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It has been a wild ride for Bishop Lamor Whitehead, aka Grand Pastor Flash, the holy rolling reverend who went viral in 2022 when he was robbed at gunpoint at the Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries church in Brooklyn while delivering a Sunday sermon that was live streamed. Some people believed the robbery was staged and that Whitehead was a scammer who had developed a reputation for flim-flamming parishioners out of their hard-earned money in order to live a life of luxury.
Whitehead even filed lawsuits against popular YouTubers who were spreading the word about him being an ungodly grifter. Well, according to g to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Whitehead is every bit the scammer he was rumored to be, and that’s why he has just been sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud, extortion and making false statements.
Bishop Lamor Whitehead’s Legal Troubles Leading Up To His 9-Year Prison Sentence
Whitehead was initially arrested in Dec. 2002 and charged with “defrauding one of his parishioners out of part of her retirement savings, attempting to extort and defraud a businessman, and lying to the FBI.” Then, last year, we reported that he was facing additional fraud charges for forging documents to buy his $1.3 million mansion in New Jersy despite having next to no money in his bank account, among a long list of other offenses that indicate he was balling on everyone else’s budget but his own.
From the Attorney’s Office’s press release:
WHITEHEAD, who leads a church in Brooklyn, New York, stole from his own parishioners, sought to defraud and extort a businessman, and committed loan fraud. First, WHITEHEAD induced one of his parishioners to invest approximately $90,000 of her retirement savings with him by promising to use the money to help her buy a home. He then spent the money on luxury goods and other personal expenses and, when she demanded to be paid back, he continued to lie to avoid returning the money. Second, WHITEHEAD extorted a businessman for $5,000, then attempted to convince the same businessman to lend him $500,000 and give him a stake in certain real estate transactions in return for favorable actions from the Mayor of New York City, even though WHITEHEAD knew he could not obtain the favors he promised. Third, WHITEHEAD submitted a fraudulent application for a $250,000 business loan, including doctored bank statements that falsely claimed WHITEHEAD had millions of dollars in the bank and hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue. He submitted similar fraudulent applications to various other financial institutions, stealing millions of dollars in the process. Finally, when speaking with FBI agents who were executing a search warrant outside WHITEHEAD’s mansion in New Jersey, WHITEHEAD falsely claimed that he had no cellphones other than the phone he was carrying when, in fact, WHITEHEAD had and regularly used a second cellphone, which was inside his house at the time.
According to the N.Y. Daily News, before handing Whitehead down his sentence of nearly a decade, Manhattan federal court Judge Lorna Schofield told the pastor he hadn’t shown “any remorse for your conduct” even after the court heard all the evidence against him, which she said was “frankly overwhelming.” After all was said and done, Whitehead was found guilty in March on five felony counts, ” including wire fraud, attempted extortion, lying to the FBI, and related charges connected to three separate schemes that saw him bilk tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting victims,” the Daily News reported. In addition to the nine years in prison, the 45-year-old was sentenced to three years of supervised release, ordered to pay $85,000 in restitution to his victims, and ordered to forfeit $95,000.
Sounds like getting robbed by gunpoint on camera was the least of Bishop Whitehead’s worries—assuming that wasn’t also a whole scam.
