With Slideshow: Gem of a find: Contents of downtown Ann Arbor's mysterious safe are revealed

With six men, power tools and a semi-truck, the 8,500-pound safe was ripped opened this morning to expose plenty of not-so-valuable paperwork — and two much-more-valuable opal gemstones.

One of the safecrackers, Pat Rabchun, said the opals were found in leather pouches with documentation and two price tags: $190 for 1.27 carats and $250 for 1.67 carats.

It was not immediately clear when the opals were placed in the safe — because no one knows how long it's been locked. Previous estimates suggested that the safe — which is six feet tall, three feet wide and three feet deep — was anywhere from 25 to 41 years old.

Kris Keller, owner of Ten Fine Jewelry & Design and previous occupant at the Tower Mini Market space, said it's "very possible" that the opals are worth more today.

"We figured there might be something small in there, so that's about right," Keller said. "It's very possible they have increased in value."

Hopefully the paperwork inside the safe didn't contain any government secrets. It was mostly ruined by water damage during the attempts to open the safe.

Now, Rabchun said he will split the contents with Tower Mini Market owner Nabeel Gneym, who yesterday offered anyone who could successfully crack the safe 50% of the contents inside.

Rabchun, who works at Budget & Stadium Towing in Ypsilanti, decided he was up for the job, so he came to pick up the massive safe outside the Tower Mini Market on Thursday evening.

“You know, I wondered if I was wasting my time,” Rabchun said. “But you never know, it was too exciting to pass up.”

Rabchun took the safe to Budget & Stadium Towing at 876 Railroad St. in Ypsilanti. From there, Rabchun and his employees brainstormed ideas about how to open the safe.

They spent six hours trying to crack the safe, using a wet saw to cut the hinges from the safe door, hooking the door to a semi-truck and using a torch to melt the safety pins.

“This was a really big safe,” Rabchun said. “It wasn’t an easy job.”

Gneym inherited the safe when he moved his convenience store into the first floor of the Tower Plaza Condominium complex in downtown Ann Arbor in May.

The safe had been in the building since the 1980’s, when jewelry store owner Matthew Hoffmann purchased two Fichet-Bauche brand safes for his store, Matthew Hoffmann Jewelry Design.

When Keller took over the jewelry store, he said the combination and key to one of the safes had been lost.

"When we went to move, the safe was too large to take so we left it because we didn't have the combination or the key," Keller said. "If there's something in it, I don't know, but it was going to cost us $1,000 for a safe-cracker to get into that."

Although Gneym was told by different locksmiths that it would cost anywhere between $600 and $1,000 to open the safe, Gneym said strangers emerged out of nowhere offering with promises to open the safe after he offered half the contents to the person who could help solve the mystery.

“We had tons of people coming by,” Gneym said. “People were trying to open it or look at it all day.”

When asked whether solving the mystery was worth it, Rabchun laughed and said, “No, but it was fun.”