For five years, Mickey Barreto lived in Room 2565 at the storied New Yorker Hotel without paying a dime.
But the free ride ended when he was not only evicted, but also charged earlier this year with a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the Midtown Manhattan hotel.
Now, two doctors and prosecutors have said that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, and a judge has given him seven days to find inpatient psychiatric care.
If he does not, he will be forced into treatment at a hearing scheduled for next week.
Mr. Barreto was charged in February with 24 counts, including 14 felony fraud counts, in what the Manhattan district attorney’s office said was a yearslong criminal scheme to claim ownership of the New Yorker Hotel. He pleaded not guilty.
After Mr. Barreto was arrested in February and his passport confiscated, he was released on his own recognizance.
But over the summer, the court ordered Mr. Barreto to take a psychiatric exam overseen by two doctors, who concluded that he did not fully understand the criminal proceedings against him and that he had two mental illnesses and a drug addiction.
Since then, Mr. Barreto has attended outpatient mental health and addiction treatment at a New York City hospital and was expected to be evaluated at a future date to determine whether he had improved enough to stand trial.
On Wednesday, prosecutors had been expected at a hearing to ask the judge in the case, Justice Cori H. Weston of New York City Criminal Court in Lower Manhattan, to revise the terms of Mr. Barreto’s treatment and have him taken into custody and hospitalized for treatment. Justice Weston said she was not satisfied with the pace of Mr. Barreto’s treatment but allowed him to find his own inpatient care before another hearing on Nov. 13.
After the hearing, his lawyer, Brian Hutchinson, said it could be difficult for Mr. Barreto to be accepted into a hospital treatment facility within the next week. But he said he planned to ask Mr. Barreto’s current treatment provider, the Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai West, to accept him.
“We’re all sort of in agreement that the substance abuse is leading to some of these other problems and making it impossible to move forward with the case,” Mr. Hutchinson said.
Before the postponement, Mr. Barreto said he believed that prosecutors were trying to have him hospitalized because they did not have a strong case against him. He denied that he had a drug addiction. “I am not insane,” Mr. Barreto, 49, said in an interview.
He faces several years in prison if convicted.
The ordeal with Mr. Barreto started in June 2018, when he paid for one night in the hotel and soon used an obscure New York City rent law to successfully argue in court that he could become a full-time resident of Room 2565. He later took over the entire property, at least on paper, with relative ease after the city accepted a deed from him in 2019 showing that the hotel had been transferred into his name.
He then asked the owner of the diner connected to the hotel lobby to redirect rent payments to his hotel room. He also told the hotel’s lender to put all accounts into his name. Neither was done.
His actions set off a frantic response by lawyers for the hotel, who sued him in civil and housing court and pleaded with judges to order Mr. Barreto to leave the hotel and for him to stop representing himself as the owner. The hotel’s actual owner is the Unification Church, which originated on the Korean Peninsula. When the deed was eventually returned to the church’s name, Mr. Barreto moved it back into his name again.
In interviews and civil court hearings, Mr. Barreto defended his actions. He argued that he had been trying to disrupt what he believed was the flow of money from the church to North Korea in violation of sanctions imposed by the United States.
The church’s founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was born in what is now North Korea but the group’s current ties to the country are unclear.
While Mr. Barreto waited on Wednesday for his case to be heard, he spoke about his continued interest in the Unification Church and the properties it owns. But he said that he had not tried to take over another building.
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