During the late eighties, thieves broke into a dozen or so hotel rooms along the South Florida coast stealing handguns.

While hotel burglary isn’t new, the victims in this case were unusual. Each of the victims was a police chief. They’d come to South Florida for their annual chief’s conference. While the chiefs were downstairs learning how to protect the citizenry back home, some clown was upstairs rummaging through their stuff. Never heard of an arrest in that case.

Then, just last month, comes a series of hotel thefts reported in the Tampa Tribune by Geoff Dutton:

In this case, as in the last, there’s an annual gathering of Florida police chiefs. This time it’s at a convention center on the Gulf coast. Police reports say an armed man carjacked a car each of the first two nights of the convention. Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) were the type preferred by the carjacker who pointed a gun at parking valets in the hotel garage.

With a hotel full of top cops, it sounds like this guy was begging to go to jail. Sensing this carjacker’s wish for incarceration, police decided to cooperate by setting up a stakeout in the hotel parking garage.

On the third night, undercover cops noticed a guy in a stairwell holding two handguns. The carjacker and the cops spotted each other almost at the same moment. The bad guy tried to run but all escape routes were covered. In a few moments, 21-year-old Paul Echols was disarmed and cuffed.

This was a discerning thief. He knew of our national craze for SUVs and that’s what he targeted. One of the victims, a salesman of police products, got back his 2000 Ford Excursion within a few days. Another police product rep has no idea whether he’ll ever again see his Jeep Grand Cherokee with its Georgia tags. The only safe vehicle to take to that convention was an ’81 Plymouth Celebrity.