*Brooklyn preacher Lamor Whitehead asked God to smite one of his parishioners while refusing to return his mother’s life savings, jurors heard in witness testimony at the controversial religious leader’s Manhattan fraud trial on Tuesday.
“I know he was berating Rasheed in [a] text and he was basically asking God to exact vengeance on him,” Pauline Anderson said in Manhattan Federal Court on the second day of Whitehead’s trial.
Anderson said the threats came more than six months after Whitehead convinced her and her son, Rasheed Anderson, to empty her retirement savings in late 2020 — promising he’d use the funds to buy her a fixer-upper home — and then disappeared with the cash, according to a NY Daily News report.
Federal prosecutors say Whitehead, a flamboyant figure and friend of Mayor Adams, ripped off Pauline Anderson, drew up fake bank documents, tried to extort a businessman, and lied to the FBI, charges he denies.
Anderson, who’s separately suing the pastor, said that she got involved with Whitehead when her son informed her of services at his church, Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministry in Canarsie, Brooklyn, helping congregants improve their credit scores. She said Whitehead presided over Rasheed’s wedding and introduced him to contacts who helped him secure his own home.
After several back-and-forths and a failed loan application, Anderson testified that the pastor convinced her to trust him with a decade’s worth of retirement savings from her career as a nurse so he could invest the funds in his company and use proceeds to buy her a home and renovate it. The 58-year-old said he promised to pay her $90,015 with Whitehead’s signature on the back, which Anderson said she asked her son to give him at Sunday Mass.
“I felt he was honestly advising me. I felt that he was truthful and that I would actually benefit from it,” an emotional Anderson said, later adding, “I trusted him. He said he had real estate experience. He was a man of God — he prayed for me in earnest. I believe in God, so I believed he would honestly help me to get this house.”
As months passed by and Anderson still had no new home, she said she faced the prospect of homelessness alongside her elderly mom when the landlord of her apartment put it on the market. Soon after, she said she started to worry when her
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