Manhattan, the vertical city, greets newcomers as a sheer rockface. To even begin the ascent requires agility, nerve, and a secure base camp. If you can’t establish that base—the right apartment—the plunge is swift: you bounce to a friend’s couch, then to a squat in Bushwick, and suddenly you’re at the Port Authority holding a sign for bus fare home.

In the spring and summer of last year, people from all over—from Brazil, Norway, Spain, South Africa, Bangladesh, Japan, even the Upper West Side—pounced on a Craigslist ad for a base camp in Chelsea: a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot loft with two large bedrooms and two baths. When they visited, Apartment 6-E at 211 West Twentieth Street proved even better than advertised. The ceilings were eleven feet high, and the windows and pendant lamps flooded light across a wood-burning fireplace, Mies Barcelona chairs, and a West Elm sofa set topped with Hermès blankets. Almost everything was dazzling white: walls, floors, furniture—even the books were cloaked in white jackets.

The apartment’s owner and impresario was a photographer named Michael Tammaro. In profile, Tammaro, who was fifty-four, resembled the Indian on the Buffalo nickel, but he was a fey charmer who adorned his shaved head with a driving cap and his arms with a Cartier watch and a gold Hermès bracelet. The one constant of his ever-changing décor was Tucker, a boisterous pit-bull-and-shepherd-mix rescue dog. On Facebook, he posted a photo of him and his dog on a rocky beach and captioned it “Family Portrait.”

Tammaro shot stars from Tina Fey to Spike Lee, putting his subjects at ease with a Boston-accented purr: “C’mon, baby, you’re so cute—yeah, you’re so sexy!” He used the apartment as his backdrop, and every detail of the scene promised access and glamour. As he took the official photographs for the Tribeca Film Festival, or posed models for Vogue, as many as seven assistants would be adjusting the lighting, changing the lenses, and serving mojitos to managers and editors and hangers-on. For years, Tammaro had been Sting’s stylist and groomer, and a warm note from Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, was posted in his guest bathroom.

And now Tammaro was renting out one of his bedrooms, or perhaps the whole place (he couldn’t quite seem to decide), so that, after a possible visit with his friend David Geffen in Malibu, he could spend a year in Sag Harbor assembling a book of his photographs. His sales pitch was devil-may-care: “Are you sure you don’t want to look around more? If it were me, I’d want to take a shower!” But he assured potential tenants that he’d get them membership in Soho House, or discounts at the nearby Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, or a visa for their girlfriend. He was equal parts trusty Sherpa and romantic-comedy confidant. He showed Bon Tjeenk Willink, a Dutch consultant for Bain & Company, photos he’d taken of Kristen Stewart right where they were standing, and, Tjeenk Willink recalls, “He promised, ‘I’ll take you to all the Hollywood parties.’ I thought, I’m going to have the best time in New York!”

Everyone wanted in: an administrator for Madewell clothing who was returning from L.A. to be near her widowed mother; a photographer relocating from Berlin with her daughter during a contentious custody battle; a South African cost manager hoping to jump-start her life; a painter who’d left his girlfriend and needed a place to complete his transformation into a beautiful woman named Nyx. Even the actress Sean Young sought to be Tammaro’s roommate.

They couldn’t all rent the apartment, of course. Unless they could!

Douglas and Juliet believed that the place was theirs. (Like several others involved with the apartment, they asked that I change their names. I have used pseudonyms for anyone identified by a single name.) In April, 2012, Tammaro was offering a summer sublet, and it seemed like a perfect place for them to live while Juliet shot the show that they hoped would make them famous: a series of dating-advice videos for YouTube.

Juliet was a wry, self-contained woman in her late twenties; Douglas, who helped manage his family’s real-estate holdings, was a few years older and resembled Newman on “Seinfeld.” They both liked their future landlord. “Michael oozed an easy charm,” Douglas recalled. “Bantering, confident, super-flamboyant.” And he said that they were welcome to use his lights and C-stands. So Douglas put down $14,950 for three months plus a security deposit. “I felt very confident doing this, because I’d reverse-Googled his phone number, and it led to his photography Web site. And because I wrote my own lease, which had a lot of protections built in. And because, like every New Yorker, I thought, I’m so sophisticated.”

In the weeks before the move, Tammaro was constantly in touch by text. Yet he was frustratingly noncommittal about providing keys and confirming that a promised washer-dryer had been installed. And his spelling and syntax made his texts a puzzle: “I am have lease fed x Ed to me I’m not in my Ny I can not sell with out parent work.” As his voice mail was always full, it was hard to get these jumbles deciphered.

Douglas and Juliet were finally set to move in on July 1st. Six days before, Tammaro e-mailed to say, “Sadly my father past away suddenly on sat.” His family was staying with him, so he’d need the apartment for two more weeks. The couple wrote a note of sympathy and found emergency accommodations in Williamsburg. Tammaro sent frequent updates: he was consoling his mother, attending a memorial at his father’s club, dealing with the estate tax. An apologetic e-mail arrived from Julie Tammaro, Michael’s mother: “We have put Michael in an embarrassing situation and he feels terrible. My son likes to make everyone happy but with our family in a day to day healing process we are quite unstable.” The couple thought it was an oddly insubstantial note, until Tammaro gave it meaning by postponing the move-in date again. He promised that Douglas and Juliet could have the place August 1st—but then his mother had a stroke, perhaps brought on by all the stress. Could they reschedule for August 15th? Or maybe a bit later? He apologized, again and again, for the confusion.

Later in August, he offered Douglas and Juliet a terrific deal as recompense: starting in September, they could have the apartment, which was easily worth seven thousand dollars a month, for a whole year at just four thousand dollars a month. Douglas wrote an even more confining lease—it specified, for instance, that for every two days a utility was inoperative they’d get a month free of rent—and Tammaro gave them keys. After making sure they worked, Douglas advanced the photographer six thousand dollars more, so that he could afford a deposit for the house he’d rented in Sag Harbor.

Douglas and Juliet told him that they were going to Mexico on vacation, and that they’d move in when they got back, the evening of September 8th. As they took a taxi in from Kennedy Airport, they turned their phones back on—and received a text from Tammaro, saying that he had to give the apartment up, because his landlord was raising the rent to seventy-six hundred dollars. He added that he was “very depressed shutting off phones.” They were dumbfounded. “In the first place, he’d told Juliet that he owned the apartment,” Douglas said. “In the second—what the fuck!”

Having nowhere else to go, they continued on to 211 West Twentieth and got into the elevator. But before they could key in 6-E a fellow-passenger did. Confused, they said that they were about to move into that apartment. The passenger, Cameron Kennedy, performed occasional errands for Tammaro but said that he didn’t know anything about a sublet; he was just dog-sitting with his girlfriend. When they all entered the apartment together, it was a wreck. Not only had Tucker left deposits everywhere—a temperamental dog, he wouldn’t go to the bathroom with just anyone—but half the furniture in their “furnished apartment” was gone: chairs, a desk, paintings, statues. Tammaro’s papers and files and private videotapes were scattered everywhere, and grime coated everything, as if packing up had turned into giving up.