NEW ‘BLING FLIMFLAM’
B’klyn bishop said his biz had $2M but it was only $10: feds
Brooklyn’s “Bling Whitehead has been fraud charge, federal Wednesday.
Whitehead told a bank his business had $2 million in its coffers when it had less than $10, a superseding indictment filed in Manhattan Federal Court details.
In June 2018, he applied for a $250,000 business loan for his company Anointing Management Services LLC, and submitted fake bank documents in his online loan application, prosecutors said.
The bishop — who drives a Rolls-Royce, has an affinity for Gucci suits and counts Mayor Adams among his pals — didn’t get the loan.
He continued to use the forged papers until February 2019, including in an application for a $1.3 million mortgage to fund the purchase of his six-bedroom, seven-bath Paramus, N.J., mansion, the feds charge.
The drawn-up documents included “entirely fabricating a bank account that
Bishop” Lamor hit with a new prosecutors said did not in fact exist,” altering statements to make it look like the company had more than $2 million “when in fact during that time period [the business] had an average ending balance of less than ten dollars,” reads the indictment.
Whitehead’s lawyer Dawn Florio said he intends to fight the allegations.
“Lamor Whitehead will be pleading not guilty when he is arraigned on the [superseding] indictment and denies those charges,” Florio said.
Nick Biase, spokesman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, declined to comment.
The new wire fraud charge adds to a litany of criminal allegations the feds brought against the 45-year-old pastor of Leaders of Tomorrow International Churches in December, accusing him of swindling a retired parishioner out of tens of thousands of dollars, extorting a businessman and lying to the FBI.
Specifically, the feds say Whitehead persuaded one of his parishioners to invest about $90,000 of her retirement savings with him to help her buy a home. Instead, he allegedly used it to buy himself designer clothing and other luxury goods.
Whitehead is accused of extorting a Bronx businessman out of $5,000 and trying to squeeze out another $500,000 in real estate transactions in exchange for leveraging his city government connections.
He is also charged with lying to federal authorities when the FBI came knocking with a search warrant on an unspecified date and Whitehead said he had no cell phones other than the one on him.
In the wake of the charges, Adams, who has described himself as a mentor to Whitehead, has previously said he will stand by his friend.
“I’ve spent decades enforcing the law and expect everyone to follow it,” Adams said in December. “I have also dedicated my life to assisting individuals with troubled pasts. While these allegations are troubling, I will withhold further comment until the process reaches its final conclusion.”
The City Hall press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new allegations.
In September, Whitehead and his wife were robbed at gunpoint of flashy jewelry in the middle of delivering a sermon at his
Canarsie, Brooklyn, church.
Shocking footage of the heist showed three gun-toting bandits stunning Whitehead as he stops his sermon and crouches down to lie on the floor. The trio made off with $1 million in jewelry lifted from him and his wife, after they stuck a gun in the face of the bishop’s 8-month-old daughter.
Months before that, in May, Whitehead tried to broker a deal for the surrender of Andrew Abdullah, accused in the fatal shooting of Goldman Sachs researcher Daniel Enriquez on the Q train.
In an Instagram live session Wednesday, the bishop said the feds should be careful because God has his back.
“For everybody that’s praying for me, thank you, man. And for everyone that wish my downfall, thank you — because the Bible says that, God says, ‘I’ll make your enemies your footstool,’ ” Whitehead said. “You gotta be careful with touching a bishop; even if you feel like I’m not one, I am one. And if you become an enemy of God, right, that’s on you.”
Whitehead pleaded not guilty to four of the five counts he now faces and is out on a $500,000 bond.