Man indicted over New Yorker Hotel takeover claim

A man claiming to be the owner of the New Yorker Hotel is instead the owner of an indictment, courtesy of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg’s office announced the indictment on Wednesday, Crain’s reported. Mickey Barreto is charged with 14 counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree — a felony — and 10 counts of criminal contempt in the second degree.

The saga at the famed Hell’s Kitchen hotel dates back to before the pandemic. In June 2018, Barreto booked a room at the hotel for one night before asking the hotel for a lease of the room the following day, in accordance with an obscure part of New York’s rent stabilization law.

The hotel denied the lease and Barreto scrammed, but left his belongings behind, according to court documents. When the hotel returned his belongings, Barreto filed a case in housing court for wrongful eviction and was ultimately granted possession of a single room.

Barreto is accused of upping the ante in May 2019. The attorney’s office claims he uploaded fake documents into the city’s property records, including a deed transferring the hotel’s ownership from the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity to himself. 

Barreto then started demanding rent from tenants and tried accessing the hotel’s bank accounts. He even demanded Holy Spirit leave and allegedly contacted Wyndham, the hotel’s franchise holder, about transferring the franchise to him.

Holy Spirit quickly went to civil court and won an order banning Barreto from presenting himself as the New Yorker’s owner. Barreto allegedly didn’t abide by the order, however, and filed more false documents last year, including a phony $400 million deed transferring ownership from himself to himself, confusingly.

An attorney for Barreto didn’t respond to a request for comment from Crain’s.

“We will not tolerate manipulation of our city’s property records by those who seek to scam the system for personal gain,” Bragg said in a statement.

The indictment could finally provide a clean break for the Unification Church, which purchased the hotel in 1976 for $5 million. The 1.1-million-square-foot building has  1,000 hotel rooms, 140,000 square feet of student housing, 110,000 square feet of office space and 16,000 square feet of retail space.

The hotel closed prior to Holy Spirit’s acquisition, but it reopened the property in 1994.

— Holden Walter-Warner

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