A couple times just before Xmas, the U.S. Attorney’s office environment in Manhattan declared that Whitehead experienced been arrested. Prosecutors in the office’s General public Corruption Unit mentioned they’d caught him boasting to have influence at City Hall although making an attempt to shake down Belmonte. Adams was not accused of any wrongdoing prosecutors reported that Whitehead, whilst earning his overtures to Belmonte, “knew” that he could not get hold of the metropolis-authorities “actions” he was promising. But it’s not clear how the govt arrived at that conclusion. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s business in Manhattan declined to comment. When I requested a City Corridor spokesperson regardless of whether Adams or any person on his personnel experienced been interviewed or subpoenaed as part of the investigation, the spokesperson referred me to responses the Mayor made soon after Whitehead’s arrest. “I have no responses on the federal investigation,” Adams explained. He known as the allegations “troubling,” but he wasn’t completely ready to clean his hands of Whitehead, as a politician may possibly be predicted to do upon listening to that an associate dropped his name although seeking to extort somebody. Adams stated he would allow the investigative approach perform out.
Whitehead is forty-four a long time outdated. He has brilliant brown eyes and a broad, participating smile. He typically spends many several hours a day live-streaming on Facebook and Instagram, wherever he promotes his church and his magnificent daily life design and style, and denounces his enemies. “Designer for times,” he the moment mentioned, offering his followers a digital tour of his wander-in “prayer closet,” which was stuffed with clothing from Gucci, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton. Whitehead, who lives in a multimillion-greenback residence in Paramus, New Jersey, advertises himself as an ascendant community chief in a multiplicity of realms: small business, politics, religion, and enjoyment. He has explained that a person of his missions is to serve as an emissary involving “the streets” and “the church.” In 2018, right after the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine pleaded guilty to building sexually express videos of a thirteen-year-previous lady, Whitehead spoke in courtroom on behalf of the rapper. “The bishop experienced to come as a result of,” 6ix9ine stated in a video he posted on Instagram. “We experienced a situation.”
There are men and women all over the metropolis who declare to have been conned, burned, harassed, lied to, or normally damage by Whitehead. Lots of have reported Whitehead to the authorities, and a number of have appear away experience that Whitehead was guarded by his relationship with Adams. “I could tell he was title dropping all over again making use of Eric Adams all over again and trying to discredit me,” a pastor named Robin Brown wrote in an e-mail to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s workplace, in 2014, describing her tries to report Whitehead to the N.Y.P.D. “I have dropped all religion in the method.” (Brown declined to comment for this posting.) “I’ve experimented with to report him on numerous occasions at the nearby precinct, but to no avail,” the Reverend Benny Custodio, of Immanuel–First Spanish United Methodist Church, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, wrote in a comment on a web site submit about Whitehead in 2017. “This cardboard bishop is at the moment at my church accomplishing the exact factor he has done in the previous, working with the church to fatten his pockets. He understands the system pretty well and uses it to his edge dependent on the close partnership he has with our borough president, Mr. Eric Adams.” (Custodio declined to comment when I contacted him quite a few months ago he died in November.)
Many Brooklyn church figures, small business associates, and former close friends of Whitehead’s refused to talk to me for this write-up, because they explained they feared him. “When he received angry, you could sense that menace,” a male named Brian Etta advised me recently. Etta showed me files indicating that, in 2006, even though Whitehead was working for a mortgage loan broker, Whitehead aided market Etta’s house in Brooklyn and then pocketed proceeds from the sale. Town records show that the house was later transferred to a firm controlled by Whitehead. In 2013, Etta volunteered for Eric Adams’s 1st campaign for Brooklyn borough president, and, at Adams’s inauguration, he noticed Whitehead at Brooklyn Borough Hall. “I thought, This is brazen,” Etta said. “A guy who desires to have an image of being squeaky thoroughly clean, and this man who is an precise legal?”
Not long immediately after Etta met him, Whitehead was convicted of a startling fraud on Long Island. Employing information and facts that he’d attained from a girlfriend, an personnel at a Honda dealership in Patchogue, Whitehead stole the identities of far more than a dozen of the dealership’s clients. He employed people identities to order luxurious cars. A prosecutor termed it one of the major identity-theft situations Suffolk County had viewed. For the duration of his demo, Whitehead got ordained as a pastor, and wore clerical collars to court appearances. “I really don’t anxiety you,” he told the judge at his sentencing, in June, 2008, right after currently being discovered guilty of more than a dozen counts of identity theft. “I fear God.”
A person of Whitehead’s attorneys was André Soleil, a previous Republican political operative. Soleil, who has lived overseas for the previous several yrs, was disbarred in absentia in 2019, immediately after remaining accused of bilking a Harlem nonprofit, and of stealing from escrow accounts he established up throughout true-estate transactions. “I will be aware that I’ve been simply accused,” he told me, when I termed him not long ago.
Soleil spoke with regret about the function he played in Adams and Whitehead’s connection. “I launched them,” he reported. A Town Corridor spokesperson disputes this, boasting that Adams and Whitehead met at “an anti-violence event with rappers” on an unspecified day “around” 2014. But there are films and pictures obtainable on the net of Adams and Whitehead with each other as early as 2013.
Soleil claims he is also a pal of the Mayor’s. “Eric and I ended up shut,” he informed me. In accordance to Soleil, they met in the nineteen-nineties, when Soleil labored as an aide to Rudy Giuliani in Town Hall and George Pataki in the governor’s office, and when Adams was still a cop—and, for a time, a Republican. Soleil helped manage fund-raisers for the duration of Adams’s 1st operate for Brooklyn borough president. An e-mail invitation to a fund-raiser throughout Adams’s 1st Brooklyn borough-president campaign lists Soleil as a “co-chair” beside Tiffany Raspberry, a latest senior adviser to Adams at Town Hall, and Jesse Hamilton, who succeeded Adams in the condition senate.
Soleil’s legal specialty was authentic estate. He played both of those sides of Brooklyn’s gentrification increase, representing equally operating-class householders and the intense true-estate corporations that flipped their households. Whitehead, who for various years in the aughts labored as a branch supervisor for a serious-estate corporation termed Personalized Cash Corporation, was a person of the few criminal defendants that Soleil at any time represented. Whitehead was sentenced to at least a 10 years in prison, but he bought out in the summer time of 2013, just after just five decades. He would afterwards tell people today that his convictions had been overturned. He also explained that he prepared to get into politics.
Shortly soon after his launch, Whitehead appeared up his previous law firm, and started hanging about Soleil’s law place of work. Whitehead would pay a visit to Soleil at his place of work and check with him about technological authorized and authentic-estate issues. A handful of times, Soleil explained to me, he arrived back again to his office environment to locate Whitehead there, without the need of authorization, reading through paperwork on his desk.
Soleil remembers a holiday get together that he threw the year Whitehead came dwelling. In a restaurant in Cobble Hill, Soleil’s Hasidic genuine-estate-investor consumers and his Black political-entire world pals mingled. Soleil had invited Adams, who gave a speech. Whitehead, in Soleil’s telling, experienced extra or fewer invited himself. Midway by means of the evening, Soleil grew to become knowledgeable that Whitehead and Adams were engaged in what Soleil remembers as an “intense” dialogue. “Shortly right after that,” he stated, “it appeared that they experienced grow to be ideal buddies.”
Soleil, along with other individuals I spoke to for this tale, believes that Adams noticed a thing of himself in Whitehead. They have been both of those charismatic, bold, and brash. They experienced equally been raised by one, performing-course mothers in the outer boroughs: Adams in Jamaica, Queens, Whitehead in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Both of those experienced also expert early operate-ins with the law. Adams was crushed in the basement of a Queens law enforcement precinct when he was fifteen a long time aged. Years before his id-theft conviction, Whitehead was billed with two counts of forgery in the 3rd degree in New Mexico. (The circumstance was dismissed immediately after he produced comprehensive restitution to the victims.) Persons close to Adams say that he’s conscious of how conveniently his existence could have been various, had he not joined the city’s law enforcement ranks. “Lamor is like his id,” Soleil reported. “We all like our id.”
Early into his friendship with Adams, Whitehead was residing with a mate named Aurora Gordon, who experienced an apartment in an very affordable-housing tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Gordon, a decade older than Whitehead, had escaped from the Earth Trade Heart on 9/11, and worked in the office environment of a tech corporation. In her spare time, she ran a little firm referred to as Battered 2 Beautiful, for survivors of domestic violence and other varieties of abuse. Gordon aided Whitehead identified a youth-outreach ministry referred to as Leaders of Tomorrow Brooklyn. They soon spun it out into an unbiased church. “She considered that it was definitely heading to be one thing massive, and she thought he was an genuine individual,” Gordon’s sister instructed me.
Whitehead, who in his early twenties experienced worked tiny work opportunities in the audio business, and modelled streetwear, had a knack for obtaining near to the popular and the impressive. He referred to the rapper Foxy Brown, a Brooklyn icon, as his cousin. On Fb and Instagram, he commenced chronicling his encounters with musicians, boxers, actors, radio personalities—and with Adams, the new borough president. Publicly, Whitehead referred to Adams as his mentor. Privately, he known as him E. In just one YouTube video clip from 2013, Whitehead interviews Adams at an function in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “We’re likely to be accomplishing a whole lot of items together,” Whitehead tells him. “Thank you for staying a patriarch for our Black neighborhood. . . . Thank you for becoming an advocate for guys.”
Whitehead and Adams fulfilled up at concert events, bars, and crimson-carpet activities. Gordon told people she knew that Whitehead frequently bought out of mattress in the middle of the night time, to go see Adams. With Adams’s assistance, Whitehead related with other politicians, folks in the enterprise planet, and N.Y.P.D. officers. Whitehead and Adams acquired jointly at Woodland, a cafe on Flatbush Avenue the place Adams favored to dangle out immediately after function hours. Woodland was the very first restaurant operate by the Petrosyants brothers, who now run La Baia. “This clique did not exist when the Mayor was in the condition senate,” a guide who worked for a person of Adams’s rivals in the 2021 Democratic mayoral most important explained, conversing about the scene at Woodland. “It fashioned close to 2013.” That was the calendar year that Whitehead bought out of prison, and when the Petrosyants brothers had been indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s business office in Brooklyn, for conspiring with others to launder phony insurance coverage payouts by shell corporations. (They afterwards pleaded guilty to lesser rates.)
