How a home renovation rocked a famous Black church in Harlem
Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem is one of the oldest Black churches in America, and certainly one of the most storied. As a college student at Columbia University, Barack Obama often lingered in the back pews during Sunday services. Hundreds of mourners have gathered at the 216-year-old institution in recent years for the memorial services of actress Cicely Tyson and fashion journalist André Leon Talley.
It’s the kind of church where networking mixes with Bible study, and the roll reads like a who’s who of Black intelligentsia and entrepreneurship.
In 2017, when Mara Porter, a member of the church, found a Harlem brownstone to buy, she was struck by the charming real estate agent who had listed it. He was also a deacon at the church. A year later, Porter and her husband, Tommie, hired the deacon as a contractor to lead the renovations of the $1.44 million house. “We really loved the idea of keeping it in the community,” said Porter, 44, host of “CrimeFeed” on Investigation Discovery.
The business deal between the parishioners, however, collapsed spectacularly, ensnaring the church and its membership in a six-year saga of multiple lawsuits, closed-door meetings at the church, a public spat in a Harlem restaurant, a bankruptcy filing by the deacon and a criminal investigation.
The Porters and other
members of the church accused the deacon, Jerome Yeiser, 63, of absconding with money in lawsuits filed against Yeiser by the Porters and another church family. The Porters wanted Yeiser prosecuted for grand larceny, for failing to pay subcontractors and misspending funds. In 2019, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, then led by Cyrus Vance Jr., opened a criminal investigation into Yeiser.
But then in January 2022, Alvin Bragg, became the DA and there was a big problem, the kind of problem that comes when the DA is also a Sunday school teacher at the church.
In August 2022, Bragg recused the office from the case because of “the nexus of the allegations and the church community” and because of his relationship with Yeiser – Bragg taught Yeiser’s
daughters at Sunday school, Emily Tuttle, a spokesperson for Bragg, said in an email.
The investigation was transferred to the Bronx district attorney’s office, which closed the case in August. “Based on the evidence, we could not prove criminality beyond a reasonable doubt,” Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a Bronx DA spokesperson, said in an email.
With the case closed, the Porters and another couple, John and Cheryl Graves, are hoping to recover their losses through lawsuits. And there are plenty of lawsuits.
Mara Porter, who grew up in Maryland, became a born-again Christian in college at UCLA.
She found her church home at Abyssinian when she moved to New York in 2002, attending nearly every Sunday and sitting high in the balcony (it was
always too crowded to find a seat down below). “It’s the Black church of Harlem,” she said.
Yeiser had been a deacon for eight years when he first met Mara Porter at the brownstone that made her swoon.
“It was an embarrassment of riches,” said Porter, who recalled the spring day when she first visited the 114-year-old brownstone just a short 10-minute walk from Abyssinian. The woodwork was exquisite, from original shutters on the windows to the 10-foot-tall wood-carved living room mirror.
A year later, in the spring of 2018, when Mara Porter and Tommie Porter, 46, who works in tech security, were getting ready to remodel the house, they did not know that the IRS had recently levied a nearly $ 75,000 tax lien against Jerome Yeiser and that he and his wife had filed for bankruptcy in the past. They would first learn about the tax troubles when Yeiser explained to them why he couldn’t pay the subcontractors, according to the Porters’ countersuit.
All the couple knew was that Yeiser had agreed to renovate their kitchen, bathrooms and add an addition to the garden level apartment, with a deck above it that would open onto the kitchen, a $539,000 job, according to the renovation agreement.
For the first few months, work moved along without incident. But in December 2018, the work came to a halt, “unexpectedly and inexplicably,” according to the countersuit.
The countersuit details mounting anxiety and confusion: When the Porters asked questions – in emails and in person – Yeiser told them that his bank account was frozen because of unpaid taxes, and some of their money had been used to pay his taxes; but the money would be released soon, he promised. As the weeks went by and winter set in with no work getting done, the Porters learned that the subcontractors had not been paid in months; inspections had not been completed; and Yeiser was not a licensed contractor. (Yeiser’s license expired in 2013, according to the city.)
Tally it up, and $192,758 was unaccounted for, the countersuit alleges.
In March 2019, Yeiser quit via email.
That same day, a sprinkler subcontractor filed a $15,000 lien against the Porters’ home, an effort to collect the debt that also meant the couple could not sell the house until it was settled.
Bleeding money – $16,000 a month in mortgage payments and rent on the apartment where the family was living – the Porters panicked.
They turned to the church.
In early spring of 2019, the Porters laid out the conflict to the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, who told them that “they were not the first victims.” Butts advised the Porters to get a lawyer and meet with him and the deacon board the next Sunday, which they did in a closed-door meeting, the Porters’ bankruptcy filings show.
Yeiser, who was at church that Sunday, too, was summoned to the meeting after the Porters left, and he and his wife were suspended from their roles as deacons, according to the lawsuit that he and his wife filed against the Porters and others.
“I felt horrible,” said Barbour, 79, who attended the meeting. “As officers and members of the church, I felt very disappointed, very sad.”
After the Porters came forward and the church began looking at the complaints, a formal investigation was opened. In February 2020, Butts told the congregation in a letter and from the pulpit that the Yeisers had been suspended from their positions.
Butts died in October 2022. A few months earlier, he called Mara Porter. “He said he really felt very badly about what happened and said, ‘I wish we had done more,’ ” she recalled. While she appreciated the gesture, it was not enough to bring her back to the fold.
“It really deeply affected my faith – not my faith in God,” she said. “It has completely turned me off to the church.” She no longer attends Abyssinian or any other church.