Should Madonna need a new personal trainer, she need look no further than her old friend, ex-con Lamont Clarke.
The kid who grooved with the mega star on the rooftop of her building on the Lower East Side before she was famous was freed from jail Monday after completing a 20-year sentence for second-degree robbery.
Now 49 and determined to start a new life teaching fitness, Clarke tells The Post, “If Madonna would take me on, I wouldn’t charge her a dollar. Loyalty over royalty.”
Grandfather of one Clarke was the subject of a 2014 jailhouse interview in The Post when he described hanging out with the Material Girl, months before her big break.
Top NYC photographer Richard Corman shot the 14-year-old and his posse in a now-iconic photo session with Madonna in 1983. The snaps made Corman’s book, “Madonna NYC 83,” and a December 2013 exhibition at The Milk Gallery in Chelsea.
‘Now I am on the outside, I feel like I have been reborn.’
“We were very close to Madonna, who had a giant boom box we’d all dance to,” says Clarke, who hopes the singer will reach out to him now that he’s sprung.
Clarke says the fledgling celebrity encouraged the five-strong crew to take part in Corman’s rooftop shoot and told her pals, “Did you think I would leave you out?”
At the time, the 24-year-old was performing in NYC clubs and renting an apartment in the Alphabet City walk-up, near Clarke’s tenement building.
Sadly, while Madonna rocketed to fame, Clarke’s trajectory was very different. The orphan got into a “negative lifestyle” as he hustled on the streets. In 1999, he started his 20-years-to-life sentence for robbing a Manhattan clothing factory.
“I take full responsibility for what I did,” says Clarke, who is back living with his wife of 19 years, Tonya, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Now I am on the outside, I feel like I have been reborn.”
He got his personal training qualifications while at Eastern Correctional Facility upstate in Napanoch, NY.
“I’m hoping to make this my career and advise people on nutrition,” adds the vegan, who was granted parole.
“I’ve got plenty to offer society now I’ve done my time.”
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