They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone.
Illustrations of people superimposed over photographs of living spaces in an apartment
It was a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot loft in Chelsea. There were big bedrooms, high ceilings, stylish furniture, a fireplace—all for a price that was oddly less than it should have been.Illustration by Martin Ansin

Manhattan, the vertical city, greets newcomers as a sheer rockface. To even begin the ascent requires agility, nerve, and a secure base camp. If you can’t establish that base—the right apartment—the plunge is swift: you bounce to a friend’s couch, then to a squat in Bushwick, and suddenly you’re at the Port Authority holding a sign for bus fare home.

In the spring and summer of last year, people from all over—from Brazil, Norway, Spain, South Africa, Bangladesh, Japan, even the Upper West Side—pounced on a Craigslist ad for a base camp in Chelsea: a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot loft with two large bedrooms and two baths. When they visited, Apartment 6-E at 211 West Twentieth Street proved even better than advertised. The ceilings were eleven feet high, and the windows and pendant lamps flooded light across a wood-burning fireplace, Mies Barcelona chairs, and a West Elm sofa set topped with Hermès blankets. Almost everything was dazzling white: walls, floors, furniture—even the books were cloaked in white jackets.

The apartment’s owner and impresario was a photographer named Michael Tammaro. In profile, Tammaro, who was fifty-four, resembled the Indian on the Buffalo nickel, but he was a fey charmer who adorned his shaved head with a driving cap and his arms with a Cartier watch and a gold Hermès bracelet. The one constant of his ever-changing décor was Tucker, a boisterous pit-bull-and-shepherd-mix rescue dog. On Facebook, he posted a photo of him and his dog on a rocky beach and captioned it “Family Portrait.”

Tammaro shot stars from Tina Fey to Spike Lee, putting his subjects at ease with a Boston-accented purr: “C’mon, baby, you’re so cute—yeah, you’re so sexy!” He used the apartment as his backdrop, and every detail of the scene promised access and glamour. As he took the official photographs for the Tribeca Film Festival, or posed models for Vogue, as many as seven assistants would be adjusting the lighting, changing the lenses, and serving mojitos to managers and editors and hangers-on. For years, Tammaro had been Sting’s stylist and groomer, and a warm note from Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, was posted in his guest bathroom.

And now Tammaro was renting out one of his bedrooms, or perhaps the whole place (he couldn’t quite seem to decide), so that, after a possible visit with his friend David Geffen in Malibu, he could spend a year in Sag Harbor assembling a book of his photographs. His sales pitch was devil-may-care: “Are you sure you don’t want to look around more? If it were me, I’d want to take a shower!” But he assured potential tenants that he’d get them membership in Soho House, or discounts at the nearby Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, or a visa for their girlfriend. He was equal parts trusty Sherpa and romantic-comedy confidant. He showed Bon Tjeenk Willink, a Dutch consultant for Bain & Company, photos he’d taken of Kristen Stewart right where they were standing, and, Tjeenk Willink recalls, “He promised, ‘I’ll take you to all the Hollywood parties.’ I thought, I’m going to have the best time in New York!”

Everyone wanted in: an administrator for Madewell clothing who was returning from L.A. to be near her widowed mother; a photographer relocating from Berlin with her daughter during a contentious custody battle; a South African cost manager hoping to jump-start her life; a painter who’d left his girlfriend and needed a place to complete his transformation into a beautiful woman named Nyx. Even the actress Sean Young sought to be Tammaro’s roommate.

They couldn’t all rent the apartment, of course. Unless they could!

Douglas and Juliet believed that the place was theirs. (Like several others involved with the apartment, they asked that I change their names. I have used pseudonyms for anyone identified by a single name.) In April, 2012, Tammaro was offering a summer sublet, and it seemed like a perfect place for them to live while Juliet shot the show that they hoped would make them famous: a series of dating-advice videos for YouTube.

Juliet was a wry, self-contained woman in her late twenties; Douglas, who helped manage his family’s real-estate holdings, was a few years older and resembled Newman on “Seinfeld.” They both liked their future landlord. “Michael oozed an easy charm,” Douglas recalled. “Bantering, confident, super-flamboyant.” And he said that they were welcome to use his lights and C-stands. So Douglas put down $14,950 for three months plus a security deposit. “I felt very confident doing this, because I’d reverse-Googled his phone number, and it led to his photography Web site. And because I wrote my own lease, which had a lot of protections built in. And because, like every New Yorker, I thought, I’m so sophisticated.”

In the weeks before the move, Tammaro was constantly in touch by text. Yet he was frustratingly noncommittal about providing keys and confirming that a promised washer-dryer had been installed. And his spelling and syntax made his texts a puzzle: “I am have lease fed x Ed to me I’m not in my Ny I can not sell with out parent work.” As his voice mail was always full, it was hard to get these jumbles deciphered.

Douglas and Juliet were finally set to move in on July 1st. Six days before, Tammaro e-mailed to say, “Sadly my father past away suddenly on sat.” His family was staying with him, so he’d need the apartment for two more weeks. The couple wrote a note of sympathy and found emergency accommodations in Williamsburg. Tammaro sent frequent updates: he was consoling his mother, attending a memorial at his father’s club, dealing with the estate tax. An apologetic e-mail arrived from Julie Tammaro, Michael’s mother: “We have put Michael in an embarrassing situation and he feels terrible. My son likes to make everyone happy but with our family in a day to day healing process we are quite unstable.” The couple thought it was an oddly insubstantial note, until Tammaro gave it meaning by postponing the move-in date again. He promised that Douglas and Juliet could have the place August 1st—but then his mother had a stroke, perhaps brought on by all the stress. Could they reschedule for August 15th? Or maybe a bit later? He apologized, again and again, for the confusion.

Later in August, he offered Douglas and Juliet a terrific deal as recompense: starting in September, they could have the apartment, which was easily worth seven thousand dollars a month, for a whole year at just four thousand dollars a month. Douglas wrote an even more confining lease—it specified, for instance, that for every two days a utility was inoperative they’d get a month free of rent—and Tammaro gave them keys. After making sure they worked, Douglas advanced the photographer six thousand dollars more, so that he could afford a deposit for the house he’d rented in Sag Harbor.

Douglas and Juliet told him that they were going to Mexico on vacation, and that they’d move in when they got back, the evening of September 8th. As they took a taxi in from Kennedy Airport, they turned their phones back on—and received a text from Tammaro, saying that he had to give the apartment up, because his landlord was raising the rent to seventy-six hundred dollars. He added that he was “very depressed shutting off phones.” They were dumbfounded. “In the first place, he’d told Juliet that he owned the apartment,” Douglas said. “In the second—what the fuck!”

Having nowhere else to go, they continued on to 211 West Twentieth and got into the elevator. But before they could key in 6-E a fellow-passenger did. Confused, they said that they were about to move into that apartment. The passenger, Cameron Kennedy, performed occasional errands for Tammaro but said that he didn’t know anything about a sublet; he was just dog-sitting with his girlfriend. When they all entered the apartment together, it was a wreck. Not only had Tucker left deposits everywhere—a temperamental dog, he wouldn’t go to the bathroom with just anyone—but half the furniture in their “furnished apartment” was gone: chairs, a desk, paintings, statues. Tammaro’s papers and files and private videotapes were scattered everywhere, and grime coated everything, as if packing up had turned into giving up.

When Kennedy texted Tammaro to ask what to do, he wrote back, “They’re crazy, they’ve got it all wrong—get them out!” At the same time, the photographer texted Douglas promising to pay for their hotel and explain everything when he returned the next day. So the couple reluctantly took Kennedy’s suggestion that they come back in the morning with their lease, which was in storage in Brooklyn, along with the rest of their stuff.

When Douglas and Juliet returned, the following day, Kennedy had locked the door, so they had to show him the lease through the window in the elevator door. “Homeboy is super, super on the offense,” Kennedy recalls, “up in my face, saying, ‘Read the document!’ ” Kennedy and his girlfriend grudgingly packed up and departed, leaving Tucker behind. And Douglas and Juliet finally had their dream home.

They immediately called a locksmith and had him change the front-door lock. Tammaro, eager to pin down their whereabouts, was texting them in mounting anxiety: at 1:53 P.M., he wrote, “?????”; at 2:35, “what is going on”; and, at 3:01, “???????”

Douglas and Juliet were equally bewildered. An hour or so after they moved in, the buzzer rang, and Douglas stuck his head out the window. A man and a woman called up, “We rented the apartment!” Stunned, Douglas was silent for a moment, and then he shouted, “You’d better come up, and we’ll talk.” Finding out that the apartment wasn’t theirs alone “was a dolly-counter-zoom moment for us,” he said, “like the camera move Hitchcock made in ‘Vertigo’—we stayed the same, but the entire background changed.”

Inside, the couples exchanged stories. The other renters were Brita Lombardi and Gavin Bishop, a well-connected husband and wife in their early forties. Lombardi had been a marketing executive until she quit to take care of her mother, who had pancreatic cancer; Bishop, an ad-sales executive at Google, was steady, circumspect, and British—a counterweight to his outgoing wife. Having given up their old place, they needed lodgings close to Bishop’s Chelsea office and in an elevator building, as Lombardi was about to undergo spinal-fusion surgery. They saw Tammaro’s ad, sped over in a taxi, and were smitten.

Once Tammaro took their $10,400 for two months’ rent, his vagueness about moving out began to gnaw at Lombardi, who knew that Craigslist, as a venue for honest dealings, has a reputation somewhat below that of a Nigerian pen pal. But Bishop reassured her, “Oh, he’s just an artist. You’re being a completely neurotic New Yorker.” Sensing that their sublet bent the building’s rules, neither wanted to push too hard lest they lose the deal—one, in a borough with a vacancy rate of 1.5 per cent, they weren’t likely to see again.

On August 28th, four days before their move, Tammaro e-mailed to say, “I started vomiting blood sat night . . . I’m on some many drugs and oxycodone. Pain is really bad I think I have a bleeding ulster.” He said he’d need more time, until September 9th, and then grew increasingly evasive. So they went to his building on the ninth—and found Douglas and Juliet. The four of them talked for hours, sitting in the white couch and armchairs, as Tucker roamed the apartment anxiously, at one point giving Bishop a warning nip. Meanwhile, Juliet says, “The buzzer kept ringing with all these other people planning to move in.”

When Michael Tammaro was fifteen, growing up poor in the North End of Boston, he told his mother, Julie, “When I’m thirty, I’m going to be famous and a millionaire, and I’ll give you everything you don’t have, Ma.” He would have to scale the heights on his own. Julie Tammaro had done her best to raise two sons as a divorced single mother, but Michael barely had a relationship with his father, Alfred, and, Julie says, “it sure wasn’t easy for him being gay in an Italian neighborhood in Boston in the seventies.” In 1982, when Tammaro was twenty-four, his younger brother, John, was ditched by his girlfriend. John shot her five times in the head—a rose was found beside her body—and fled to Manhattan, where he slept on the streets for ten days before returning to Boston to surrender. (He is now in prison.)

Tammaro put himself through hairdressing school, and by the early nineties he was in New York, arranging Claudia Schiffer’s and Naomi Campbell’s hair for fashion ads, and charging seven hundred dollars for a cut. He styled Sting’s hair, and in time he became a regular guest at the pop star’s manor in Wiltshire and his villa in Tuscany, where he’d do hair and makeup for magazine portraits and album covers. He’d bring his camera, and Sting used one of his snapshots for publicity. Soon enough, Tammaro was photographing Courteney Cox and David Arquette’s wedding.

Before that transformation, in 1993, he found the loft on West Twentieth Street, for only twenty-four hundred dollars a month. His mother recalls, “He gave them a deposit in early May, and he called me and said, ‘Ma, I just have to thank you—it’s an omen that I got this place on Mother’s Day!’ ” His landlords, Barry and Jan Zonon, lived in the penthouse above him, and, early on, the new tenant gave Jan a fetching haircut, and ingratiated himself with Barry. “But it didn’t take us long to realize we’d made a big mistake,” Jan Zonon, a cheerful woman who describes herself as a soccer mom, told me. Tammaro put in cabinets and track lighting and painted the oak floor white, all in violation of his lease, and he blasted Carly Simon songs at 5 A.M., waking the Zonons’ young son.

Tammaro liked to live large. “Every time you eat off of a silver spoon,” he’d say, “you feel like a king.” He’d give his assistants a hundred dollars to buy two cartons of milk and tell them to keep the change. But, while his life seemed triple mint, it was a secret fixer-upper. He drank, and did cocaine, and many of his clothes had hidden holes or tears. His black 1978 Mercedes-Benz 450SL convertible “looked great,” one of his assistants told me, “but the A.C. didn’t work and I felt like the Flintstones in it, like I was going to have to use my feet to make it go.”

Tammaro accumulated liens and judgments—from New York State, American Express Travel Services, Bergdorf Goodman. In 1996, the same year that the I.R.S. filed a lien against him for $249,918, he began missing rent payments. Fortunately for him, he had a rent-stabilized lease. A landlord can elect not to renew a regular lease, but rent-stabilized leases—instituted in New York in 1969, to keep housing affordable for the middle class—allow even the most noxious tenant to essentially stay forever. In two decades, Tammaro’s rent rose only to $3,694.42—as Barry Zonon pulled him into housing court more than twenty times for back rent.

For years, Tammaro was able to outrun his debts. Then, in his mother’s account, “He fell out with Sting, and the recession hit and nobody was having their pictures taken, and magazines wanted younger photographers, and his career went south. New York City was burning out my kid—he told me the stress of trying to pay the bills was killing him.” In February, 2012, Tammaro had to sign a probationary agreement with Jan Zonon. (She had taken over as the landlord after Barry died, in 2010.) If he didn’t pay his rent every month, it would be grounds for eviction. Faced with real deadlines, Tammaro evidently decided that he had two remaining assets: his apartment and his wits.

“And this is Joshua, he’ll be a hundred and forty–seven months next week.”

Tammaro had brought in roommates over the years to help with the rent. It now occurred to him that it might be easier and more profitable to collect payments without the bother of actual roommates. In August, 2011, he floated a Craigslist ad, and someone responded: Joseph Wilson, a logistics executive arriving from San Francisco. When Wilson showed up on the appointed date, with his moving truck hours away, no one was home. He went to the Tenth Precinct, conveniently situated across the street, to complain. The cops weren’t much interested, but when Wilson threatened Tammaro with a police report and a lawsuit the photographer sent an assistant over with thirty-two hundred dollars in cash.

Though the trial run didn’t pay off, it did establish that the police wouldn’t rush to clap Tammaro in irons. So he began advertising the loft continually, in a scheme whose boldness was both an operational asset—how could someone who lived in the apartment be running a scam?—and a trap that would eventually require a brilliant exit strategy. He favored renters who were foreigners or busy executives (or, often, both): people without the time or the street smarts to disrupt the elaborate shell game to come. The game would involve:

The Hold-Off. Once Tammaro got paid, he’d remain very chatty by e-mail and text, yet become remarkably absent-minded about details like when, exactly, he was moving out. Renters inferred that he was simply juggling too many balls. “He kept saying he was going to FedEx the keys, but he was flighty about it, an airhead—like a lot of people in the business,” Tara Kelly, the Madewell manager, said. “I was used to grown men needing help.”

The Blockout. Days before the scheduled move-in—even the day of, as someone was en route from the airport—Tammaro would write with terrible news: he had developed an ulcer; his landlady had jacked up the rent; he had fallen from a scaffolding while shooting the Olympic Games in London, and sustained a head injury that left him with nausea and amnesia. His preferred tragedy, though, was his father’s death—guaranteed to win sympathy and buy time. Last June, he spun the full family romance to Damien, from Japan, describing the family he might have wished for: “I’m sorry to say my father passed away suddenly last night. It is a shock for my family as he was 67 and vital. My parents were still together and very happy.” (Alfred Tammaro is remarried and living in Malden, Massachusetts; his wife, Jean, told me that he and Michael “haven’t spoken in thirty years, so I would guess in Michael’s mind he is dead.”)

Tammaro would then explain that his family was grieving in his apartment. His mother, Julie—or his sister Julie, or his brother Alex—would then follow up to clarify that, though the grieving process was taking longer than expected, Julie, the mother, would soon move to Colorado with Julie the daughter, or else to Australia (or sometimes Hawaii) with Alex. Of course, Alex was a junkie, and Julie the mom—the only member of this family who actually exists—wasn’t eager to move so far away. Instead, she’d usually attempt suicide.

Tammaro’s plot twists were so fluent, so idiosyncratic and haphazard, that they achieved verisimilitude. Many renters eventually vetted him online, but search engines don’t pick up liens and lawsuits, and Tammaro canvassed his reviews on sites like Yelp and got the negative ones removed. In late July, a prospective renter named Holly Van Straten, a training manager for the Oneworld airline alliance, ran a very thorough Google search on him. “I’m single,” Van Straten said, “so you’ve got to check people out pretty carefully.” She found nothing untoward, even on the thirtieth page.

Meanwhile, Tammaro would offer to pay his renters’ hotel bills and storage costs—or else to return the deposit if they couldn’t wait. He felt confident that the apartment would be hard to give up. After spending a week in limbo on a friend’s couch, Lindsey Brake, the South African cost manager, said, “I knew it was a bit fishy, but because it was such a nice apartment I was really committed to it.”

Eventually, though, even the hardiest couch-surfer would ask for a refund. This would trigger:

The Rope-a-Dope. The renter would be assured in a stream of texts that he was going to get his money by messenger later that day, or that the new check would clear, or, anyway, that it would all get straightened out as soon as a nettlesome impediment—“I’m shooting Sting for Vanity fair he is running late”—had been swept from Tammaro’s path. With Jose, from Australia, Tammaro’s feints and dodges across two months included: send me account number again; how much do I owe you; getting on a plane; I had my sister Julie handle it; bank read Julie’s handwriting wrong; sorry, but I had to pay out $10,000 for my dad’s burial; sorry neither check went through; tell your lawyer that you refused payment through Paypal and see what he says; lost my phone and just now found your number; Tucker is very ill; driving in the rain; waiting for funds to clear.

If a renter mentioned lawyers, Tammaro would reply that his own attorney was now going to have to research the matter: “you brought up lawyers and police what was I supposed to do.” And he was expert in the imagined slight. In early September, Uno Vesje, a harpist from Norway, agreed to wait to move in; meanwhile, he and his girlfriend would crash at the Norwegian Seamen’s Church. But, when Vesje politely inquired whether he could get the corresponding portion of his deposit back, Tammaro replied that the request was such an affront to a photographer of his stature that he didn’t want them to move in, after all.

By scripting these daily dramas, Tammaro retained not only his victims’ money but also their full attention. They were all prisoners of his whims. Damien, here for the summer from Japan with his wife and two small daughters, was one of several renters who eventually sued Tammaro; he sought to recover $10,400 in rent and some six thousand dollars in stopgap-housing costs. But he says that what truly galled him was the protracted stress and uncertainty: “Michael is heartless and pitiful.”

In mid-August, Tammaro expanded his sales effort to his Facebook page, where his loft grew in the telling to twenty-six hundred square feet. (It was actually eighteen hundred and seventy-five.) Yet all the case management, the constant throughput of new renters to be beguiled and old ones to be placated, was taking its toll. He began conflating story lines. When Lindsey Brake, the cost manager, who had made arrangements entirely by e-mail, came by to get her keys, she saw Tammaro for the first time, sitting in his Mercedes out front. “Michael?” she said, uncertainly. “Yes!” he said, giving her a kiss. “Don’t you remember me?” He told another renter that his father wasn’t doing well—two days after saying that he was dead.

The cops at the Tenth Precinct were growing accustomed to foreigners with Tammaro-related complaints, many of them sent over by Jan Zonon after they rang her bell. The renters often met with Captain Jack Jaskaran, a former supervisor of the city’s Grand Larceny Task Force and an expert in fighting pickpockets. He would tell them that they had a choice: the official route of a complaint, which wouldn’t get them their money back, or street justice. As New Yorkers will, they chose the latter. Jaskaran would then call Tammaro, who would slink over, apologize for the confusion, and offer up some cash as a cost of doing business, the Ponzi part of his scheme.

“I died in Buffalo.”

Saurabh Vardhan, a technology consultant for Ernst & Young who’d transferred from the company’s Mumbai office, was eager for his move-in day. “I’m an aspiring photographer, and I knew I could learn everything from Michael,” he said. “There wasn’t going to be any charge for utilities or cable, and there was a washer-dryer, which in a New York apartment was really jelly on top.” (There wasn’t a washer-dryer.) After signing a lease, and patiently waiting two months (father’s death, followed by fall from scaffolding), Vardhan noticed the apartment for rent again on Craigslist. Tammaro explained that his sister had posted the ad by mistake, but Vardhan finally grew suspicious. Even as he tried to meet Tammaro to get his money back, he set up a counter-sting: he had a female friend make an appointment to see the loft at 2:30 P.M. on August 26th. That day at noon, Vardhan and his friend went to Twentieth Street and spotted Tammaro, bent over his iPhone, walking Tucker. Outside the building, Tucker sniffed Vardhan’s leg and seemed to recognize him, but the photographer was too busy texting Vardhan that he wouldn’t be home until 3 P.M. to notice that he was right beside him.

Bewildered, Vardhan went to the Tenth Precinct to tell his story—and learned the truth from Captain Jaskaran. He then had his friend phone Tammaro, feign perplexity about the address, and ask him to meet her on the street. When Tammaro came down, Vardhan and Jaskaran were waiting. “The captain lost it on him,” Vardhan recalls, “saying, ‘How can you be confused about renting your apartment to more than one person?’ Tammaro became a meek dog.” At the same time, though, the photographer saw Vardhan’s friend standing nearby, and gestured to her to wait. “You know she’s with us, right?” Jaskaran said. “You can’t cheat her, too.”

Vardhan promptly went onto Craigslist, Yelp, and MerchantCircle and blasted Tammaro as a scammer. After helping to set up a Google Group for renters to share their stories, he wrote Tammaro to say that “your name will bring up all information about you in a Google search from now on.” As the pursuit closed in, Tammaro’s tactics grew wilder. He sent Clark Sims, a programmer, an e-mail that purported to be from David Geffen: “I have beenade aware of Michael,s difficulties and I am here to help,” the supposed Geffen wrote from his “dreamworks@gmail” address, adding that “ichael is a talent but has issues.” Sims, who after losing his deposit would spend five months bedding down in a piano studio in Tribeca, responded sternly that Tammaro should devote himself to making a plan for restitution, as his desperate ruses “will be used to prove mens rea (criminal intent) and to impeach your credibility (you habitually lie).”

By Labor Day, the post office was receiving mail for forty-two people in 6-E, and Tammaro’s assistants were tired of lying about his whereabouts and being yelled at in Spanish, French, or Bengali. “Michael would start drinking at 6 P.M.,” his assistant Jean said. “And in the morning there’d be bloodstains on the floor, powder on his desk, bottles and vials everywhere. One of his assistants asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ He went into this crying rant about how his brother is dead, his mother is in prison, he’s battling addiction, and things are about to crash down. The assistant said, ‘Do you need help?’ And Michael said, ‘Yes. I don’t care about people anymore.’ He fronted like a big shot, but he was just lonely. Only the dog loved him.”

That loneliness underpinned his final gambit, the Im the True Victim Here. He asked one renter, “How many Tylenol PM would it take to end it all?,” then told Brita Lombardi that suicide seemed like the only way out: “I’m in nature with tucker and don’t see much of a future for me I have been a bad seed all my life.” With any given victim, Tammaro slowly shifted from an omnicompetent dazzler to a pitiable wretch buffaloed by circumstance. And in this, too, he represented Manhattan, the city that in dreams works beautifully and in daily life is a brutal gantlet.

As the accusatory texts mounted, and Tammaro began preëmptively selling off his furniture, he drew comfort from the renters who still believed in him. Kenny Song and Yvonne Moon, an Asian-American couple in their twenties, had paid Tammaro $3,650, expecting to move in on September 1st. A few days beforehand, sadly, Tammaro’s father died. Song and Moon arranged to meet the photographer at a Starbucks near his apartment on August 30th, and, when he texted to say that he wasn’t home and couldn’t make it, Moon, a sociable barista, replied, “But we have something to give you because your father died!” Tammaro showed up a few minutes later, with his glasses broken and taped, and they presented him with a bouquet of Stargazer lilies. He was so touched that he wrote them a check for $3,650 on the spot.

As it happened, Tammaro was arrested that afternoon—someone finally pressed a complaint at the Tenth Precinct—then released on his own recognizance. When Song and Moon told him that there weren’t any funds in the Citibank account he’d written the check on, he apologized and met them at Starbucks again. He said that he was taking painkillers for his ulcers, but seemed glad to see them. “Everyone was giving him shit then,” Song said later, “and we might have been the only people who were his friends.” The photographer gave them fifteen hundred dollars in cash and wrote another check for the rest; his hand was shaking so badly that Moon had to sign for him. Then he said, “If you need a place to crash, you can always stay with me.”

When that check, from a Chase account, bounced, Tammaro met them at Starbucks for the third day in a row. This time, he pulled up in his Mercedes. Moon recalls, “He had checkbooks all over the back, on the passenger seat, spilling out of the glove compartment. The thing was a rolling checkbook! He gave us eight hundred dollars in cash, then started looking for a checkbook that might work for the balance. Finally, he came to the ‘Michael Tammaro Photographer’ account, and he gave me a pen and said, ‘You write it—this one should work!’ ” Song adds, “But it didn’t.”

Tammaro never realized that Moon and Song were playing him. When he told them that his father had died, they’d checked online and found the scam warnings, which by then were rife. They went to the Tenth Precinct, and Captain Jaskaran specified the threat they should use: “We’ve contacted the police and are ready to press charges, but we’ll give you an opportunity to give us our money back, so you won’t get arrested.” They decided that sympathy would work better. Moon says, “If somebody sympathized with him, he always responded right away.” The lilies were tactical, bought at Whole Foods for ten dollars in the minutes after Moon promised him a gift.

A few days after his arrest, Tammaro moved to an inn in Sag Harbor. His exit strategy, seemingly, was to find a house out there and assemble his book of photographs. At times, he said that it was a Tribeca Film Festival project—but he was not, as he claimed, the festival’s photographer. Rather, his agency contacted filmmakers directly, in the hope that news outlets would pay for the resulting photos. (Nor was he a member of Soho House or a friend of David Geffen’s.) And, while Tammaro romanticized his own artistry, his photographs were mostly portraits that were notable chiefly for their technical assurance, or else pouty pictures of semi-nude men: they exposed flesh without revealing character. His Hamptons escape plan was further hindered by his having alienated local real-estate agents and bounced a $13,700 check for the down payment on a house rental. And, of course, by the fact that the United States has an extradition treaty with Sag Harbor.

Amid the chaos, Tammaro seems to have forgotten that he’d given Douglas and Juliet keys. So he was in Sag Harbor when he got Douglas’s e-mail, on September 9th, saying that he and Juliet had “taken possession” of the apartment, and that if Tammaro attempted to gain access “I will have no choice but to call the police.” The photographer responded with a volley of threats, focussing chiefly on Tucker’s status as a prisoner of war, until Douglas was moved to write “What part of GIVE ME BACK MY MONEY AND I WILL GIVE YOU BACK YOUR APARTMENT do you not understand?”

“If somebody abuses you at work, you always have the option to go home and let it stew in your brain all night.”

Douglas and Juliet decided to host a support group in the apartment for all the renters who’d been ringing the bell. The following night, some ten people came by to eat Thai food, drink wine, commiserate, and explore. Brita Lombardi found a note from Sting that told Tammaro he had to stop blaming his wife for their breach, as both of them preferred the Tammaro who wasn’t on chemicals. And Lindsey Brake found a folder marked “July,” with the leases Tammaro had signed that month; it was an inch thick. While they were prospecting, new victims rang the bell. The next day, Con Edison shut off the power, because Tammaro hadn’t paid his bill, so Douglas and Juliet had to use lanterns. Douglas told me, “Every day in that apartment seemed a hundred hours long, because of the filth.” Juliet added, “And because something happened every hour.”

“In the beginning,” Jan Zonon said, “the people Michael was scamming were Japanese, Koreans, and Pakistanis. When he started with the Americans, Brita in particular, he bit off more than he could chew.” Lombardi made a timeline and a list of victims. On September 12th, she and her husband went downtown with Douglas and Juliet to the district attorney’s office. After Douglas and Juliet detailed the scam for a deputy chief prosecutor named Al Peterson, he said, “I’ve been in this job fifteen years, and I’ve heard everything—but I’ve never heard of the scammee locking the scammer out.” He went on, “I’m going to give you some advice—get out of the apartment. You’re two young people, starting out together, and you don’t want your lives to be about this terrible person.”

Douglas and Juliet moved in with Bishop and Lombardi in an apartment that Lombardi’s father owned, on the Upper West Side. “Brita and Gavin were the best people for us to run into when we were so depressed—the nicest people we’ve ever met,” Juliet says. It was like starting all over again as students. Bishop and Lombardi slept on her childhood futon; another victim, a chef at Jean-Georges, moved in down the hall; and when Lombardi’s father visited he had to bunk down in a sleeping bag in his own living room. They stayed together for several months, bonding in exile. When Douglas proposed to Juliet, in October, he showed Lombardi the ring first.

With the apartment empty, Tammaro promised Jan Zonon that he’d surrender the lease if he could just gather his stuff—and then moved back in. Unaware that the police had executed a search warrant in his absence, he was enraged to find his computer gone, and e-mailed Douglas to ask where it was. “Wow, that must be very inconvenient,” Douglas responded, delighting in their role reversal. “What did this computer look like?” “Fuck you,” Tammaro replied.

On September 24th, thanks to Lombardi’s zeal in pursuing the D.A., he was arrested again. At the lineup, Douglas almost didn’t recognize Tammaro without his driving cap and the cue of his whispery voice. “It was very disorienting,” he told me, “like seeing Chaplin without the mustache and the cane.” A grand jury indicted the photographer on twelve counts of grand larceny and two of a scheme to defraud; eventually, prosecutors located forty-five victims, who’d been relieved of at least a hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars. An unknown tally of others were too embarrassed or despondent to come forward.

Jan Zonon believed that the arrest would end her problems. There was only one person left in the apartment—Tammaro’s friend Jen Gatien was staying for a few days—and she’d promised to leave as soon as Tucker was settled. Yet on September 26th Zonon found the apartment set up like an office; half a dozen workers were in the living room, with their laptops open. Incredulous, she asked, “Who the hell are all you people?”

Gatien, a personable film producer, had met Tammaro in 2011, at the Tribeca Film Festival; she was débuting her documentary “Limelight,” and Tammaro took her photograph. At the festival the following year, Tammaro shot her again and impressed her with his carefree swagger. They struck up a friendship. He took care of her Doberman pinscher when she was travelling—then prevailed on her for a thousand-dollar loan to help establish a defense fund for his brother. (He neglected to mention that John had been convicted three decades earlier.)

In September, Gatien began work on an independent film, starring Robert Forster and Zoë Bell, and Tammaro suggested that she use his apartment as a production office while he was in Sag Harbor. Thrilled by the low-cost opportunity, she gave him twenty-six hundred dollars toward his rent, and, with the apartment empty after Tammaro’s arrest, she moved her staff in. A friend began living in one bedroom, originally to help with the dog-walking. Then Gatien allowed two crew members to sleep over when they were in town. After Zonon failed to shame the squatters with glares in the elevator (and, later, by running across her floor in high heels and blasting a Keith Jarrett CD when they had a loud party), she filed a Notice of Termination in housing court, asking for Tammaro and his subtenants to be evicted. From Rikers Island, Tammaro replied with a threat: he called Zonon’s management agency and left a message saying that if his buzzer, back bathroom, and dishwasher weren’t fixed in two days he would sue. “Or we’ll just turn the water on, and she can pay for the damages underneath. How does this sound?”

Gatien eventually wearied of her morally ambiguous sublet, and got ready to move out at Thanksgiving. (The others stayed on till early January, then left with the thermostat set to ninety-two degrees and the toilets clogged with paper towels.) But, as Tammaro seemed likely to remain in jail for some time, she had to find Tucker a new home. It happened that one of her crew members, Tim Bruno, was crazy about Tucker, so Gatien let him take the dog to upstate New York.

On February 7th, however, at a hearing in New York Supreme Court, Tammaro’s attorney said that he acknowledged defrauding his victims and was pleading guilty to grand larceny in the second degree. Tammaro sat attentively with his hands manacled behind his back. Behind him, Brita Lombardi watched alongside Douglas and Juliet, who’d finally found an apartment, in Queens. They all wore stern expressions. “I want to make sure even Burger King wouldn’t hire him,” Juliet told me.

The prosecutor asked for a prison sentence of two to six years. Instead, Judge Michael Obus told Tammaro that he’d have two years to pay all the victims back, and in the meantime he’d be on “interim probation.” When the Judge asked if he understood that if he failed to make restitution he would go to prison, Tammaro bent forward, and, in his most accommodating voice, said, “I do.” The bailiff unlocked Tammaro’s cuffs, and Lombardi sucked in her breath. “Wow,” she said. “He goes back to the apartment!”

Two weeks later, Tammaro was across the street in housing court to face Jan Zonon. Before the hearing, he slouched on a bench down the hall from the courtroom, attired in a black cap, rimless spectacles, a black jacket, and black leather zip-up boots, like the bad guy in a spaghetti Western. At the other end of the hall, Zonon sat with Douglas and Juliet; for luck, she’d worn her late husband’s socks and slipped her wedding ring back on. In the middle, her lawyer and Tammaro’s sparred about what it would take for the photographer to relinquish the apartment. At one point, Zonon got up to consult with her lawyer and returned in astonishment. “You can’t make this stuff up,” she said. “They wanted to know, if he looks for another apartment, if I would give him a reference.”

Once the lawyers agreed that Zonon wouldn’t respond to any future landlord’s inquiry, and Zonon agreed to waive five months of back rent, Tammaro agreed to clear out, and the judge made it official. Zonon staggered from the courtroom, hugged her lawyer, and burst into tears. Tammaro’s tenancy had cost her more than ninety-five thousand dollars in legal fees alone.

I went over to Tammaro, on his bench, and said, “Michael Tammaro?”

“No,” he replied, instinctively.

“You’d better let me handle this transaction, sir.”

I introduced myself, handed him a business card, and explained that I had spoken with many of his renters, and that I was curious to hear his side of the story. He remained bent over his iPhone, never looking up.

Knowing that he was about to lose his base camp, Tammaro sought to rebuild both financially and emotionally. When he got out of prison and discovered that Tucker was gone, his wrath was so intense that Jen Gatien finally told him she’d given the dog to Tim Bruno. In an e-mail, Bruno told Tammaro that he and his son adored their new pet, and pleaded to keep him. Tammaro replied with thanks, but said, “Tucker is like my child.” Bruno responded with a startling admission: three weeks earlier, Tucker “ran into the road and a car struck him, he died instantly.” Bruno added that he had withheld this vital detail, “one because I don’t want to break [Tammaro’s] heart with tragic news, and two I had heard that when in jail he threatened to kill Jen if anything happened to his dog.” While many readers of those e-mails might be skeptical of Bruno’s account, particularly as he didn’t include his last name in the correspondence, Tammaro seemed convinced. He warned Gatien that he’d tell every producer she had ever worked with that she stole from him, and threatened to start a blog called “Jen Gatien Killed My Dog.”

But Gatien had an unsought tactical advantage. She had left a book of starter checks behind in Tammaro’s apartment, and within two weeks of his release he had removed about twenty-four hundred dollars from her account. After Gatien told prosecutors her story, he was arrested again, and later indicted on eight counts of forgery and grand larceny.

On March 6th, Tammaro was back before Judge Obus. Sporting a tonsure that made him look like Christopher Lloyd, he addressed the Judge, twisting forward in an attitude of innocence. “It’s—I wouldn’t do it. I mean, you have been so kind to me—why would I blow that for a couple of hundred dollars of checks? . . . It makes no sense.” It was a convincing speech. Julie Tammaro, without seeking to excuse her son, says, “I really think he believes, in his diseased mind, he had no intention of scamming people.”

Obus, glaring down and calling Tammaro’s swift return to his courtroom “quite amazing,” remanded him to custody. The photographer pleaded not guilty, but there remained the strong possibility that he could be sentenced to prison for the apartment scam as early as the next hearing, on June 6th.

Tammaro did have a bit of satisfaction, perhaps. In March, he’d installed a friend from Rikers in the apartment, with the explanation that he was helping pack up. No packing got done, however, and later that month Zonon marched downstairs to interrupt what she suspected was a drug deal. There were three men in the loft, and she could see that both beds had been slept in. “This place has been a turnstile for riffraff!” she thundered. “It stops now. Meet me downstairs in half an hour with the keys!” Cowed, they did, and after twenty years the apartment was finally vacant. The walls were banged up, the floors scuffed, a bathroom sink had somehow gone missing, and the whole place—stripped of its keepsakes and lies, its romance—now seemed shabby and small.

Clark Sims, the programmer, eventually retreated to a condo in Charlotte, North Carolina, which, to his surprise, was just as advertised: “I had this picture that it would be a burnt-out shell of a building.” Nyx Kanne, the transgender artist, told me, “I ended up moving back to Richmond and starting over on someone’s couch.” She had lost fifty-six hundred dollars to Tammaro and spent the rest of her savings on storage and dog kennels as she waited: “It’s completely fucked up my life.”

Tammaro’s victims often came to see him as a test administered by Manhattan itself, an appraisal of their moxie. Saurabh Vardhan said, “There was the anger not just at the scammer but at myself for being so stupid. I was overly accommodating of his father passing away—you’ve got to be a lot more cynical in New York.” Brita Lombardi still hasn’t found a new place with her husband or had her back surgery, but she remained feisty: “My dream is, Tammaro has to auction off his possessions because he’s so broke, and I buy some of his photos and then write him a letter: ‘I love your image of so-and-so. And it’s mine now!’ ”

Kenny Song and Yvonne Moon, who got most of their money back and who eventually found a sublet in Alphabet City, treat their experience as a rite of passage, and have even talked about visiting Tammaro in jail. They probably won’t, though. Time passes, lives resume, and the summer of Michael Tammaro becomes an anecdote, a measure of the tangible frustrations and elusive joys of this teeming and impossible city. “It was a very, very nice apartment,” Holly Van Straten, who ended up moving into a one-bedroom she shares with a roommate two nights a week, said. “But all one hundred of us wouldn’t have fit into the same bedroom.” ♦