A man who lived in the iconic New Yorker Hotel for half a decade without paying a single cent in rent has been sentenced to jail.
Police arrested Mickey Barreto in February 2024 and charged him with filing fraudulent property records after he attempted to claim ownership of the hotel, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
Prosecutors said Barreto skirted thousands of dollars worth of rent payments by exploiting a little-known local housing law, and then attempted to charge another tenant in the building rent.
“As alleged, Mickey Barreto repeatedly and fraudulently claimed ownership of one of the City’s most iconic landmarks, the New Yorker Hotel,” Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney, said in a statement in 2024.
Barreto faced 24 charges, including 14 felony fraud counts, The New York Times reported. In February 2026, he pled guilty to a felony count of filing a false instrument and was sentenced to six months in jail and five years of post-release probation.
Barreto’s residency at the renowned hotel — which in its heyday hosted many dignitaries and celebrities, including Muhammad Ali and John F. Kennedy — dates back to 2018 when he first learned about New York City’s Rent Stabilization Code. This law grants tenants living in individual rooms in buildings built before 1969 the right to request a six-month lease.
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In June 2018, Barreto checked into room 2565 with his partner, Matthew Hannan, for one night and was charged $200.57.
The following day, Barreto requested a six-month lease from the hotel and was promptly evicted.
Barreto — a California transplant with a penchant for conspiracy theories who also claims to be the leader of a tribal community he founded in Brazil, according to The New York Times — refused to take no for an answer.
Barreto was eventually caught in a web of lies
That July, he took the building’s owner, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, to housing court, claiming he was illegally evicted. A representative for the church didn’t show up, so the judge sided with Barreto, and the hotel had to give him the key.
The two parties never agreed on lease terms, and because he couldn’t be evicted, Barreto lived at the hotel rent-free.
Soon, Barreto began portraying himself as the hotel’s owner and eventually demanded rent from one of the building’s tenants, the TickTock diner.
The DA’s office said that Barreto also registered the hotel under his name with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection as part of an effort to gain control of the hotel’s bank accounts.
The Unification Church, which bought the New Yorker in 1976, sued Barreto for representing himself as the hotel’s owner on LinkedIn and uploading a forged deed to a city website. Barreto was ordered by a judge to stop asserting that he owned the building, but he continued to live there.
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In 2023, Barreto again filed papers with the city claiming to be the building’s owner, and that’s when the district attorney’s office stepped in.
Business Insider reached out to Barreto through his company, Mickey Barreto Missions, in 2024, but didn’t receive a response before publication.
“I never intended to commit any fraud. I don’t believe I ever committed any fraud,” Barreto told The Associated Press. “And I never made a penny out of this.”
When asked for a comment by Business Insider, the New York City Police Department directed questions to the district attorney’s office.
Correction: April 12, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated details about the legal claims filed by Barreto and the building’s owner. Barreto initially took the building owner to housing court for being illegally evicted, and a judge sided with him because a representative for the owner did not appear in court. That case did not go before the state Supreme Court and there was no appeal filed. The story has also been updated to clarify some details about the chronology of the legal disputes between the two parties.
