They were charged with burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. They arrested them for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, housed in the same complex as the hotel.
#THE MIDNIGHT WAVE EPISODE 1 PLUS#
The police apprehended five men (the Miami four plus McCord), dressed in business suits and wearing surgical gloves. By the time he witnessed the undercover cops going room to room investigating the DNC’s sixth-floor suite of 29 offices, it was too late.
#THE MIDNIGHT WAVE EPISODE 1 TV#
Former FBI agent Baldwin, then McCord’s ally at CREEP, became distracted while watching the film Attack of the Puppet People on TV and failed to observe the arrival of the plainclothes officers in front of the Watergate building. Baldwin III, the “spotter” for this motley crew of miscreant oddballs, was perched in the window of a room at the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street, armed with binoculars and a walkie talkie to warn the burglars if necessary. Shoffler) working the overnight “bum squad.” The unlikely-looking trio of officers was dressed undercover as hippies on the lookout for drug deals and other street crimes.Īlfred C. An unmarked police cruiser arrived carrying three plainclothes officers (Sgt. When he returned a short time later and discovered that someone had retaped the locks, he called the police.
He removed the tape, believing it was nothing. The tape allowed the doors to close but remain unlocked.
Sometime after midnight on Saturday, June 17, 1972, Watergate Complex security guard Frank Wills discovered a piece of tape covering the latches on some of the complex’s doors leading from the underground parking garage to several offices.
That night the seven men dined on lobster on the Terrace Restaurant of the Watergate Hotel, overlooking the Potomac River, and formulated a plan. Gordon Liddy, the “fixer” and ex-FBI man gone rogue then working in “political intel,” and James McCord, a former CIA officer working full-time for President Richard Nixon’s Committee for the Re-election of the President, forever known by the prophetic acronym of CREEP. Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA agent who claimed to be personally responsible for the death of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, G. Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez booked Room 214, and Virgilio Gonzalez and Frank Sturgis booked Room 314. On June 16, 1972, four men from Miami Beach Florida checked into the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. Next Thursday we’ll pass a historical milestone that I suspect will largely go unnoticed: the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.