On March 11th, 2024, Howard Elliot Marchetti — the owner and sole managing member of Marchetti Residential Holdings, a 14-building, 380-unit rent-stabilized portfolio across the Bronx and Upper Manhattan — was arrested and charged with grand larceny in the first degree, offering a false instrument for filing, scheme to defraud, and rent overcharge violations after regulators uncovered seven years of fraudulent renovation filings. Investigators found Marchetti had submitted Major Capital Improvement and Individual Apartment Improvement applications claiming renovations that were either partially completed or never done at all, using invoices from a construction company controlled by his own family and reusing "renovation completed" photographs from a handful of genuine model units across dozens of unrelated apartments, generating $3.8 million in illegal rent overcharges to roughly 340 tenants. The scheme was uncovered after a tenant organizing committee, formed originally over unrelated heating complaints, compared notes and filed a joint overcharge complaint, triggering inspections that found original 1980s fixtures still installed in units whose filings claimed complete recent renovations. Marchetti was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in state prison and permanently barred from owning or managing rent-stabilized property in New York City. ––– Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.