Eric Adams’s mentee Lamor Whitehead is a convicted fraudster and identity thief. Has he been protected by his relationship with the Mayor?
was sworn in as the mayor of New York, an old friend and church leader named Lamor Whitehead went to an auto shop in the Bronx, to drop off a Mercedes-Benz G-Class S.U.V. that had been in a crash. Whitehead led a small church in Brooklyn called Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries. People called him Bishop. The shop he visited, No Limit Auto Body, was operated by a man named Brandon Belmonte, who was involved in real estate.
Since the early days of his political career, Eric Adams has had to fend off allegations of corruption. In 1994, when Adams, then a thirty-three-year-old transit cop, mounted a long-shot campaign for Congress, his opponent, Representative Major Owens, accused him of staging a break-in at his own campaign office. Nothing came of a police investigation into the matter.
On January 1, 2022, Adams was sworn in. He soon appointed to important posts an array of friends and close connections. For his deputy mayor for public safety, he chose Philip Banks III, a former N.Y.P.D. official who had resigned in 2014, amid a federal investigation into favor trading and bribery. For his chief of staff, he picked Frank Carone, a Brooklyn Democratic Party power broker who has drawn scrutiny for his business dealings.
Brandon Belmonte was not the first person to go to law enforcement with the suspicion that Whitehead and Adams were engaged in corruption. Both men deny that their relationship goes beyond that of mentor and mentee. “Everybody is trying to connect me and the Mayor with some fiduciary experience,” Whitehead told me, a few weeks ago. “We don’t talk about real estate. We don’t talk about stocks. We don’t talk about none of that. We talk about life.
Many Brooklyn church figures, business associates, and former friends of Whitehead’s refused to speak to me for this article, because they said they feared him. “When he got angry, you could feel that menace,” a man named Brian Etta told me recently. Etta showed me documents indicating that, in 2006, while Whitehead was working for a mortgage broker, Whitehead helped sell Etta’s house in Brooklyn and then pocketed proceeds from the sale.
Soleil claims he is also a friend of the Mayor’s. “Eric and I were close,” he told me. According to Soleil, they met in the nineteen-nineties, when Soleil worked as an aide toin City Hall and George Pataki in the governor’s office, and when Adams was still a cop—and, for a time, a Republican. Soleil helped organize fund-raisers during Adams’s first run for Brooklyn borough president.
Soleil, along with others I spoke to for this story, believes that Adams saw something of himself in Whitehead. They were both charismatic, ambitious, and brash. They had both been raised by single, working-class mothers in the outer boroughs: Adams in Jamaica, Queens, Whitehead in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Both had also experienced early run-ins with the law. Adams was beaten in the basement of a Queens police precinct when he was fifteen years old.
Whitehead told people that Adams planned to appoint him to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, and Adams asked community figures—political operators, business people, and religious leaders—to join a committee called Leaders of Tomorrow, run by Whitehead, which met on at least one occasion. “In politics, you run into everybody at the same meetings and stuff,” one attendee remembered. “This gentleman, Lamor, was new to a lot of us.
Soleil found Adams to be a surprisingly cautious borough president—he treaded carefully, perhaps because he had his sights set on City Hall. Whitehead was an exception to this rule. “I thought that my friend Eric Adams was out of his goddam mind,” Soleil said. “He gave this guy a key to Borough Hall.”
In June, 2014, Miller-Bradford and her mother discovered that there had been a ceremony in Miller’s honor, on the block he was killed on. Adams and Whitehead had attended, and Adams had given a copy of an official proclamation about Miller to Whitehead. Florence Miller wrote an e-mail to Adams: “I do not want anyone using my husband’s name or the tragic cold blooded murder for publicity and/or personal gain,” she wrote.
The concert was the turning point in Whitehead’s relationship with a number of associates, including his collaborator and roommate, Aurora Gordon. “It was your bad attitude and your rush to have money,” Gordon wrote to him, in an e-mail that November, explaining why the concert had fallen apart. She listed more than a dozen people who were supposedly “falling back,” or distancing themselves from Whitehead.
Gordon told the D.A. that her understanding was that Adams had promised Whitehead money. “I worked 1 1/2 years for Lamor believing he was in partnership with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams who [ . . . ] promised we would be funded by end of year,” Gordon wrote in an e-mail to the office’s senior executive for law-enforcement operations. She told the office about the hundred and fifty thousand dollars that Whitehead had raised for the Adams-backed Barclays Center concert.
By that point, the F.B.I. was already investigating Whitehead. Early one morning last spring, Brandon Belmonte, of No Limit Auto Body, met federal agents at a Kohl’s parking lot in Paramus. They handed him a short stack of hundred-dollar bills, totalling five thousand dollars, to give to Whitehead. Belmonte stuffed the bills in his left pant pocket. He then drove to Whitehead’s house. “He just kept talking,” Belmonte said. “ He got more and more excited when he saw the money.
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