YOUR ‘MENTORING’ IS ‘NOT WORKING,’ ERIC
Woman doubts scandal-plagued ‘bling bishop’ is her half brother and accuses the Brooklyn cleric of threats to her and her family
One reason Mayor Adams has offered for maintaining his friendship with Lamor Whitehead — the Brooklyn preacher charged with extortion and wire fraud last month — is the fact that the man Whitehead calls his father is Arthur Miller.
Miller, a businessman and community leader, died at the hands of NYPD officers in 1978 when Whitehead was an infant, and Adams has suggested it’s that tragedy that led him to take the Brooklyn pastor under his wing years ago.
“The bishop lost his dad — Arthur Miller was his name — during a police incident,” Adams, a former NYPD captain, said last year. “I have always maintained relationships with people who have gone through traumatic experiences. My goal is to mentor people who go through crisis.”
But one woman is questioning Adams’ mentorship of Whitehead, a controversial figure whose relationship with Adams has puzzled political observers for years.
LoLisa Miller-Bradford, the youngest daughter of Miller and his wife, Florence, is skeptical of Whitehead’s assertion that he’s her half brother. She says her father did not sign Whitehead’s birth certificate and did not include Whitehead in his will.
Miller-Bradford has also called Adams’ “mentoring” into question, telling the mayor that it’s “not working” after one of several contentious phone calls and social media exchanges she says she’s had with Whitehead over the years.
“This is your mentee, the man that you stand behind and support,” Miller-Bradford wrote in a 2020 text message to Adams that she showed to The News, after she says Whitehead went on a Facebook rant against her and her family. “I hope you’re proud of this behavior.”
Her blunt assessment is the latest wrinkle in the saga of Mayor Adams and Bishop Whitehead, who was robbed at gunpoint midsermon in July and whose legal issues include a December 2022 arrest on federal charges that he bilked one of his congregants out of her life savings, extorted a businessman and deceived investigators.
While Adams described the allegations as “troubling,” he’s yet to distance himself completely from his old friend, the “bling bishop.”
When Miller-Bradford first spoke with Whitehead decades ago, she said, he claimed to be her half brother. According to her, Whitehead told her he’d learned of settlement money the family received from Miller’s death and asked her family to help him buy a Toyota Camry.
“I said that was impossible,” she said. “I told him he is literally out of his mind.”
Miller-Bradford said she challenged Whitehead to take a DNA test to prove his claim and that he hung up the phone on her, an exchange first reported by The New Yorker and confirmed with Miller-Bradford by the Daily News.
Whitehead says she’s lying — and suggested that The News set up a DNA test to prove Miller is his dad. His lawyer Brian Ponder declined to comment on whether Miller’s name appears on Whitehead’s birth certificate, and Whitehead did not respond to an inquiry regarding the document. Efforts to reach Whitehead’s mother were unsuccessful.
“She’s a liar,” Whitehead said of Miller-Bradford. “I know who my father is.”
As a teen, Arthur Miller came from the Bahamas to Brooklyn, where he’d eventually own several businesses and serve as head of a neighborhood watch group.
On June 14, 1978, Miller’s brother, Sam, was stopped by two NYPD officers trying to serve a summons for failing to pick up
debris. The cops told him he was driving with a suspended license as well. Sam Miller protested and fled, drawing more cops to the scene.
Arthur Miller showed up with a licensed handgun in his waistband. Police restrained him with a nightstick across his throat — with witnesses describing foam gushing from his mouth and his feet poking from a police car window as it cruised away.
Miller’s death sparked several anti-police protests in his Crown Heights neighborhood. Miller-Bradford, his daughter, was only 8 years old at the time.
After not hearing from Whitehead for years, Miller-Bradford recalled receiving a call from him in 2014 after she had raised concerns with a local TV station about a story set to air on Whitehead and her father. Miller-Bradford said she was opposed to the story airing and that the call with the pastor grew heated.
Miller-Bradford said that during the call, Whitehead told her “he was going to eff me up,” a claim the bishop denies.
Not long after the call with Whitehead, she said, Adams reached out to speak with her as well.
“He told me my father was such a great man,” she said, adding that Adams promised to support the foundation her family was planning to start in Miller’s honor and to present her mother with a proclamation in his capacity as borough president.
Adams, she said, never followed up, and that has left a bad taste in her mouth to this day. Now she says all she wants from him is to set his mentee straight.
“I’m not asking you for money. I’m not asking you for a donation. I’m not asking you to sign nothing,” she said. “All I’m asking you to do is get your protege in check and just ask him to please leave us alone. That’s it.”
Miller-Bradford said that while Adams shared his cell phone number and told her to reach out “anytime,” the mayor never responded when she tried to contact him after Whitehead wrote a Facebook tirade directed at her and her family in 2020
“I AM BISHOP LAMOR MILLER WHITEHEAD !!! NOT ARTHUR MILLER!!!” he wrote. “Don’t Let That Go Over Your Head!!! HASHTAG ALL OF YOU HATING MILLERS!”
“So I Will Give You A little Shine but I’m really Cutting OFF Your Lights,” he continued. “NOW I WILL STEP OFF ON YOU CLOWNS!”
In her text to Adams following that post, Miller-Bradford said, “I & my family will not accept this harassment or threats.”
Miller-Bradford said Adams again failed to respond to her six months later, when she contacted him after she had a heated exchange with Whitehead in which she told him she couldn’t support his claims of being Miller’s son without any proof.
When The News asked Whitehead if the mayor ever contacted him about Miller-Bradford, he said no.
Adams declined to respond through a spokesman.
The entire ordeal has left Miller-Bradford exasperated and ambivalent.
She told The News she would have been open to entertaining Whitehead’s claim that he’s her half brother, but that over the years he’s been so disagreeable, she now just wants to be left alone.
“It’s about who you are as a person and how you treated us,” she said of Whitehead. “That’s why we don’t want anything to do with him.
“Leave us alone, that’s all I’m asking. I have nothing against Whitehead,” she said.
“I don’t know him. And to be very honest with you, I feel sorry for him. I do.
“I feel sorry for him.”