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.
The headline does not do justice…like this is tied to the cult that the former prime minister of Japan was assassinated over.
Dude could’ve stayed there forever but he got too greedy.
That’s an… interesting tale. It shows the dangers of bureaucracy, how easy it is to ‘game the system’ and the consequences.
Thank you for the read.
I read this the other day… Absolutely insane story, I don’t know how this is real life.
It sounds like if he hadn’t tried to push the envelope, and had just taken his free room and left it at that, he might have gotten away with it for longer, or at least wouldn’t be facing jail time now. This is a wild story!
Well it was never supposed to be free. It’s a requirement to lease. So he needed to accept one of their offers or at best show the judge he was negotiating a lease in good faith.
I’m more interested in the hotel’s property tax exemption. Why do they have it and why are they allowed to avoid paying their share to the city that probably needs that revenue.
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.
It’s a church
Of course it fucking is. Our laws are a joke
Hotels collect huge taxes from guests staying there, it likely more than makes up for any property taxes.
And?
What do you mean, And? That’s a perfectly valid answer.
In lieu of property taxes they pay occupancy tax. Do you pay occupancy tax on the people who stay in your home? Those people are getting a benefit from the services the city provides, so you should have to pay a tax for each person staying on your property, right? Last time I stayed in NYC, my room was $200/night plus $33 in taxes per night.
In this case, they’re tax exempt because it’s a church (the Moonies cult), and most of the rooms are permanently occupied by members.
In this case its probably a drain on resources considering they’re now trying to recover money using our court system even though the business is tax exempt.
So I’m trying to figure out what is stopping someone else from using this rule to get a rent-controlled room there. I think this forces the hotel to offer a lease to anyone who stays there, and maybe at rent-controlled prices, too. He pushed it too far by trying to seize the building and then impersonating being the owner after being told by a judge to stop. But it sounds like the hotel is stuck under a weird law that it can’t change to get out of.
Highly recommend everyone read this. What a crazy wild read it was. Will have to set news alerts to get updates on this one because I need to know the conclusion.
I think the strangest tidbit is ‘In New York City, the sheriff’s office is a division of the Finance Department.’
In most of the rest of NYS, the County Sheriff’s Depts are the primary local law enforcement arm. But NYC has its own police department. To my knowledge, NYC sheriffs mainly do enforcement actions (civil judgements, evictions, and similar stuff), so it makes sense to be part of the Finance Dept.
