Here's a tiny, trivial script that you can use on OSX to unlock all files beneath the current directory. Note that if there are any symlinks to directories, it will probably go badly awry because I didn't write code to handle them sanely. You need to deal with them, you can fix it. I wrote this on the spot to handle a large directory with lots of locked files in it on a system at work.

Note also that the program I use to unlock might require the developer kit to be installed.

there is an app called BatCHmod that will let you change permissions as well as unlock files with a nice little GUI. it will also let you force empty the trash if thats being stubborn and rm scares you.