JUST IN: Reread march 1 2022 evergreen version

Welcome to Reread, a newsletter series that pulls great stories from New York’s archives. Our first edition is devoted to the magazine’s most compelling stories of scam artists, con men, grifters, and hustlers of all kinds. You will receive one new story a week for the next eight weeks.

New York is a city where feral gamesmanship is an almost essential ingredient for success. It’s too expensive to live well here unless you have an angle or an in; if you want the good life without an inheritance, chances are you need a side hustle, whether it’s as simple as a rent-stabilized lease or as complicated as a yearslong Ponzi scheme. Over its 54 years of publication, and especially recently, New York has specialized in chronicling the cheerfully amoral characters who win at this game, and for the next eight weeks, we’re sharing a few of our greatest hits in this newsletter.

In January 2013, the writer William Brennan — a college student at the time — picked up a copy of Philadelphia’s City Paper, which contained a brief story about a roommate situation gone bad. A man named Jamison Bachman, claiming that he’d been flooded out of his New York home by Hurricane Sandy, had moved into a woman’s apartment and then refused to leave, withholding rent, becoming scarily combative, and attempting to drive her out. “He’d basically taken over the property,” Brennan recalls. “And I was really struck by the temerity, but also the terror of it. The story stuck in my head for years. Whenever I had an idle moment, I’d wonder what happened with her and the guy.” Four years later, Brennan had spent some time on staff at The Atlantic and had quit to freelance — “I wasn’t ready for it; I was in a what-have-I-done way,” he says, laughing — “and I looked up the piece again and noticed that he was in his 50s. And I had the gut feeling: You don’t just start like that. I bet he’s done it before.”

Oh boy, had he ever. The story that New York published about a year later under the headline “Worst Roommate Ever” revealed a serial menacer, a sociopath with a deep knowledge of housing law and how to get around it. Bachman had moved from apartment to apartment around the East Coast, doing this again and again. And as Brennan continued his reporting, it grew stranger and more terrifying; without spoiling anything, I’ll say that it ends far more badly than even that scary beginning would suggest. “Just as I started reporting, that all exploded — within a couple of days of when I got the assignment. I often have thought about, would I have written it differently if I’d come upon it afterward, instead of experiencing it in real time?”

Just as the original short City Paper story stuck in Brennan’s head, his own, much more in-depth version freaked a lot of readers out. (Sample comments: “This is 18,000 different kinds of ­crazy” and “completely fucking bonkers.”) Some of that can be laid to the obvious: Many of us have had weird roommate situations over the years, and the story triggers your empathy for Bachman’s victims. And, I think, it also gets you at an atavistic level, because it’s in these people’s homes. If you face a predatory madman on the street, you can perhaps get away; if it’s at work, you can, at least theoretically, get another job. But “when it’s your home, where do you go?” Brennan muses. “It’s the place you can seek refuge” — unless you can’t. That is especially true, I suspect, among New York’s New York City readers, who often are stretched to their limit to pay for tiny apartments; sharing your house with a sociopath would be bad enough, but doing it in 350 square feet would be extra-terrifying.

The story moves fast and builds drama, like a thriller, and so it’s not surprising that, Brennan says, there is talk of a movie adaptation. In addition to that, a limited-run docuseries by the same name is now on Netflix. Worst Roommate Ever covers not just this story (which gets a two-episode treatment) but three other horrifying tales of Craigslist-adjacent woe. Brennan was only modestly involved with the show, he says, helping the producers with research and contacts, and watched when it aired along with everyone else. He still hears from people about his feature, he says. “It was definitely the most intense reporting experience I’ve ever had.”