Photo: Corbis News
For five years, Mickey Barreto lived rent-free in the iconic New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan by exploiting a loophole in the city's housing laws.
In June 2018, Barreto booked a room at the New Yorker Hotel for one night. The next day, he demanded the hotel give him a lease, claiming he was considered a tenant under New York housing law.
Under the law, anybody staying in a single room of a building built before 1969 is entitled to demand a six-month lease from the owner.
The hotel refused, and Barreto filed a lawsuit, claiming he was wrongfully evicted from the room.
He lost his first court battle but appealed to the New York Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor and ordered the hotel to give Barreto a key to the room.
The hotel refused to negotiate a lease with Barreto but could not evict him, allowing him to live in the building for free.
However, Barreto didn't stop there and now faces two dozen criminal charges.
Prosecutors said that in 2019, Barreto tried to claim ownership of the building by uploading a fake deed to a city website. The deed showed that the hotel's owner, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, which bought the property in 1976, had transferred ownership to Barreto.
He then proceeded to demand rent from one of the tenants in the hotel and tried to have the hotel's bank transfer its accounts to him.
The church sued Barreto, and the case remains ongoing.
Now, he's facing numerous criminal charges after he was indicted by the New York State Supreme Court on 14 counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first-degree and ten counts of second-degree criminal contempt.
"Mickey Barreto repeatedly and fraudulently claimed ownership of one of the City's most iconic landmarks," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement. "We will not tolerate manipulation of our city's property records by those who seek to scam the system for personal gain."