200 pounds of steel security per cubic foot.

Charter Private Safe Deposit Company is the first non-bank safe deposit facility in New Jersey. It's the only organization of its kind in the state, says Ed Rogan, spokesman for the N.J. Department of Banking and Insurance, which gave Charter its license last year.

In the 25 years the state has had a provision to charter non-bank safe deposit companies, Charter Private is the first company to apply.

"They felt the demand was strong and saw an opportunity to do this. It sounds like a smart business idea," Rogan says.

Step up to Charter's storefront at 128 Stanhope St. in Princeton Forrestal Village and you'll be greeted by a locked door.

Two of them.

A client needs an electronic key and PIN number to get past the double doors.

Once inside, the client's name and photo come up on a computer screen. The client has to sign in on an electronic pad -- "it knows how hard you press, how fast you write your name," Medalia says -- and then past another gate to get inside.

A nearby security screen gives a 180-degree scan of the parking lot outside and can zoom in on any license plate.

"This is just the overt security," Medalia teases. "It has nothing to do with covert security of all sorts of sensors."

Past the inside gate and to the right is what you want to see.

The vault.

It glistens in gold.

Inside, your voice echoes off the concrete-and-steel walls.

You need two keys to open a safety deposit box -- yours and the attendant's, Medalia says. Box sizes range from 5 by 10 inches to 20 by 30 inches and cost between $295 to $3,400 a year.

There are 440 boxes in the vault now and room for 800 to 1,000 more, he says.

Clients -- Medalia won't say how many he has -- can take their box into one of three private viewing rooms and add or remove whatever contents they desire.

The vault -- at 1,000 square feet -- is the largest built in the state in 20 years.

"It would take two men with torches and jackhammers an hour to drill a hole 12 inches in diameter," Medalia says.

"We'd know they were here in a second," he brags.

There are only about 15 other non-bank safety deposit facilities in the nation, says E-Ping Nie, the company's COO and Medalia's wife of 26 years. Before safe deposit boxes, the couple ran a graphics business in New York City and an online site -- called justballs.com -- which sold sports balls over the internet.

"It seems odd -- graphics, sports balls, safety deposit boxes. The thread that runs through it all is being able to find undervalued niches in a large industry and then just focus on that niche," Medalia says. Charter Private opened its doors April 7 and now Medalia -- the former sports equipment entrepreneur -- looks nothing if not like a banker in his black suit and gray pants.

"That's what happens when you marry a serial entrepreneur," Nie jokes.

But in the meantime, there's the vault. And all the secrets -- the valuables -- locked inside. "'Valuable' is really a personal thing," Medalia says after a while. "There's some things that have great value to me if somebody found wouldn't mean anything to them."

Medalia runs his hand along the vault's smooth steel, then pushes the door shut. It moves silent, except for a click.

Contact Jeff Trently at jtrently@njtimes.com.

Charter Private Safe Deposit Company, 128 Stanhope Street, Princeton 08540; 609- 919-1925; Jim Medalia, President. www.charterprivate.com.