Paul Barreto moved into Room 2565 at the New Yorker Hotel the year after his father, Mickey Barretto, did. It was 2019 and the 135-square-foot queen-bed room in Midtown Manhattan felt like it could be a good home, or at least a better one.
It was nothing like where Paul, then 13, had most recently been living with his mother in California: There were no mice running around, no one was fighting outside his window and no strangers were stopping by at odd hours. At the hotel, Paul had the bed to himself, while his father slept on the floor with his boyfriend, Matthew Hannan.
And at last, Paul was back in school every day. Mr. Barreto had begun home-schooling Paul and his older brother, Jason, when Paul was in the third grade. But the boys did not have a curriculum to follow. Most days, Paul said, he watched hours of YouTube videos.
For the first time, Paul was making friends at school and socializing with them after class, something his parents had not allowed him to do.
Soon, though, things would unravel as they always did with his father, a delusional man with a short fuse, an obsession with conspiracy theories and a fondness for outlandish claims, like being the owner of Brazil. Over the years, Paul had learned how to avoid his father’s ire and ignore his ramblings. But now, in the cramped hotel room, he felt trapped.
Before Paul moved in, his father had already started a legal war with the hotel’s owners. First, Mr. Barreto took them to housing court and argued that an obscure New York City rent law could make Room 2565 his permanent residence. He won.
He paid $200.57 on his first night there and never paid a penny more over the next five years.
The entire hotel was his, Mr. Barreto would rant, certain that the court ruling meant that he owned the New Yorker. In recent interviews, Paul recalled telling his father that he was acting delusional, that he did not own the hotel and that he would get in trouble if he kept at it.
But Mr. Barreto filed a deed with New York City. Once it was accepted, he used it to claim that he was the legal owner, demanding that the diner attached to the hotel lobby send its monthly rent payments to his room. The hotel was eventually reverted to its true owner and the authorities warned him not to file a deed again. He did it again.
Meanwhile, Paul was falling behind.
He bounced between New York and California, where his mother lived and would smoke crack in front of him.
He missed most of the 2020-21 school year, returning to New York City for good in the spring of 2021. He was not re-enrolled in school.
But he still had friends in the city, and the more he hung out with them, the more he realized that his upbringing was not normal. Their homes had books. Their parents doted on them. They watched children’s movies together, not R-rated films.
He started to reveal things about his life at the hotel with his friends and their parents, which led a family to report their concerns about him to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, the agency that investigates child abuse and neglect.
Investigators repeatedly tried to make contact with Mr. Barreto at their home, Paul said, but his father would not let them inside. As the agency kept asking to meet, his father abruptly announced, one day in September 2021, that they were flying to California the next day.
Paul knew then that if they went to California, his case with the agency would be further delayed for probably a year. “I didn’t have another year,” he said. “I had to do it now.”
That night, his father slept against the front door, blocking anyone from leaving. The next morning, when his father was distracted while packing for the flight, Paul escaped out the door.
Over the next three days, he said, he hid in Central Park, charged his cellphone on sidewalk kiosks and slipped back into their old apartment building after midnight to sleep in a stairwell.
He eventually went to a local police precinct and asked to be taken to a children’s shelter. But he said the police discovered that Mr. Barreto had filed a missing persons report for Paul, so officers returned him to his father.
Determined to leave again, Paul slipped out two days later with nothing but the clothes on his back and made his way to a friend’s apartment near Central Park.
Paul told his friend, Jack Ryan, that he was scared to go home. Jack ran to his mother’s room.
“Paul is ashen white, just disheveled,” recalled Jack’s mother, Jennifer Ryan, now 62, a single mother who owns a textile company. “He proceeded to tell me that his parents abused him.”
She had met Paul briefly only once before, but Ms. Ryan told him that night that she would take him in. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.
The next morning, Ms. Ryan made the boys pancakes and called the Administration for Children’s Services, which knew about Paul’s case. By the afternoon, case workers had signed off on Ms. Ryan taking in Paul as her foster child.
The following week, Ms. Ryan enrolled Paul in ninth grade at the High School for Climate Justice on the Upper East Side. She bought him clothes and toiletries and got him all the vaccinations he had not received as a child.
Paul was then 15, but he didn’t know how to clean up after himself, what a thermometer was for or that he didn’t have to wear his clothes to bed. Ms. Ryan recalled that despite his lack of schooling, he had an expansive vocabulary far beyond someone his age.
She plans to formally adopt Paul in the coming years, after his family court case is fully resolved.
“I feel extraordinarily lucky, like one in a trillion kind of luck,” he said recently, sitting at a Starbucks in Manhattan after school. With tousled and wavy dark hair, he recalled in detail and at length his upbringing, speaking matter-of-factly about what he had endured and, at times, joking about the number of hotels he had lived in during his nomadic childhood.
“It’s just jarring sometimes — going from that to this,” he said.
Paul’s father was charged in February on 24 counts — including 14 felony fraud counts — in what prosecutors in Manhattan said was a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the New Yorker. At first, he was released on his own recognizance but was taken into custody in November and placed in a cell with several other inmates at the Rikers Island jail complex, his trial on hold after he was deemed mentally unfit to stand.
Evaluated by two court-appointed psychiatrists, Mr. Barreto was found to have a delusional disorder, one doctor said, and symptoms of schizophrenia, the other said. Mr. Barreto also told them that he abused crystal meth, according to his mental health evaluation.
Mr. Barreto was transferred last week to a state mental hospital, the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Randall’s Island.
In a phone interview from the hospital, Mr. Barreto denied that he had ever assaulted Paul, saying that his son had “memories that he was forced to fabricate.”
He also defended his parenting, claiming that the home school he created was “one of the best home schools you could ever find.” He said it involved a lot of acting classes and noted that Paul played the role of Steve Jobs’s son in the 2013 movie “Jobs” about the Apple co-founder.
Mr. Barreto said he had been “winning” the family court case until his son, under cross-examination by Mr. Barreto himself, testified that his father would hit him.
But “I don’t want him back,” Mr. Barreto said.
Paul’s mother, Yvette Barreto, admitted in a recent interview that she had verbally abused Paul and that his father had often hit him.
Earlier this month, Ms. Barreto spoke on the phone with Paul for the first time in three years. She said she was in poor health and had called to apologize for his childhood.
“I told him I was sorry and to please forgive me,” said Ms. Barreto, who lives in a shelter in California with her other son. “I feel like I failed my kids.”
Paul hasn’t seen his father since he ran away, and said he didn’t plan to.
Now 18, Paul will graduate in June from LaGuardia High School, an elite performing arts school in Manhattan. After picking up the double bass in ninth grade and taking just 11 lessons, he auditioned for and was accepted into the school’s music program.
He eventually earned a chair in its philharmonic orchestra, which is reserved for LaGuardia’s most advanced musicians, and a spot at a rigorous music training program at the Juilliard School.
At the start of this school year, Paul set a goal to learn how to play the first movement of Giovanni Bottesini’s Concerto No. 2, a challenging piece often performed by college students in auditions for master’s degree programs.
Lubima G. Kalinkova-Shentov, his double-bass teacher at Juilliard, said he was on pace to be able to perform it next year.
“I’ve never had a student who actually learned so much in such a short period of time,” said Ms. Kalinkova-Shentov, who has been teaching for 25 years, adding that Paul had the potential to be a professional musician.
He has applied to top music conservatories and plans to apply to several Ivy League universities.
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