A Book Of Led Zeppelin

THE DRAKE HOTEL THEFT

So firstly when I searched for more ideas on Led Zeppelin scandals (as requested by sodapoppop ), this came up...

Yeah... I don't know how many of you have heard of the mud shark incident, I read about it a while ago but I wasn't planning on including it. I'll let you all find out about that one on your own if you (for whatever reason) want to. It's a lovely story as you can see, worth a read.

SO moving on, here's a scandal I am actually writing about; The Drake Hotel theft. This is a 40 year old mystery that was never solved, although several convincing and not so convincing theories have sprung up around it.

Led Zeppelin were performing the last three nights of their very successful 1973 tour of North America, at Madison Square Garden in New York. However, on 29 July, more than $200,000 in CASH was stolen from a safe from the hotel they were staying in at the time, the luxury Drake Hotel.

Now to any of us, losing that amount of money would probably ruin our lives but of course to the band (who had earned over $4,000,000 during that tour alone) it was a tiny sum and no major loss. The money was, in fact, kept on hand in the hotel because the band had "a lot of expenses to pay" according to tour manager Richard Cole.

But even though it wasn't a massive deal, the question still remains; how did $200,000 mysteriously vanish from the safe? According to Zeppelin's management, all of the money was accounted for when the box was checked at around 01:00 on July 29, but it was gone when it was next opened around 19:30 that evening.

But what's weird is that neither police nor detectives investigating the theft could find any evidence that the box had been forcibly tampered with and opened. What's also weird is that whoever took the money left the five passports that had also been in the same safe. What's weirder still is that Zeppelin's management seemed almost reluctant to press the matter further, which does give some backing to any theories that suggest the theft was all just a publicity stunt.

It's true that the whole thing might just have been a publicity stunt for press attention. If it was, then it definitely worked, they did get a large amount of attention for it. But then you've got to think, why would Led Zeppelin need to stage a big drama like this to get some attention? They were a big enough drama in themselves - this was the tour when they broke the Beatles' record for the largest audience for a single live act (over 56,000) - so they weren't exactly starving for it. I also wouldn't have thought they'd risk the very negative attention they'd also get if it was leaked that it was a stunt too.

So if it was a genuine theft then there are obviously suspects that it could be linked to. Ironically, Richard Cole was the one to discover the money was missing, and was also responsible for the money, so was therefore questioned as a suspect immediately (apparently his other responsibilities were clearing the hotel rooms of girls and drugs before the police arrived to investigate). He obviously wasn't found guilty though, and although many people speculated it was him all along I personally doubt it; he may have been a horrible person but he did have an extremely good job as Zeppelin's tour manager. Why would he throw all that away for money he didn't need at the time? And his money problems after he was fired as tour manager don't exactly speak of a man who had such a large sum of money tucked away, so unless he spent the $200,000 without anyone questioning his sudden increase in wealth suspiciously after the money that he was responsible for gets stolen then I strongly doubt that he did it, however much I hate him.

So that leaves the option that someone in the hotel stole it. Zeppelin sued the Drake Hotel a while after the robbery and never stayed there again, so they clearly thought it was an inside job or were keeping up appearances, one of the two. This hotel inside job option seems the most likely, but honestly I don't know, I'm not a detective, it could be anything. So unless there's some sort of deathbed confession about the money being buried somewhere in Jimmy Page's garden, we'll probably never know what really happened to all that money.

To be honest it probably just ended up being snorted up someone's nose and that's the end of it.

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Picture: a newspaper showing the theft as headline news - they really did get a lot of publicity