Brooklyn ‘Bling Bishop’ Lamor Whitehead Should Get 12 1/2 Years in Prison: Prosecutors

“Bling Bishop” Lamor Whitehead should spend 12 1/2 years in prison for several fraud counts, including defrauding a parishioner’s mother out of her life savings, federal prosecutors in Manhattan argue.

The politically connected pastor continues to show a “total lack of remorse” for his crimes and has even begun selling documents that were sealed in his defense to subscribers on his Patreon site, prosecutors said in a court filing Monday.

Whitehead, 46, is asking for parole and supervised release, in part because of conditions at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, but prosecutors ridiculed the request, emphasizing that he has only been in prison for a few weeks awaiting sentencing Next Monday.

In March, a jury in Manhattan Federal Court found Whitehead guilty of five counts, including wire fraud, attempted extortion and lying to the FBI. Prosecutors say the bishop continued to lie, both on the witness stand and after the trial, and are seeking 151 months in prison.

March 12, 2024: Bling Bishop guilty

“Lamor Whitehead presented himself to the world as a religious leader, a ‘prosperity gospel’ preacher whom God made rich,” federal prosecutors wrote. “Those signs of wealth and success that aided and formed part of the defendant’s fraud in this case were false. The accused lived a lie. “His extravagant lifestyle was a facade, funded by the crimes for which he was convicted.”

Judge Lorna Schofield jailed Whitehead on May 20 after prosecutors alleged he violated bail conditions by disparaging victim Pauline Anderson and her son and selling prohibited court documents in an April YouTube stream.

“The court couldn’t understand it at all. You couldn’t understand it at all. These are just formalities,” he said in a now-deleted video from April 30, according to court documents. “And we will have all this paperwork on Patreon.”

Patreon is a site where content creators provide exclusive content to varying levels of paid subscribers.

Last week, Whitehead tried to use what federal defendants in New York often call an “MDC discount” – when a judge reduces a sentence by months or years – to explain notoriously hellish conditions at a federal prison in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors argued that he should receive no leniency because his prison complaints are “outdated, false, unsourced or not specifically related to the defendant, but are in any event largely irrelevant to the present case because he is in detention for only a few weeks and he will most likely be placed in another facility after the verdict is passed.”

The pastor, who describes himself as Mayor Adams’ protégé, is known for his flashy clothes and jewelry. He is also a convicted fraudster who started his church after being released from state prison in 2013.

His hot-headed personality began gaining public attention in May 2022 after he became involved in a failed attempt to broker the surrender of a subway shooting accused, angering both police and defense attorneys. This July, three armed robbers robbed him of his jewelry while livestreaming one of his services in Brooklyn.

December 21, 2022: Come on!

A jury found him guilty of a series of loan fraud schemes that netted him $6 million, robbing Anderson of her $90,000 life savings, and lying about his connections with Adams to extort and attempt to defraud Bronx body shop owner Brandon Belmonte , in a real estate transaction.

“Whitehead not only robbed other alleged criminals; he didn’t just rob anonymous financial institutions; he didn’t just rob trusting parishioners. He robbed them all. He stole constantly. And he did it all himself. “Even the money he brought in ‘legally’ was in fact the product of his fraud,” prosecutors wrote.

“To the extent that Whitehead attracted public attention and had a following, it was because of his flashy, expensive and luxurious lifestyle – his mansion, Rolls-Royce and expensive suits. All of these things were also financed by his crimes.