Mickey Barreto’s five-year stay cost him only $200.57. Now it might cost him his freedom.

The New York Times

By Matthew Haag

Matthew Haag interviewed Mickey Barreto a half-dozen times and spent a night at the New Yorker Hotel.

Published March 24, 2024

Updated Nov. 6, 2024

On a June afternoon in 2018, a man named Mickey Barreto checked into the New Yorker Hotel. He was assigned Room 2565, a double-bed accommodation with a view of Midtown Manhattan almost entirely obscured by an exterior wall. For a one-night stay, he paid $200.57.

But he did not check out the next morning. Instead, he made the once-grand hotel his full-time residence for the next five years, without ever paying another cent.

In a city where every inch of real estate is picked over and priced out, and where affordable apartments are among the rarest of commodities, Mr. Barreto had perhaps the best housing deal in New York City history.

Now, that deal could land him in prison.

The story of how Mr. Barreto, a California transplant with a taste for wild conspiracy theories and a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, gained and then lost the rights to Room 2565 might sound implausible — another tale from a man who claims without evidence to be the first cousin, 11 times removed, of Christopher Columbus’s oldest son.

But it’s true.

Whatever his far-fetched beliefs, Mr. Barreto, now 49, was right about one thing: an obscure New York City rent law that provided him with many a New Yorker’s dream.

The First Night

On that summer afternoon nearly six years ago, Mr. Barreto walked through the hotel’s revolving door on Eighth Avenue and entered a lobby centered by a 20-foot Art Deco chandelier, a nod to the hotel’s geometric architecture.

When it opened in 1930, to great fanfare, the New Yorker Hotel was not just the largest in the city but also the second largest in the world. It was an opulent hotel of the future, with 92 telephone operators, a power generating plant and a radio with four channels in each room.

Today, the mystique has faded, though the property still attracts tourists with its central location. Less than half the rooms are open to guests, and the hallway carpet is tattered and lined with brightly lit vending machines of sodas and snacks. Most of the building is occupied by followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah who bought the hotel in 1976 and made it his organization’s headquarters.

Even by New York City standards, the room to which Mr. Barreto was assigned was small, just under 200 square feet. The beds consumed most of the maroon and gold carpeted space. A tiny closet could fit a handful of garments. There was also a 42-inch TV with free HBO.

Over the course of several recent interviews, Mr. Barreto described what happened next — events that led to a yearslong ordeal for the hotel.

In conversation, Mr. Barreto vacillates between lucid and unstable. He said he experiences panic attacks and seizures but insisted he had never been diagnosed with a mental illness — even as he claimed to be the chief of an Indian tribe he founded in Brazil.

Much of Mr. Barreto’s story is corroborated by years of court records, but one crucial moment comes from only his account: On that first night, he settled into his room, high above Midtown, along with his partner, Matthew Hannan. Before that night, Mr. Barreto says, Mr. Hannan had mentioned, in passing, a peculiar fact about affordable housing rules that pertain to New York City hotels.

With their laptops open, he claimed, they explored whether the New Yorker Hotel was subject to the rule, a little-known section of a state housing law, the Rent Stabilization Act.

Passed in 1969, the law created a system of rent regulation across the city. But also subject to the law was a swath of hotel rooms, specifically those in large hotels built before 1969, whose rooms could be rented for less than $88 a week in May 1968.

According to the law, a hotel guest could become a permanent resident by requesting a lease at a discounted rate. And any guest-turned-resident also had to be allowed access to the same services as a nightly guest, including room service, housekeeping and the use of facilities, like the gym.

The room becomes, essentially, a rent-subsidized apartment inside a hotel.

Despite the reasonable assumption that what he was undertaking had been orchestrated from the start, Mr. Barreto claimed the idea only took shape when his and Mr. Hannan’s online search stumbled upon the 27th line of a 295-page spreadsheet titled “List of Manhattan Buildings Containing Stabilized Units.”

According to court documents, Mr. Barreto left his room the next morning, rode the elevator to the lobby and greeted a hotel employee at the front desk. He handed over a letter addressed to the manager: He wanted a six-month lease.

The employee dialed the manager, and after a brief exchange, Mr. Barreto was told there was no such thing as a lease at the hotel and that without booking another night, he would have to vacate the room by noon. The couple did not remove their belongings, so the bellhops did — and Mr. Barreto headed to New York City Housing Court in Lower Manhattan and sued the hotel.

In a three-page, handwritten affidavit dated June 22, 2018, Mr. Barreto cited state laws, local codes and a past court case in arguing that his request for a lease made him a “permanent resident of the hotel.” Removal of his items amounted to an illegal eviction, he said.

At a hearing on July 10, in the absence of any hotel representatives to oppose the lawsuit, the judge, Jack Stoller, ruled in Mr. Barreto’s favor. Judge Stoller not only agreed with his arguments; he even cited the same case law as Mr. Barreto and ordered the hotel “to restore petitioner to possession of the subject premises forthwith by providing him with a key.”

Mr. Barreto returned to Room 2565 within days, now as a resident of the hotel — and soon, as its new owner.

employees to scrutinize before posting online.

Mr. Barreto tried repeatedly to file for a deed, but was rejected over various technicalities. After his sixth attempt, a clerk told him he needed to contact the sheriff’s office. (In New York City, the sheriff’s office is a division of the Finance Department.)

Mr. Barreto said he spoke to a sheriff’s deputy, an investigator in the department, who asked why he was filing so many times. He said he responded that he had been given possession of the property but was having technical difficulties.

At the same time, the hotel’s owners had filed their own lawsuit to evict Mr. Barreto, claiming the hotel was exempt from the housing law’s hotel provision. Ultimately, the lawyers could not produce documentation from May 1968 to prove the hotel’s weekly rate was at the time more than $88 a week. The judge dismissed the suit.

Meanwhile, Mr. Barreto filed for a deed for a seventh time. It was accepted.

On the afternoon of May 17, 2019, nearly a year after Mr. Barreto booked his one-night stay, he was identified in ACRIS as the owner of the New Yorker Hotel, a 1.2 million-square-foot building.

employees to scrutinize before posting online.

Mr. Barreto tried repeatedly to file for a deed, but was rejected over various technicalities. After his sixth attempt, a clerk told him he needed to contact the sheriff’s office. (In New York City, the sheriff’s office is a division of the Finance Department.)

Mr. Barreto said he spoke to a sheriff’s deputy, an investigator in the department, who asked why he was filing so many times. He said he responded that he had been given possession of the property but was having technical difficulties.

At the same time, the hotel’s owners had filed their own lawsuit to evict Mr. Barreto, claiming the hotel was exempt from the housing law’s hotel provision. Ultimately, the lawyers could not produce documentation from May 1968 to prove the hotel’s weekly rate was at the time more than $88 a week. The judge dismissed the suit.

Meanwhile, Mr. Barreto filed for a deed for a seventh time. It was accepted.

On the afternoon of May 17, 2019, nearly a year after Mr. Barreto booked his one-night stay, he was identified in ACRIS as the owner of the New Yorker Hotel, a 1.2 million-square-foot building.

Tick Tock Diner, which is connected to the lobby by double doors. He dropped off a letter addressed to the owners. Monthly rent checks, he wrote, should be sent to a new address: Room 2565.

One of the diner’s owners, Alex Sgourgos, recognized Mr. Barreto. Since he had moved into the hotel, Mr. Barreto, along with Mr. Hannan, frequently ate at the Tick Tock, a ’round-the-clock restaurant styled as a 1950s diner with neon lights, red booths and a laminated menu. The two men often ordered breakfast, sandwiches and chicken entrees, Mr. Sgourgos said, and always paid in cash.

“They looked like strange guys,” he added.

After reading the letter, Mr. Sgourgos called the Unification Church, which told him to ignore Mr. Barreto’s demand. The couple continued to eat at the restaurant, he said, and never mentioned the rent payments again.

Two days after Mr. Barreto walked into the Tick Tock, the lawyer for the hotel was in court, explaining the situation and pleading with a judge to issue an order to stop Mr. Barreto from representing himself as the owner.

The lawyer, Matthew B. Meisel, said his law firm partners had “never seen such an egregious set of circumstances.”

In court, Mr. Meisel said he believed that Mr. Barreto was under investigation by prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, though he did not specify for what.

Across the country, it is not uncommon for overworked municipal recorders to accept property filings under the assumption that they are legitimate, and for real estate speculators to take advantage of the system.

But Bill Lienhard, a lawyer who has represented many victims of deed theft in New York City, said he was stunned by the apparent ease with which Mr. Barreto transferred a 41-story Manhattan hotel into his name.

“Boy,” he said, “this takes the cake for the city’s record department not paying attention.”

Representing himself in court, Mr. Barreto insisted he had done nothing wrong. “As for me proclaiming to people I was the owner, I only did that after I had the deed,” he said in court.

A few months later, the judge issued a ruling: “The subject deed is a forged deed by all accounts,” he wrote. Mr. Barreto did not own the property.

But that was not the end.

able to stop one of the hijackers before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I’m sorry I disrupted your attempt to finance weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Barreto said. “It’s Mickey Barreto versus North Korea.”

While Mr. Moon, who died in 2012, was born in what is now North Korea, his church’s current ties to that country are unclear; it once operated factories and a hotel there. The church came under intense scrutiny in Japan after the 2022 assassination of Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister. The alleged killer believed Mr. Abe had ties to the church, which has long been accused of preying on vulnerable people for donations, in Japan and elsewhere.

Mr. Barreto voiced similar claims to relatives, about both the church and his family’s genealogy, leaving them confused about whether his statements were tethered to reality.

“It was something that was just hard to believe,” said the relative, who asked to remain anonymous because of sensitivity within the family. “I was thinking maybe it’s true, I don’t know. With Mickey, it’s hard to say.”

A spokeswoman at the Unification Church declined to comment about Mr. Barreto’s allegations, his residency or the lawsuits.

arraigned later that morning in a Manhattan court on 24 counts — including 14 felony fraud counts — in what prosecutors said was a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the hotel. Mr. Hannan, who Mr. Barreto said was not involved beyond staying with him at the hotel for much of five years, was not charged or accused of any crime.

Mr. Barreto is now awaiting trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan and facing several years in prison if convicted. In jail before he was released on his own recognizance, Mr. Barreto said he used his one phone call to dial the White House, leaving a message about his whereabouts.

There was no reason to believe the White House had any interest in the case or any idea who Mickey Barreto was. But you could never quite tell with Mickey — he’d been right once before.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653396&forum_id=2:#48479330)

The Son Who Couldn’t Leave

Paul Barreto’s father, Mickey, lived at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan for five years, paying only $200.57. Paul was desperate to escape.

Paul Barreto will graduate in June from LaGuardia High School, an elite performing arts school in New York City.

Credit...

Elias Williams for The New York Times

By Matthew Haag

Dec. 23, 2024

The Great Read, Continued

We are following up on some of our most compelling stories from 2024.

Paul Barreto moved into Room 2565 at the New Yorker Hotel the year after his father, Mickey Barreto, did. It was 2019 and the 135-square-foot queen-bed room in Midtown Manhattan felt like it could be a good home, or at least a better one.

It was nothing like where Paul, then 13, had most recently been living with his mother in California: There were no mice running around, no one was fighting outside his window and no strangers were stopping by at odd hours. At the hotel, Paul had the bed to himself, while his father slept on the floor with his boyfriend, Matthew Hannan.

And at last, Paul was back in school every day. Mr. Barreto had begun home-schooling Paul and his older brother, Jason, when Paul was in the third grade. But the boys did not have a curriculum to follow. Most days, Paul said, he watched hours of YouTube videos.

For the first time, Paul was making friends at school and socializing with them after class, something his parents had not allowed him to do.

Soon, though, things would unravel as they always did with his father, a delusional man with a short fuse, an obsession with conspiracy theories and a fondness for outlandish claims, like being the owner of Brazil. Over the years, Paul had learned how to avoid his father’s ire and ignore his ramblings. But now, in the cramped hotel room, he felt trapped.

Before Paul moved in, his father had already started a legal war with the hotel’s owners. First, Mr. Barreto took them to housing court and argued that an obscure New York City rent law could make Room 2565 his permanent residence. He won.

He paid $200.57 on his first night there and never paid a penny more over the next five years.

The entire hotel was his, Mr. Barreto would rant, certain that the court ruling meant that he owned the New Yorker. In recent interviews, Paul recalled telling his father that he was acting delusional, that he did not own the hotel and that he would get in trouble if he kept at it.

But Mr. Barreto filed a deed with New York City. Once it was accepted, he used it to claim that he was the legal owner, demanding that the diner attached to the hotel lobby send its monthly rent payments to his room. The hotel was eventually reverted to its true owner and the authorities warned him not to file a deed again. He did it again.

Image

At one point, Mickey Barreto, Paul’s father, claimed he owned the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Credit...

John Taggart for The New York Times

Meanwhile, Paul was falling behind.

He bounced between New York and California, where his mother lived and would smoke crack in front of him.

He missed most of the 2020-21 school year, returning to New York City for good in the spring of 2021. He was not re-enrolled in school.

But he still had friends in the city, and the more he hung out with them, the more he realized that his upbringing was not normal. Their homes had books. Their parents doted on them. They watched children’s movies together, not R-rated films.

He started to reveal things about his life at the hotel with his friends and their parents, which led a family to report their concerns about him to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, the agency that investigates child abuse and neglect.

Investigators repeatedly tried to make contact with Mr. Barreto at their home, Paul said, but his father would not let them inside. As the agency kept asking to meet, his father abruptly announced, one day in September 2021, that they were flying to California the next day.

Paul knew then that if they went to California, his case with the agency would be further delayed for probably a year. “I didn’t have another year,” he said. “I had to do it now.”

That night, his father slept against the front door, blocking anyone from leaving. The next morning, when his father was distracted while packing for the flight, Paul escaped out the door.

Over the next three days, he said, he hid in Central Park, charged his cellphone on sidewalk kiosks and slipped back into their old apartment building after midnight to sleep in a stairwell.

He eventually went to a local police precinct and asked to be taken to a children’s shelter. But he said the police discovered that Mr. Barreto had filed a missing persons report for Paul, so officers returned him to his father.

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Mickey Barreto in March.

Credit...

John Taggart for The New York Times

Determined to leave again, Paul slipped out two days later with nothing but the clothes on his back and made his way to a friend’s apartment near Central Park.

Paul told his friend, Jack Ryan, that he was scared to go home. Jack ran to his mother’s room.

“Paul is ashen white, just disheveled,” recalled Jack’s mother, Jennifer Ryan, now 62, a single mother who owns a textile company. “He proceeded to tell me that his parents abused him.”

She had met Paul briefly only once before, but Ms. Ryan told him that night that she would take him in. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

The next morning, Ms. Ryan made the boys pancakes and called the Administration for Children’s Services, which knew about Paul’s case. By the afternoon, case workers had signed off on Ms. Ryan taking in Paul as her foster child.

The following week, Ms. Ryan enrolled Paul in ninth grade at the High School for Climate Justice on the Upper East Side. She bought him clothes and toiletries and got him all the vaccinations he had not received as a child.

Paul was then 15, but he didn’t know how to clean up after himself, what a thermometer was for or that he didn’t have to wear his clothes to bed. Ms. Ryan recalled that despite his lack of schooling, he had an expansive vocabulary far beyond someone his age.

She plans to formally adopt Paul in the coming years, after his family court case is fully resolved.

“I feel extraordinarily lucky, like one in a trillion kind of luck,” he said recently, sitting at a Starbucks in Manhattan after school. With tousled and wavy dark hair, he recalled in detail and at length his upbringing, speaking matter-of-factly about what he had endured and, at times, joking about the number of hotels he had lived in during his nomadic childhood.

“It’s just jarring sometimes — going from that to this,” he said.

Paul’s father was charged in February on 24 counts — including 14 felony fraud counts — in what prosecutors in Manhattan said was a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the New Yorker. At first, he was released on his own recognizance but was taken into custody in November and placed in a cell with several other inmates at the Rikers Island jail complex, his trial on hold after he was deemed mentally unfit to stand.

Evaluated by two court-appointed psychiatrists, Mr. Barreto was found to have a delusional disorder, one doctor said, and symptoms of schizophrenia, the other said. Mr. Barreto also told them that he abused crystal meth, according to his mental health evaluation.

Mr. Barreto was transferred last week to a state mental hospital, the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Randall’s Island.

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Paul Barreto moved into the New Yorker Hotel with his father in 2019.

Credit...

John Taggart for The New York Times

In a phone interview from the hospital, Mr. Barreto denied that he had ever assaulted Paul, saying that his son had “memories that he was forced to fabricate.”

He also defended his parenting, claiming that the home school he created was “one of the best home schools you could ever find.” He said it involved a lot of acting classes and noted that Paul played the role of Steve Jobs’s son in the 2013 movie “Jobs” about the Apple co-founder.

Mr. Barreto said he had been “winning” the family court case until his son, under cross-examination by Mr. Barreto himself, testified that his father would hit him.

But “I don’t want him back,” Mr. Barreto said.

Paul’s mother, Yvette Barreto, admitted in a recent interview that she had verbally abused Paul and that his father had often hit him.

Earlier this month, Ms. Barreto spoke on the phone with Paul for the first time in three years. She said she was in poor health and had called to apologize for his childhood.

“I told him I was sorry and to please forgive me,” said Ms. Barreto, who lives in a shelter in California with her other son. “I feel like I failed my kids.”

Paul hasn’t seen his father since he ran away, and said he didn’t plan to.

Now 18, Paul will graduate in June from LaGuardia High School, an elite performing arts school in Manhattan. After picking up the double bass in ninth grade and taking just 11 lessons, he auditioned for and was accepted into the school’s music program.

He eventually earned a chair in its philharmonic orchestra, which is reserved for LaGuardia’s most advanced musicians, and a spot at a rigorous music training program at the Juilliard School.

At the start of this school year, Paul set a goal to learn how to play the first movement of Giovanni Bottesini’s Concerto No. 2, a challenging piece often performed by college students in auditions for master’s degree programs.

Lubima G. Kalinkova-Shentov, his double-bass teacher at Juilliard, said he was on pace to be able to perform it next year.

“I’ve never had a student who actually learned so much in such a short period of time,” said Ms. Kalinkova-Shentov, who has been teaching for 25 years, adding that Paul had the potential to be a professional musician.

He has applied to top music conservatories and plans to apply to several Ivy League universities.

Matthew Haag writes about the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He has been a journalist for two decades. More about Matthew Haag

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