Woman sued for taking over NYC co-op in trendy neighborhood and trying to sell it but blames city official for scheme

A Florida woman took over a co-op building in trendy Williamsburg, illegally pocketed rent and even tried to sell the building for $1.4 million, a new lawsuit claims.But phony landlord Jessica Vargas claims did nothing wrong because a city official told her ownership of the squatter-infested building was “good to go” before she allegedly collected nearly $450,000 from the low-income co-op.“A thief?” Vargas told The Post.“That’s not who I am — I’ve always been honest.”Vargas was named in a lawsuit this week filed by state Attorney General Letitia James, seeking to take the building’s title back, and pushing Vargas to pay the co-op back.Vargas, the suit contends, created multiple false documents to claim ownership of 13 Scholes St., a three-family limited-equity co-op building known as an HDFC, turning the supposedly affordable building into “a Floridian’s personal piggy bank,” James said in a statement this week.“Jessica Vargas declared herself president of a building she had no claim to, exploiting New Yorkers for her personal gain while living over a thousand miles away,” James said. But Vargas said that she only inherited a situation her late father created — and that after he died in 2018 a since-retired city official told her everything was kosher.Her lawyer, Alexander Levkovich, said Vargas is innocent, and called the suit “a significant overreach.” The suit states that Vargas, 41, who grew up in the building with her family and now lives in a Tampa suburb where she works as a data specialist, “has engaged in repeated fraudulent acts” and must return $442,000 in rent that should have gone to the co-op.

The building owes over $40,000 in city property taxes.Vargas said the money she netted — $6,500 in monthly rent paid by a developer-owned LLC her father signed an agreement with before he died — was used to support her siblings and legal fees for the building, not to make her rich.“I’ve been living in the same ho...