HotelChatter

The swanky Mayflower Hotel, built in 1925, has seen its fair share of bold names at its Connecticut Avenue location. The Hollywood crowd and the well-heeled have spent time here. But amid its polished interior is one big smidge of dirt that New York’s then Governor Eliot Spitzer brought to the hotel, and can’t be removed. In 2008, Spitzer aka “Client 9”, was nabbed by the feds for hiring a $3,000 prostitute from New York and arranging to have her brought to him to the Mayflower for a little tête-à-tête. He resigned the day after the news broke out.

The Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City has been the location for two different incidents. In 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton catastrophe, White House employee Linda Tripp and Lewinsky met at the hotel for lunch, in which Tripp recorded their conversation at the request of the FBI. Incidentally, the agency had rented a room at the hotel, and days later, Lewinsky was detained there for 11 hours by nine prosecutors and FBI agents in the hotel’s now famous Room 1012. That same year, sportscaster Marv Albert and his paramour Vanessa Perhach had met up at the hotel, but a supposedly romantic tryst ultimately ended badly when Perhach accused Albert of biting her (all pre Twilight, obviously).

In 1990, what is now the Westin Washington, D.C. City Center was then called the Vista International Hotel, and the site of one of the capital city's most embarrassing episodes. Just five blocks from the White House, then mayor Marion Barry was holed up in Room 727 with a woman named Rasheeda Moore. Think this was just another affair? Nope. FBI agents, who had installed cameras in the room, caught the official smoking crack, and busted in the room to arrest him. Barry’s infamous line as he was lead out of the hotel in cuffs? “B-tch set me up!” Miraculously, after a six-month stint in federal prison and four-year duck out of the limelight, Barry was re-elected mayor!

[Photos:ABC/dbking & Ashley]