He ‘booked’ Bx. migrants
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.
Ebou Sarr, 47, was busted for that, too, back in January.
When cops found him 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 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, told The Post of scraping together the $600 total 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. The father of four, who works for an app as a deliveryman, was living on the streets when a friend told him about Sarr’s.
“He gave us food, only one meal per day, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said of Sarr.
Sarr said the $300 rent was a donation, and he never took more than what the migrants could afford. He insisted 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.
On Thursday, four brand-new, still-wrapped mattresses sat inside the rooms, which were cluttered with garbage and reeked of urine.
Sarr said he plans to fight the trespassing charges and wants to sue the NYPD. Migrants ordered to vacate the buildings by the city this week had to abandon their belongings.