The owner of the Four One Three Salon, Alicia Powers, told Business Insider that she closed her Pittsfield, Massachusetts, business that day at the request of the Secret Service, which examined the area earlier in the week.
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“They had a bunch of people in and out of here doing a couple of bomb sweeps again — totally understand what they have to do, due to the nature of the situation,” Powers told Business Insider. “And at that point, my team felt like it was a little bit chaotic, and we just made the decision to close for Saturday.”
A Secret Service spokesperson told Business Insider that the agency’s employees “would not enter” without the permission of the business owner, but acknowledged an agent taped over the security camera lens.
At 8:10 that Saturday morning, a Secret Service agent — wearing a dark suit and open-collared white shirt, but no pin on her lapel — walked up to the salon’s front entrance while swinging a roll of masking tape in her left hand. She looked at the door. Then she looked at the security camera on the porch. Then she looked at the door again.
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The door was locked. But later that afternoon, another security camera, pointing at the door from the inside of the building, spotted four other people over the course of nearly two hours.
Two people wearing emergency medical services uniforms and one person in a camouflage state police uniform walked in. The fourth person, wearing a dark suit and white shirt like a Secret Service officer, stood by the door.
The salon’s security alarm rang the whole time. The security footage from the two cameras, which Powers shared with BI, doesn’t show anyone allowing the people in.
“There were several people in and out for about an hour-and-a-half — just using my bathroom, the alarms going off, using my counter, with no permission,” Powers said.
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Powers told BI that an EMS worker later told her the Secret Service agent in charge of security that day “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.”
BI asked Secret Service spokesperson Melissa McKenzie whether the agency invited other people to use the bathroom. She told BI that agency employees “would not” tell someone to enter the salon without the owner’s permission.
When Powers returned to the property later that day, she found the door’s lock looked like it had been picked, she told BI.
The people who entered the Four One Three Salon didn’t do much damage aside from leaving an untidy bathroom behind, Powers said.
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Powers said she felt “violated.”
“Whoever was visiting, whether it was a celebrity or not, I probably would’ve opened the door and made them coffee and brought in donuts to make it a great afternoon for them,” she told BI. “But they didn’t even have the audacity to ask for permission. They just helped themselves.”
Brian Smith, the building’s landlord, said he didn’t give the Secret Service permission to use the property either.
“Me and my dad own the building, and I have a crazy eccentric guy that lives upstairs,” Smith told BI. “And he didn’t tell the Secret Service they could use it, and I didn’t tell them, and my father didn’t tell them, and they had no permission to go in there whatsoever.”
The Secret Service apologized after BI reached out
The day after BI initially reached out to the Secret Service for comment for this story — more than a week after it entered the business — an agency spokesperson said it had “since communicated” with Powers.
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“We hold these relationships in the highest regard and our personnel would not enter, or instruct our partners to enter, a business without the owner’s permission,” she added.
Bill Pickle, a former Secret Service special agent, who previously oversaw training for the agency, told Business Insider that it’s conceivable why a member of the Secret Service would tape over the security camera lens.
Pickle speculated that someone from the agency’s technical services division — which handles explosives, bugging, wiring, and other physical security risks — may have wanted to limit visibility of Harris’s whereabouts if the vice president were to walk into the camera’s view.
But invading the property to use the bathroom “sounds weird,” Pickle told BI.
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Powers said she contacted a local Secret Service field office after the incident, and that a person there told her to ask the local police, who said they knew nothing about it.
“I know for certain none of our members were involved in this,” Pittsfield Police Captain Matthew Hill told BI.
On Thursday morning — the day after BI reached out to the agency for comment — the head of the Secret Service’s Boston-based field office called Powers to apologize, she said.
“He said to me everything that was done was done very wrong,” Powers said. “They were not supposed to tape my camera without permission. They were not supposed to enter the building without permission.”
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Powers said she’d take him up on it.
“I want him to see the salon, and I want him to see what I do for the community, and be in this space, and have an understanding as to how this could have been ruined with the slightest wrong move,” she said.
* Original Article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/secret-service-busted-salon-use-bathroom-owner-2024-8?amp