Abyssinian Baptist Church is one of the oldest Black churches in America, and certainly one of the most storied. As a college student at Columbia University, Barack Obama often lingered in the back pews during Sunday services, taking in the sermon and the choir. Hundreds of mourners have gathered at the 216-year-old institution in recent years for the memorial services of Cicely Tyson and André Leon Talley.
It’s the kind of church where networking mixes with Bible study, and the roll reads like a who’s who list of Black intelligentsia and entrepreneurship.
In 2017, when Mara Porter, a member of the church, found a Harlem brownstone to buy, she was struck by the charming real estate agent who had listed it. He was also a deacon at the church. A year later, Ms. Porter and her husband, Tommie Porter, hired the deacon as a contractor to lead the renovations of the $1.44 million house. “We really loved the idea of keeping it in the community,” said Ms. Porter, 44, host of “CrimeFeed” on Investigation Discovery.
The business deal between the parishioners, however, collapsed spectacularly, ensnaring the church and its membership in a six-year saga of multiple lawsuits, closed-door meetings at the church, a public spat in a Harlem restaurant, a bankruptcy filing by the deacon and a criminal investigation.
The Porters and other members of the church accused the deacon, Jerome Yeiser, of absconding with money in lawsuits filed against Mr. Yeiser by the Porters and another church family. The Porters wanted Mr. Yeiser prosecuted for grand larceny, for failing to pay subcontractors and misspending funds. In 2019, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, then led by Cyrus R. Vance Jr., opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Yeiser.
But then in January 2022, Alvin L. Bragg Jr., became the D.A. and there was a big problem, the kind of problem that comes when the D.A. is also a Sunday school teacher at the church.
Mr. Bragg is a longtime church member. He even counted on some of his fellow congregants to help him get elected: Mr. Yeiser, his wife, Avis, who was a deaconess at the church, and elder daughter all contributed $50 or less each to Mr. Bragg’s campaign.
In August 2022, Mr. Bragg recused the office from the case because of “the nexus of the allegations and the church community” and because of his relationship with Mr. Yeiser — Mr. Bragg taught Mr. Yeiser’s daughters at Sunday school, said Emily Tuttle, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan D.A., in an email.
Hermann Walz, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former assistant district attorney in Queens and Brooklyn, said district attorneys recuse themselves to avoid the appearance of impropriety. “It’s absolutely proper to say, ‘My office should not handle this case,’” he said.
The investigation was transferred to the Bronx district attorney’s office, which closed the case in August 2023. “Based on the evidence, we could not prove criminality beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a Bronx D.A. spokeswoman in an email.
With the case closed, the Porters and another couple, John and Cheryl Graves, are hoping to recover their losses through ongoing lawsuits.
And there are plenty of lawsuits: In January 2020, Mr. and Ms. Graves filed a lawsuit against Mr. Yeiser for breach of agreement and fraud. Two months later, Mr. Yeiser and Ms. Yeiser, 60, followed up with a lawsuit for defamation against the two couples and the New York Daily News, which reported on the conflict; intent to inflict emotional distress against the two couples: and for assault and battery against Ms. Porter. And in December 2023, the Porters countersued Mr. Yeiser and his company, Siva Real Estate Services, for breach of contract, unjust enrichment and fraudulent inducement. None have been resolved, though a judge dismissed the claim against the Daily News.
Mr. Yeiser, 63, declined to comment on the lawsuits or the allegations against him, saying, “I definitely don’t owe a dime and I have all my proof and when it’s time, it will be submitted.”
‘No Other Church’
Ms. Porter, who grew up in Maryland, became a born-again Christian in college at the University of California, Los Angeles.
She found her church home at Abyssinian when she moved to New York in 2002, attending nearly every Sunday and sitting high in the balcony (it was always too crowded to find a seat down below). “It’s the Black church of Harlem. There was no other church I would have thought of going to,” Ms. Porter said.
The church, which declined to share the number of members in its congregation, has 50 deacons and deaconesses, according to Gerald Barbour, the chairman of the diaconate. Every Sunday, the sister deaconesses sit in the center pews and the deacon brothers sit along the side, by the organ, Mr. Barbour said. The deacons handle blessings, communion and wear a badge identifying themselves.
Mr. Yeiser had been a deacon for eight years when he first met Ms. Porter at the brownstone that made her swoon.
“It was an embarrassment of riches,” said Ms. Porter, 44, who recalled the spring day seven years ago when she and a friend visited the 114-year-old brownstone just a short 10-minute walk from Abyssinian. The woodwork was exquisite, from original shutters on the windows to the 10-foot-tall wood-carved living room mirror.
Ms. Porter imagined moving out of her Upper West Side apartment and raising her two children in Harlem, in the home where, decades earlier, a young Harry Belafonte had lingered on the front stoop with a teenage Sidney Poitier.
“Jerome was great, very present, very engaged,” Ms. Porter said, recalling her interactions with Mr. Yeiser during the home buying process. “He often referenced how proud he was of me and Tommie being a young Black couple raising a family in Harlem. From the beginning, he made it feel like he was rooting for us.”
A year later, in spring 2018, when Ms. Porter and Mr. Porter, 46, who works in tech security, were getting ready to remodel the house, they did not know that the Internal Revenue Service had recently levied a nearly $75,000 tax lien against Mr. Yeiser and that he and his wife had filed for bankruptcy in the past. They would first learn about the tax troubles when Mr. Yeiser explained to them why he couldn’t pay the subcontractors, according to the Porters’ countersuit.
All the couple knew was that Mr. Yeiser had agreed to renovate their kitchen, bathrooms and add an addition to the garden level apartment, with a deck above it that would open onto the kitchen, a $539,000 job, according to the renovation agreement between Siva Real Estate and the Porters.
For the first few months, work moved along without incident — walls came down; electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems went in, according to the countersuit and a video The Times reviewed of a meeting between Mr. Yeiser and Ms. Porter. But in December 2018, the work came to a halt, “unexpectedly and inexplicably,” according to the countersuit.
The countersuit details mounting anxiety and confusion: When the Porters asked questions — in emails and in person — Mr. Yeiser told them that his bank account was frozen because of unpaid taxes, and some of their money had been used to pay his taxes; but the money would be released soon, he promised. As the weeks went by and the winter set in with no work getting done, the Porters learned that the subcontractors had not been paid in months; inspections had not been completed and Mr. Yeiser was not a licensed contractor. (Mr. Yeiser’s license expired in 2013, according to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.)
Tally it up, and $192,758 was unaccounted for, the countersuit alleges.
In March 2019, Mr. Yeiser quit over email.
That same day, a sprinkler subcontractor filed a $15,000 lien against the Porters’ home, an effort to collect the debt that also meant the couple could not sell the house until it was settled.
“It’s rare that somebody just stops paying,” said Barry McLaughlin, the plumber for the job. “But in this situation, he just basically vanished.”
Bleeding money — $16,000 a month in mortgage payments and rent on the Harlem apartment where the family was living — the Porters panicked.
They turned to the church.
‘Not the First Victims’
In early spring 2019, the Porters laid out the conflict to the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, who told them “they were not the first victims,” and other parishioners who had hired Mr. Yeiser as a contractor “had been defrauded out of thousands of dollars in fact patterns that were eerily similar,” according to documents filed in federal bankruptcy court by the Porters as creditors seeking payment from Mr. Yeiser.
Dr. Butts advised the Porters to get a lawyer and meet with him and the deacon board the following Sunday, which they did in a closed-door meeting, the Porters’ bankruptcy filings show.
Mr. Yeiser, who was at church that Sunday, too, was summoned to the meeting after the Porters left, and he and Ms. Yeiser, were suspended from their roles as deacons, according to the lawsuit he and his wife filed against the Porters and others.
“I felt horrible,” said Mr. Barbour 79, who attended the meeting. “As officers and members of the church, I felt very disappointed, very sad.”
For the Yeisers, the experience was ostracizing and humiliating, and “turned a house of worship, which had been for decades a place of solace and comfort to the plaintiffs, into a place of near-medieval banishment,” according to the Yeisers’ lawsuit, as they were “told that they were no longer welcome in their own Church.”
The Yeisers’ suit goes on to chronicle more humiliations: Two months after losing their positions, the Yeisers were at lunch with three Abyssinian deacons at Renaissance, a Harlem restaurant. It was a Sunday, and Ms. Porter was there, too. She called the couple thieves and liars who could not be trusted, walked up to Mr. Yeiser’s table and in front of everyone, poured a glass of water over his head.
Ms. Porter denied the allegations in her countersuit.
She and her husband, desperate to finish the renovation, contacted the various subcontractors directly.
“They had a house partially finished, they wanted to move into it and they couldn’t,” said Mr. McLaughlin, the plumber. “Jerome was gone.”
Ms. Porter cut deals with the subcontractors, including Mr. McLaughlin, and Bilal Farooq, the HVAC subcontractor. “The lady paid us in pennies to get it done,” Mr. Farooq said.
The family moved into their house in July 2019.
Mr. Yeiser filed for bankruptcy a month later.
‘Church Folk’
Years before the Porters hired Mr. Yeiser, Mr. Graves, 66, and Ms. Graves, 59, met Mr. Yeiser in the fellowship hall, where parishioners often gather and eat, after Sunday services in early 2014, according to a lawsuit the Graveses filed against Mr. Yeiser. The conversation turned to home improvement — the couple wanted to renovate the basement of their Harlem brownstone — and Mr. Yeiser offered to do it, according to the Graveses lawsuit.
The job was a big one for a basement — a contractor would need to level the basement floor and renovate the wall along the steps, according to the work agreement between Mr. Yeiser and the homeowners. In July 2014, Mr. Yeiser signed a contract for almost $18,000, but like with the Porters, work stopped in December and Mr. Yeiser “refused to pay subcontractors,” according to the Graveses lawsuit.
Mr. Graves rarely went to church on Wednesdays. But after Mr. Yeiser stopped returning his texts and calls, Mr. Graves, a lawyer, showed up at church on a Wednesday night looking for Mr. Yeiser, but could not get a straight answer from him as to when and how the work would get done, the Graveses lawsuit shows.
As the Porters would do years later, Mr. and Ms. Graves turned to Dr. Butts, their lawsuit shows. They were told that they were not the first couple to come forward, according to documents filed in federal bankruptcy court by the Graveses as creditors seeking payment from Mr. Yeiser. Mr. Barbour, however, told The Times that he knew of only two families — the Porters and the Graveses — that came forward with allegations.
Another deacon tried to mediate the peace, talking to Mr. Yeiser and Mr. Graves separately, according to the Graveses lawsuit. Quinton Dixie, an associate research professor of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School, said such a strategy is common in churches. “Generally speaking church folk would try to handle things themselves, rather than introduce any kind of secular authorities,” Dr. Dixie said.
But no resolution was reached and Mr. and Ms. Graves eventually hired another contractor to complete the job, according to the their lawsuit.
Mr. and Ms. Graves declined to comment on the lawsuits.
After the Porters came forward and the church began looking at the complaints, a formal investigation was opened. In February 2020, Dr. Butts told the congregation in a letter and from the pulpit that Mr. Yeiser and Ms. Yeiser had been suspended from their positions. “It was pretty much publicized throughout the church,” Mr. Barbour said.
Dr. Butts died in October 2022. A few months earlier, he called Ms. Porter. “He said he really felt very badly about what happened and said, ‘I wish we had done more,’” Ms. Porter recalled. While she appreciated the gesture, it was not enough to bring her back to the fold.
“It really deeply affected my faith — not my faith in God,” she said. “It has completely turned me off to the church.” She no longer attends Abyssinian or any other church.
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