She’s no angel!
For a decade, Sister Milindia has tugged on heartstrings in Little Italy. Wearing a cross, veil and nun’s black habit, she approaches strangers and asks for donations, saying she’s an Episcopal sister raising money for an orphanage and the homeless.
Saturday, July 17, was typical for her. She spent the day hustling along Mulberry Street’s busy pedestrian plaza, ducking into Italian restaurants and thrusting her metal cup at shoppers, diners and passers-by.
“Please give money for the children of St. Joseph’s,” she asked a reporter seated at an outdoor table at Giovanna’s Ristorante.
Many did, and after five hours of begging, Sister Milindia called it quits.
At 6:30 p.m., she bought some bootleg DVDs outside a pharmacy and caught the Brooklyn-bound Q train at Canal Street.
During the ride, she tried peddling vials of perfume to a female straphanger, who turned her down.
She got off at Avenue J/Kings Highway, where, cigarette dangling from her lips, she disrobed on the street.
She pulled off her white coif, black veil and tunic-like habit to reveal a pink tank top. She put on brown shorts under her black skirt, which she peeled off, folded and stuffed into a plastic bag.
After buying a sandwich, canned pasta and a bottle of water, she took a bus to Linden Boulevard in East New York, lit another cigarette and rang the bell at 714 Jerome St., a rundown brick house with garbage strewn across its front yard.
A hulking man emerged, gave her a bear hug and whacked her lustily on the behind.
A boy who answered the door there two days later said she had gone to Atlantic City.
All in a day’s work for the lying nun.
“Sister Milindia” is not a sister. The Episcopal Church has never heard of her; she’s been busted at least once, in 1997, for misrepresenting herself as a nun in The Bronx; and the orphanage for which she claims to raise money doesn’t exist.
Her real name is Mindy LeGrand, 54, and she’s connected to a “church” in Crown Heights founded in the 1970s by a killer rapist with a harem of a dozen phony nuns. The church is now led by the founder’s son, who is also a convicted rapist.
The outfit has no Episcopal or other church affiliation, is not a registered charity and has no foster- or day-care license of any kind.
The pseudo-sister spins competing tales. She tells some would-be donors that she’s collecting for an orphanage in upstate Liberty and others that the money is “for the homeless.”
She described herself as a “missionary sister for the Episcopalian Church” and claimed to care for 37 13-year-old girls. She told a reporter that she was different from other nuns “because we take only two vows,” which she declined to explain.
She says she has been collecting money on Mulberry Street for 30 years. Police, who often shoo her away, say it’s more like 10.
They say they’ve wanted to bust her for years but can’t come up with a charge that will stick.
“This is worse than a crime — this is a sin,” said an officer familiar with her antics. “She is going to burn in hell.”
Her sister act includes wearing an aging homemade ID around her neck with the name Sister Milindia, though she told a reporter her name was “Sister Melinda.”
The ID indicates it is from St. Joseph’s Church of Christ and Home, where, she explained, further donations can be made.
The “church,” at 222 Brooklyn Ave. in Crown Heights, is a four-story residential row house that has no sign. An open room on the first floor is rimmed by a handful of folding chairs but there are no printed material, spiritual icons or indication that the place offers services.
LeGrand is a member of a cult-like clan whose founder, Devernon LeGrand, was a notorious serial killer and rapist who did 30 years at an upstate prison and died in jail in 2006 at age 82.
Mindy is Devernon’s daughter-in-law, according to Quomenters LeGrand, 53, one of the founder’s sons.
“She had married into the family,” said Quomenters, a former Wall Street worker who says he handles youth services for the church while his ex-con brother, Noconda LeGrand — convicted of participating in the rape with his father — serves as reverend and head of the operation.
“She’s our sister,” said Quomenters, who declined to provide details about the marriage or Mindy’s relationship with the family.
But he said she raises a “substantial” amount of the funds needed to keep the church going.
“She belongs to St. Joseph’s. She’s been around for many years,” he said.
She has also had trouble paying her bills for years. A $2,843 judgment by Chase Manhattan bank in 1992 is among a half-dozen civil suits against her, including claims by Deutsche Bank, Capital One and KeySpan.
The suits reference two aliases: Mindy Felsher and Mindy Serano.
The church itself is cloaked in murder and mystery.
Devernon LeGrand, a self-styled bishop, used the Crown Heights building to operate what he called St. John’s Pentecostal Church of Our Lord during the 1960s and ’70s.
Brooklyn prosecutors proved it was actually a front for his twisted harem and house of horrors.
LeGrand seduced teens and young women, forcing them to have sex with him and demanding they dress in nun outfits and beg for money. This army of forced volunteers fanned out across the city and raised about $250,000 a year, prosecutors estimated.
The patriarch was convicted of murder in 1976 after he killed an ex-wife, raped a woman and slaughtered two teen girls in his order because they threatened to testify against him in a fraud case.
The girls’ bodies were burned, hacked up and dumped in a lake in the Catskills near Liberty, where LeGrand owned a 58-acre farm that church leaders claim is now used as a summer camp for poor kids. Cops suspected him of additional murders.
Noconda, 55, did eight years in jail for his role in the rape as a 20-year-old. He was released in 1984 and now serves as St. Joseph’s “pastor” and leader, his brother said. Noconda did not respond to requests for an interview.
The owner of the building is another family member, Schavaston LeGrand. He owes $5,000 in unpaid taxes on the property, the city says. He could not be reached.
Quomenters, who goes by the nickname “Uncle Mentey” in the neighborhood, says his family has rejected its dark past.
St. Joseph’s used to have an orphanage but no longer does, although it continues to take in runaways and troubled teens, he said.
Nine of them, ranging in age from 8 to 21, live full time in the apartments above the church space, he said. He claimed they were all away at summer camp.
“They’re not really orphans — they’re strays, kids that were put out of their homes,” he said. “In order to avoid going through the system, they come to me.”
Quomenters is well-liked in the neighborhood because he helps kids with schoolwork, organizes basketball games and gives them money, according to several youngsters hanging out at Brower Park, a block away from the church.
On Monday, Uncle Mentey was busy filling up a plastic pool outside the church building so kids could cool off.
“I’m the most respected person in the neighborhood,” he said.
The good feelings don’t extend to Little Italy and Sister Milindia, however.
“It’s disturbing what she is doing,” said Stefano Signorastri, the manager of Il Cortile at 125 Mulberry St. “I’ve been chasing her out of the restaurant for eight years.”
The sordid past of the cult-like family organization:
In the late 1950s, self-styled “Bishop” Devernon LeGrand began recruiting women — some just teenagers — to his unregistered “St. John’s Pentecostal Church of Our Lord” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He directed his harem of fake nuns to panhandle across the city, and reportedly sired 47 children with them by 1965, when investigators found kids “caged” inside the building at 222 Brooklyn Ave.
In the 1970s LeGrand was convicted of murdering his ex-wife, raping a woman in the church and killing two teen girls. The teen nuns’ bodies were found in an upstate lake. LeGrand died in prison in 2006.
LeGrand’s son, “the Reverend” Noconda LeGrand, 55, now heads the “church” in the same building but called “St. Joseph’s Church of Christ and Home.” It has no nonprofit status and is not recognized by any organized religion.
Noconda did eight years in prison for raping the same woman his dad brutalized. He was released in 1984.
Another son of Devernon, Quomenters LeGrand, 53, claims he left a Wall Street job to run the church’s youth services. He is known as “Uncle Mentey” in the neighborhood. He said nine runaways are housed in the apartments above the church and that they are now camping at the family’s Catskills compound. He said Mulberry Street’s panhandling “nun,” Sister Milindia, a.k.a. Melinda LeGrand, is his sister-in-law but would not say whom she married.
Additional reporting by Liz Pressman and Larry Celona