smoke-filled room

"We didn't want people fumbling about in the dark, in possibly a smoke-filled room, trying to undo a lock," she said.

“Even though these landlords are not getting together in the proverbial smoke-filled room and saying, ‘We all need to raise our rents by $100,’ they’re colluding by using the same software that aggregates their data,” he said.

We even have the cliched “smoke-filled room” where this used to happen.

When officers enter the cell, they can be seen wrestling Zumwalt to the floor in the smoke-filled room.

For decades during the 1900s the process was dominated by state and local party bosses, giving rise to the notion of the “smoke-filled room,” where top leaders were said to huddle secretly to determine their presidential candidate.