Post Mortem: Harvey’s

J. EDGAR HOOVER ALWAYS GOT HIS MAN, or so they said, but apparently he never got his hat.

Sometime during World War II the fearsome director of the FBI went into Harvey’s, which was then next to the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue, and laid his fedora on the counter of the restaurant’s checkroom. Hoover didn’t bother to get a claim check, however, and sometime during the next few minutes his hat disappeared.

The case of the missing hat was never solved. Margaret Cooper, the checkroom clerk at Harvey’s, had her back turned during the brief interval in which the hat of the nation’s number-one G-man was left on — and then left — the counter. “I don’t feel as though it was ever really left to me,” she told a reporter years afterward.

Hoover never abandoned the hope that someday, somehow, his hat would turn up at Harvey’s. He returned there for lunch virtually every week (usually on Thursdays) for more than a decade.

This article originally appeared in the February 1989 issue of Regardie’s.

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation Harvey's Harvey's Restaurant J. Edgar Hoover Margaret Cooper Mayflower Hotel