- Mickey Barreto lived at the New Yorker Hotel for free for years before his recent arrest.
- Barreto faces 24 charges, including fraud.
- Doctors found Barreto unfit for trial. The judge ordered him to go to treatment.
Doctors say a man who lived in a famous New Yorker hotel for free for more than half a decade does not deserve to be prosecuted.
Mickey Barreto lived in the New Yorker Hotel for years without paying a cent of rent. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office said Barreto claimed to be the owner of the hotel building and was attempting to extort another tenant. In February, police charged Barreto with filing stolen property records.
Barreto now faces 24 charges, including 14 counts of fraud.
This summer, two doctors ruled that Barreto did not understand the criminal charges against him, and a court ordered him to enter mental health and addiction treatment. whether his mental state will improve, The New York Times reported.
In a hearing Wednesday, New York Criminal Court Judge Cori Weston said she was dissatisfied with Barreto’s rate of treatment and ordered him into hospice care, according to the Times. Weston gave Barreto until November 13 to find a suitable location. His next court appearance is scheduled for the same day, court records show.
Brian Hutchinson, Barreto’s attorney, told the Times that he plans to ask Barreto’s current treatment provider, the Addiction Center of Mount Sinai West, to accept him for inpatient care.
“We all agree that drug abuse leads to some of these problems and makes it impossible to continue the case,” Hutchinson told the agency.
Hutchinson’s office and District Attorney Alvin Bragg did not immediately return requests for comment from Business Insider about Barreto’s psychiatric evaluation.
Barreto dismissed the drug addiction charge as “celebration” and said prosecutors want to hospitalize him because they have no case against him, The Associated Press reported.
In June 2018, Barreto and his partner, Matthew Hannan, stayed in room 2565 New Yorker Hotel for one night and paid $200.57.
Armed with knowledge of New York City’s Rent Stabilization Code, which gives landlords the right to ask for six months’ rent for rooms built before 1969, Barreto asked the hotel for a lease the next day. .
He was fired immediately. The following month, Barreto filed a lawsuit in housing court against the building’s owner, the World Christian Association of the Holy Spirit—which had purchased the hotel in 1976—saying he was evicted. outside the law.
Since no church representative appeared in court, the judge ruled in Barreto’s favor, ordering the hotel to give him the key. With no lease agreement in place and unable to evict him, Barreto ended up living in a hotel without a lease.
But free rent at a fancy hotel wasn’t enough for Barreto.
The District Attorney’s office said Barreto later registered the hotel in his name with the Department of Environmental Protection to take control of its bank accounts and demanded rent from the business’s tenant.
The Unification Church filed a lawsuit in response. Although the judge ordered him to stop identifying himself as the owner of the hotel, Barreto continued to stay there for free.
When Barreto filed papers with the city saying he owned the building again in 2023, the District Attorney’s office finally got involved.
According to the Times, he faces several years in prison if convicted.