Pastor Transferred in Probe of Unauthorized Mortgages

A pastor whose charges of racial discrimination sparked a highly publicized protest at a Korean American hat shop last year, has been transferred from the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Pasadena as church officials probe two mortgages he took out on the parsonage without approval, church officials said.

The Rev. Lee Norris May will be replaced April 4 by the Rev. Johnny Carlisle, pastor of Bethel AME Church of Oxnard.

The Right Rev. Vernon Randolph Byrd, presiding bishop of the Fifth Episcopal District, confirmed that he decided to transfer May. He would not identify May’s new assignment and declined further comment on the issue.

May has declined to comment.

Byrd said May lacked authorization when he took out mortgages of $56,000 and $112,000 in the church’s name on the three-bedroom bungalow in the hills of Altadena.

Byrd ordered May from the pulpit last month after learning about the $112,000 mortgage, he said. A week later, church officials placed May on “mandatory vacation,” Byrd said.

“Something is desperately not right,” Byrd said.

“I think it is a relief that the Rev. May is leaving,” said church trustee Adrian Panton. “But people are upset that he would be sent to anyone else in the AME church until there is resolution to the problems here.”

The church is getting free legal help from the Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny & Meyers to remove the deed of trust on the parsonage, according to Panton.

He said officials learned in December that the parsonage had been mortgaged by the pastor. “We know these loans took place--that much is certain--and we didn’t authorize it,” Panton said.

An official at the Los Angeles finance company that provided the mortgages said the church has informed him in writing that the mortgages were unauthorized and said his insurer is investigating.

May took out the $56,000 mortgage in late 1995 and the $112,000 mortgage in June 1996, according to property records. Church regulations require that the board of trustees approve any transactions involving church property, according trustee Panton.

Sheldon Cohn, the finance company official, said the $112,00 mortgage was used in part to pay off the previous mortgage. The $112,000 remains outstanding, he said.

It was May who last February focused attention on a South-Central Los Angeles hat shop run by In-Suk Lee with the help of her husband. May said that while shopping for a hat for his wife a month earlier he had been asked to leave the store because he is a black man. He later held a news conference outside the store with an estimated 30 protesters mobilized by the Brotherhood Crusade.

A frightened Lee left the shop and has never reopened it. May rejected her letter of apology, demanding instead that they meet face to face. They reconciled at a private meeting at her church, but the accord blew up after May called a news conference to announce it and demanded that she attend.

Last August she and her husband moved to a small town near the Mexican border, where they run a general store.

Lee, who ran the hat shop for 13 years “without an incident until Pastor May walked in,” said what happened to her was “unfair.”

“I miss my children in Los Angeles so much,” she said. “Sometimes, watching a night sky, I cry thinking about them.”

Still, she said she thanks God for helping her and her husband start a new life.

“I forgave Pastor May a long time ago and try not to think about our loss,” she said.