chapotraphouse

The writer was canny. To get you to keep reading - he sprinkles the details throughout. It's one teaser after another. The entire article is worth a read - the story gets crazier and crazier. The Unification Church is involved too.

archive.today • NYC Man Spent $200 for a Five-Year Stay at the New Yorker Hotel - The New York Times

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.

[...]

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.

The Finance Department

Back in their room days after the ruling, the couple read Judge Stoller’s ruling over and over. In it, there was no order that the hotel provide a lease, no limit on their stay, no suggestion that rent was due.

But one word was mentioned throughout: possession. Mr. Barreto was given “final judgment of possession.”

Mr. Barreto said he called the court to ask someone to explain what exactly that meant.

“You have possession,” Mr. Barreto — sharply and slowly stressing every syllable of the final word — said he was told. “You’re not a renter. You have possession of a building.”

[...]

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.

Spoiler...

Finally, last year, the hotel’s owner succeeded in court against him. A judge ruled in the hotel’s favor, citing Mr. Barreto’s refusal to pay or sign a lease. He was evicted in July.