Latest news with #DeTommaso
New York Post
29-04-2025
- New York Post
'Professional squatter' pays no rent, 'terrorizes' LIC neighbors
A tenant who hasn't paid her $100-a-month rent in more than a decade is back in court, fighting to hold on to the two-bedroom Queens apartment she inherited through a controversial death-bed adoption, The Post has learned. Maria DeTommaso, 74, has lived in the rent-controlled railroad flat on the bottom floor of a Long Island City row house since at least 2002, where neighbors say she causes many problems. 'I think she's a demon in human skin because of what she puts people through,' said Anjanie Narine, who has lived next door to DeTommaso for more than 20 years. 'Every interaction with her is negative. She terrorizes everyone, and acts as if she owns the building.' DeTommaso scored her sweet rent deal when she moved in with an elderly former dock worker, Nicholas 'Nicky' DeTommaso, who had the original lease on the apartment. Days before he died in 2009, the then 58-year-old Maria convinced the 85-year-old retiree to adopt her. Advertisement 9 Maria DeTommaso has been fighting eviction from her $100 per month rent-controlled apartment in Queens for years. A fellow tenant who lives on the same floor called her 'a demon' who has rented rooms in the two-bedroom flat on Airbnb. Brigitte Stelzer 9 DeTommaso moved into the apartment after initially cat-sitting for a friend in the 90s, according to a neighbor. She is pictured at the apartment last week. Brigitte Stelzer Nine years later, the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal granted DeTommaso 'successor rights' to the apartment, keeping its rent at $100 and allowing her to stay in perpetuity. Similar units in the building now rent just below $2,000. Advertisement During the time she has lived in the unit, neighbors say she has 'terrorized' them by renting out part of the apartment on Airbnb, ushering in a steady stream of dozens of tourists from around the world who rented rooms from her for $55 a night, according to complaints made to the Department of Buildings and online ads. One longtime fellow tenant in the six-unit building said DeTommaso, who is also known as Pamela Becker and Prema Deodhar, has even changed the locks on the front doors and invited a steady stream of veterans from a nearby shelter who have caused havoc in the building. 9 Maria Detomasso and Nicholas 'Nicky' Detomasso, who adopted her shortly before his death, in an old photo where they are celebrating together. Angel Chevrestt 9 Maria DeTommaso convinced Nicholas DeTommaso to adopt her as his daughter in the weeks before his death, and then gained succession rights from the state to his $100-a-month apartment a few years ago. Advertisement For years, The Post has documented attempts by the building's octogenarian owners, Sugrim and Kowsila Outar, to evict DeTommaso from the apartment. They are scheduled to return to Queens Housing Court on May 6. 'Her case has already gone through five of the judges here in Queens, and benefited from every change in the housing laws since COVID,' said Elan Layliev, the attorney for the Outars who is fighting to evict DeTommasso. '[It's been] a wild ride. Ms. DeTommaso has utilized every loophole in the court system to prolong and delay this trial.' For her part, DeTommaso told The Post last week the claims against her are exaggerated and designed to kick her out of her home. Advertisement 'I won the succession,' she said. 'This is sick. I'm the legal tenant. I have every right to be here and I don't know how people can lie so much. They are trying to evict me, but my lawyer says I don't have to worry.' 9 The building where DeTommaso lives, which is also occupied by her landlords, whom she has been in a 10 year protracted legal battle with. Helayne Seidman 9 The owners of a six-apartment complex in Long Island City have spent years in court trying to evict a rent-controlled tenant who hasn't paid rent in more than a decade. Brigitte Stelzer DeTommaso's lawyer, Zara Feingold, is a legal aid attorney who works with the New York Legal Assistance Group, according to court documents and her LinkedIn page, which means DeTommaso doesn't have to pay her for representation. Under New York law, she also doesn't have to pay rent while the legal case with her landlords is ongoing, which is currently a decade. Still, she has prevoiusly said she puts rent money into an escrow account so it can be paid after the legal matter is settled. DeTommaso, who lives with her two dogs — a miniature grey hound and a dachshund — told The Post she recently broke her hip in the apartment because the landlords have not done necessary repairs. She said her oven doesn't work, and complained about roaches and mice in the living space. However, according to Layliev, DeTommasso will not allow workers contracted by the Outars into her apartment and has previously hired homeless veterans to do the work and told them to present the bills to the owners. 9 Maria DeTommaso in the brightly decorated apartment in 2013. Helayne Seidman Advertisement 9 DeTommaso holding up a picture of Nicky. She says she still has a good relationship with his family and talks to them regularly. Helayne Seidman DeTommasso was born Pamela Rose Becker on March 1, 1951. She grew up in Washington DC and attended a series of posh private schools. Her father served as US ambassador to Honduras during the Ford administration and her brother, Ralph Becker, is a former mayor of Salt Lake City. A yoga enthusiast, she showed up at the Long Island City building to cat sit for a friend in the late 1990s. When the friend returned, she claimed she had nowhere to live and asked Nicky if she could spend a few days, said Narine. She never left. Nicky, who was known in the neighborhood as 'Uncle Nicky,' had moved to the apartment in 1924 as an infant. He lived there with his mother, three brothers and two sisters, and stayed until his death on July 15, 2009. Advertisement 9 DeTommaso has been accused by neighbors of converting some of the rooms in the apartment and renting them out for $55 a night to tourists. A devoted 'Star Trek' fan, he played stickball on the street when he was a child and chain-smoked cigarettes on the stoop, helping his neighbors secure parking spots when he was older, according to 'Nicky D from LIC: A Narrative Portrait' by writer and artist Warren Lehrer. Five years after moving in, DeTommasso secured Nicky's power of attorney in 2007. When his health was in decline, she drove him around the city to do errands and to see his doctor in a series of cars he bought for her, according to an interview with The Post in 2018. 'He loved me, and his whole family still calls me,' said DeTommaso last week. Advertisement But Narine, an office worker, said she recalled Nicky had allegedly tried to kick her out almost as soon as she moved in. 'He woke up early, and every morning I would hear him curse at her to get the f–k out,' she said. 'I'm next door and the walls are pretty thin.' The protracted battle with the Outars, immigrants from Guyana who also live in the building, has taken its toll on the elderly couple, claimed Narine, adding that Sugrim Outar, 85, has had several heart attacks over the years. 'They are both physically weak,' said Narine. 'I have no doubt in my mind this battle with this professional squatter has taken years off their lives.'
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The next Caruso
'People think it's old fashioned, to see a tenor 'playing to the gallery',' says Freddie De Tommaso. 'But showmanship is important when the public has paid to be entertained. When you hit those big, high notes you want eyes popping, jaws dropping. You want them thinking: he's still going, he's still going!' He grins. 'The critics who say that's 'unmusical', that you're 'asking for applause?' No! You're doing your job as an entertainer.' Not that critics would ever call De Tommaso unmusical. The 32-year-old Italian restaurateur's son from Tunbridge Wells has been universally feted as an 'ardent', 'thrilling' and 'bombshell-voiced' performer since winning first prize at the 2018 Tenor Viñas International Singing Competition in Barcelona. 'He sounds like a youthful Italian Domingo with a gorgeous baritonal quality to the lower end, building up to a heart-rending top,' trilled Opera Now. His fame soared when, in 2021, he stepped in at the last minute to perform the role of Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca at the Royal Opera House after the scheduled singer was taken ill. 'British tenor saves night at the opera!' trumpeted the Daily Mail. That year he signed to Decca records and released his debut album, Passione, on which he paid homage to the great, early 20th-century Italian tenors he loves: Mario Lanza, Franco Corelli, Giuseppe Di Stefano and the man he calls the 'father of all modern tenors, Enrico Caruso'. As he arrives at the Royal Opera House in a waft of aftershave and tosses aside his leather jacket, it's uncanny how much De Tommaso physically resembles a singer from the Carusonian age. He's got a vintage strongman's inverted triangle build. The handshake is a meaty sparkler – gold pinkie ring, bracelet and rose-gold Rolex. 'I must have been a magpie in a past life, I love shiny stuff!' he says, a boyish grin brightening his ruddy, earnest face and raising his hooped jet brows. There's no liquorice-curled tache today although he's sported one in the past. 'I am old school,' he nods. 'People call my singing old fashioned all the time – sometimes with a negative connotation. But I think the old style of singing is much, much better.' He's proud to embrace the romantic, Southern Italian intensity audiences enjoyed 'when opera was the pop music of the day, the man on the street bought arias as vinyl singles.' Now, he sighs 'opera has become this elitist niche thing, until the World Cup comes around and all sorts of people crank up ole Pav singing Nessun dorma,' he shakes his head. 'That's just an aria and not even the best one in the canon. Anybody who hums along to that would probably enjoy coming along to Rigoletto or Carmen which is packed with tunes they'll know…' It irks him that there is virtually no opera on British television. 'Such a shame. It's like the whole world is dumbing down.' De Tomasso is preparing for his role as Don José in this season's ROH production of Carmen today. In Damiano Michieletto's staging, the action takes place in small town Spain in the 1970s, with the heroine strutting her stuff disco-style and the khaki of Don José's uniform (he's in the police, not the army now) echoed by the dried tufts of grass sprouting from the stage. Since Bizet's opera has been performed around the world since 1875, I hope it's no spoiler to say that Carmen ends with Don José killing its heroine in a fit of jealous rage. A heightened awareness of femicide around the world means there has been some debate about opera houses continuing to mount productions of Bizet's opera. Add to that, the 'toxic' internet culture inspiring misogyny in young boys as dramatised in Netflix's recent hit drama, Adolescence. De Tommaso has no time for 'cancelling' operas like Carmen. 'It's just a story!' he says. 'But this production does lean into the fact Don José is not a nice bloke. He has all this backstory of having killed somebody, having to go into the police force instead of prison.' This production also highlights Don José's 'complicated' relationship with his mother. De Tommaso adopts a puppyish whine to explain how that's usually played: 'Oooh, I love her and wish I could see her!' He makes a face. 'This production shows that relationship as strained to the extreme, with Don José's mother incredibly overbearing and controlling.' And that feeds into the character's battle for control with Carmen? 'I suppose so, yeah,' he nods. And the key thing is that it's clear Carmen doesn't 'deserve' what happens to her? 'Nobody deserves that!' he shudders. 'Carmen doesn't do anything wrong at all. She just tells Don José: this is over, I'm going with this nice bullfighter now and he doesn't take that very well.' Drama actually came ahead of singing for the young De Tommaso who won a scholarship to the private Tonbridge School in Kent at the age of 11. 'I did drama clubs before that and my first leading role was Mowgli in the Jungle Book when I was nine,' he says. 'My mum likes to joke that I was a 'very well nourished Mowgli'. I wasn't scrawny!' He inherited his 'performer's spirit' from his Puglian-born father, Franco: a 'bon viveur and big character' and chef patron of the popular Italian restaurant, Signor Franco, in Tunbridge Wells. 'It was quite an old school, Italian fine dining place – thick table cloths and Pavarotti on the sound system,' he says. 'We only ever ate there ourselves on special occasions and I started working there from the age of 16. Otherwise, as my two younger brothers will attest, we saw very little of our dad because running that place was a 365-day-a-year job.' Franco De Tommaso died when his eldest son was just 18. 'Your father dies when you're just starting out in life? Well, it's not great is it.' Freddie went off to Bristol University to study French and Italian but dropped out after a year and a half. 'I wasn't getting enough out of it,' he says, 'and felt I was wasting time and money. But I'd never have quit if my dad hadn't died because he was quite strict. If he hadn't died I would never have set out on the path to becoming a singer.' Having failed to get into the choir at university – 'I assumed my voice was good enough for school but not good enough for the next level' – De Tommaso went home and worked at Signor Franco. It was only as 'a bit of fun, to fill the time between lunch and dinner service' that he decided to take some lessons from his old singing teacher 'who said: hang on, your voice is much better, in fact I think it might really be quite good…' He went on to spend five years at the Royal Academy of Music, initially as a baritone before teachers discovered his tenor range – 'like opening a series of doors into new notes' – where he first began performing the role of Don José. De Tommaso enjoys fast cars, expensive watches and good red wines: 'all the boys toys'. He married Australian soprano Alexandra Oomens and says she's an incredible chef so the pair might open a restaurant one day. They live in Berlin so in London he's staying with one of his brothers and was delighted to find there's a Brazilian deli around the corner where they slice meat from a skewer. As a singer he says he's 'very low maintenance compared to a lot of singers. Some are completely nuts,' he confides. 'They won't speak for 24 hours before a performance – completely ridiculous.' De Tommaso says his regime involves 'a trip to the gym in the morning if I've slept well. I eat a good lunch: steak, a lot of protein with broccoli and loads of fluids. I like those Vocalzone throat pastilles and my Olbas inhaler in the afternoon. After a performance I'm knackered so I have a few pints with a meal and go to bed at 11pm.' Although he has the odd nightmare about stepping on stage into the wrong opera, nothing in his real life makes him nervous. Later this year he'll be appearing opposite the world's greatest soprano, the Russian Anna Netrebko in a new production of Tosca at Covent Garden. She's a bona fide diva, shunned in the west for refusing to denounce Putin, and at 53, has over two decades on him. But he's not intimidated. 'Because I started in this spinto tenor range at such a young age I'm used to having a big age gap with my soprano.' His only sadness is that his dad is not able to enjoy his success. 'Because he would have loved all this. The travel, the shows, the seats in the front row.' He sighs and rallies. 'It means I'm all the more determined to enjoy every moment for us both.'
