Secret Service busted into a salon to let people use the bathroom during a Kamala Harris fundraiser, business owner says (2024)

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. The salon is located behind the Colonial Theatre, a performing arts space in the Berkshires, where Harris spoke.

"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.

She walked away. When she returned two minutes later, she grabbed a chair from the porch, stood on it, and taped over the Ring security camera that had been watching her.

(Business Insider blurred the face of a Secret Service agent in the video below.)

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 law enforcement 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.

"And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left, and left my building completely unlocked, and did not take the tape off the camera," she continued.

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.

But what bothered her was what she saw as sheer disregard for her business, by entering without permission and leaving the place unlocked when they left, she said.

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.

"The U.S. Secret Service works closely with our partners in the business community to carry out our protective and investigative missions," McKenzie wrote in an email to BI. "The Secret Service has since communicated with the affected business owner."

"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.

"We just don't go in and take place or seize it," Pickle said. "The only time you do that is if it's a crime scene or if there's a real threat."

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."

Powers said the Secret Service representative she spoke to offered to have the salon cleaned and pay her alarm company bill for the day. Powers said he also offered to visit and apologize in person over a cup of coffee.

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.