A flashy Florida man who claimed to be the “Wolf of Airbnb” was sentenced Monday to more than four years in prison after pleading guilty to illegally subletting more than 18 Manhattan apartments — and raking in more than $1 million in rental income while refusing to pay rent.
Konrad Bicher, 32, made more than $1.1 million in rental income on his fleet of illegal “mini hotels” between July 2019 and April 2022, and separately stole more than $565,000 from the US government’s COVID-19 relief program, federal prosecutors said.
The wannabe business whiz exploited tenant protections enacted during the pandemic to stop landlords from evicting him, while he defrauded them by renting out their properties, court papers say.
“Now bro I will become evil,” Bicher texted one of his partners on April 20, 2020, while discussing how he planned to ramp up his scheme at the height of the pandemic, according to the feds’ sentencing submission.
Bicher added in another text that he would “rape every single landlord in NYC.”
“Every landlord now is gonna be f—–ddddd,” he then wrote in a third text.
Bicher gave himself the “wolf” moniker as a reference to the 2013 film “Wolf of Wall Street,” which chronicled the rise and fall of penny stock broker and convicted fraudster Jordan Belfort, according to one of his text messages cited by the feds.
He also bragged about his purported wealth by posting photos on social media of private jet rides and lavish vacations — even as court papers say he owed Manhattan landlords hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent.
Bicher declined to speak in Manhattan federal court Monday before Judge Lorna G. Schofield doled out his sentence on his guilty plea to one count of wire fraud as a part of the scheme.
The convicted fraudster was sentenced to 51 months in prison and was also ordered to forfeit more than $1.7 million and pay more than $2.2 million in restitution. He’ll be on supervised release for three years after he is released.
Bicher has two prior convictions, including a 2015 bust for impersonating a landlord to get paid for rent he was not entitled to collect, prosecutors said.
His attorney had urged the judge to impose a lesser sentence after mentioning that Bicher has a 6-month-old daughter and a stay-at-home wife, court records show.