In 2016, the Department of Buildings issued another violation for running a business from the apartment. But that violation was also dismissed when a judge with the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings determined that the business took up less than 25 percent of the space in the apartment, which is permissible. Fortunetelling requires a modest footprint — two chairs and a crystal ball.

The psychic parlor had existed in this way for almost a decade when the woman who had lost her job as a recruiter happened by on the way home from shopping in May 2018. She had recently undergone abdominal surgery to remove a precancerous growth and was feeling overwhelmed, she said. That’s when Ms. Mitchell, showing concern, offered a reading.

“If someone tells me a miracle is coming at the end of the journey, I believe them,” the woman said in an interview. By the end of the visit, she had paid $80 for a palm and face reading and an additional $150 in advance for Ms. Mitchell’s “research.”

“She gave me a small bottle of gold dust which she said to bathe in, to calm down my energy,” the woman later wrote in a statement to the police.

The next day, Ms. Mitchell summoned the woman back to the apartment. They spoke as Ms. Mitchell’s two young children played underfoot. She said she had discovered the woman’s troubled past lives — three of them . To cleanse her energy, Ms. Mitchell needed to light a candle for each of the 42 years of the woman’s current life. Each candle cost $90 (Ms. Mitchell told her they were large).

The woman paid her $3,780, she told the police.

There were more meetings, more evil spirits to be warded off with expensive tools, like a wax statue of the woman (to come from a supplier in Tunisia) and a special crown. Ms. Mitchell told her that her parents were at risk, and that her boyfriend was not her soul mate. The woman kept her dealings with Ms. Mitchell a secret from her boyfriend, she said.

There would be one more payout, a whopper at $30,000, which Ms. Mitchell said was needed to finish their work. “She said, ‘You’ve already spent this much,’” the woman recalled in an interview this week, requesting anonymity because she was the victim of a crime. “‘It’s all wasted if you don’t continue.’”