Hello,
My roommate & I had recently rented an apartment here in New York City. We signed the lease 2 weeks before our current lease ended to ease the moving process. As we lived 10 blocks from our new place, we both carried some of our smaller items such as books, clothing & jewelry over to our new place ourselves starting on November 10th, the day the lease started. All was well until November 14th when we entered our apartment and noticed that a number of dresses, purses, pictures, cds and jewelry was gone.
Long story short, one of the elderly residents was told by the cleaning man who lives on site, that he had discovered items in our apartment and he, apparently unaware that we had signed the lease already, told this lady that he would let her in to take whatever she wanted and he would have to throw the rest away so the place could be empty for the potential new renter. Therefore on Monday, November 12th, she did just that. She claims to have taken only dresses and purses that were in my room, which she has since returned.
However, the jewelry, pictures and most of the cds are still missing, not to mention a picture of me and my 13 year old sister (Creepy). The elderly lady claims she did not take them and in fact, she was apparently seen on the security camera around 1pm taking the dresses etc but my roommate had not even brought the CDs over until 7pm. The things the old lady took and returned (with the exception of the jewelry) were all my things so my roommate did not notice anything awry. Therefore someone else clearly was let into my apartment. The cleaning man, according to the Apartment Manager was not supposed to have keys to begin with nor did he have authority to let anyone in our apartment, rented or not.
My question is, what sort of action can I pursue on this? I'm assuming the Apartment Management Company is liable?

