This whole story sounds like something out of the Onion:
For five years, a man managed to live rent-free in a landmark New York City hotel by exploiting an obscure local housing law.
But prosecutors say Mickey Barreto went too far when he filed paperwork claiming ownership of the New Yorker Hotel building in midtown Manhattan — and tried to charge another tenant rent.
This month, he was arrested and charged with filing false property records. But Barreto, 48, says he was surprised when police showed up at his boyfriend’s apartment with guns and bulletproof shields. As far as he is concerned, it should be a civil case, not a criminal one.
“I said, ‘Oh, I thought you were doing something for Valentine’s Day to spice up the relationship until I saw the female officers,’” Barreto recalled telling his boyfriend.
This guy was getting free rent at a $200 a day hotel through a legal loophole for five years and still got greedy and tried to claim ownership of the entire hotel:
Manhattan prosecutors acknowledge that the housing court gave Barreto “possession” of his room. But they say he didn’t stop there: In 2019, he uploaded a fake deed to a city website, purporting to transfer ownership of the entire building to himself from the Holy Spirit Assn. for the Unification of World Christianity, which bought the property in 1976. The church was founded in South Korea by a self-proclaimed messiah, the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Barreto then tried to charge various entities as the owner of the building, “including demanding rent from one of the hotel’s tenants, registering the hotel under his name with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection for water and sewage payments, and demanding the hotel’s bank transfer its accounts to him,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
“As alleged, Mickey Barreto repeatedly and fraudulently claimed ownership of one of the city’s most iconic landmarks, the New Yorker Hotel,” said Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg.
You can read more at the link, but essentially a gay guy uses incompentent New York government to live rent free in a landmark New York hotel for five years and then tries to steal hotel from a notorious religious cult.
Blowback against religious engagement in politics has surged in Japan following the assassination of former PM Abe Shinzō on July 8. The main target is the Unification Church. Anticult fears are spreading. They may shape the governing coalition and shift policymaking (thread) 1/
The Unification Church has definitely been in the headlines recently due to its link to the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe:
Kwak Chung-hwan, the former president of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification who was once called the No. 2 man of the church when its founder was alive, speaks during a news conference held at Hotel Koreana in central Seoul on Tuesday. Yonhap
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, better known as the Unification Church, claimed that the church and its members in Japan faced death threats and hate crimes following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The threats were reactions to “abusive” donation practices of the church, founded by self-claimed messiah Moon Sun-myung in 1954 in Seoul.
Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspected gunman in the assassination of Abe during a campaign speech in the city of Nara on July 8, confessed to police that he came to hold a grudge against the former prime minister for his alleged link to the church. Yamagami’s mother reportedly made a huge donation to the Unification Church that forced her into bankruptcy.
In a statement released on Monday, the church’s headquarters in Korea blamed media outlets for what it called “inaccurate and biased” news reports, following a news conference hosted by a group of Japanese lawyers on July 12 that it claims triggered a raft of hostile media coverage against it.
Since then, the church noted that several media reports have been produced solely based on comments from the members of the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales of Japan, a group that represents former Unification Church members and their families.
You can read more at the link, but Yamagami’s mother was reported to donated $720,000 of her family’s inheritance to the church and then proceeded to go bankrupt a few years later.
I can understand why this guy has a grudge against the Unification Church, but it in no way justifies murdering Shinzo Abe:
Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspected killer of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is taken to prosecutors on July 10 in Nara. (Jin Nishioka)
The mother of the man suspected of murdering former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe donated more than 100 million yen ($720,000) to the Unification Church, a relative said.
The contributions to the religious group included 50 million yen she received from a life insurance policy taken on her husband, as well as proceeds from property sales, the relative told The Asahi Shimbun.
She was declared bankrupt in 2002.
Her son, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, has been sent to prosecutors on suspicion of murdering Abe, 67, who was gunned down on July 8 while giving an election campaign speech in Nara.
Nearly 6,000 couples promised to be true in sickness and in health in a mass wedding Friday in South Korea, and put their new vows immediately to the test as fears surrounding the coronavirus continue to surge. Thousands of brides and grooms, all members of the Unification Church, tied the knot before a crowd of 30,000 in Gapyeong, a county in the north of the country, Agence France-Presse reported. Some couples reportedly wore face masks, as did those in the audience, as they all joined together in a large crowd despite the fact that the contagious respiratory illness now known as COVID-19 has been spreading since December.
