Police shut down Clinton Hill’s Prince Lefferts Hotel on Friday, citing reports from undercover officers that prostitution was being conducted there. An officer parked near the hotel on Sunday afternoon said police had been monitoring the area 24 hours a day since the court order to close the building, which stands at 127 Lefferts Place, came on Friday.

Police had been trying to get permission from the Brooklyn Supreme Court to close the hotel under the nuisance abatement law ever since nearby residents started complaining that the facility’s hourly rates facilitated prostitution. Friday’s action comes as part of an initiative within the 88th precinct, first reported in The New York Sun on June 28, to eliminate quality-of-life crimes in Clinton Hill. The owner of the building, Moses Fried, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who has worked as a real estate manager in Brooklyn for decades, told the Sun on Sunday that he never sanctioned prostitution or hourly room rentals.

“They never took money for sexual favors, they never did any such thing,” Mr. Fried said. “I’m a Jewish religious man. I would never permit to run prostitution there.”

But according to affidavits included in the police report that was affixed to the building’s front door on Sunday, several undercover officers have seen evidence to the contrary. One undercover officer wrote that he saw a man hand a woman currency after she offered him a sexual favor. He noted that the woman then handed the money over “to the individual in control of the subject premises.” The couple went upstairs, according to the affidavit, and shortly thereafter, another woman entered the lobby and offered the officer a similar treatment.

According to the report, the 88th Precinct has records of at least three incidents of prostitution inside the hotel since September 2005. Although there had been no complaints about the hotel before Mr. Fried purchased it in 1998, he claims that things were actually much worse before he took over the building.

“No decent person walked in — then it was really run like a whorehouse,” he said. Mr. Fried said that although he forbade the hotel manager several times from renting the rooms on an hourly basis, the manager occasionally gave in to requests from clients and granted hourly rentals anyway. Mr. Fried said he could not remember the manager’s name or phone number, and no employees were at the Prince Lefferts Hotel yesterday.

When police came calling, Mr. Fried said, he offered them full access to his security cameras and encouraged them to send in undercover agents. Mr.Fried, who runs four hotels in Brooklyn and several homeless shelters leased to the city — including one across the street from the hotel — said the Prince Lefferts establishment is the only one of his buildings that has drawn complaints from the surrounding community.

But one other property registered to his business address has recently drawn fire from nearby residents who are concerned about Mr. Fried’s plans to build an apartment hotel there. The building, which has stood vacant at 205 Parkside Avenue for several years, was purchased by one of Mr. Fried’s many limited liability corporations in 2001.

When Daniel Canale-Parola,who runs the neighborhood blog PlanetPLG.com, discovered that the building was owned by the same person who owned the Prince Lefferts Hotel, he wrote, “While the Planet has consistently supported affordable housing, we weren’t referring to low hourly rates.”

At this point, the future of Mr. Fried’s plan to convert the building rests with the Board of Standards and Appeal, which will review his request to expand the number of units in the building to 24, which is four more than the area’s zoning laws allow.

Council Member Yvette Clarke is looking into the situation, according to her spokesman, Rance Huff. “Despite this owner’s present history with several Brooklyn properties,” Mr. Huff said, “Council Member Clarke does not want to jump to conclusions about the Parkside property and will afford him a chance to address the residents of Central Brooklyn who will be affected by his decision.”