NEW YORK (AP) — A Brooklyn preacher with ties to New York City Mayor Eric Adams is set to go on trial Monday in Manhattan federal court over charges that he looted a parishioner’s retirement savings and tried to extort a businessman to fuel his lavish lifestyle.
Lamar Miller-Whitehead, 47, a Rolls Royce-driving bishop, faces the start of jury selection two years after a grand jury lodged charges against him including wire fraud, attempted wire fraud, attempted extortion and making false statements to federal law enforcement officials.
Prosecutors say he plundered a parishioner’s savings and duped a businessman with false claims that they could leverage his connections to New York City officials, including Adams, to make millions of dollars. Miller-Whitehead has pleaded not guilty.
Miller-Whitehead has been free on $500,000 bail since his arrest, which came only months after he was the victim of a robbery when $1 million in jewelry was stolen from him by gunmen who surprised him during a church service.
His lawyer, Dawn Florio, said at the time that her client felt as if he were being turned from a victim into a villain.
“Bishop Whitehead has pled not guilty, and is looking forward to having his day in court, so that he can fight these charges,” Florio said in a statement Friday.
In charging documents, prosecutors made no mention of the friendship that Miller-Whitehead developed with the city’s mayor while he served as Brooklyn’s borough president before his election to the city’s top job.
But an evidentiary request from prosecutors suggests the mayor’s relationship with Miller-Whitehead might become a focal point at the trial. Prosecutors are seeking to require a writer for The New Yorker to testify about a January 2023 article titled, “The Mayor and the Con Man.”
Attorney Rachel Strom, who represents New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach, argued in a letter to Judge Lorna G. Schofield that prosecutors…
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