The Patel Cartel

How a Gujarati sub-caste came to dominate the American lodging industry

Eighty-three years ago, a Gujarati man arrived in the United States illegally by boat and bought a motel off a California highway.

That single purchase set off a chain reaction - of handshake loans, SBA guarantees, clan loyalties, and quiet migrations.

Today, seventy percent of America’s motels are Indian-owned. Most belong to one caste: the Patels.

I worked for one back in the mid-2000s - and saw firsthand how they built and ran their business.

This is the story of how a mercantile clan from Gujarat came to dominate the American lodging industry - through informal lending networks, government-backed loans, and relentlessly cutting corners in their ethnic family enterprises.

I dug into 25 years of SBA loan data, combing through over 10,000 lines of Excel, to argue the case that the Patels had full institutional support.

Finally, I include my own experiences working for a Patel, in an essay that I call:

The Patel Cartel: Inside A Quiet Motel Monopoly

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Crash Course in Patel History

The first 30% of this article was written as a crash course in the subject of Indian owned lodging properties in the US. Since most people came for that information, I put it front and center.

What follows after this first section is one that covers Small Business Administration data, regarding loans that have gone out over the past 25 years.

Finally, the last 70% of the article is a series of personal reflections about my time working at a Patel owned motel, which will be valuable to illustrate how these properties operate.

I firmly believe that each of us can share our own story about this issue, in lodging and other industries, that is so pressing today. Every voice counts.

With that out of the way…

An old photo of Mr. Desai

The first American motel purchased by an Indian was by a man named Kanjibahi Desai. Accounts differ about what hotel was the first, some saying it was the Ford Hotel in Sacramento - from a Japanese woman sent to an internment camp by Roosevelt; and others write that it was the Hotel Goldfield in downtown San Francisco. He acquired the hotels with other Patel business partners, also illegals, by leasing them at rock bottom rates.

Every source is clear about the fact that Desai was an illegal immigrant who came to America from Gujarat by way of Trinidad, likely to work the agricultural fields of California’s Central Valley.

He came to America so that he could send remittances back to Gujarat and resolve familial farming debts. Along with these dollars, he sent word to Patels back in the old country encouraging them to immigrate to America and get into the hospitality industry, saying that “There is nothing better here, so if you are a Patel, lease a hotel.”

Desai’s pioneering efforts multiplied as he helped set up more than 30 other Patel hoteliers in northern California in the following decade. He occupies a high station in the Patel motel lore, as without him, the phenomenon would likely have never started.

Old photo of Nanalal

There’s another man, Nanalal Patel, who is arguably more influential in the formation of the Patel cartel. He arrived in California as a stowaway, another illegal, from Panama on a “banana boat.” He hit the fields as a farmhand in Yuba City, working for Punjabis, before leasing his first property.

Nanalal innovated what has become the crucial element contributing to Patel domination of this industry - what has been termed the “handshake loan.”

This is where a group of Patel hoteliers, who may or may not be blood related, will hand out loans - in small batches from each person - to a new Patel who is looking to get into the game. The loan has no interest attached to it, no time limit for it to be repaid. This “handshake loan” happens to this day - in fact, I witnessed one myself in the mid-00’s - and it’s what gives the Patels an ethnically-centered competitive edge.

There are dozens of other Patels who were influential in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s in expanding from California throughout every other state in the country.

Persons like Bhulabhai Patel, who came to the US as one of only 100 Indians who were allowed visas annually at that time - by the law established in the Luce Cellar Act of 1946.

Once in the country and in the hotel business, Bhulabhai helped other Patels get to the US through the visa system and got them on their feet, providing jobs in his motels, and loans for their own properties.

This process multiplied in an exponential way over the following decades, so that by the 1970s, the Patel grip on the industry was permanent.

Turmoil in Uganda, with Idi Amin and his expulsion of all Asians from his country, accelerated the process. Thousands of Gujaratis who lived in that African country came to the US and were integrated into the Patel patronage networks. They were given jobs as housekeepers, front desk clerks, janitors - and the more enterprising found opportunity to become hoteliers by way of the Patel handshake loan.

The journalistic narrative from this time paints a picture of discrimination and racism against Indians in the hotel business, particularly from banks and insurance carriers.

The stereotype held by financial institutions was that Patels would go into default more often, fudge paperwork, and even commit arson to avoid paying back loans. There was a regional fire marshal’s convention in Tennessee that raised these issues, reporting that Patels set fire to their motels and submitted phony claims. Word got back to the insurance brokers and the Indian hoteliers were cut off from protection.

AAHOA convention in Dallas, TX

The Patel response was to form their own ethnic guilds. The first of its kind was the Mid-South Indemnity Association, also founded in Tennessee, and later spread nationwide. It changed its name to the INDO American Hospitality Association and later merged with a second group founded in Atlanta in 1989, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association - or AAHOA - which represents the interest of Indians in the lodging industry to this day.

There are over 20,000 hoteliers in its ranks with 36,000 properties under them, and this accounts for more than 60% of all hotels in the country.

Photo of an aged Michael Leven

In 1985, a veteran hospitality executive, Michael Leven, was appointed as president of Days Inn of America, after the fledgling 250-unit regional chain was acquired by the Tollman-Hundley Hotel Group. Leven realized phenomenal growth for the Days Inn brand, as he saw the opportunity to sell franchises to the growing Patel community.

Leven was also one of the co-founders of the AAHOA ethnic industry guild - an interesting fact, given that he wasn’t Indian. Within five years, Days Inn expanded to over 1,500 properties, accomplished through the aggressive expansion of franchise operations among Patels. There’s little doubt that Leven’s connections through the AAHOA secured this growth.

The New York Times published an article with the inquisitive title, “A Patel Motel Cartel?” on July 4th, 1999 - ironically, America’s Independence Day. It was written by the Indian-British journalist Tunku Varadarajan and it explored the Patel’s ascendancy in America’s hotel business.

Varadarajan termed this phenomenon a “nonlinear ethnic niche” - defined when “a certain ethnic group becomes entrenched in a clearly identifiable economic sector, working at jobs for which it has no evident cultural, geographical or even racial affinity.”

This phenomenon is not dissimilar to the Vietnamese owned nail salons in Los Angeles, the Arab gas stations in Detroit, or the Sri Lankan porn-shop entrepreneurs in New York - a segment that I was completely oblivious to. Varadarajan distinguishes the Patels in one important way, however - in that they could be found in all corners of the country, from small towns to the Big Apple, from mom-and-pop to fancy boutique properties.

When this New York Times piece was written, it was estimated that Indians owned over half of American motels - and as I’m writing this piece, that number has grown to over 70%, although the number is likely higher, although there are no official statistics.

And is it any surprise? The NYT article features a Gujarati-American named Hasmukh Rama, who was the first Indian to head the American Hotel and Motel Association, a larger, non-ethnic trade group that represented the entire industry. He came to the US in 1969, caught on to the opportunity in hospitality, and by 1973 he owned his first property. By 1999, his company JHM Enterprises operated 23 rooftops in the US and one in India.

Not only did Indians have their own association to represent and protect their interests, but they had one of their own members as head of the industry’s top trade group.

Varadarajan notes that the expansion of Indian owned motels accelerated in the 1970s due to the relaxation of immigration laws. Older white Americans who owned these properties were selling them off as they aged and their children didn’t take up the family trade. This was where the Patels, who are said to be of the mercantile vaishya caste, swooped in and seized the opportunity in a job and business that didn’t require much English, according to the article.

When a Patel buys a motel, it becomes a family operation. Children, cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody is involved in the day to day tasks of cleaning, maintenance, and front desk work. And the property isn’t seen just as a business, it’s often used as a residence, where the family can live on-site, reducing costs from rent or mortgages.

Both of these factors contributed to the Indian success in this field where margins are worn thin by labor costs. Employing extended family, often illegal and outside minimum wage and tax laws, along with living on-site, were both things that I saw first-hand, and I will talk about when I share my own experiences working for a Patel.

Now that we’ve laid a solid foundation and introduction to the Patel phenomenon, there is one other aspect to their success that isn’t discussed much in the news or industry articles, but has been a subject of discourse on X in recent months.

That is the question of Small Business Administration backed loans.

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The Loan Question

I want to preface this section by clarifying a common justification for the SBA-backed loans that have enabled many Indian entrepreneurs to acquire and develop lodging properties.

It’s often argued that the vast majority of SBA loans are successfully repaid, and that the program therefore poses little risk to the public or to lenders. This is true, but it does not tell the full story. While the high repayment rate suggests stability, the SBA guarantee fundamentally reshapes who receives financing and how banks deploy their capital.

When a bank issues an SBA-backed loan, it reduces its own exposure to loss because a significant share of that loan - sometimes up to 85% - is guaranteed by the federal government. This guarantee makes such loans highly attractive from a risk-adjusted standpoint, particularly in sectors where the SBA has a strong footprint, such as hospitality.

The result is not that there is a finite pool of money that “runs out,” but that capital and underwriting attention become increasingly concentrated in areas where the government has subsidized the risk. In other words, the credit market tilts toward SBA-qualified borrowers and industries, even when other qualified applicants exist. The SBA program influences the distribution of opportunity - not by denying loans directly, but by encouraging banks to favor guaranteed returns over unguaranteed ones.

In a homogeneous society, the banks will distribute capital in a relatively equal way among qualified borrowers, giving opportunity to different social classes to start their own business. Where this becomes a problem is when Indian immigrant groups, with ethno-narcissistic tendencies, have a clear pattern of acquiring capital through community networks and informal financing, which was discussed above as the “handshake loan.”

This gives the specific advantage among Indian borrowers of initial down payments and assets that help meet collateral and equity requirements, therefore improving the chances of SBA-backed loan approval.

Ideally, American whites would be doing the same thing - and in some situations, this does happen - but it’s not a common practice to the extent that it is in the networks of Patels and other Indians who have used this strategy explicitly in their expansion within the lodging industry.

With all this said, I wanted to look at the actual data. You can find everything in the CSV files hosted on SBA’s own website here: https://data.sba.gov/dataset/7-a-504-foia

These files show loan data from present day back to 1991, although the data for hotels is only calculated back to 1998.

In that period of time, over $15 billion - not accounting for inflation or 2025 real dollars - was loaned out in the Hotel Category. If we assume that the percentage of motels owned by Indians is around 50%, and that number is equally reflected in the number of loans, then at minimum they received over $7.5 billion in SBA-backed loans in that span of time.

Realistically, the number is higher than this, for the reasons that I argued above - that Indians are more likely to receive SBA-backed loans to fill in the gaps of purchasing a property due to informal ethnic financing. Also, the percentage of Indian-owned motels grew to at least 70% of the market by the 2000’s. This would make the realistic total that Indians have received from SBA-backed loans closer to $10 billion, not adjusted for inflation.

I did attempt to do a manual tally of who was receiving these loans in the Excel file. This produced mixed results. The drawback is that there’s nothing in the data that indicates if the loan went to an Asian or any other racial category. Also, although the names of business entities are listed, they’re often vague or generic. But not always.

In poring over the thousands of rows in these spreadsheets that rolled out over 25 years of loan data, a pattern of business names emerged that made who was receiving these loans crystal clear.

Let’s look at a few examples.

In November 1998, Bharat Enterprise Inc received a loan of $558,000 ($1.1 million in 2025). The address listed for the business is 4643 U.S. HWY. 67, Mesquite, TX - which is now a Motel 6.

Two weeks later, December 1998, Shree Radha Properties, Inc receives $352,000 ($700,000 in 2025). The address listed is 1010 South State Street, Big Rapids, MI - which is now a Walgreen’s. Who knows what motel was here before, but it was likely sold to a commercial real estate developer, so it’s likely that Shree Radha Properties exited with a nice sum.

February 1999, a $270,000 ($525,000 in 2025) loan to one Pankaj R. Patel. Address listed, 2076 Rosamond Blvd, Rosamond, CA - the current location of the Devonshire Inn Motel. This property is now owned by Nandini LLC, a business whose Agent and Principal are both Pankaj Patel.

We can keep going - and again, I’m grabbing only a few of the thousands of entries in the data.

Two days after Christmas, and only days before the impending doom of Y2K, Om Shiv Properties Inc receives a $666,000 ($1.3 million in 2025) loan to purchase a property at 4786 Beckley Road, Battle Creek, MI. This is now a FairBridge Inn Express property, but it appears to have started as a Days Inn, according to Dun & Bradstreet, and was owned by one Ramesh Patel.

Should we continue?

March 2000, the Y2K crisis averted, and the loans keep flowing. This time, a cool $1 million ($1.9 million in 2025) to a Vishnu Hotels LLC, address listed at 25921 Industrial Blvd, Hayward, CA. The property is a Fairfield Inn and Suites.

A sliver of ironic humor here, as the company is named after the Hindu god that everybody looks to curse to prove they’re not Indian. This company is still operational according to the California Secretary of State filing shown below, with one Narendra Dahya listed as Agent and Principal.

The data goes on and on like this, these SBA spreadsheets spitting out ample evidence of the Indian dominance in the lodging industry.

And on and on and on.

What’s interesting is that in the spreadsheet showing the most recent data from 2019 until today, the prevalence of Indian-owned businesses increases in a substantial way. Again, there’s really no way to prove that some of these loans are being given to Indian businesses, since there’s no check mark or column that confirms this data, but it can be deduced from the business name that is receiving the loan. In a majority of the data, the business name is generic or gives no ethnic markers. But in the past ten years, this changes significantly, to the point where nearly every row shows a business that is ran by Indians.

You can see what I mean here.

Over the course of a fortnight, 18 out of 34 loans were given to businesses with an explicitly ethnic Indian name attached to them. How many of the generic business names, like Fairview Hotels LLC or Trident Hospitality Inc, are also owned by ethnic Indians is hard to say unless each is investigated individually.

Each one of those would increase the total, and I assume there are Indians owners among the generic names, and so my estimate is conservative with over half in this small sample.

Accounting for each business would be an incredible undertaking, but one that could be fruitful on many fronts. There are over 10,000 rows for the data covered in the past 25 years. What could be found in here?

Each line is a story, a business loan that could’ve gone to you or someone you know. More importantly, they’re loans that are often given out to subsidize businesses that are operated with shoddy and illegal practices - hiring illegal housekeepers, unlicensed contractors, and other behavior that isn’t normally tolerated by American small business.

This gives the Patels an unfair advantage in the lodging industry.

I poked around for a few hours and the picture this data paints is one of complete ethnic dominance of the hospitality business.

Much like the H1B issue, where 90%+ of the approved applicants are of Indian origin, the question inevitably rises: Why is it that this sub-caste from Gujarat owns over 70% of the lodging properties in the United States?

It’s a serious question that needs to be answered keenly with an appraisal of the history and data that I’ve presented, and not through rhetorical flourishes.

But this is also personal for me, too. It wasn’t until I found the name of a person that I used to work for myself in these spreadsheets did I take a step back and reflect on my own experiences with Patels. And it’s here that I want to transition to an anecdotal essay.

I front-loaded this piece with historical evidence and data that shows how the Patels come to dominate the lodging industry. That way, readers who came here for that information could access it without having to scroll through my own story.

In the next sections, I’ll share my own experiences working for a Patel motel owner, where I became close with them and saw the good, bad, and ugly aspects of the operation: how I got the job; gaining the trust of the owners; the employment of illegal immigrants, both Hispanic and Indian; ethnic handshake loans; cutting corners with unlicensed contractors; forging of hotel registration cards, which are legal documents; and much more.

I’m confident that these stories will help paint a fuller picture of how these motels operate.

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The Connection

NOTE: Some names have been changed, but everything below is a factual recollection of my time employed at a Patel motel.

I got the job at Super 8 when I was 20 years old.

The motel sat back from a service road that snaked off a Midwestern interstate. It was fifty-one rooms stacked in three stories of beige plaster. The lobby was cramped but comfortable and we had a big plush office chair behind the front desk.

When somebody checked in, they filled out an old fashioned registration card that were then filed in a plastic holder and sorted by room number. At 2AM the night auditor would go through and account for every room, collect the registration cards, print out a special report, and bundle it all in a folder for the morning, which is when the owners would pick it up.

In the beginning, I mainly worked second shift, which gave me time to attend community college part time. This was the busiest time for checking people in. We booked up nearly every night, with the majority of stays being one-night travelers from the interstate.

I made a game out of charging people the highest rate I thought they’d pay. And I never let anybody walk out of the door. If you turned away, I’d let you get half way to the exit before interrupting you with a “I can do 10% off.” It nearly always worked, so I always quoted high off the bat and negotiated from there.

I showed up every day to work wearing a suit. We could wear what we wanted and my wardrobe was stocked with mismatched dress pants and shirts from the thrift store paired with oversized patterned ties that belonged in the 1970s.

The job was fun and I had a large degree of autonomy. But more importantly, the owners trusted me and for good reason. I was referred to the job by another Patel, a guy in his late 50s who had sold his own motel property, making him a millionaire. He picked up work at the local Walmart, where he could get health insurance for him and his wife.

He went by an Americanized name, Lenny, and before giving me the in at Super 8, I was his lead man on an overnight crew of grocery stockers at the big box store.

He stood about 5’5” and wore his hair like Erik Estrada from CHiPs - teased up and dyed chestnut brown except at the graying sides. He wore a pair of khakis and the same rotation of long sleeved shirts every night along with a designer silver watch and gold chain. He had been in the country for over twenty years but I was the only one who could make out what he said through his accent. He was a master at the head-bob.

Needless to say, Lenny didn’t fit in well. The crew was rough and motley. A couple middle aged alcoholics, a college drop out, a convicted sex offender, a big lurch behind on child support, and then there was me. I was young but I was the lead guy in this shitty job. I looked out for Lenny, made sure that he wasn’t bullied, and over time I gained his trust.

I didn’t have a car at the time and after the shift I’d walk back to my apartment, less than a half mile away. Lenny drove a ten year old Lexus and offered me rides every morning, which I took him up on after particularly rough shifts. On one of these rides, he asked me if I wanted different work. I asked him what he had in mind and that’s when he said he had a relative in the motel business who was looking for a front desk guy.

An interview was arranged a week later, which Lenny drove me to, and it’s where I met the owner of the Super 8. His name was A-----, but he went by Adam. The interview was a formality since Lenny had put in such a good word on my behalf that all I had to show Adam was that I was breathing and could shake his hand - and from there I got the job.

A week later I quit Walmart without notice, leaving Lenny to fend for himself. He told me he would be alright when I was gone, and I told him to keep in touch, but we never met up again. I always meant to swing by Walmart again, but life moved on, and so did Lenny - I got word a few months later that he quit, too.

I never knew how Lenny bought his motel. If it was by a handshake loan or some SBA arrangement - but it struck me as strange how a man who could barely speak English owned a business that made him a millionaire.

I didn’t understand it then, but Lenny belonged to a parallel system - one that rewarded patience, family ties, and loyalty to the clan. I would come to know that system firsthand working at this motel.

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The Night Auditors

The first month working at the motel was great. It was much easier checking people in and filling out paperwork than slinging cans onto shelves overnight at Walmart.

I had more time to attend classes, and also picked up a habit of day trading Forex - at that time you could leverage accounts 200:1, so I would throw a couple hundred bucks into an account, run it up to a few thousand, then lose it all on one trade with a margin call. I could do it all on my laptop while at work, too.

I got the hang of things after a couple weeks. Since I worked second shift, I met with the night auditor every night when he came in at 11PM, and I’d give him the rundown of how the day went, any issues that he should be aware of, rooms out of order, problem guests, or funny things that happened that day. His name was Mike.

He was a well-rounded man, in the literal sense. Middle-aged, late 30’s, and stood about 5’6”. His body formed a nearly perfect spherical shape from the bottom of his neck to his knees - a comically obese man. He kept a clean buzz cut, wore the same dress shirt every day, and smelled of day old cold cuts. The motel night auditor position was his second job, as he needed the money to pay for his daughter’s child support.

Despite the grim physical nature of this man, he had a good nature to him and we got along well enough. He never caused problems for me and if I made a mistake with anything he kept it between us, never going to the boss - and in my eyes that meant he had some shred of dignity hidden in his mass.

One afternoon I came to work, getting the news of the day from Karen - a woman with permed gray hair, mid-60’s, who ran the front desk in the mornings, and who was a real thorn in my side.

Even on a good day, Karen carried a laundry list of complaints. Gripes that she’d unload onto me the minute I walked in - the majority of them completely immaterial to the operations of the motel. She also had a problem with sneaking out quiet, dusty farts that stunk up the lobby and that I had to endure in silence myself. But on this day, she had actual news for me.

“Did you hear what happened? Did Adam call you?”

“No, I just got done with class,” I said, thinking that the printer ran out of ink or something equally inane, as was typical of Karen’s news.

“Oh well he should’ve called you. Mike was robbed last night. They came in with a gun and took all the money from the register. Look.” She opened the till and all the cash was gone, except for a $100 bill that was under the metallic tray, which the gunman must’ve missed.

I didn’t really know what to say, but I knew that Karen was serious, as she always had been even about the smallest thing. “Did they catch the guy?”

“No, he wore a mask,” Karen said. “The detective was in this morning and they’ll look at the security tapes to see what they can come up with.”

A tinge of anxiety came over me, as I had been at the wrong end of a pistol in a home invasion robbery when I was a teenager, and the trauma of that experience still lingered with me years later.

I didn’t want to talk about the robbery with Karen anymore, so I changed the topic to the guests at the motel, asking if there were any other issues that I needed to know about. She gave me the scoop for the day, packed up her purse, and left me there behind the front desk to dwell on the possibility that I might be robbed, too.

I didn’t tremble, my hand wasn’t shaky, my heart wasn’t beating out of my chest - but the possibility that I could get robbed was now lodged as an idea, more like a detached thought form, in the back of my mind. I ran through the steps of what I’d do in that scenario. Open the till, hand over the cash. No heroic shit.

Half way through my shift, at about 8PM, Adam drove up in his Toyota Sienna to drop off food for the next morning’s free continental breakfast.

I helped him unload the boxes of gravy mix, danishes, and bags of milk, and waited for him to bring up the robbery. After we unloaded the food he came in and checked the computer to see how many rooms were booked that night - I think it was slow, so we weren’t sold out - then gave me instructions to not let anybody walk out if they came in, which meant to sell rooms for any price that I could.

He didn’t mention the robbery once. This was when I realized how he viewed the workers under his employment. They were disposable and only useful in so far as how they functioned in the business and not as people.

Mike took a few days off work and when he came back he seemed in good spirits. I didn’t want to broach the subject of the robbery right away, but he didn’t hesitate bringing it up. I only remember one thing he said about it.

“I wish he would’ve shot me.”

Mike said it with such a nonchalance, as he counted cash from the same till that was emptied by the gunman, that it rang completely true. Not a hint of irony there.

It wasn’t more than a month after the robbery that I was offered a job at Adam’s second motel, which was a Days Inn down the road. This motel had over 120 rooms and was much more important in terms of cash flow for the owners. They wanted me in the main front desk role, as I had proven my ability to sell rooms for high rates and not let any walk-ins leave.

Since the two motels used the same software, there wasn’t much needed in terms of training, other than getting to know the new people I would be working with and some of the unique aspects of the property. So the transition went smooth enough.

After a week, Adam assigned a special task for me. He told me that the regular night auditor at this property, a woman in her 50s named Virginia, was likely pocketing money from the guests who checked in with cash.

He explained that her scheme worked by checking cash-paying guests out of the software system and putting a note on their file that they left with a refund issued due to being dissatisfied with some aspect of the room or motel. She would put these rooms on the housekeeper’s list for the morning, but pocket the cash from the register.

The owner instructed me to set up several rooms in the system with fake guests who paid cash and he’d check the next day to see if Virginia checked these rooms out with refunds.

After a week of this, it became clear that Virginia was skimming cash with her method and she was fired.

This leveled up the trust that Adam had in me and I quickly became his right hand guy at the motel. If anything needed to be done, he called me, and I would do it.

It also gave me some unique insight into how the motel worked - I got to know the characters behind the operations of this larger property - the illegal housekeepers, the unlicensed contractors - they weren’t there by accident, but by design.

An Indian owned motel depended on people like them. Cheap, invisible, and always replaceable.

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The Housekeepers

The owners started off as housekeepers about ten years before they purchased their first motel. I remember seeing the owner’s skill at this part of the trade one winter in a situation that I’ll never forget.

An ice storm had swept across the region and knocked power out in the city, except for the district where the hotels were. I don’t know why the hotels didn’t lose power, but needless to say, the slowest time of the year suddenly became the busiest as residents from the local area flocked to the motels for rooms where they could sleep with a heater and run hot water.

Normally, our policy was to not rent to locals, unless they had a major credit card and put down a hefty deposit, but because of the storm and the hardship, Adam told me to exercise leniency with guests.

The motel filled up quickly, mostly with people that left in the morning for day jobs and returned in the evening, when they would crowd in the lobby and chat with each other about this and that, the kind of brisk yet candid conversation that is common after a natural disaster.

The ice storm brought people together and I enjoyed getting to know some of these guests.

A couple of days into this, as crews from around the region drove in to stitch the power lines back together, a middle-aged woman approached the front desk. She slid her room key across the counter without making eye contact and mumbled that she was checking out. She added that there was a $20 tip in the room for the housekeepers.

I took the keycard, slid it into the keycard maker, and it displayed the room number. I checked the computer to make sure she had no unpaid balance but before I could confirm that, she turned away and exited the lobby without another word.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, except for the fact that because she checked out early enough in the day, we could get the room cleaned and rent it again. I called Adam and told him the news. He said that he’d be at the motel within the hour and the two of us could get the room in shape for another guest.

Adam arrived as the wintry sun was setting, sometime around 6PM. He met me in the lobby and since there weren’t any other rooms to rent except the one we needed to clean, I didn’t need to be posted at the front desk, so we walked together down the hall towards the room on the first floor.

I told him that the lady left a $20 tip and he said that I could keep it if I helped him clean. Money was money and I wanted to order some food anyway, so I figured the $20 could go towards that. We got to the room, opened it with a master keycard, and stepped in.

Immediately, something vile smacked my nose. I didn’t know what it was at first but I knew that it wasn’t good. Adam was ahead of me and he started coughing, pulling his dress shirt over his face. I took another step into the room, past the initial crook where you’d hang your coats, and looked into the bathroom.

The walls, toilet, countertop, and floor were smeared with brown streaks. These weren’t little smudges. It was like a post-modernist painter had gotten his hands on a brush and went to town in the toilet, hitting any and all surfaces, and when I realized what I was looking at, I started gagging as my ocular and olfactory orifices joined together to form a disgust response.

Adam and I both ducked our heads and split as fast as we could from the room and shut the door, keeping the stink contained behind us.

After catching our breath with fresh air, it became clear what we were up against. I asked Adam if we should call the housekeepers in for this. He shook his head no and said that he would be the one to take care of it. I asked if he needed my help and he shook his head no again.

Nevertheless, when he re-entered the shit-stained room, I followed after him, as my morbid curiosity made me want to know how bad it was.

It was worse than I thought.

The TV, the bedspread, the carpets, even the remote control were victimized in this mess. Adam told me that he’d handle it - and he got to work, rolling up his sleeves, grabbing a housekeeping cart, and hit the room with cleaning rags that became casualties in the cleaning process and tossed in trash bags.

It took Adam about two hours to clean the room, and when finished he came back to the lobby and handed me the $20 bill, which was one of the only items spared from the brown chaos.

Adam chuckled to himself and said that he needed to go back home to take a shower. He was unfazed. I took the $20, making sure that it was clean, and ordered my food from the Denny’s down the street.

I was impressed with Adam’s decision to clean this room himself, saving his housekeeping staff from the shitty horror - but he didn’t always treat them with this sort of consideration.

The roster of housekeeping staff consisted of mixed races, although the majority were Indian.

There was one white woman, Rhonda. She was the only housekeeper who could reliably speak English. Her teeth had rotted out due to a meth habit but she showed up on time and was paid an hourly wage. That meant that she was likely employed legally and on the books. There’s nothing much to say about her except that one day she came to the front desk to tell me that a brown recluse spider had bit her nether parts. She was gone for about 3 months after that and when she returned never spoke another word about that ordeal.

The only other non-Indian was a Mexican girl, Martha. I don’t think she was legal, but she was paid hourly, and also did a decent job. I could rely on her to clean rooms that I wanted cleaned - like if I decided to stay in one after a night of drinking, I could put it on her list; or if I gave one out to a group of friends for free to party, she wouldn’t say a word. She kept her head down and got to business when she showed up to work and never fussed.

Every other housekeeper was ethnically Indian and came from Gujarat. They were definitely illegal and were paid under the table by the number of rooms they cleaned as opposed to by the hour. The going rate was $3.50 per room and they could do about 40 or 50 on a normal day. This incentivized them to work as a family to speed up the cleaning, which is what they did.

The Indians all stayed at an apartment building not more than 100 feet from the motel and their rents were paid by Adam, which was probably part of their arrangement. It was convenient, in a way, because if I needed a room cleaned, I could call them up and they’d come down at any hour of the day or night to do the job.

One of the families consisted of a man in his early 50s, his wife who wasn’t older than 35, and their 17 year old daughter whose name I still remember, Pahlavi. On the weekdays, the husband and wife would pair up to clean as many rooms as they could tag-team style. One would get the mop and vacuum, the other would follow with the rag and duster. When the weekend rolled around, Pahlavi would join them.

This arrangement worked well enough, but after awhile, it became clear that they didn’t get along with the other housekeepers. I didn’t really know why in the beginning because I didn’t work the morning shift, so I wasn’t the one to assign rooms to the housekeeping staff. But I started to hear gossip in the afternoons from others at the motel.

The Indian family, who didn’t speak a lick of English, would bitch and moan to the morning front desk staff, who didn’t speak a lick of Gujarati, until they got more rooms. It got so bad that Adam had to be the one to assign the rooms, as he was the only person they would listen to. The Indians thought that if they moaned enough they could get more rooms which meant more money.

This wasn’t the only problem. They would cook a variety of curries, soups, lentils, and other dishes from their cuisine and bring it with them as they cleaned. Again, this wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that it left a residual odor in the rooms, which guests complained about after being checked in. Since I was the one who rented rooms on second shift, I had to deal with this countless times, as white Americans with sensitive noses were repulsed by the curry even more than if I checked them into a smoking room.

I remember one day a woman who was staying for a week, maybe for a convention, stomped down the hall towards the front desk. I could see she was angry from the CCTV camera and prepared to resolve her complaint, something that I was skilled at doing. When she arrived at the front desk, she told me that her laptop was missing from her room. This wasn’t a normal complaint and her tone was deadly serious.

My first response was to check and see what housekeeper was assigned to her room, and indeed, it was the Indian family. I asked the guest if I could have some time to figure out a solution, suggesting that she could return to her room in the meantime, and she shot that down - demanding that I resolved it then and there.

She knew who was cleaning her room, as she had been staying for a few days already, and saw the Indian housekeepers in that part of the motel. She didn’t hesitate to name the Indians as the culprits. I got on the phone and called Adam, who said he’d be there shortly. After thirty awkward minutes of waiting around in the lobby with the guest, the owner arrived, and shortly after the Indian family of housekeepers did, too - husband, wife, and daughter Pahlavi.

They went back and forth in Gujarati, with Adam escalating his tone and the housekeepers denying everything with head-bobs, while I looked on and the guest grew more and more visibly upset. She finally interrupted the foreign tongued exchange and demanded that her property be returned. Adam said that he would take care of it and he left in a hurry with the housekeepers lagging behind him.

Adam returned not more than five minutes later with the laptop and handed it over to the woman. He apologized over and over for the “misunderstanding” but it was clear that that wasn’t going to cut it.

She threatened to call the police, saying that she knew they were illegal, and this threat spooked Adam. Right away he promised a full refund for her stay and that he would pay for her next room in another hotel. He pointed across the street to a more dignified property and said they could go right away to get her the room. This gambit worked and she settled down enough to agree.

After school, Pahlavi would come to the lobby to use the computer there, as I think it was her only access to internet. But really, she was there to be around me. It became clear pretty quickly that she had a crush on me. Adam would even poke fun and ask me if I wanted an arranged marriage. She wasn’t so bad looking - petite and always kept a graceful air about her, even though her family was poor. I’d joke back saying sure, but it never went further than that.

Pahlavi would bring food from her family’s dinners down for me, and it wasn’t half bad. I never got sick from it, although I couldn’t confirm the hygiene of their kitchen.

And although Pahlavi was enamored by me, I knew it would never work. Not because she was a year underage - I lived in a state where that didn’t matter, with parental consent - but because if I did eat that curry, I’d be expected to lock it down and eat that dish, and only that dish, forever.

Needless to say, I don’t regret not marrying Pahlavi, but I often wonder where she ended up.

---

The Owners

I didn’t decide to write this essay and share my personal experiences to expose the owners as evil people.

In fact, while working for them I earned their trust and confidence fully, to the extent that they invited me into their home and brought me along to business meetings that involved the subject of purchasing other motel properties and sealing the deal on handshake loans for other Patels that they knew.

In short, I was their “main guy,” and I believe that if I would’ve stuck around working with them, I would have ended up managing one of their properties - which they have expanded to several motels and restaurants - or even have part ownership in one myself.

The latter was confirmed to me by one of the housekeepers, an elderly Gujarati man named Bob. One day, Adam asked me if I could drive Bob to the neighboring state, about five hours away, for a meeting with another Patel. I agreed since it sounded better than another day stuck behind the front desk and I’d be paid for driving Bob’s car, which he feared taking on the American interstate - an ironic and humorous thing since the Indian traffic is notoriously chaotic.

Even though Bob was just a housekeeper, the owners respected him the most out of any of the other staff besides myself, and followed his lead with any of his demands. I recall that he was highly educated, being an engineer of some sort back in India, and held some special position in the Gujarati caste and clan hierarchy.

But he was still plainly Indian culturally - one day Bob burst into my apartment unannounced, as the front door was unlocked, to ask if I would drive him. This was when I was living at the apartments near the motel. I told him never to do that again, but that I would give him a ride, as Adam already arranged it.

The ride was uneventful but it was clear that Bob respected me. He told me several times that it’s likely he would be getting his own independent motel soon - that is, not a franchise property - and that I should partner with him. I was only 21 at the time, and fate took me away for other reasons, but looking back I should’ve taken his offer more seriously, even with everything I know now about the Patels and how they operate.

In any case, we arrived to our destination, which was a mid tier franchise hotel - I think it was a Double Tree - and met the owner, a portly Gujarati man in his 50s, who looked like he stepped out of central casting as a villain from a Bollywood film.

There were another dozen or so Indian men gathered in the conference room and the atmosphere was casual and friendly. They spoke to each other in Gujarati, only breaking this code to ask if I needed anything to drink or eat. Adam arrived about an hour after we did, which I wasn’t expecting, and I wondered why the three of us didn’t ride there together. I figured that he didn’t want to be in the same vehicle as Bob for some reason, but I didn’t ask about it.

The meeting of hoteliers lasted a couple hours and by the end an agreement had been made. One of the guys there would be purchasing a new franchise motel in the region and he successfully secured the loan from the group. Bob told me this as an aside, along with his attempt to secure his own funding from this gathering.

I don’t think Bob ever materialized this loan. This told me that not every enterprising and ambitious Patel, no matter their age or status within their clan, gets the backing of their community. These are shrewd businessmen, after all.

It wasn’t long after this gathering of Patels, maybe a month or two later, when Adam invited me to join him at an after hours business meeting he was to have at the lounge of a Ramada Inn. This was a full-service hotel, meaning that it had a bar, restaurant, and room service, and it sat only a couple blocks away from the Days Inn. He said that he was looking to buy the property. I agreed to join him, although I found it unlikely that I’d add much value, since I was only 21 and really only had skill to negotiate room rates.

The two of us met the owner of the Ramada Inn, a silver-haired Greek man, at the hotel’s bar. The Greek was hospitable, friendly, and magnanimous - ordering rounds of Greek beer that didn’t seem to stop. I also learned that he owned the upscale Greek restaurant in town, which I had taken a date to while I worked at Walmart - a night that I spent a $100 on and got a make-out session and a blowie at her apartment, but didn’t pan out to much after that. The Greek was looking to sell the Ramada Inn and Adam was the most likely prospective buyer.

Indeed, within a year, Adam did buy the property, one that he owns until this day.

Sarah worked as the bookkeeper and oversaw the paperwork of the entire operation, where Adam handled the strategic parts of the business along with the day-to-day operations. She deferred to her husband’s decisions and followed his lead, even when she visibly disagreed with something. I attributed this to their culture but also their age difference, as Adam was 10 years her senior.

Sarah had a younger brother who owned a small, independent motel in a neighboring state, too. I had only met her brother once or twice and I found him to be a strange and unwelcoming character, the opposite of how I knew Sarah. His Americanized name was Chris.

A few weeks before I quit this job - due to a series of unfortunate events that I will describe in a following section - Chris visited the Days Inn.

It was later in the evening, around 9PM, a quiet time when most guests had already checked in, had their dinners, and were in their rooms getting ready for bed to wake up for their next leg of travel.

I got a call from Sarah telling me that her brother would be dropping by. When he got to town, she called again and said that she would meet me at the lobby with him. The siblings entered the lobby as if they were on the run from something, and their mannerisms were stressed and hurried.

Sarah told me to fill out a registration card for a vehicle and check a “ghost guest” into the room - that is to say, there was a vehicle in the parking lot that I would write onto the registration card as having stayed at the motel, noting the make and model and license plate number, along with the name of a person who wasn’t present.

I thought this was a very strange request. My gut told me not to do it. And although I was trusted and respected by the owners, I didn’t feel like this was a good idea - in fact, I knew it was illegal - and thus questioned why she would ask me to do this. Remember, hotel registration cards can be used as legal documents in court to provide alibis, for example.

After a few minutes of consideration and going back and forth with both Sarah and her brother, I told them I wasn’t going to fill it out. This upset Sarah and she called Adam, and after a heated exchange in Gujarati, she hung up the phone and told me that she would fill out the card. She seemed nervous writing out the details of the vehicle and guest name, checking the absent guest into a room - I could tell she didn’t want to do this either.

Sarah took off with her brother, without much else to say, and left me in the lobby to finish my shift.

All the strange and stressful things that I endured working at the motel seemed to be coming to a head. This was only a sign that I wouldn’t be working there much longer. And it was true, not more than a month after this registration card incident, I left - and for a related reason.

In the weeks that followed I learned that the vehicle had been used in the commission of a crime, and it was something serious - either an armed robbery or similar - that was carried out by two other people associated with the property.

They were two of the contractors - and it’s their part of the story that I will tell next, as hands down they brought more problems to myself, other workers, and guests than anybody else.

---

The Contractor Crews

Renovations are an essential part of any motel. Every few years, new beds, carpet, drywall, TVs, lamps, and furniture need to installed in the rooms and hallways. This is mostly due to the fact that they wear down faster than anyone expects. Hotel customers are notoriously ungracious guests.

There were two contractor crews that were hired for work at the Days Inn, along with an independent handyman - a middle-aged, sleepy Mexican man with frizzy stiff jet black hair and a thin pencil mustache. We called him Lalo and he lived onsite for most of my tenure there.

Lalo took care of maintenance issues that would come up throughout the day: plugged toilets, light bulb changes, minor upholstery fixes, things like that - except for when he hit the town, dressed up as a *vaquero*, neatly pressed button down and starched jeans, cowboy boots that curved up in a long tip, and a stiff Stetson to top it off. He spoke a little bit of English, enough to get across the ideas of what needed to be done, and he was most definitely illegal.

The other crews were white - the bigger group, about five or six guys, lived in a nearby major city. Their lead man was a guy named Doug, about 40 years old, square-jawed with goatee, divorced, and a student of judo. He brought his brother and cousins, along with a couple other guys, down to work on the motel for extended periods of time during the slow months. They stayed for free in a set of rooms, the shoddy ones on the second floor, that we blocked off in the system.

It was my impression that these guys were licensed and worked above board. That is to say, they were insured, bonded, and paid taxes. They were also patriotic, red-blooded Americans who loved poker, women, and guns.

We held weekly Friday poker nights in the conference room, where the group of us met up to play cards. One night, we got to playing a few rounds of In-Between - also called Acey Deucey.

It’s a simple game, with stakes that can grow very quickly, as you place bets based on the likelihood that a card’s value will be between two cards that you hold - for example, if you hold a 2 and a Queen, you’ll place a bet up to the value of the total pot on the next card drawn having a value between 2 and Queen, but not outside of that. So in this case, an Ace and King would mean you lose your bet, but a 2 or a Queen would mean you lose your bet and have to pay in double whatever you staked. Every other card would be a winner.

That particular hand, the 2 and Queen, was what I was dealt. There were ten of us at the table - both crews present - and the pot had grown to about $400, which was a wager that was more than I had in my bank account. Without hesitation, I bet the pot. If the next card was a 2 or Queen, I would double what I had to my name, but when the card was drawn it was a 3.

I pulled the money into my corner of the table, counted it up, and told the guys I was done for the night. This didn’t go over so well, and I admit it now, it was bad etiquette. I should’ve stayed at least another hand to throw in a few chips to help the guys save face. The next day I heard an earful about it, as the guys were down for the hotel’s breakfast, bitching to the morning front desk girl about how I stole the pot.

A couple weeks later, me and Doug’s crew were drinking mescal up in one of their rooms. We got hungry and took a break from drinking to grab some food at the Waffle House, which was less than a five minute walk from the property. After grubbing on smothered, covered, and diced hash browns, we made it back to the motel to continue drinking.

At this point, Doug’s older brother John pulled out a pistol. It was a Glock G19 and after a little diatribe about the Second Amendment, he handed the gun over to me, and told me to stick it to his head and pull the trigger. I want to be clear here, the whole lot of us were drunk, but this doesn’t excuse what I did next. After telling me to bring the pistol to his head and pull the trigger again, insisting that the chamber was empty, I followed his instruction. I put the barrel to his graying temple, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.

The guys got a big laugh out of this. I think they were testing me to see what I would do for shits and giggles, but even thinking back on it now, I have a disgust response to the whole thing. I could still be sitting in prison for that mistake after having killed a man.

In regards to murder, the second contractor crew was familiar with that crime. It was a two-man group, the lead guy named Ralph, an ex-convict who was about 60 years old, walked with a bum leg, wore a thin white shirt and a splotchy 5 o’clock shadow that never went away. He spent fifteen years in prison for second degree murder, and did another bid for assault.

Ralph’s underling was a gangly wild-ass that we called Three Beer Bill. He got this nickname because every morning he bought a case of Budweiser to drink while he was working, and he’d be drunk after the third beer - so you can imagine how straight he hung that drywall. I remember seeing a row of nails he set and as they went down the hall, the line of them drooped down as they trailed off to the end. By the end of the shift he would finish the case and go to his room to drink hard stuff.

The first night Ralph and Bill arrived to the motel for their duties, they went out drinking at the country bar down the road. At about 11PM, a long-stay guest came stumbling into the lobby with blood dripping from his mouth. I examined the injury and his bottom front tooth had pierced the mentolabial sulcus - yes, I looked that anatomy up, but it’s the area right below the lower lip.

He explained that Bill had been arrested for stabbing a black guy at the bar. Ralph arrived to the lobby minutes later, nonplussed about the stabbing, but told me to call the jail so that we could bail Bill out as he didn’t want to lose the next day’s work. I called Adam first, telling him what happened - and he left his wife and kids to drive down to the motel. I called the police station and asked if Bill had been booked, but they said I needed his last name. I asked Ralph for the last name, but he told me he didn’t know it.

This said everything right there. The way I was told their background, Ralph and Bill had been working together at different Patel motels for the past three or four years together. And after all of this time, the lead man Ralph didn’t know his own worker’s name. They were friends, too - Ralph had Bill’s mother’s phone number, which he gave me to call so I could find his surname.

Needless to say, Ralph and Bill were unlicensed, unbonded, and uninsured. In fact, that second charge that Ralph had spent time in prison for - the assault - came about because some guy had ratted him out for working as an unlicensed electrician. Ralph told me the story about this one slow day in the lobby. He paid a big fine for working under the table, then waited patiently to get his revenge on the snitch.

After a year or so, enough time passed where the rat forgot about watching his own back, and one morning he came out of his house to go to work. Ralph waited in the bushes, dipped in black, with a baseball bat - and he rushed the guy, beating him down bad enough to catch a case.

The murder was something he didn’t speak much about. I found out by looking him up in the state’s circuit court records. I never asked him about that case. But I knew that he had a violence in him that I didn’t want to test.

One day, a friend of mine who did odd jobs at the motel got hold of a universal keycard, broke into Bill’s room, and stole some of his prescription drugs. I found out one early afternoon when I just settled in for my shift behind the front desk. Ralph and Bill stormed into the lobby and started peppering me with aggressive questions: “Where’s the stuff?”, “Where’s it at?”

I had no idea what was going on. I wasn’t playing dumb - and I told them that they had to tell me the problem for me to fix it. This pissed Ralph off more, as he thought I was hiding something, and he told me to call my friend to ask where the stuff was at. I called my friend and asked him what the hell was going on, and he answered “I’ll come over in a minute.”

Twenty minutes later he arrived and waved Ralph and Bill out of the lobby. I saw my friend walk out to the next door gas station, buy a couple cases of beer, and handed them off to Bill. He came back to the lobby and told me it should all be good.

I didn’t know that he stole the drugs for about another week or so. Ralph and Bill both treated me like a piece of shit, though, as they thought I was the one that gave my friend the key card that my friend used to enter the room.

Doug and his crew didn’t get along with Ralph and Bill, and near the end of my tenure at the motel, the two crews were both at the property at the same time to work on a big overhaul renovation.

We put them up on the upper hallway, the one with the bad rooms, and blocked off sections of the motel as they worked on them.

A group of teenage girls were staying at the motel for a basketball tournament. One night, a father of one of the girls came down to the front desk and told me that one of the contractors was leering at his daughter. It wasn’t an accidental peek - he apparently was standing outside of her room at night and tried to get in. The kicker - he was successful, as the lock on that door malfunctioned, I think to do with the renovations that were happening.

This was a potentially dicey situation. I called Doug down, the one contractor I could trust, and he told me it was Bill from the other crew who was the one doing it. I thanked him and got on the phone with Adam to give him the rundown. It made sense for me to do this since it was his property and the father of the teenage girl could very likely call the cops over the matter.

Thirty minutes after I hung up with Adam, I got another phone call. It was a call from one of the rooms - I could tell from the phone system’s display - and it was coming from where the contractors stayed. I picked up the phone and Ralph was on the other end.

He asked me why I snitched. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He asked me again, why did I snitch. He said he’d just gotten off the phone with Adam - him and Bill were being kicked out. I didn’t say anything and he hung up. Five minutes later he was down to the lobby.

Ralph came in holding a metal pipe. The father of the girl came in right after him. Guests were checking in. I could feel it all collapsing at once - the noise, the tension, the smell of beer and sweat. Ralph said he’d jump the desk and beat me then and there. The dad said he’d call the cops.

I tried to juggle the situation, but it all came crashing down.

The guests left the lobby without looking back. The dad threatened to call the cops.

I picked up the phone and called Adam and told him to come down to his motel. That I was leaving for the night. Then I hung up and walked out.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Ralph knew where I lived. Even writing these words now, I feel like a coward, but there was a good chance that because he felt like I snitched on him and it resulted in him losing his contract at the motel, that he would put the blame for the incident on me - and I knew how he handled that.

Adam tried calling my house phone, but I didn’t answer. The next day, I went down to the Greyhound station and bought a bus ticket back home - an 800 mile journey. I was done with the motel.

In retrospect, knowing everything I know about handshake and SBA loans, the ethnic Indian dominance in the industry and their business practices of hiring illegals and cutting corners, the way it all ended makes sense. I was lucky. It could have ended a whole lot worse.

The motel was a business on paper, but really was a pressure cooker of foreign and illegal elements that shouldn’t have been thrown together. It was inevitable that there would be problems that exploded like they did.

And there are thousands of these motels operating in the same way across the US. Look at that motel in Dallas, the one where the manager was beheaded by the illegal Cuban maintenance guy.

I think about that often. His wife and son watching as the machete went at the neck. The head kicked across the parking lot. Picked up and tossed in the dumpster.

It didn’t surprise me - and it won’t be the last.

---

Well, what do you think?

I’d love to know your thoughts. You can comment here on this newsletter article or on Twitter.

My next essay will be a continuation of the occult theme from my essay The Exquisite Corpse (click here to read) - where I will explore European colonial encounters with tribal beliefs.

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