Call Security! Another Of My Stories Of Being A Hotel Security Officer in Washington D.C.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.


This happened around 1988. The crew of the British Concorde stayed at our hotel at that time. They had to get up very very early to get out to Dulles Airport for their flight on time.
 The room service man would come in a do a special set up of coffee and something to eat for the crew.
It was around 5:30 a.m. or so and it was still dark outside.
I got a call that a street person was eating off of the set up for the British Concorde crew.
I went to t he lobby and found five or six of the crew eating and having coffee.
And the street person was having some also.
I told him it was not for him and he would have to leave.
He said one of the female flight attendants told him he could have some of their food and coffee.
I disagreed.
The female told me that yes she had told him that and she saw nothing wrong with it.

I engaged her in conversation.
I told her "You would not let him on your airplane". "Yes I would"she said which made no sense.
We continued to argue about this until finally I told her "What's the matter is your social conscience bothering you?"
That did not go over well with her. She really got angry and said "I can't believe you said that".

Meanwhile the guy was still eating and drinking coffee.

Someone called back to our office and told my partner that the street person was still in the Lobby.
While I was arguing with the female flight attendant I saw my partner coming down the hall toward the Lobby.
  He did not say a word.  He went right over and picked up the little guy by the seat of his pants and the back of his shirt collar and bum rushed him out the door.
The little man was hollering "Why am I being molested?"
My partner never said a word. He turned around and went back to our office.

The lady was shocked to say the least but she did not say anything.
The interloper and my former football player partner were both black men.
So nobody said anything about the incident.
Later the Concorde British Airways crew decided to move out closer to Dulles Airport.
We had an old man who worked at night and he would carry their bags so slowly he was making them late for their flight.
And he kept holding them up for tips.
  He was later fired for sleeping on the job.

Click on the label Hotel Security in the Labels box below for many more of my stories of my being a Hotel Detective(Security)in Washington, D.C.
Also click on the label Hotel Detective in the Labels box below for many more stories of my career as a Hotel Detective in Washington D.C.

Trouble In The Kitchen At The Shoreham Hotel In Washington D.C. Back In 1977

 

 

The above pictures are from the movie THE SHINING. I put them on here to illustrate the story
below. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.


When I first went to work as a Security Officer at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C. in 1977 the other Security Officer I was working with on the 3pm to 11pm shift  told me to "take your time if you are called to the kitchen".  We did not carry guns. Security Officers in hotels in DC didn't carry guns back then. They did in Miami and New York City but not DC. As one Security Chief told an eager young Security Officer who asked why we didnt carry guns, "Because I want you to use your brain not your gun".

I was new but I understood what the guy was telling me. The Shoreham Hotel has 4 sub basements. The  kitchen is down below and as you descend each level gets to look more and more like the lower depths. Broken glass covers the floors.

So I got a call to go to the kitchen that a fight was underway. And that one of the cooks was chasing another cook with a butcher knife.
I did not run to the basement where the kitchen is located. But neither did I hestitate to go. I walked calmly down not knowing what to expect. By the time I got there the two of them were separated. A big black cook was holding a butcher knife and a small Korean chef(who was his boss) told me they were cutting vegetables and that they had argued over how the work was to be done.
The little Korean chef showed me some marks on his neck which he said were from where the big black cook had choked him and lifted him up off the floor. And that the big guy had threatened to kill him.

In cases like this it was standard procedure to tell the offending party to leave and punch out and go home.
So I told the big black cook to leave and punch out and go home and come back in the morning and talk to the head chef. He did just that. They fired him the next day and I heard no more about it.


Another short story. There was an old rabbi who came to the hotel to make sure to food was prepared kosher for kosher events. He once slipped on a banana peel in a dark underground hallway and broke his glasses when he fell. I had to write a report on that.

One of the cooks told me that once a chef was tired of the rabbi hanging around and got a skillet burning  hot and put it down on the floor and told the rabbi, "Rabbi hand me that skillet". The rabbi picked it up not knowing it was hot. 

The Midnight Shift At The Shoreham Hotel In Washington D.C. Back In The Day

Click on the above pictures to enlarge them. They show the lower lobby of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C. and a nice color view of the upper Lobby. The hotel has large fresh flowers in the Lobby every day.
The hotel is like a large ocean going liner. Beautiful in first class but the guests never see the 4 sub basements below the lobby. More on that another time. It is very much like the ship in the play The Hairy Ape. First class guests never see what goes on behind the scenes.

Here is a true story of the workings of the hotel Midnight Security  back in the day.


When I went to worked at The Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C.in 1977 they had 2 military guys working the midnight shift in Security The third guy was a young man who had been drawn into the scheme simply by being assigned to that midnight shift.
Only problem was the guys had it fixed so only one of them came to work and called down to the timekeeper and had the timekeeper punch all three of them in. The next night one of the other guys would come to work and do the same thing and then the third guy would do the same thing when he worked. So the hotel was paying for 3 Security Officers but only one was working on any given night from 11pm to 7am.

I worked the 3pm to 11pm shift and noticed that only one guy showed up to relieve me and the guy I worked with. He would tell us to go on home that the other 2 guys would show up sooner or later.

Nobody ever said anything about this and it went on for over 3 years.

The boss came in at 7am but he either knew what was going on or did not care. He would only see one in the morning and that was good enough for him.

One guy was an active duty Marine. One was a retired Air Force Sgt. and the other was  a young man who had another day job.

Once the midnight telephone operator lady called to Security to come over to the telephone room located under the motor inn behind the Hotel.
She said there were insects in her small room bothering her. She wanted him to bring her some bug spray.
 But the midnight Security(the Marine) was upstairs asleep in a
bed in an unoccupied room and did not want to be bothered. He told her he was coming but did not bother to go. She called back 2 more times. He finally got out of  bed and got some bug spray
and went over to the telephone room and sprayed bug spray all over the room and her as well. At least that is what she said when she complained to the boss the next morning. Nothing came of it.

Finally the boss got fired(because nobody could find a Security Officer on the Midnight Shift) by a new Hotel Manager and the new Hotel Manager hired a really serious hot shot Security Director who was a retired DC policeman who had worked in internal affairs on the DC Police Department.

It did not take him long to figure out what the 3 midnight guys were up to.

The new Security boss came in during the night and told me to say nothing. He hid out and observed the youngest of the 3 midnight guys punching all three of them in.
He called him into the office and fired all three of the midnight shift.

The young guy seemed to think I had fingered them or squealed on them. I had not. But he still thought I was the one that ratted them out. He said to me "Is your insurance paid up?" But nothing came of that threat.

Some More Stories From A Former Hotel Detective Or House Dick As They Used To Be Known

Click on the picture above to enlarge them.
The link below is to some good info on Hotel Detectives.
http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/behind-closed-doors

I was lucky enough to be a Hotel Detective at one of the very best hotels in Washington, D.C. It is the Shoreham Hotel. It has been a landmark in Washington, D.C. since it was built in 1929. It was an upper class hotel back then with riding stables and a full service garage and service station in the underground parking garage. Rudy Vallee came down from New York for the grand opening in 1929.

Later Bob Hope used Suite B120 every time he came to Washington D.C. as his home away from home.
The New York Yankees used to stay there when they came to town to play the Washington Senators. But that was before my time.

By the time I went to work at The Shoreham it had become a convention hotel. Back in the old days there was no need for a security force. I was told back in the old days there was only one House Detective(or House Dick) and he was an old friend of the owner. The hotel orignally was also an apartment hotel and even when I went to work there in 1977 there were still a handful of permanent residents.

     #1: Someone was breaking in the pinball machines in the Game Room and stealing all the money.
This was in 1977 before the advent of more modern electronic games.
I decided to catch whoever it was. We had been patrolling the area but it was located in a remote room at the end of a remote corridor.
One night I went in a saw that a machine had been broken into. I walked back toward the Lobby and came to a Men's Room at the end of that corridor. I went in and saw no one. But my wife had told me that Columbo (the TV detective played by the actor Peter Falk) always got down on his hands and knees to look for things and get a better view. So I knelt down and looked under the stalls. I saw several stacks of quarters and the bottom of two legs. Someone was stacking up the quarters and counting them.
So I said to the person come out. It was a teenager.  He admitted breaking in the machines. I found out he was staying in the hotel with his parents. So went up to their room and I explained the situation to them.
I did write a report but I dont think we bothered to call the police. His parents said they would make sure it would not happen again.

#2. When I came to work one day at the Shoreham the boss showem me a box of what looked like costume jewelery and asked me if I knew anything about it. I told him no.
  One of the guys from the night before had left it in his desk thinking it was cotume jewelry. It had been turned in by the Chipnese Banquet waiter named Chang. Chang told him if there was a reward he wanted it.
It had been left at a party the night before.
   Later that evening I got a call from a man from Philadelphia, Pa.  He said his wife had lost some jewelry and was worth ten thousand dollars. He wanted us to send it to him. I told him no he would have to come and get it and prove it was his and sign for it.   He said he would come down on the train the next day.

I told the night security who had received it from Chang and put it in the desk of the boss what had happened.  He said why did I tell the man we had it. He said he could use that money. He was an active duty Marine by the way.
I left it at that. I must have also told the boss what was going on with this found property.
The next day I learned the man had come down and given a large reward to the Marine who claimed he found it. And the Marine gave nothing to Chang. Well Chang got wind of what had happened and complained to the Boss and the Hotel Manager.   After everything came out Chang got some money and the Marine was fired.


More stories to follow soon. Stay tuned.




I worked in hotels before the advent of security cameras. We did not have any. And even if we did there are simply too many places where cameras could not be used. We had to patrol the whole propery.
Mostly what we did at the Shoreham was do whatever we were asked to do by management. We had a bunch of old retired military and retired cops working there. Sometimes they hired young guys who went on to become full time cops.

  At Washington Plaza they hired a quite a few retired old guys from the Old Soldiers Home. The official name is The Soldiers and Airmen Home in Washington D.C.
It was built before the Civil War. The money for it came from a fine General Winfield Scott(old Fuss and Feathers)imposed on the defeated Mexicans after the war with Mexico. The fined them 150,000 dollars. The money was used to build the Old Soldiers Home in Washington D.C.
   I visited that place several times. It is a real interesting place. Read about it below.
http://www.defense.gov/specials/heroes/history1.html

Two More Hotel Stories That Were Never Printed In The Washington Post One Was A Fire At The Shoreham Hotel And The Other Concerns Chuck Brown And The Soul Searchers

Some news stories never get printed in The Washington Post or any other newspaper.
Sometime in the 1980s(I don't remember the exact date)there was a fire at The Shorham Hotel in Washington D.C. It was never reported in The Washington Post. It happened like this.

    Some Howard University students rented a suite for a Saturday night. They did not tell the hotel they were going to have what the Howard Students call a "Cabaret".
What that means is they were going to sell tickets to come to a party at the room they rented. That is not something the hotel allows so the people that rented the room just kept quiet about that.

  The party got going and the music got loud and then louder. It was after midnight and the party was still going strong. The hotel assistant manager called Security and told them to go tell the people to knock off the noise. The assistant manager lived with his family in a room nearby where this party was going on.

   The Security Officer(a friend of mine)went and told the students to be quiet. That did not work. It got later and later and the party got louder and contiued.
   So the assistant manager called again at 2am and told the Security Officer to call the police to  come and shut the party down. He could have avoided what happened by moving himself and his family to another room but he chose not to.

    The D.C. police arrived. They went up around 3am and shut the party down. They unplugged the music after arguing with the students who claimed they had rented the room and were going to continue the party.
   When the police left they found their car on fire in front of the hotel. It was a brand new police car parked under the entrance to the hotel. The fire burned the car completly up and set fire to the roof above the entrance to the hotel.

   The incident was ignored by the Washington Post. It never appeared in any newspaper as far as I know. And I never read of any students going to court over it either.

  
The other hotel story is about a party at The Washington Plaza in D.C.   This happened again on a weekend. Chuck Brown and The Soul Searchers were playing a dance at the hotel on a Sat. night.  A large number of young people came and I guess everybody had a good time. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Brown
There is plenty of Chuck Brown on Youtube. Just go to YouTube and type in Chuck Brown.
  Here is one. Double click on the video to go to YouTube and see many other Chuck Brown videos. One you can find there is his big hit "Bustin' Loose".


The hotel had been renovated just recently and the ballroom had brand new carpets.

   On Sunday morning when I came to work I found hundreds and hundreds of cigarette burns in the new carpet. Maybe thousands of cigarette burns in the new carpet.
 It was totally ruined. Now this has always perplexed me. Did they do it on purpose? Or did they do it just because they did not care or know any better. I suspect they just didn't care. Or maybe they had never seen carpet before.

Call Security! The Life And Times Of A Hotel Detective International Inn And Shoreham Hotel Washington D.C.

Click on the picture above to enlarge it. That is the Shoreham Hotel in the picture above. The picture below is of the old International Inn Hotel. I worked at both places.
Here is some good information on the Shoreham Hotel. There is a link at the bottom of this wikipedia page to a good history of the hotel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Shoreham_Hotel



Click on the above pictures to enlarge them.
Here is good information about the man who designed the International Inn which opened in 1962. Interesting that he also the designed the Hotel Americana Bal Harbour on Miami Beach among others there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Lapidus

I worked for 25 years as a Hotel Detective in Washington D.C. We were also known as Security. Hotel Detectives were once known long ago as House Dicks.
I will tell some incidents from my days as a Hotel Detective as I can remember them.
I will try to keep each vignette as short as possible.

#1: A young man comes in the hotel in the afternoon and goes to the restaurant. He orders the best steak and champagne. He is not dressed well. It is getting late in the afternoon and he keeps ordering and eating. Finally the staff gets nervous about whether he is going to pay or not. They call Security. I go to the restaurant. I wonder why they served him in the first place. By the time I get there the young Vietnam Veteran restaurant manager has the guy in his office. I stand outside. I hear yelling and then thumping and crashing. The manager is yelling at the guy telling him to never come in his restaurant again.
The Asst. Security Chief shows up. He has just come on duty. He is related to the restaurant manager. He asks what is going on. I tell him. He says. "Butch will kill him". Meaning Butch will hurt the guy. The Asst.Chief hurries in the office to keep Butch from hurting the guy any further.
The guy is from Romania. He tells us he has just gotten out of jail. He did the same trick the day before at the Mayflower Hotel. The police he says just arrest him and keep him overnight and then they let him out and he goes and does it again in another hotel.
Times are tough in Romania. Many people have left to come to the USA.
The police are called and they take him away.

#2: Again it is mid afternoon. I am in the restaurant talking with the bartender who is orginally from Thailand. I am looking at him as we talk with my back to the window facing the swimming pool. He suddenly says you better get out there. I ask why. He says some guy just jumped on a woman.
I run out to the pool. The lifeguard is sitting on top of the guy. The police are called. The young woman is wearing a two piece bathing suit. The guy had jumped on top of her and she is not hurt so much as just surprised. When the police arrive one of the wits on the force says to the guy "You know in this country we usually offer them a drink before we jump on them". The young guy is not American. Maybe Muslim maybe Middle Eastern.
I get a chance to ask the guy why he did what he did. No one had bothered to ask him. They weren't the least bit interested in why he did it.
He tells me he did it because his religion tells him to. I guess he was offended by her showing so much flesh.
They take him away. The young woman goes back to sunbathing.

#3: We ran the garage operation at the hotel. I ran the monthly parking accounts. No one else wanted to do this but I figured out that if I ran it all by myself when hard times hit and layoffs and firings occurred they would keep me on to run the garage. And that is what happened. At one point we closed for renovation and I was the only Security guy kept on because of the monthly parking accounts.
We also oversaw the garage equipment and the garage attendents. That is the cashiers and the valet parking.
One day I was in the lobby and got a call that there was no one in the garage booth exit. I said that is not possible. I had just seen the guy out there. But I was told there was a line of people waiting to get out of the garage.
I went outside and it was true I could see no one in the garage booth. I went over and looked inside. The cashier(an Ethiopian namde "Sami")was down on the floor on his prayer rug saying his prayers. I watched for a moment or two and then asked him to get up and attend to the customers.

#4. Some of the best events happened late at night when I wasn't there but I would be told about them in the morning when I came on duty.

They had hired a young woman from Chicago to run the Personnel or Human Resources department. Since this was a somewhat small hotel of only 300 rooms her operation was a one or two at the most operation.
This was in the 1980s and she fell under the spell of a guy from Texas who was working in the sales office. He got her hooked on drugs. Cocaine primarily. But she was also seeing the head of the sales dept. who was a young man recently graduated from the University of Virginia.

Whenever I went to Personnel to find her on business I never could find her. She kept her office closed and locked all day. Or she would open the door a crack and tell me she was busy and to go away.

So it came to pass one night things suddenly got more interesting. We had a former U.S. Marshall working the night shift. He was a middle aged black guy with an easy going attitude. He was from Louisiana originally. He had played football at Grambling in La. and had had a tryout with the New Orleans Saints.

The morning in question I arrived at 7am and he was in a shaken state of mind. He told me that the lady in charge of Personnel had been downstairs in her office with the head of the sales dept. in the middle of the night. Something had not gone right and she ran out of the office with no clothes on wearing a chain necklace and nothing else. She was in a stoned state of mind running around the hotel basement and lobby naked.

He had to deal with this crazy naked white woman. He told me it made him most nervous. He was worried he might somehow get implicated or accused of something. However he did get something to cover her naked body and managed to handle the situation from that point on.

It was a sensitive time since we were getting a new manager that next day. Discussions were held as to tell the new manager or not. Decisions were made.The new manager was told of the events. She was let go. So was the sales guy who got her on drugs. Somehow the sales manager kept his job.

#5: The owners of the hotel liked to present a high class image. When Reagan was first inaugurated(1980) the manager and the owners installed a guy in a tux in the lobby to play classical music on a grand piano.
The manager invited all the Hollywood and other celebs over for a fine brunch before the swearing in ceremonies. So Wayne Newton and his band came over from wherever they were staying along with many other celebs. But this story is about Wayne Newton's band from Las Vegas.
Somehow the band members didn't like the stiffness of the classical pianist and the general uptight air of Washington,D.C.
So on the morning of the swearing in the lobby was full and the guy was playing his classical music. Wayne Newton's band guys from Las Vegas had seen and heard enough of the classical piano player. The band guys were standing over by the front desk. One of the guys dropped his pants and turned and showed his naked backside to the piano player. They all laughed. It all happened so fast I am not sure how many people saw him. Nothing came of it. Case closed.

#6: We got a call early one Sunday morning from a tour bus driver who was sleeping in a room on the top floor of the Shoreham Hotel. This was a larger hotel I had worked at previously. The bus driver said someone was scratching on the walls of his room.
We went up to take a look. It was around 7am. He was still in bed. We listened and indeed we could hear scratching on or in his walls.
I went out and walked up some stairs up toward the roof. I got inside the roof and found that pigeons had come in through the vents in the outside wall and were scratching on the man's room walls. We got the pigeons out somewhow. Case closed.
Use the link below to read about the Shoreham Hotel. You can see photos and also take a virtual tour of the hotel.
http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/WashingtonDCShoreham.aspx

#7: We got calls from time to time to put homeless people out of the lobby and public restrooms which were not kept locked. Sometime junkies would go in the men's room across from the Executive Offices and go in a stall to shoot up. The guy(Richard from Panama)who cleaned what he called "the water closets" would complain to me about the blood in the stalls he had to clean up.

I got to work around 6am one morning. At that time we had the British Airways crews of the Concord staying with us. They had to get out early every morning so a buffet would be set up for them in the lobby at 530am. We also had an old man who worked for us who would carry bags at that time of night since no bellman was on duty. This man kept holding them up moving slowly with his hands out for a tip. They finally could stand it no longer and moved out to a hotel at Tyson's Corner nearer Dulles Airport where the Concord would be waiting for them. He was not on duty the morning of this incident.

I had just arrived at work. We got a call to remove a homeless man from the lobby who was drinking coffee and eating from the British Airways buffet. I went up to put him out. When I got there one of the British Airways female flight attendents told me "Why don't you let him have some coffee?" The guy was an older short black man. I told him he had to go. He replied that she had offered to let him stay. I told her she was interferring and that if he had walked on her plane she would not invite him to stay. It was still dark outside. I asked her if her social conscience was bothering her. She said "I can't believe you said that".

The guy behind the front desk must have called our office again because I saw our night man who was an ex football player and former U.S. Marshall coming around the corner heading for the lobby. He also happened to be black. He came on without saying a word picked the short black man up by the seat of his pants and his collar and bum rushed him out the front door. The short black man said "Why am I being molested". He did not come back in.

The British Airways female flight attendent looked shocked but said nothing.
The former U.S. Marshall did not say a word to anybody. He just calmly walked on back to our office. He never said a word to me about it or to anybody else. Case closed. End of story.

#8. At The Shoreham we had 3 military guys working the night shift. They had been doing this for 3 years. It turned out one of them would come in and punch the other two in so that all 3 got paid but only one was working each night. They finally got caught and got fired.

Before they got fired I heard about this story. The one on duty on the midnight shift would sometimes go in a vacant room and take his clothes and go to sleep. This one night the midnight telephone operator who worked alone in a room in the basement of the motor inn called and said she needed Security to bring her some bug spray. He ignored her. She kept calling back. He finally got tired of her bothering him and he said he took some bug spray over to the phone room and sprayed it all over the room and her.
She complained but nothing came of her complaint. Case Closed.

#9. I was standing in the Lobby of the Washington Plaza Hotel near the front desk. The Washington Plaza is what the International Inn Hotel became after it was sold and shut down for renovation and then reopened.

I saw a well dressed black lady over by the elevators. The Washington Plaza has a small lobby and it is possible to stand near the front desk and see the elevators and also out the front door and also down to the bar and restaurant.
I looked back toward the elevators and saw the black lady stick her leg out and put her foot in the door as if to try and stop the door from closing. She got on the elevator and disappeared.

I was back in the office a short time later when the phone rang. The Security Chief answered it. He listened. Then he told me there was a lady in the lobby who was saying the elevator closed on her foot.
I told him I saw her stick her foot in the elevator door on purpose in an effort to keep the door from closing. He asked me "Are you willing to swear to that in court?" I told him yes. He then told her what I had said. No further complaint was made. She dropped the matter. I never heard anymore about it.

#10. We had an air curtain in the front door of the Washington Plaza. That way the sliding glass doors could be kept open and the air conditioning or heat could operate up through vents in the grate by the front door. These vents had narrow openings of less than half an inch. It was not a problem to walk on unless you were in high heels.

A female jazz singer(she will go unnamed)who was playing at Blues Alley was staying with us. The hotel had a contract to put up all the jazz musicians and singers that performed at Blues Alley. Mose Allison, Miles Davis, Nancy Wilson, John McLaughlin, and others had stayed with us.

She had a date with the quarterback of the Washington Redskins(he also will go unnamed). They had been out on the town and came back late to the hotel. She somehow managed to catch one of her high heel shoes in the grate at the front door and the heel snapped off.

She started cursing. She said, "Who is going to pay for my MFing shoes?" She got louder and louder. The quarterback looked embarrassed. He tried to calm her down. A report was made and she was told the hotel insurance would cover the costs of her shoes.

Years later I learned that this famous black female jazz singer had committed suicide. It was a very sad story. She had problems she could not handle. I dont know what they were but I do know she had trouble keeping a relationship with men. She was very tall. Taller than most men. And she also was a very demanding personality. It was a great loss to the jazz world.

#11. The Christmas season was always a time of crime in D.C. We had many junkies in the neighborhood and they preyed on the parked cars in our garage late at night.
At that time all of 14th Street near Thomas Circle and Mass. Ave. was full of pimps,and prostitues, and junkies. Especially late at night. The area has since been cleaned up and all that is mostly all gone.

But one Christmas one of our female employees left all her Christmas gifts in her automobile overnight. The next morning we were called to the garage. Someone had broken into her car and not only stolen all her gifts but they had ripped the gift wrapped packages open and left the empty boxes and gift wrapping on the garage floor.
Thefts from cars are the #1 crime in D.C.




More Hotel Detective Stories to follow. Check back from time to time.