Man who used legal loophole to live rent-free for years in NYC hotel found unfit to stand trial

NEW YORK (AP) — A man charged with fraud for claiming to own a storied Manhattan hotel where he had been living rent-free for years has been found unfit to stand trial, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Doctors examining Mickey Barreto deemed he’s not mentally competent to face criminal charges, and prosecutors confirmed the results during a court hearing Wednesday, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.

Judge Cori Weston gave Barreto until Nov. 13. to find suitable inpatient psychiatric care, Bragg’s office said.

Barreto had been receiving outpatient treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, but doctors concluded after a recent evaluation that he did not fully understand the criminal proceedings, the New York Times first reported.

Barreto dismissed the allegations of a drug problem to some “partying,” and said prosecutors are trying to have him hospitalized because they did not have a strong case against him. He does see some upside.

“It went from being unfriendly, ‘He’s a criminal,’ to oh, they don’t talk about crime anymore. Now the main thing is, like, ‘Oh, poor thing. Finally, we convinced him to go seek treatment,’” Barreto told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

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Brian Hutchinson, an attorney for Barreto, didn’t immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. But during Wednesday’s hearing, he said he planned to ask his client’s current treatment provider to accept him, the Times reported.

In February, prosecutors charged Barreto with 24 counts, including felony fraud and criminal contempt.

They say he forged a deed to the New Yorker Hotel purporting to transfer ownership of the entire building to him.

He then tried to charge one of the hotel’s tenants rent and demanded the hotel’s bank transfer its accounts to him, among other steps.

Barreto started living at the hotel in 2018 after arguing in court that he had paid about $200 for a one-night stay and therefore had tenant’s rights, based on a quirk of the city’s housing laws and the fact that the hotel failed to send a lawyer to a key hearing.

Barreto has said he lived at the hotel without paying any rent because the building’s owners, the Unification Church, never wanted to negotiate a lease with him, but they also couldn’t legally kick him out.

Now, his criminal case may be steering him toward a sort of loophole.

“So if you ask me if it’s a better thing, in a way it is. Because I’m not being treated as a criminal but I’m treated like a nutjob,” Barreto told the AP.

Built in 1930, the hulking Art Deco structure and its huge red “New Yorker” sign is an oft-photographed landmark in midtown Manhattan.

Muhammad Ali and other famous boxers stayed there when they had bouts at nearby Madison Square Garden, about a block away. Inventor Nikola Tesla even lived in one of its more than 1,000 rooms for a decade. And NBC broadcasted from its Terrace Room.

But the New Yorker closed as a hotel in 1972 and was used for years for church purposes before part of the building reopened as a hotel in 1994.