A squatter who executed a bizarre plot to seize the hotel he was living in rent-free from its owners has been sentenced to jail. Mickey Barreto, 50, checked into the landmark New Yorker hotel in Manhattan with his boyfriend for one night in June 2018—and stayed for five years, without ever paying for his room. He then requested a lease under an obscure housing law and won a court case to stay. Then in 2019, Barreto filed a fake deed in a bogus attempt to claim the hotel’s ownership had been transferred to him from its owners, the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies. He was finally evicted from the New Yorker in 2023. He pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court to a felony count of filing a false instrument and was sentenced to six months in jail and five years of post-release probation, according to court records. He had originally been charged with 24 counts, 14 of which were felony fraud. A court-ordered psychiatric exam deemed Barreto unfit for trial, but after mental health and addiction treatment, he was declared competent in spring 2025. The $280-a-night art deco New Yorker opened in 1930 as the city’s biggest hotel and hosted big bands, stars of the era like Mickey Rooney, and was home to the inventor Nikola Tesla until his death. The Moonies, led by Sun Myung Moon, bought it in 1976 as a guest house for unmarried members, whose numbers decreased because of the cult’s mass weddings. It is now a Lotte.
Read it at The New York Times
