A Louisville pastor admitted to six criminal charges after prosecutors say he and an accomplice stole wallets from elderly women shopping at local grocery stores, then ran up thousands of dollars on their cards.

Virgil Mozee, pastor of The New Christian Church of Jesus Christ, pleaded guilty on July 23 to three counts of credit card fraud and three counts of theft, Premier Christian News reported. The charges stem from three separate incidents over a 15-day span in which Mozee and an alleged accomplice, Nathaniel Porter III, targeted women while they shopped at Meijer and Kroger stores in Louisville.

Court documents lay out a straightforward scheme. Mozee and Porter allegedly lifted the women's wallets during shopping trips, then used or attempted to use the stolen bank and credit cards at Walgreens locations. Prosecutors say Mozee spent thousands of dollars across all the stolen cards. One victim reported discovering 10 unauthorized transactions on her card totaling nearly $4,000.

Video surveillance from all three incidents backed up the victims' reports, prosecutors said. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 28.

Three victims in 15 days, and a pastor behind the scheme

The victims were elderly women, people who should have been able to run a routine errand without worrying about a man of the cloth picking their pockets. The court documents describe three distinct thefts compressed into just over two weeks, a pace that suggests something closer to a practiced operation than a one-time lapse in judgment.

Mozee's guilty plea covered all six counts. Whether Porter, identified in court filings as Mozee's accomplice, has been separately charged or entered a plea remains unclear from available court records. So does the total financial damage across all three victims, though the nearly $4,000 reported by just one woman gives a sense of the scale.

The case is one of several recent instances of clergy members facing serious criminal accountability. A Louisiana pastor was convicted on 25 counts after stealing more than $343,000 from his own congregations, a reminder that financial misconduct among church leaders is neither rare nor trivial.

Surveillance footage tied Mozee to every incident

Prosecutors built their case on a foundation that left little room for ambiguity. All three thefts were captured on store video, linking Mozee and Porter to the locations where the wallets disappeared and the stores where the cards were subsequently used. That kind of evidence tends to simplify plea negotiations.

The scheme itself was not sophisticated. Steal a wallet in the checkout aisle at Meijer or Kroger, walk to a Walgreens, and start swiping. But the victims, women described as elderly, were chosen for a reason. They were vulnerable, and the man targeting them held a title that most people associate with trust.

Questions about pastoral accountability have surfaced repeatedly in recent months. In one case, an Episcopal priest found guilty of conduct unbecoming appealed a church panel's recommendation to strip his ministry, raising questions about how religious institutions police their own.

Mozee's church, The New Christian Church of Jesus Christ, has not been publicly linked to any institutional role in the thefts. No statement from the church or from Mozee's defense attorney appeared in the court record as reported. The case, as it stands, is about one pastor's personal conduct, and the elderly women who paid for it.

Sentencing looms, but key questions remain unanswered

Mozee faces sentencing on September 28. The potential penalties he could receive have not been disclosed publicly. Whether a plea agreement shaped the terms of his admission is also unknown.

The broader pattern of criminal misconduct among church leaders continues to draw scrutiny. A California pastor was hit with a second murder charge in the case of a missing former congregant, and in South Carolina, a Pawleys Island church pastor and director resigned after a sex offender was allegedly given access to children. These cases span different denominations, different states, and different crimes, but the thread connecting them is the same: people in positions of spiritual authority who betrayed the trust placed in them.

Mozee's victims were not parishioners handing over tithes. They were strangers buying groceries. He did not need access to a church treasury to steal from them, just proximity and a willingness to prey on people who could not see it coming.

A pastor's collar does not make him immune to the law, and a guilty plea on six counts is a good start toward proving it.