Furniture store owner who ran two illegal migrant shelters busted for starting third pop-up hostel in abandoned library: NYPD
A Queens furniture store owner busted this week for running two illegal boarding shelters for West African migrants — including one housing dozens in a cramped, hazardous basement — also operated a third pop-up hostel in an abandoned library, The Post has learned.
But Ebou Sarr, 47, was busted for that, too, back in January.
When cops found the wannabe franchiser inside the chained-up Old Fordham Library in the Bronx, he told officers they were walking into “our migrant shelter,” court documents state.
“I run it,” Sarr told police, according to a criminal complaint. “I help these people because they have nowhere to go. Shelters won’t accept us. I have proof of residency from the mayor … I have a business up the street, but this is where I live.”
Cops hit him with two counts of trespassing.
But the charges — which he must answer in court April 16 — don’t seem to have deterred the Senegalese immigrant, who argued he took matters into his own hands because the city wasn’t stepping up.
“It was a place that I think is empty, and it’s safe for us to put our people. We were trying to get the city to give us that library. It’s been there for so many years,” Sarr told The Post Thursday.
“Places like that, they can put the people in. Fix the place and put the people in there.”
Sarr charged $300 per month to the more than 70 men who slept in shifts at his packed makeshift shelter on the first floor and in the basement of a South Richmond Hill furniture store — shuttered by city officials Tuesday due to “severe overcrowding and hazardous fire trap conditions.”
Migrants who stayed at a Bronx cellphone store where Sarr ran another hostel — in what the city on Wednesday deemed “hazardous life-threatening conditions” — also said they coughed up $300 monthly.
“It was hard,” Fallou Seye, 29, said of scraping together the $600 total he told The Post he paid Sarr to sleep in an overcrowded basement with about 45 other people, two to a bed.
“We had no bathroom; we had to go to Planet Fitness to take a shower,” said Seye, who arrived in the US from Senegal six months ago and first stayed with his sister.
The father of four then had to leave and lived on the streets, until a friend told him about Sarr’s. He works as a deliveryman for an app, but business has been slow.
“He gave us food, only one meal per day, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said of Sarr.
While running the ad hoc hostels, Sarr — who said the $300 rent was a donation, and he never took more than what the migrants could afford — seemed to be scouting a third location: the century-old library.
He insisted to The Post that he hadn’t broken into the abandoned building at 2556 Bainbridge Ave. when cops found him there around 6:40 p.m. Jan. 14 — though he admitted he also didn’t get permission to go inside.
“I’m gonna take this to the news,” he told cops as they busted him, according to the complaint.
On Thursday, remnants of his endeavor littered the property.
Four brand-new, still-wrapped mattresses sat inside the rooms, which were cluttered with garbage and reeked of urine.
Workers had installed metal bars on the basement and first-floor windows, and padlocks decorated the double doors facing Marion Avenue.
Sarr said he not only plans to fight the trespassing charges, but wants to sue the NYPD afterward.
“We’ve lost a lot of money in that place because they took us out and didn’t give us a chance to get our properties,” he said. “The guys lost their stuff. It was safe and that’s why we chose that place. It’s a big building.”
Migrants ordered to vacate Sarr’s improvised boarding houses by the city this week also had to abandon their belongings, and many said they were forced to sleep out on the streets or in the subways.
“It was nice inside. He [was] good to me,” said Bamba Ndiaye, 42, as he returned to the converted furniture store in Queens to pick up his possessions.
The married dad of three kids back in Senegal arrived in the US in August and got work washing dishes at a Brooklyn restaurant two months ago, which is when he started renting at Sarr’s.
“I’m going to go to my job and hope for the best,” he said Wednesday morning as he left empty-handed.
Back at Sarr’s other makeshift motel in the Bronx the next day, frustrated migrants also waited to get their personal belongings out of the now-closed-off building.
Bamba Ndeyhe, 30, told The Post that he needed to retrieve his passport and immigration documents — but nobody from the city buildings department has come to let him in.
Ndeyhe forked over $900 to stay at Sarr’s place, but he hated every second, noting, like Seye, that he only got one meal a day from the sneaky landlord, and was sent to shower at Planet Fitness because the shuttered cellphone store had no water.
When asked if he was treated well, Ndeyhe simply replied: “No.”
Sarr admitted sending his tenants to the tiny gym across East Kingsbridge Road to shower, claiming he gave them all memberships and that he’d done the same thing himself for a year while living in the building.
Neighbors didn’t love the arrangement, either.
There were quarrels about where Sarr’s tenants’ copious amounts of garbage ended up. And several neighbors felt he was raking in cash from hopeless migrants with few other options.
“He was taking advantage of those people,” one neighbor told The Post. “At least, if you want to take them and charge the money, let them live like human beings. I think he played with their mind.”
A woman named Tricia, who braids hair at a nearby salon, was much more blunt.
“He is no good,” she said of Sarr.
“I think he is a scammer.”
Sarr brushed off the comments Thursday.
“People can say whatever they want to say,” he said.
“They have their opinion. But the people that was with me wouldn’t say that.
“They don’t know nothing.”
