Back in the pulpit of his Brooklyn church after the millionaire robbery scare during the sermon–or was it a farce? Gucci slim fit and banana color with black prints.
He's said it before, "Fendi, Louis (Vuitton) or Gucci, why can't we wear this to church, what's wrong?"
According to the “prosperity gospel” philosophy that grew out of African-American religious traditions, it is natural for someone who preaches that God provides material wealth to show evidence of that. In your case they seem excessive.
Dressed to preach, the bishop went to the Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries congregation, in the Canarsie neighborhood, and staged the robbery that occurred at that same altar a few days ago, when three hooded guys entered with a gun in their hands. Whitehead, 44 years old, they knocked him down, they held a gun on him. From him and his wife, and loot of more than a million dollars in jewelry and gold was taken from them.
"The devil didn't want me back in the pulpit," he assured his parishioners. "God says, 'You can't take his life. You can take material things from him, but you can't touch his soul.'"
Seen everything that has come later, the robbery only turns out to be the beginning of his ordeal.
Since Sunday July 24 and to date, saved last minute arrests, the thieves remain unaccounted for. It has been speculated that perhaps the bishop already knew they were going. He denied to the journalists that it was all a plan to collect the insurance policy.
One of his complaints is that the media, instead of focusing on the crime, are concerned with his lifestyle – Rolex, luxury cars – and a past in which he served a sentence for fraud, the defaults he has been leaving or complaints for appropriation of other people's money.
There is a date that marks its existence. On June 14, 1978. That night, the police stopped a driver for not having a license. A ruckus arose. His brother, named Arthur Miller and a well-known neighborhood merchant, went out to mediate. He was carrying a gun, legally owned and licensed. But the cops slowed him down with a practice chokehold. Doctors certified his death at the hospital. He left behind several children, one of them an infant, Lamor Miller Whitehead.
The mother brought them forward. Lamor studied accounting and videography at Eastern New Mexico University and returned to Brooklyn. He worked in Manhattan as a mortgage broker. There was something else.
A Suffolk County woman called the police in 2005 to report that someone had bought a motorcycle in her name and using her personal information.
Shortly after, the agents stopped a man who was driving that motorcycle. It was Whitehead, he was 27 years old. Thus began an identity theft and fraud investigation, a set-up led by Whitehead, whose girlfriend had access to the credit reports of customers at the Long Island car dealership where she worked. He was accused of stealing the identity of a dozen people, which he used to buy vehicles. High society stuff.
While awaiting trial, he continued with the mortgages and in 2008, already in Sing Sing, after imposing a sentence of 10 to 30 years, he received another complaint for "diverting" more than 300,000 dollars.
In July 2013, five years after his imprisonment, Whitehead was released for good behavior. The following week his church was born.
The robbery has brought to light the complaint of Pauline Anderson, who says that in 2020 she gave the bishop $90,000 for the promise that she would help him buy a house. Asking her to return them, she replied that it was late. Whitehead was in talks to buy a mansion in New Jersey.
From the pulpit he called Anderson a liar. “That is what the enemy wants you to think,” she emphasized in his sermon. "I'm a miracle," he continued, "I'm not supposed to be here today. Everyone wants to talk about what the tabloids are talking about and forget about the miracle." Perhaps therein lies the secret of so much tinsel.
