Around 2 a.m., a security guard named Frank Wills noticed taped-over door locks and called police, who caught five burglars inside DNC offices carrying wiretapping equipment and cash. The seemingly minor break-in, initially dismissed by the White House as a 'third-rate burglary,' would eventually expose a vast web of Nixon administration corruption and force his resignation two years later.
Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard making his rounds, found a piece of tape covering a door latch on the ground floor of the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. He removed it, assuming it was left by maintenance. When he found the latch taped again on a later round, he called police.
Officers arrived to find five men in business suits, wearing surgical gloves, carrying cameras, bugging equipment, and sequentially numbered $100 bills. One of them, James McCord, turned out to be a security coordinator for the Committee to Re-elect President Nixon. The burglars had been attempting to repair a wiretap planted during an earlier break-in and photograph documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee.
White House press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the story as a 'third-rate burglary attempt' unworthy of comment. But dogged reporting by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, aided by an anonymous FBI source later revealed as Mark Felt ('Deep Throat'), traced the money and orders back to Nixon's inner circle. The unraveling cover-up ultimately forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency on August 9, 1974—the only U.S. president ever to do so.