Illustration: Federico Yankelevich
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I’m finishing dinner one night in July 2021 at my cousin David’s house in Westchester. He’s away, so the house is empty save for me and my husband, Mike. My phone pings with an email from our building manager down in the city. I almost skip it, but we’ve got an apartment there that we’ve just rented to a new tenant, and I glance down and click.
“Han and Leo have been doing demolition at your loft,” it reads. “Assuming you’re okay with this.”
What? This makes no sense. And who’s Leo?
It’s been two weeks since that new tenant, whose name is Han Lo, moved in. He was a 38-year-old architect with a wide smile and sturdy bank account. His LinkedIn had shown us a serious education: B.A. from Harvard, an M.S. in France, a Ph.D. underway in London, memberships in the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects, both of which require professional and educational verification. His website connects him to an award-winning start-up called Tatami, specializing in affordable modular housing. Best of all, he could pass our co-op board of five.
Our floor-through apartment on Bond Street is my luckiest business decision and my only retirement fund. I got it in 1993, when comparatively few people wanted to live there. Crack vials on the stoop, dealers around the corner on Bleecker, plywood floorboards, and a really rough bath. (How rough? When friends came over, they’d secretly slip out to use a bathroom at a café down the street.) NYU’s map for freshmen marked our block as too dangerous to walk down, a vestige of pre-gentrified lower Manhattan, and with help from my dad on a down payment, the apartment came at a price a young person could afford. It’s in the David S. Jones House, one of the first townhouses on Bond, built about 200 years ago in the 1820s. Our youngest child grew up at the loft. Our older two lived with us there for years.
Now, with Mike and me at the other end of our careers, the space means everything to us, both emotionally and financially. Years ago, when my husband’s work took us to Kenya for a few years, we hired a contractor and turned it into a hipper, funkier pad, worthy of its address, while still maintaining its historic bones. By the time we returned, the neighborhood had gotten an upgrade, and our loft had too. Since our daughter went off to college, we moved to southeastern Connecticut and rented it out. Because I lost my job in the pandemic and Mike is looking for work, the apartment is now our principal source of income. Although it is usually occupied by a tenant, it’s also a business, Bond Street Loft, rentable as an occasional set for commercials, movies, and TV shows seeking tin-ceilings-and-industrial-windows authenticity. Scenes for the films Winter Passing and When in Rome were shot there. More recently, Martin Scorsese directed Timothée Chalamet in a Chanel ad and Sofia Coppola shot On the Rocks there. We split the location fees with tenants and put them up at a good hotel during shoots; everyone wins.
Because the apartment was, at the time, designated “Artist in Residence” by the city, it (technically) mandated that tenants work in the creative arts. Our building also requires they have the ability to pay a decent Bond Street rent. Han meets both criteria and says the right things to us. “It’s like I’ve found the last bastion of true artists in Noho,” he told me at one point. He’d shown documentation and bank statements, I’d checked references, and the co-op board and I waved him through. About our only point of contention was the start date, because he was so eager to move in. Almost all of our renters still love the vibe of a downtown space that, unlike so much of our neighborhood, hasn’t been completely stripped of its character. I’d thought Han Lo was one of them.
After hearing from the building manager, we get into the car to speed into Manhattan. Zinging down the FDR in the dark, I phone an architect friend, Zhenya Merkulova. “I’ll be right there!” she says after my panicked briefing. I envision her stiletto boots clicking across the cobblestones of Bond Street and feel instant relief. She too went to Harvard. She knows the architecture world, and has nerves of cast iron. Maybe she can help us make sense of what’s going on.
We park in front of our loft and are aghast. In the alley that runs alongside our building and up to the next block at Great Jones, mountains of debris are piled against the brick walls: broken two-by-fours, shards of drywall, shattered doors. I recognize parts of my daughter’s room and a closet built when the artist Neville Wakefield was living there for his then-girlfriend, the actress Minnie Driver. Stunned, we start taking photos.
Zhenya arrives. Together we go up to the second floor. Mike knocks, almost pounding in his anxiety. A young man — Leo, we infer — unlocks and then opens the door. “Han is sleeping and doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he says. “It’s an emergency,” Mike replies. Reluctantly, Leo stands aside and gestures for us to come in.
Toward the front, our apartment is open, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. To the rear are clustered four bedrooms, several closets, and a pair of baths. Or rather, were.
“Oh my God, what have you done?” I am almost screaming. The walls of the first bedroom are gone. So is our daughter’s former bedroom across the hall. So is her closet. Bookshelves are ripped out. An entire wall of the master bedroom is missing, along with all the doors. A two-by-four hangs from a possibly live electrical wire, which is dangling like the tail of a dead cat. Even the thermostats and baseboards have been stripped. Only one bedroom of the four is intact. On the white marble counter of the open kitchen lie six or seven tools neatly arranged by size, including a power drill, a hammer, and a handsaw. I wander back into the mess, dazed and distraught, trying to take photos in the dark while also calling 911.
Soon I hear shouting at the front by the kitchen, then the slamming of a door. I rush forward.
Black eyes, dark hair, Han is blocking the exit, standing with his hands on his hips, like a big fat X. I realize I am alone with him, as Mike has run downstairs to fetch his phone and Zhenya is outside, her leather jacket caught between door and frame.
“So, now you want to leave?” he says menacingly.
“Yes, I do,” I say, keeping my voice as even as I can. He stands in front of me, clenching and unclenching his square jaw, considering. What feels like minutes pass.
“Fine,” he says, finally, and lets me out.
Zhenya crouches there in the hallway, cradling her hands, her jacket released. “He attacked me,” she tells me and Mike, who has come running back up. The building manager arrives as well. “He punched me in the face and slammed my hands in the door,” Zhenya continues. Her fingers are swelling and turning red. “I didn’t want to leave you alone in there with that guy, so I waited by the door. I told him it wasn’t his home, and he went berserk.”
By now Mike has also called 911, and the cops soon arrive. We describe what happened and show them the piles of debris in the alley; they hold up their flashlights so we can take better photos. Zhenya shows them her swelling fingers and they ask her if she wants to file a complaint. “Not now — I just want to go home,” she replies, not yet realizing the extent of her injuries. “If you change your mind,” they tell her, “go to the precinct in the morning.”
The apartment as it appeared before demolition, with a previous resident’s furniture and art.
Photo: Courtesy of Suzanne Seggerman
The officers go in to speak with Han and Leo. When they emerge almost half an hour later, a summit conference takes place at the threshold. One of the cops is shaking his head. “This is a matter for Housing Court,” he says. Han now is all smiles, having completely changed channels. Smirking and looking at Mike, he says: “Why don’t your lawyers sit down with my lawyers around a table. That’s how this usually works.” With a pandemic eviction moratorium in force and a two-year backlog at Housing Court, he knows that he has us. Is he looking for a payout? We don’t have the money for that.
Zhenya heads home to ice her hands. We go back to David’s, up in Westchester. Mike drives as I Google, frantically checking our tenant’s background again: LinkedIn, website, awards, education, his Instagram with “art photos” ostensibly befitting an architect. On a hunch I Google his name and “housing court.” “Oh shit,” I say.
Mike clenches the wheel: “What?”
I read aloud an online article from dnainfo.net. “Han Lo, 32, checked into …” According to the article, published in 2016, Lo moved into the New York Edition hotel, in the Gramercy area, then racked up a $13,000 tab and refused to leave for nearly two months. Police finally arrested and removed him. So it’s not just us. I keep searching housing-court records to see if he might have been involved in other such cases. A Han Lo was sued, in 2006, in New York Supreme Court. There are several entries for the same woman as plaintiff, including a default judgment for $53,647 in unpaid bills. The next day I find her on Facebook. “Han Lo, what a nightmare,” she replies, asking me not to use her name, and ends our conversation. “I want nothing to do with that guy ever again.”
Bedroom and closet, before … Suzanne Seggerman.
Bedroom and closet, before … Suzanne Seggerman.
… and after.
Photo: John Maher.
Soon thereafter, Zhenya texts from urgent care: A finger bone on each hand is fractured, and one may need surgery. “We will take care of you, whatever happens,” I assure her. Zhenya checks the Harvard database and finds no evidence that our tenant ever attended; it turns out he did attend an adult-education class at the extension school in the early aughts. Zhenya also checks the public records of all 50 states and confirms that he is not licensed to practice architecture anywhere in the U.S. and thus legally can’t call himself an architect. Then she puts out feelers to her architecture friends. He doesn’t appear to be enrolled in architecture school in London. I don’t bother with France. Following a trail of Cambridge and Boston addresses, I discover that Boston Architectural College had a Han Lo as well, who “enrolled but never matriculated.”
Eventually I come across a previous address for Lo on Bedford Street in the West Village, an apartment that rented for $20,000 a month. Soon I’m on the phone with its owner, Justin Bradburn, a finance guy, former British infantry officer, combat veteran, and trained sniper. “I’ve been chasing this guy for years,’ he tells me in his British lilt, crisp and succinct. “He’s got victims around the world. I think he’s done this everywhere.”
For close to an hour, he tells me how Lo moved into his Bedford Street townhouse, ripped out expensive fixtures, stopped paying rent, and refused to leave. When confronted, Lo threatened Justin with physical harm via email if they didn’t “work things out with our lawyers.” When he tried to confront Lo on Bedford Street, Lo refused to come to the door. I have no idea what Justin said to Lo, but within a month, Lo had fled. Justin says Lo now owes him more than $165,000 in legal fees, back rent, and repairs. “My lawyer, David Skaller, is a bit of an animal,” Bradburn tells me, and I’m envious. “This guy is a nightmare tenant,” I say. “More like a monster tenant,” Justin replies. He tells me how he’s tracked Han Lo “from New York to Tokyo to London to Zurich and then finally back to New York,” and now to me. We agree to meet up. Hanging up, I think: If Lo was able to dupe this guy, maybe I’m not such a rube.
Medium height and fit, with a brisk, amiable manner, Justin regales and horrifies us in equal measure. A strategy emerges, with Justin tracking location, Suzanne uncovering victims, and Zhenya deep-diving into the worlds of art and architecture. Our motley little band of amateur crimefighters is launched.
I should say here that I too have a past. I have made some serious mistakes in my life. In 2001, my father left my mother, my three siblings, and me a surprise inheritance in a Swiss bank account. After some consideration, we hid it, as he had. When my name came up on a list of American clients at Swiss banking giant UBS in 2009, I came clean on everything, and I’ve endured the consequences: four months’ incarceration and a hefty IRS tab almost three times my original inheritance. My shame is surpassed only by my regret. But the experience left me with a fresh set of contacts in the criminal-justice system. Justin has his own experience dealing with bad guys. And Zhenya, a real architect, has resolve.
I soon confirm some of Justin’s discoveries and make more of my own. Han Lo was a member of Manhattan Community Board 3. I find his name on the Metropolitan Museum’s Young Friends Apollo Circle, as well as at MoMA’s Junior Associates, a list of donors to the Whitney, and a host of others. He’s been in partnerships with prominent architects who were named as co-defendants when he was sued for yet another debt in 2019. I bet they had no idea what they were walking into either.
Han Lo, in the apartment.
Photo: New York County Clerk’s office
Justin shared that Lo usually travels with his “precious architectural book collection” and “his fussy furniture.” When moving into our loft, he seemed to have brought little except a bed frame and a mattress delivered from a store down on Broadway. Eventually, I find a listing for Han Lo, age 38, in in Chinatown through June 2021. The same apartment as his parents.
They turn out to be fairly accomplished. Sun-chang Lo has a fine career as an artist and architect, and Jean Lo is apparently a real-estate agent. A person of that name had, in fact, sent Han’s documents to my broker, telling her that she was his aunt. Justin and I discover that the bank and financial statements Han had provided each of us are almost identical, except for a few digits and dates two years apart — a technical impossibility. Same near match with the bank statements, at around $500,000. I also received his 1040 form and a housing application, which showed an income over $3 million a year and lists his profession as “architect.” Now it all looks suspect to me.
Other hints, if chiefly psychological, come from Han himself. On his Instagram account, I find a photo of a real-estate lawyer’s ad displaying the words NIGHTMARE TENANTS. There is also something else on this front, and it’s telling. In my distress, I share the gruesome story with a friend. “It sounds like Pacific Heights,” she says. “That movie from the ’90s where a psychopath moves into this couple’s house and starts tearing it down.”
As seen on Han Lo’s Instagram account: “Nightmare Tenants.”
Photo: Courtesy of Suzanne Seggerman
Then I remember: Just before Lo had signed the lease, he’d failed to respond to a question promptly, and I’d e-mailed to say that I didn’t like tenants who don’t communicate well, joking about the prospect of a new Netflix series called “The Ghost Tenant.” “Haha,” he wrote back. “Sounds like a great show — I’d watch! Although perhaps not as scary as that other classic tenant horror movie Pacific Heights.”
Clearly, I need a lawyer, though I can’t afford “an animal” like Justin’s. But with my background, I have a good list. David Tendler, deliberate and even-keeled, recommends an aggressive response and files an immediate TRO, or Temporary Restraining Order, forcing Han to stop his demolition. A few days after Han is served, we stop by our building and encounter new piles of debris in the alley — looks like pieces of the furnace closet. Tendler tells us we’ll pursue a contempt-of-court judgment for defying the order. Meanwhile, Zhenya has filed a complaint for the assault. Justin recommends she carry Mace.
One day during all of this, Silicon Valley calls. A major tech company that scouted the loft some months ago for a product launch wants to go ahead. An Oscar-winning director is lined up. An alternate location has fallen through and they are committed. “This guy is trouble,” I warn the location manager, John Maher. The crew has met Lo as they prepare to shoot –- and he has been charming and cooperative. Our lawyer gives the thumbs-up. I say a prayer and carry on.
The scene that greeted the film crew.
Photo: John Maher.
Filming begins in early August with the undertaking known as “prep day.” John arrives to find chaos. Though the shoot location in the front of the loft by the windows is miraculously untouched, metal beams, doorframes, and trash bags of construction debris are piled high next to the door. In back, a pipe is leaking, damaged when the wall supporting a heater was torn out. The room is sodden and floorboards are already warping. We call in an emergency plumber. As our film contract stipulates, Han and Leo have been put up in the Bowery Hotel during the two-day shoot — two days, at least, when the loft is safe — and the location scout grabs photos of the destruction. While I call the police to make a “destruction of property” complaint, Leo posts a photo on Instagram of a sunset shot from the Bowery Hotel. An Officer Kafka (his real name!) arrives on the scene. After I fill him in and show him the TRO, he seems ready to make an arrest, but then after many calls to many superiors, he says, eponymously, “Sorry, my boss says it’s not possible. This is a matter for Housing Court,” a phrase I am now hearing in my sleep.
Shortly after Han and Leo check into the hotel, our lawyers’ process server gives him a Notice of Termination of Lease. It triggers instant fury. Lo hurls enraged texts and emails at my lawyer, and also at John, the location manager. But he saves his best shot for the day of filming. Just as the director is about to arrive, Lo texts and orders everyone out. They are trespassing, he informs the crew, and he’s going to call the cops unless he, personally, receives his part of the location fee, plus half of mine. “Just to be clear, it’s not about me getting more money but about her getting less,” Lo texts John. “Suzanne has to pay for her actions … Especially since she took advance [sic] of the situation to serve me at the Bowery.” It’s a shakedown, and in order to preserve my relationship with the production team, I quickly decide to forgo his share, which constitutes his August rent. Lo shows up, they cut him a check, and he flees, just as the famed director is ushered in. The ad is spectacular.
Before traveling in mid-August, we install a motion-sensor Ring security camera in the hallway outside the loft. Because they are usually peering at their phones when they arrive to open their new high-tech lock, Han and Leo don’t spot the blue blinking sensor as it captures them coming and going.
Han Lo, recorded by security cameras as he removed demolition debris from the apartment. Courtesy of Suzanne Seggerman.
Han Lo, recorded by security cameras as he removed demolition debris from the apartment. Courtesy of Suzanne Seggerman.
Continuing to scour the internet, I unearth victim after victim — and call them all. Pentagram, the preeminent graphic-design firm, sued Lo in 2019 and got a judgment for $188,000 after he failed to pay his bill. A landlord and music producer in Los Angeles got a default judgment for $26,000. Luxigon, another design firm, is chasing him for $12,000.
In late August, Zhenya, having filed her assault complaint, goes in to pick Lo out of a photo lineup. Afterward, we both start calling and texting the detective, asking when police will act on the warrant for his arrest. The detective says that shortly after the lineup, he asked Lo to turn himself in. He also reported that he had gone to the loft and rung the buzzer; no one answered. We couldn’t find that on any building security-camera footage — and I had given them the thumbs-up to break the door down. (I still wonder why they didn’t arrest him the night of the attack; there was an arrest warrant out for him for the Edition Hotel debt.)
Then, on August 30, the Ring goes off. I check and see Leo sweeping plaster dust from the loft into the hallway. As he pushes out the dirt, he looks up directly at the blinking blue light — and his look suggests that for the first time he understands that he’s been seen. Perhaps the two of them now know we can inform the cops whether they are in, or perhaps they have simply found a new scam elsewhere that is not a dirt-filled demolition site. The next time we spot Han Lo on camera, 72 hours later, the two are headed out, scurrying down the wide stairs with a large computer monitor and several bags. They are gone, presumably for good, a full 21 months before the end of Lo’s two-year lease. The relief is beyond measure.
Later that day, our building manager emails all members of the co-op, who have been on red alert since the night of Lo’s attack on Zhenya, as he lives among them while this sordid story unfolds. “I just saw an older Asian couple leaving the apt with tool boxes,” he reports. “They said they were ‘cleaning’ the apartment for Han.” That day, they remove the digital lock and put back the deadbolt. Though both wear hats and masks and keep their heads down, there is one full-face photo caught on the Ring as a delivery man picks up the two-month-old mattress. He looks a lot like Han’s father. (Justin reports that a woman who looked like Han’s mom cleared out his place, too.) The co-op votes to change the locks to the front doors of our building, and we place a notice on the front door to that effect, making keys available to all tenants and owners, as is required by our lease.
None of us can shake the question: Why? It doesn’t feel to me like he’s tethered to the world in the same way as the rest of us, existing in a place part fantasy, part rage. “He wants to be living in a chic apartment without having to pay,” says Justin. Yet if he were simply trying to stay there indefinitely without paying, he wouldn’t have torn out the walls, and the film shoots would have made it a bargain. My own theory is that he’s desperate to be seen as a person of consequence — as a visionary architect, a groundbreaking real-estate entrepreneur, with the right education and taste and the right books and furniture. But without the discipline to do the work, any authentic talent he might have is squandered as he bolts at the first roadblock or erupts in a rage. Natasha Jen of Pentagram remarks that after he got an eviction notice from the Colonial, “he destroyed the apartment over a Sunday night.” It’s almost like an adult tantrum — but with adult consequences, like court cases and arrest warrants.
And what of the parents? His mother hands over the rental applications, and surely she must suspect that he never attended any of these schools and doesn’t have that kind of money. Zhenya discovers nonworking web sites for Jean’s companies, although she has a real-estate license and has recorded recent sales in their building. She certainly doesn’t seem to be a criminal mastermind, and neither does her husband. Are they afraid of him? Do they mop up his messes to protect him or themselves? Or is he telling them the same stories we’ve been hearing?
Mike and I still have to go through the eviction process to regain possession and pursue damages. Lo makes a counterclaim that the loft was “uninhabitable.” (Our photos, date-stamped the days before he moved in, show that it was in great shape.) As far as we know, he has not shown up for previous legal proceedings. He does come to one hearing, held virtually during the pandemic, then ghosts the next one; his lawyer says she doesn’t know where he is. Our lawyer David Tendler’s final salvo is unequivocal, with 67 exhibits, including the social-media posts, the dramatic before and after photos, a list of other victims, and persuasive language, “Lo lived up to his Instagram post. He is indeed the Nightmare Tenant.” We work out a deal to release the apartment back to us, whereupon his lawyer resigns. We never learn why. (Because he doesn’t respond, the case officially remains open.) Soon, we see new Instagram photos of an apartment in L.A. Down in the comments, someone writes: “Get off my roof.”
Eventually, with the help of a New York reporter, James Walsh, I’m able to piece together more about his life, spanning a wide geography. He’s left a long trail.
Rory Barish, a Los Angeles real-estate broker and president of the board of a building in West Hollywood, is succinct when reached by phone: “God, hopefully he’s in jail right now.” The building, known as the Colonial — former home of Clark Gable, Bette Davis, and more recently Katy Perry — is architecturally distinguished, but, Barish says, Lo “destroyed the apartment, throwing moldings out the window … gutted it. He pulled out everything from light sockets to fixtures to walls. There was a fireplace taken out. Everything.” And, she explains, “this is a 1928 historic building under the Mills Act” — that is, it’s all protected. “I walked in and almost cried.” Worse yet, Barish said, “he bragged about it,” putting pictures on Instagram. Lo’s friends treated it as a joke, commenting “something about [a] dinner party before Lo gets evicted.” The whole experience, Rory says, “was violating.” Barish also discovered that the organization Open House NY, where Han Lo had claimed to be executive director of a Los Angeles division in order to make his way into the Colonial — going as far as to build a website, now apparently deleted, attesting to his job there — had never heard of him.
Former closets and bedroom walls, in the alley next to the building.
Photo: Courtesy of Suzanne Seggerman
Barish, like us, had been looking at Lo’s Instagram and noticed some furniture made by a woodworking shop founded by the actor Nick Offerman. Turns out, Lo has scammed him too. Offerman’s group works closely with a non-profit that teaches L.A.’s Skid Row residents to build high-end furniture in the primitive style of Italian designer Enzo Mari, and “Han Lo fell in love with that,” said Matt Micucci, a woodworker and fireman who worked there. Han put in an order, wired only a down payment, then disappeared, leaving a tab for “the furniture that these artisans off Skid Row have made with their blood, sweat, and tears.”
Eventually our list reaches more than a dozen more victims, nearly all with similar experiences, most of them bursting with a desire to talk. Many of them are unaware of all the others. “Oh my gosh! I’ve been trying to track this guy down for so long,” said a former business partner of his in L.A. who asked not to be named. Another, a former friend named Kev O’Sullivan, found it ‘”weirdly cathartic” to get the call. Takeshi Soshi, a former colleague in Tokyo, added, ”I hope no one will ever have the same experience as me.” Han had eventually coaxed him into investing more than ¥3 million — about $20,000 — in a modular-housing start-up. Soshi was skeptical of the idea itself, believing it ”an idea that was already obsolete,” but Lo charmed and persuaded him into writing a check. Whatever existed of that company quickly burned through his investment and others’; Lo put pressure on Soshi to bring in more investors and charged his WeWork rent to Soshi’s credit card. Eventually he took off for Los Angeles, leaving Soshi’s number as his Tokyo apartment’s emergency contact. Soon Soshi was fielding calls because Lo hadn’t paid rent before leaving. Unsurprisingly, Soshi has never seen any payout.
The cleanup begins.
Photo: John Maher.
Many shared their experiences of how Han Lo originally presented himself as extremely wealthy, though no one was ever sure what he did for a living. “He was always the one who paid for dinners or drinks,“ says another Tokyo investor, Paul Chen, who also lost 5 million yen on that same modular-housing start-up. “He invited me to Michelin-starred restaurants,” says Soshi. “Makes seven figures a year,” a former business partner in L.A. added, “but unclear how.” There was ubiquitous talk of “something about real estate” in “London, Paris, Hong Kong, L.A., New York.” Also a lot of bragging about his “social connections” and “network.” Always there were the references to Harvard, to his work as an architect and in philanthropy. “He had his own charity,” recalls a former boyfriend who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
Sayeed Choudhury, who leased an apartment to Lo in New York, told us about “two months of payment, then ghosts.” Others tell of more: “Six months of no payment,” and ”at some point he just stopped paying rent.” They each got excuses about cash coming in shortly: “All these emails of bullshit,” one said. And others: “The wire never came through,” “the infamous wire,” “it’s coming, it’s coming.”
They also describe how the charisma eventually turned into rage and menace, just as it had with me. Ultimately, his victims would begin to figure out what was going on, and the slick façade would fracture. “None of it really made sense,” says the ex-boyfriend, “and he just got really controlling and just, I don’t know, kind of psycho.” Similar descriptions abound: “A tyrant,” one says. “He has demons.” “The monster would come out.” He would rage; ”I cannot be involved with this guy,” says an ex-boyfriend. A landlord in L.A. is precise: “He really knew what he was doing. I’m sure he has done this many times.” Pentagram’s Natasha Jen offers a sentiment we heard from many others: “He has to be in jail.” Instead, he flees, usually abroad. After he wrecked the Colonial apartment, Barish recalls, “he left at 11 o’clock one night, and … the next thing, there was an Instagram of him in Japan.” Justin saw him move on to Tokyo, London, and other European cities. After he skipped out on me, it was L.A. and then Basel and Japan.
Most who have encountered him want to put the Han Lo experience behind them. There are a few exceptions, however; Zhenya wants him thrown out of the architecture field, to the extent that he’s in it, on principle. Rory Barish wants to make sure it doesn’t happen to others. Justin continues to track him because he wants his money back, but barring that, “wants a court case that will haunt him for life.”
Finally, we reach Han Lo’s younger brother, Dan, who runs a family dry-cleaning business in Queens. He seldom sees Han but sends a birthday message every year. Sometimes he hears back, Dan tells us, and occasionally picks up tidbits about his brother’s opulent life. “He’s very, very good with people, in an, I dunno, unbelievable way … I mean I just think that everything he does is slightly duplicitous.” He too doesn’t understand how Han sustains that life: “How does he even have all this money? I work seven days a week and I don’t have his lifestyle.” Han once brought his clothes to his brother to be dry-cleaned, and “his stuff was filthy — it’s like he didn’t clean it.” Had he been doing more demolition somewhere? Unlikely, Dan says, but for an unexpected reason. “He’s not strong enough to do that kind of thing.”
Although he explains that they’re not a close or warm family, Dan confirms that his brother is in touch with his mother, and she seems to believe Han’s stories. “It’s surprising to me that my mom said he graduated,” Dan says. “How’s that possible?” Their father, he explains, “can’t stand living with him. So if he has stayed with him, it’s very short-term.” The relationship may be complicated by the fact that “they’re both explosive tempers. There have been periods where they don’t speak to each other for several years, and then they’re buddy-buddy.” Neither Jean nor Sun-chang responded to efforts to contact them. Neither did Han himself, although he took down his public social-media pages shortly after we messaged him.
In the video above, we saw Han and Leo as they moved out.
Once we get our apartment back, our slow recovery begins. We burn sage to scrub the loft of his presence. Mike and I put a mattress on the floor in the front of the loft, away from the demolition site, and use Han and Leo’s empty Prada boxes as nightstands, camping out while we figure out next steps. Fortunately, we are insured, and with the payout we rebuild the basic interior of the apartment, with two bedrooms instead of four. The insurance does not cover full reconstruction or any of the bookshelves and closets they ripped out, but it’s enough to make it our old home again. Mercifully, Lo left the kitchen and bathrooms intact, as well as the front of the loft where the film shoots take place.
I keep up the pressure to prosecute Lo, to not much response. “That’s just street crime,” a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York tells me at one point. “People are busy.” Until about nine months later, when David Tendler calls. “Hi Suzanne, I got a call from the prosecutor’s office at SDNY. They’ve begun an investigation on Han Lo. Would you be willing to speak with them?”
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