- Mickey Barreto lived for free at the New Yorker Hotel for years before his recent arrest.
- Barreto faces 24 charges, including fraud.
- Doctors found Barreto unfit to stand trial. A judge ordered him to undergo treatment.
Doctors say a man who lived for free inside the iconic New Yorker Hotel for more than half a decade is not fit to stand trial.
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 ownership of the hotel building and even tried to pay rent to another tenant. In February, police charged Barreto with filing fraudulent property records.
Barreto now faces 24 charges, including 14 counts of fraud.
Over the summer, two doctors concluded that Barreto did not understand the criminal proceedings against him, and the court ordered him into outpatient mental health and addiction treatment to see if his mental state would improve, The New York Times reported.
At a hearing Wednesday, New York City Criminal Court Judge Cori Weston said she was dissatisfied with the rate of Barreto’s treatment and ordered him into hospital care, according to the Times. Weston gave Barreto until Nov. 13 to find a suitable facility. His next court appearance is set for the same date, court records show.
Brian Hutchinson, an attorney for Barreto, told the Times that he planned to ask Barreto’s current treatment provider, the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai West, to accept him for inpatient care.
“We all agree that substance abuse is leading to some of these other problems and making it impossible to move forward with the issue,” Hutchinson told the newspaper.
Hutchinson and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office did not immediately return requests for comment from Business Insider about Barreto’s mental evaluation.
Barreto dismissed the claim that he is addicted to drugs as “party” and said prosecutors want to hospitalize him because they don’t have a case against him, the Associated Press reported.
In June 2018, Barreto and his partner, Matthew Hannan, stayed in room 2565 at the New Yorker Hotel for one night and paid $200.57.
Armed with knowledge of New York City’s Rent Stabilization Code, which gives tenants the right to ask for a six-month rent for individual rooms built before 1969, Barreto asked the hotel for rent the next day.
He was immediately expelled. The next month, Barreto filed a lawsuit in housing court against the building’s owner, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity — which had bought the hotel in 1976 — saying he had been illegally evicted.
Since no representative from the church appeared in court, the judge ruled in Barreto’s favor, ordering the hotel to give him a key. With no agreed lease terms and unable to evict him, Barreto ended up living in the hotel rent-free.
But free rent at an iconic hotel wasn’t enough for Barreton.
The District Attorney’s office said Barreto later registered the hotel in his own name with the Department of Environmental Protection to gain control of his bank accounts and sought rent from a commercial tenant.
The Unification Church filed a lawsuit in response. Although a judge ordered him not to represent himself as the owner of the hotel, Barreto continued to live there for free.
When Barreto filed paperwork with the city claiming ownership of the building back in 2023, the District Attorney’s office finally got involved.
He faces several years behind bars if convicted, according to the Times.