‘Bling Bishop’ Lamor Whitehead’s robber reenacted stick-up to his pals, feds say
NEW YORK — One of the robbers who stuck up Brooklyn Bling Bishop Lamor Whitehead “gleefully” reenacted the caught-on-video heist to his buddies — and his attempt to blame the crooked man of cloth for the crime is “despicable,” prosecutors said.
Say-Quan Pollack, 25, whose lawyer said in a court filing that he should get leniency because Whitehead is a convicted fraudster, waved around the bishop’s stolen bling in a Brooklyn apartment building, according to a court filing Tuesday.
Pollack and his accomplices met with some associates in an apartment building lobby shortly after the July 2022 robbery, prosecutors said.
“There, Pollack appeared to gleefully reenact part of the robbery and then displayed what appears to be a diamond ring to others,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Schuman wrote Tuesday, asking Brooklyn Federal Court Judge William Kuntz sentence him to more than seven years in prison.
Pollack’s lawyer, Gary Villanueva, made an issue of Whitehead’s March conviction in his plea for leniency, describing the bishop’s crimes as “factors which the Court may consider in fashioning a reasonable sentence.”
Schuman blasted that argument on Tuesday, and said Pollack has offered no apology for the robbery.
“Rather, he instead spends much of his submission casting aspersions against one of the victims ... as if the victim’s unrelated criminal conviction somehow justifies Pollack’s decision to target members of the clergy and commit an armed robbery in a sacred space during a religious service,” she wrote. “The Court should disregard Pollack’s despicable attempt to shift blame to one of the victims.”
Whitehead, who counts New York Mayor Eric Adams as a personal mentor, is serving a nine-year prison sentence after his March conviction in Manhattan Federal Court of $6 million in loan frauds, of fleecing a parishioner out of her $90,000 life savings, and of lying about his ties to Adams to extort and try to defraud a Bronx body shop owner in a real estate deal.
Whitehead was preaching at Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministry in Canarsie on July 24, 2022, when Pollack, Juwan Anderson and Shamar Leggette barged in. They forced the bishop to the floor and stole his pricey jewelry as his parishioners and his wife, who was holding their baby daughter in her hand, watched in horror.
Anderson, who also took a plea deal, is awaiting sentencing, while Leggette was killed in a January shootout with cops and U.S. Marshals.
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