There Were Feral Cats in The Basements of The Shoreham Hotel

There used to be feral cats in the basements of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
They were put there long ago to control the mice and rat population.
 I have no idea if they are still there or not.
 D.C. has lots of rats. Both the 2 and four legged kind.
When I went to work at the Shoreham in 1977 it was reported in the Ear Gossip section of the old Washington Star that a guy working in the Steward's Dept. was shooting the cats with an air rifle.
So the SPCA came and put in cages to catch the cats but it did not work.

I used to see and hear the cats in the basements. They would crawl around on the heating ducts to stay warm. If you were not careful they would jump down from the pipes and pull your hair.

I found a group of kittens one night mewling behind a large freezer. I took one home for my children thinking it would be domesticated by the time it grew up.
It did not work. The kitty would crawl in the beds of our children at night and pull their hair.

I had to get rid of that cat and get a tame one.

Click on the Label hotel detective in the Labels Box below to read many more stories about hotels and my work as a hotel detective.

World Boxing Association Event 8-27-1976 At The Shoreham Hotel In Washington D.C. Howard Cosell Was The M.C. Every Living Heavyweight Champion Except George Foreman Came And I Got Autographs From Joe Frazier And Muhammad Ali

The Shoreham Hotel Washington D.C. 2500 Calvert Street N.W.

You can find the photo described below by clicking on the link below and clicking on Events.

http://www.miltonwilliamsphotography.com/captionsevents.html

Row 1. Box 3. I AM THE GREATEST!!! said Muhammad Ali at the WBA 55th Annual Convention at the Shoreham Americana Hotel in Washington D. C. as Howard Cossell looks on. Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali, 2/25/64 to 3/22/67 (stripped of his title by the WBA and others for refusing military service because of his religious beliefs) - 10/ 30/74 to 2/15/78 and 9/15/78 to retirement in 1979 - First heavyweight champion to hold title 3 times in boxing history. Photo by Milton Williams c. 8.27.1976.

The above photograph of Bob Dylan and Ali was taken in another place at another time.

Joe Frazier just died. He was 67 years old. I got his autograph when I worked at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C. in August 1976.
   He was there for a big World Boxing Association Event. Howard Cosell was the M.C. More than a 1000 people came to the event held in the large Regency Ballroom. Every single living heavy weight champion was there except George Foreman. The ones who came that I remember were Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis,  Jersey Joe Walcott, Ken Norton and Floyd Patterson.
I saw all these champions lined up in the hallway outside of the Regency Ballroom waiting to go in.

Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali in line waiting to go in the event. Click on these photos to enlarge them to view them better. Photo by Joe B. Stewart

The above photo is of a young Joe Frazier.
   I got Ali's autograph in the Lobby of the Shoreham Hotel the next day. He was standing in the Lobby all alone. No one else was around. I said, "Hi Champ. Can I have your autograph?" He signed his name on a small piece of paper which I handed to him. Then I said "I saw you had your picture taken with Bob Dylan." He nodded yes.

Above is the Muhammad Ali autograph that he gave me in the Lobby of the Shoreham Hotel in 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heavyweight_boxing_champions
The night of the event after it was over I saw Joe Frazier sitting with two pretty young women one on each side of him on a couch in the hallway off the lobby. I went up to him and said hello. I told him my daughter has asked me to get his autograph for her. I told him I had told her I was going to get Ali's autograph and my daughter said "Get Joe Frazier's autograph too". The two women both said "Yes". I got Joe 's autograph and gave it to my daughter.
   Howard Cosell was a great M.C. for the event. He joked and traded insults with Ali. Cosell told Ali "I knew you when you were a kid in Louisville,Ky. stealing bicycles".
 Two photos below taken after the event. Both are of Ken Norton. I look on.

Unwanted Animals At The Shoreham Hotel In Washington, D.C.

Click to enlarge this picture of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C.

When I worked at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C. in 1977 and 1978 we had feral cats in the basements. I say basements plural because there are several sub basements at The Shoreham. It is like decending into the bowels of a large cruise ship. Up top everything looks pretty down below is another story.

   Years ago cats were put in the basements of the Shoreham to control and kill the rats and mice. Over the years the cats became feral. They are not domestic. They are wild animals. They will jump in your hair from the pipes in the ceilings.

   There was an assistant Steward who starting shooting them with an air rifle. This somehow was reported to the old "Ear" gossip column in the old Washington Star. Then the Humane Society arrived and put a stop to that and said they would bait and trap the wild cats with cages. It did not work. The cats were still there when I left.

I found a little kitten once deep in the basement. I took it home as a pet for our children.
But it remained wild. It would pull on the kids hair at night while they slept.
I had to get rid of it. I took it to Rock Creek Park and turned it loose. As I was driving away I saw a lady stop her car and get out and go get the cat. 

One time we had a bat in the lobby. The employees wanted nothing to do with catching and getting rid of the bat. The lobby of the Shoreham is very large and has very high ceilings. Nothing we had was long enough to get the bat which was way up high on a wall in the lobby. Finally someone came up with a solution. We got a fire extinguisher and shot the foam at the bat and it fell down. We wrapped in a towel and took it outside and released it.

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.

Thefts From Hotel Kitchens And Storerooms Shoreham Hotel And The International Inn Washington D.C.

Click on the pictures above to enlarge them.
For more of my posts about being a Hotel Detective in Washington, D.C. look at some of my recent posts by scrolling down below.

When I first went to work at the International Inn we had a problem with thefts from the storeroom.
One morning a coffee shop bus boy from Afghanistan named Kasem told me that a cook was stealing from the storeroom. It was about 6am and we had unlocked the back doors for the kitchen cleaners to take the garbage out.
I went to take a look. Kasem said he had seen the cook take boxes of steaks and shrimps and put them in the trunk of his car.

When I looked I saw a car backed up to the receiving doors and water was leaking out of the bottom of the trunk. It might be the frozen food was melting.
I went and got the Asst. Chief and we told the cook to open his trunk. He stated he would not open the trunk until the Executive Chef(his boss) was at work.
We said fine we will wait.

Sometime passed and the Executive Chef arrived and we told him the story. We went back to the receiving area but the car was gone and so was the cook.
We wrote up a report. It went to the General Manager. The next day he called in the cook and asked him, "Why did you leave?" The cook replied, "I was scared I was going to hurt somebody". He ended up being fired even though he was in a union. He never came back to work at that hotel.

We knew he had a record and had been in prison. He also had threatened Kasem with bodily harm if he told anyone about his stealing. We found out later he had been taking the steaks and shrimps up 14th Street and selling them to a grocery store.



At the Shoreham someone was stealing large quantities of meat from the locked storerooms. On the midnight shift I found one night someone had bent the locked steel bar that ran across the lockers. By bending it far enough they had removed it.
I searched around the receiving area around 6am and found two large briskets of beef carefully hidden. I photographed them and then took them back to our office.
We staked out the receiving area and saw the two kitchen cleaners come to pick up their stash. They were eventually fired. Large quantities of meat had been disappearing. The thefts stopped.

We got a new Security Chief at the Washington Plaza. He was an ex D.C. cop and he was a Mexican American who meant business. He fired almost the whole staff.The old night man was fired for sleeping on the job. He hired some young large football sized guys. He told all of us he wanted all bags checked as the employees were leaving from work. This was something that had been in effect before but not enforced. Everyone was friendly and just let every one pass.
But under the new boss not only packages and bags were checked but women's pocketbooks as well.

We had a cook who had been at the hotel for many many years. No one had ever checked his back pack or bag. But one afternoon when I was not there(I was told the story the next day) this cook was leaving after his shift and the new Director of Security told him to open his bag. The cook said he was not going to open it. There was a short argument and then the new Chief grabbed the bag and the cook fought with him over it. The Chief fought this guy out in the parking lot and had to ask one of the big beefy guys to help him. The guy had just been standing there watching. Finally they subdued the guy and opened the bag and found it full of steaks and shrimps. He was fired.

One of the waitresses asked the cook when he came to get his last check why he had taken the items since as a cook he could eat anything he wanted in the kitchen while he was working. He told her, "I just had a taste for it".
This had been going on for years. The new boss had put a stop to it.

More Hotel Detective Stories. Sheraton Carlton Washington D.C. International Inn And The Shoreham Hotel See Other Post Below About Hotel Security

Click on all these pictures to enlarge them.








The pictures above are of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel at 16th and K Streets N.W. in Washington D.C. This hotel is now called The Saint Regis Washington,D.C.

I worked at the Sheraton Carlton at 16th and K Street N.W. in Washington D.C. in 1978 1979 and 1980.
This was a small fancy hotel 2 blocks from The White House. I worked nights there and on weekends.

One night I was told by the guy on the front desk that there were some prostitutes up in a room and I should go up and put them out of the hotel.
I went up and knocked on the door. A man opened the door wide and I could see inside a group of Saudi Arabians sitting on the floor in their white robes. The man asked me what I wanted and I told him the two women(they were blond Americans)had to go. He asked me, "How much money do you want?" He had pulled from his pocket a large roll of money. I told him I could not do that because I would be fired. I waited until the ladies came out and escorted them downstairs and out of the hotel.

Another night a middle aged man came downstairs at 3 am with a college aged blond girl. I watched them. No one else was in the small lobby. He looked at me and said, "She is my daughter and she is going out for cigarettes". He went back upstairs. She never came back.

Sometimes when I would come on duty at 11pm the cooks would be closing up the kitchen to go home. From time to time they would offer me some of the left over specials. One time a cook asked me if I would like some beef bourguignon. I said yes of course. It was tremendous.

Click on the link below to read about this dish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_bourguignon

My favorite memory of this hotel was the night of Sunday Feb. 18,1979. The next day was a holiday. George Washington's birthday. Celebrated each year on the third Monday of Feb.
I went to work at 11pm and it started snowing. It snowed all night. I sat looking out the windows from the restaurant facing K Street and watched it come down. There was no traffic on 16th or K Street.

The snow plows kept plowing until 5am and then they gave up and went home and never came back. The snow was 4 feet deep in K St at 6am. I was scheduled to be at work at the other hotel at 7am. No one showed up to relieve me. In fact, no employee period showed up at the Sheraton Carlton that morning except one cook who told me he had walked all the way in from Alexandria,Va.
That is a distance of 15 or more miles in heavy deep snow across the bridges and unplowed streets.
I gave the keys to the front desk and told them I had to leave to be at work at another hotel. I walked out onto K Street. There was no traffic. The snow was up to my waist. The only way people were getting around was by skis. The streets were deserted. The wind was blowing the snow into a swirling blizzard.
I left my car on the K St. service road. I did not get it dug out until 3 days later. The city came to a standstill for about 2 days.

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.