And now something on sheets:

“The hotel, which overlooks Lake Zurich, provided an unlikely setting for the apprehension of six global soccer executives who were arrested on corruption charges and now face extradition to the United States. The operation took less than two hours and was strikingly peaceful — no handcuffs, no guns drawn. It also involved an unusual use of a bedsheet.”

(…)

“After directing Mr. Li through the bowels of the hotel, the officials led him out a side door that opened onto a narrow street. Hotel staff members wearing suit coats with tails were there to meet him, holding up white bedsheets in an effort to obscure the view of curious pedestrians or members of the news media. He was hustled into a waiting hatchback car — not a marked police vehicle — which drove through a red light as it pulled away from the cur,” Michael S. Schmidt and Sam Borden write in the Times.

Read the article here.

Baur au Lac – I stayed there a couple of times – is a pleasant hotel indeed. And this is basically what you want from a five-star-hotel: if you get arrested the concierge should use a sheet or a big towel to protect you from the gaze of onlookers and paparazzi.

It seems that the Times was informed about the operation well before the operation started. In an ideal world the concierge at a five-star-hotel in Switzerland would also be informed, the concierge would tell you: “Sir, you’ll get arrested tomorrow morning. Do you need a wake-up call?”

But we don’t live in an ideal world.