COUPLES who stay in the Waldorf's Royal Suite pay $10,000 a night for a room once occupied by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Across the hallway, 42 floors above Park Avenue, is the residence of the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Guests rest their heads on pillows embroidered with images of the Duchess's pugs, and in the morning many decide to steal something.

"We lose items out of that suite quite regularly," said Matt Zolbe, a spokesman for the hotel, who was discussing this delicate matter over an iced tea in the hotel bar.

"The framed photographs of the Duke and Duchess walk ridiculously easily, but that's representative of what we are talking about."

"Its discovery has questioned the integrity of our progenitors," they wrote. An investigation had "narrowed suspicion to a bachelor uncle" who frequented the Waldorf in his youth with friends "whose surnames grace many NYC landmarks. Did he succumb to youthful temptation?"

A lady from San Diego sent the coffee pot "taken by my dad on his honeymoon night in the Waldorf Astoria, October 8, 1938".

Catherine and Edward Hayner of New Jersey, who honeymooned there on June 25, 1949, lifted a cocktail fork. The bride, the daughter of a police chief no less, slipped it into her purse. Their granddaughter handed it in.

Mr Zolbe also received a saucer, stolen by a couple who met in the hotel lobby in 1945. "He was coming back from World War Two," said Mr Zolbe. They did not even stay the night.

Some surprisingly large items are still missing. Mr Zolbe is appealing for the return of a 60cm-tall fluted crystal vase, commissioned in 1913 for the hotel's 30th anniversary, and the shower doors from a suite once occupied by Frank Sinatra.