The Watergate Complex. Designed by Italian architect Luigi Moretti. No right angles anywhere in the building. He said the shapes were made by an angry thumb. Look at the curves. It's actually gorgeous — six buildings, six hundred and thirty apartments, a hotel, and the office building that gave a scandal its name.
June seventeenth, nineteen seventy-two.
Five men break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the sixth floor of the office building in front of you. They're there to plant listening devices and photograph documents. This isn't even their first try. They'd already broken in three weeks earlier and installed two wiretaps. One didn't work. So they came back.
What happened next was the most incompetent burglary in American history.
Start with the money. The five burglars were carrying brand-new hundred-dollar bills. Sequential serial numbers. One after another after another. Like they'd walked into a bank and said give me a stack. The money traced straight ba
ck to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Yes, that was the actual name. Yes, the acronym was C-R-E-E-P.
Next — the doors. To reach the sixth floor, they taped open every door latch from the parking garage up. Horizontal strips of duct tape over every lock. A security guard named Frank Wills found the tape on his midnight rounds. Pulled it off. Figured a maintenance worker had been careless.
