The Georgetown motel looks more like an apartment building that was painted all wrong, cream-colored with chipped white trim. There's a black Trans-Am decomposing on gravel behind the motel. Because the satellite dish on the motel roof seems more substantial than the motel that supports it, the building looks to be on the verge of tipping over, uprooting the back end of the motel and unexpectedly exposing a woman in a shower or an ex-convict in bed reading the more violent chapters of the Old Testament. In a word, the Airlane Motel is not the Ritz.
Located on East Marginal Way S. in Georgetown, the Airlane is part of strip of cheap motels, low-profile industrial shops like Cascade Machinery and Electric, and inexpensive Mexican restaurants.
It is for this reason (the strip's cheapness) that the Airlane was round one in an operation that, 15 minutes later, progressed down the block to the Aero Motel and, 30 minutes later, concluded at another East Marginal Way S. stop, the Munson Motel.
"I don't agree with prostitution," says the manager of the Aero Motel, Connie McGregory, who was the second manager implicated in the vice operation, "but if you are going to raid our business for prostitution, then you have to raid all the other hotels as well."
Though McGregory broke the law (after reaching an agreement with the undercover agents--30 minutes for $20--she did not complete a motel registry or request picture ID), she is right about the unfairness of the vice department's "sting operation." The sting selected cheap motels and not posh downtown hotels. "There is prostitution everywhere," McGregory says. "It's at the Four Seasons, it's everywhere, but they pick us because we are a cheap motel. Why don't they go to the other hotels and be aggressive and mean like they were to me?" (Alisa Martinez, public relations director for downtown Seattle's Four Seasons Hotel, would not address accusations that prostitution exists at the Four Seasons, and said the Four Seasons has never been investigated by the vice squad. She seemed surprised by the fact that police ran undercover operations that implicated any hotels or motels. Other downtown hotels--the W, the Westin, and the Sheraton--did not return our calls.)
McGregory is justified to point out the class bias approach to the vice squad's sting operations. In the three years I have read police reports as The Stranger's Police Beat columnist, I have never read about vice targeting upscale hotels; it seems that they only harass adult entertainment businesses, strip clubs, seedy downtown streets, and cheap motels. The frequency with which vice performs its undercover operations in these areas makes the department look more like a thriving theater company than a law enforcement agency.
Like Annex or Theater Schmeater, the Seattle Police Department's vice section has rehearsals and uses costumes, and if the performance is successful they capture their audience. Unlike most theater companies, the vice section is well funded (the SPD Investigations Bureau's vice section gets close to $1.6 million a year), despite the fact that their audiences never enjoy the outcome of their plays. For example, the only people who enjoyed the undercover operations staged at the Georgetown motels were the cops, who experienced the vicarious thrill of playing a horny john and a hot whore. The audience, duped into incriminating discussions about room rates and the availability of condoms, was frustrated and even traumatized by vice's little dramatic production.
Despite repeated requests for comment on these matters, the SPD's vice section did not return our calls.
Just minutes after the opening scene at the Airlane Motel, motel manager McGregory fell into the same trap down the block at the Aero. After McGregory told the departing vice actors not to leave a sex mess in the room, six police officers stormed her lobby. "They must have been hiding in the bushes or something. I was surprised I didn't see them because there were so many of them. And after they were done being rude to me, they just left. Just like that. And I sat there not knowing what to do. They were off to the next hotel. Now, if it takes them 10 minutes to raid our place, then they should raid the fancy hotels. That would be fair."
