Bey's second wife was a confidant of Chauncey Bailey
Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Religion Writer
Sunday, December 30, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/30/MNQDTT4HB.DTL
She was known over the years by many names - Sister Felicia, Nisa Islam, Nisa Bey and Nisayah Yahudah - as she moved through the tight-knit black leadership circles of Oakland.
She was a close ally of the late Yusuf Bey - becoming his second wife - as they led Oakland's first Nation of Islam mosque and he then made Your Black Muslim Bakery into an independent, quasi-religious movement, a multimillion-dollar business and a highly regarded icon of black empowerment.
She was also a longtime colleague and confidante of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, whose distinctive style of journalism entrenched him in the city's black community, particularly the ethnic newspapers and television stations he helped build.
This summer Bailey told Yahudah he was working on a story about a violent struggle for power at the bakery after Bey's death. Within hours, bakery members were aware of the once-secret story, according to Saleem Bey, Bailey's confidential source.
On Aug. 2, Bailey was assassinated as he walked to work, his story still unpublished. A bakery handyman has been arrested and charged with the killing.
Yahudah told The Chronicle that Bailey, not she, was the reason the bakery learned of the story.
"Chauncey told a lot of people he was working on a story about the bakery," she said, adding that she had warned him to be careful about betraying confidences. "I don't think it was a secret."
But Yahudah said that she's been unfairly spurned by many black people in Oakland since Bailey's death, driving her to near bankruptcy.
"I have no understanding why anyone would want to hurt Chauncey Bailey," said Yahudah, who is working on an autobiography about her life as a Black Muslim. "He was like a brother to me. ... There's no way in the world I'd want to harm him. Whatever he did, he never did anything to cause somebody to kill him."
Early years in the Nation of Islam
Yusuf Bey and Yahudah played critical roles in bringing the Nation of Islam to Oakland. The early years provided the seed for a relationship that would last decades.
In the 1960s, the Bay Area's only Nation of Islam mosque, Mosque No. 26, was in San Francisco, even though the region's largest black population lived in Oakland.
So two brothers, Joseph Stephens, a cosmetologist who would later change his name to Yusuf Bey, and Billy Stephens, who ran a mosque in Santa Barbara, asked Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, if they could start a mosque in Oakland.
Muhammad gave them his blessing, and in 1968, the Stephens brothers founded Mosque No. 26b in Oakland.
Billy Stephens was the minister, the spiritual head of the congregation. Joseph Stephens was the captain, the mosque's second in command and leader of the men. The former Stephens brothers were granted an "X" for their last name, signifying a higher membership in the Nation of Islam.
The X also signified that the brothers were relinquishing the European surname forced upon their ancestors through slavery, which stripped slaves of their traditional names, language, family and spirituality.
The sister captain, the leader of the women, was Yahudah, who was known as Sister Captain Felicia. Yahudah said Elijah Muhammad had asked her personally to come to the Bay Area.
"When he called me there and put me in charge of the females, my assignment was to come back to the Bay Area and clean it up," she said. "And that's what I did."
She ran the Muslim Girls Training Class, which trained the mosque women how to be homemakers, according to Abdul Sabry, a childhood friend of the Stephens brothers and a member of Mosque No. 26b at the time. Women were taught to cook, clean and take care of the house.
But Yahudah, a former model, also sought to upgrade the image of Black Muslim women.
Muhammad "asked me to ... teach them to dress with style and professionalism and at the same time, be modest," she said.
Yahudah said that she was merely teaching women that attention to appearance was also important.
Critics "claim I came into the (Nation of Islam) and changed everything," she said. But Yahudah's message was simple and positive. "I told them that they needed to get out of the beige and white everyday, and put some color on."
Meanwhile, Joseph X taught the men how to sell newspapers and attract followers, said Sabry, the first chairman of the Black Studies Department at San Jose State University.
Many of the men who were joining Mosque No. 26b were living criminal lives on the street or coming out of prison, but Captain Joseph X was able to persuade them to turn their wayward lives around, said Sabry, who left the mosque in 1970 to move to Louisiana.
"He was a motivator," said Sabry. "He was good at it."
Joseph X and Billy X did not adhere to all of the Nation of Islam's theological tenets. The Nation of Islam had a strict segregation of the sexes, meaning unmarried, unrelated men and women couldn't even sit in the front seat of a car together.
Captain Joseph was married, but he and Yahudah spent considerable time together privately, members of their mosque and other Nation of Islam members said.
"She was like his girlfriend," said Sabry. "Back in those days, you didn't question it."
Yahudah declined to talk about Bey's courting of her.
Birth of the bakery
The Stephens brothers started a bakery to support their mosque community's effort for financial self-sufficiency. Others couldn't help but marvel at their success.
"They were doing things at a speed it's hard to imagine ... when we had seen how hard it was to go brick by brick," said Askia Muhammad, a student minister at the San Francisco mosque, which couldn't match the Oakland mosque's financial success. "They were aggressive, smart businessmen who knew how to play the angles - and play them well."
But it wasn't all done according to the Nation's protocols.
Elijah Muhammad had forbidden selling "Muhammad Speaks," the Nation of Islam newspaper, in white neighborhoods, believing that racial tension was too severe in the 1970s, Askia Muhammad said.
But Oakland mosque members were doing just that so that they could make more money, he said.
"They were flaunting the rules," Askia Muhammad said.
By 1971, Joseph X and Billy X had a falling out.
Joseph left the mosque community and took with him the bakery, which several Mosque 26b members considered communal property. Yahudah went with him.
"The real leader of the men is the captain," said a former leader in the Oakland mosque under Billy X who spoke on condition of anonymity because of relationships he still has in the community. "The minister is the titular head. But if you had a weakness between you and the men, the palace coup was always possible and that, fundamentally, was what happened."
Joseph "started establishing his own leadership. He became the minister of the bakery. He started building his own following, his own cadre, his own empire right on the corner there. The rest is history."
Several Nation of Islam members said Joseph X's move fueled an intense three-way battle among the region's Nation of Islam centers: Mosque No. 26 in San Francisco, No. 26b in Oakland and Joseph X's bakery, which claimed North Oakland and Berkeley.
A captain of the San Francisco mosque was gunned down at a North Oakland gas station, and members of Billy X's mosque in Oakland were physically threatened if they came into Joseph X's territory, the former leader of Billy X's mosque said. Elijah Muhammad dismissed the leader of Mosque No. 26 in San Francisco - a man known as Minister Henry Majied - for ordering Black Muslims "to attack" other believers, according to Askia Muhammad.
Yahudah said she was almost killed for her leadership during that era, which she called "a disaster." But she declined to elaborate.
"It turned out to be a tragedy," she said. "You don't want to be reliving a tragedy. My whole life has changed since that time."
Elijah Muhammad didn't trust Joseph X, according to the former leader in the Oakland mosque. Muhammad blamed him, in part, for the violent rivalry between the mosques.
"Elijah Muhammad was not really pleased of Joseph," said the leader, who, along with the vast majority of Nation of Islam members, permanently converted to the Sunni branch of orthodox Islam in 1975. "Elijah Muhammad was pretty aware of people who had ulterior motives - ex-gangsters, pimps, murderers, pimps, convicts - people from the dregs of society." At some point, Joseph X changed his name to Yusuf Bey. He said he was given the name by Elijah Muhammad.
A problematic relationship
As Bey developed his own following at the bakery, his relationship with Sister Felicia - who had changed her name to Nisa Islam - grew problematic.
Elijah Muhammad told Bey he was not supposed to have more than one wife, but that if he did want to have more than one, he needed to marry Nisa, according to sworn testimony in a civil deposition from Jane Doe 1, a woman who said she was raped and impregnated as a child by Bey. Doe 1 was one of three alleged sexual assault victims who tried to sue Bey for abuses they suffered as children, but the case against him crumbled after his death.
So Bey had a Black Muslim wedding with Nisa Islam (Yahudah), according to Doe 1, and she changed her name once again, this time to Nisa Bey.
But Bey was involved with other women as well. He would ultimately have approximately 100 women whom the bakery community regarded as his wives over time, and some 46 children.
In 1974, he impregnated 19-year-old Esperanza Johnson. Fearing scandal about another unmarried sexual relationship, Bey hid Johnson in a hotel until she gave birth in April 1975, and then he forced her to relinquish her child to Nisa Bey (Yahudah), Doe 1 said in the sworn deposition, based on her conversations with Johnson, her foster parent.
Johnson described the birth and the forcible relinquishing of her child in stark terms.
"I did not see her born," Johnson testified. "I blocked it out."
Johnson told Doe 1 that Yusuf Bey said that in exchange for giving her child to Yahudah, "He was going to marry her and make her his No. 1 wife," said Doe 1, who was also considered a "wife" of Yusuf Bey.
The child would be called Islam Bey. But on her birth certificate, she was only listed as "Baby Girl Johnson," according to documents presented at the deposition by an attorney representing Alameda County. A year after her birth, Yusuf Bey and Yahudah formally adopted her.
Yahudah said she didn't want to talk about the adoption because "that's a very sensitive area in my life."
She said only, "We were married at the time. I had lost twins. That was a husband trying to make a wife happy. I imagine it caused a lot of resentment. I lost my twins, and I adopted her."
Six years after the birth, Johnson went to Yahudah and asked for her child back. The request was granted. Yahudah said she had little choice because she had decided to leave Bey.
"After I broke up with him, he made it very difficult for me to keep her," she said. "That was a very treacherous, sensitive time in my life, so I don't want to discuss it."
Yahudah said that from then on, she was kept out of the family in many ways, including financially.
Building the black media
After leaving Bey, Yahudah developed a career as a television personality. The role preserved a cordial relationship with Yusuf Bey - and introduced her to Bailey, himself a journalist inspired at Hayward High School by the Black Nationalist movements of the 1960s, which flourished in Oakland.
During the 1980s, still calling herself Nisa Bey, Yahudah was the host of "Nisa's Show Time Productions" and "San Francisco Live," which aired on various Bay Area cable channels. When Yusuf Bey wanted to have his own television show, Yahudah produced it.
"I always helped him," Yahudah said. "I was never his enemy."
Yusuf Bey's television show ultimately became "True Solutions," a rebroadcast of the speeches on self-empowerment that he gave at the bakery. Along with bakery products that sold in dozens of grocery stores, the show became one of the primary ways Bey made himself known to the Bay Area.
One of the stations that aired "True Solutions" was Soul Beat, a paid-programming channel that served Oakland's black community. Yahudah also had a show on the channel, and Bailey became Soul Beat's news director, hosting a news program. Yahudah said she was also for a time the personal assistant to Soul Beat owner Chuck Johnson.
Soul Beat went off the air in November 2003, the same year that Yusuf Bey died of prostate cancer. Yahudah said the Bey family kept the gravity of his illness from her and he died without her knowing.
"I know he wouldn't have wanted me to be kept from his deathbed," she said. "The family did that to me. I felt that was a very cruel thing."
Bailey, who also worked as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, then helped co-found OUR TV, a black cable channel where he had a news show. Yahudah has her own show, "What's Your Business," on the station, Channel 78 on Comcast Cable in Oakland.
After Bailey was fired from the Oakland Tribune in 2005 for ethical lapses, he worked as "senior journalist" for the Globe Newspapers, serving the East Bay's African American community. Bailey often wrote un-bylined stories, according to several colleagues and employers.
In March 2006, the Globe ran an un-bylined story by "Globe Staff" that gave a glowing portrait of Yahudah, who was the chief executive of a nonprofit intended to "increase the visibility of minority women in the modeling industry." Bailey wrote the story, Yahudah said. She said she didn't know why he didn't use a byline. But the lack of a byline concealed Bailey's friendship to Yahudah, a breach of journalistic ethics.
Yahudah said that she and Bailey had long had a collaborative relationship.
"We were like sister and brother," she said. "He supported me, and I supported him. He supported me in helping promote the business I was creating. I would bring different stories to him."
In June, Bailey was hired as the editor of the Oakland Post, an African American-owned newspaper that serves the black community.
Bailey brought Yahudah to the Post, too, according to Publisher Paul Cobb. Yahudah was going to do volunteer marketing and sell advertising for the newspaper, Cobb said.
Cobb said she sometimes used the Post's office space and sold advertising, receiving a commission but no salary. Cobb said she was never an employee.
"She was a friend of Chauncey's from the Soul Beat television days," said Cobb, who said Yahudah "was a known entity" because of her television shows.
"Anybody who would volunteer to sell advertising - if you're a struggling black newspaper - you don't say no to them," Cobb said.
The end of the bakery
In July, Bailey began working on a story about the bakery's financial troubles and the rift within the Bey family. His primary source was Saleem Bey, a "spiritual son" and legal son-in-law of Yusuf Bey, according to Cobb. Saleem Bey and other family members said that rivals in the vast Bey family had improperly seized control of the bakery. Saleem Bey's contingent believes that the bakery's bankruptcy filing was a scheme to drain bakery assets.
Saleem Bey told Bailey that he wanted to be an anonymous source for the story, out of concern for his personal safety. As a further protection, Bailey said he would write the story without a byline, Saleem Bey said.
But as Saleem Bey walked out of the Post's office where they had done the interview, he ran into Yahudah. He told her he'd been talking to Bailey about his computer business.
By the time Saleem Bey got home that day, July 16, word had already circled back to the bakery and his wife that he had talked to Bailey about the bakery's bankruptcy.
Saleem Bey said he immediately called Bailey.
"What kind of news organization are you running?" Saleem Bey asked. He reminded Bailey that he was supposed to be an anonymous source. "You don't understand the gravity," he told Bailey. "These dudes are killers."
Bailey apologized and admitted that he had spoken with Yahudah. He told Saleem that she had offered Bailey insight into the bakery, according to Saleem Bey.
Yahudah said word must have spread through other Bailey connections to family members - not through her.
"Chauncey was a friend of mine, so why would I go around telling anybody?" she said. "If he did tell me he was working on something, I wouldn't tell anybody."
Yahudah said Bailey had told many people, including those attending the July 14 and 15 "Black Expo 2007" at the Marriott in downtown Oakland, that he was working on a story about the bakery. But the event took place before Saleem Bey said he met with Bailey about the story.
Yahudah said she could not offer the names of any people Bailey had told about the bakery story.
On July 30, Saleem Bey said he received a cell phone call from an unknown number. The caller said, "Keep my name out your mouth." Saleem Bey said he recognized the voice to be that of Yusuf Bey IV, 21, who became the chief executive of the bakery two years after his father died.
Three days later, Bailey was slain as he walked to work. The following day, Oakland police raided the bakery and made numerous arrests.
Bey IV was arrested on kidnapping and torture charges in an unrelated case. While in custody, he would tell police that Bailey "had written slanderous things" about his father, who had faced rape charges. But Bey IV denied involvement in the slaying, and he has not been charged.
Bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard was also arrested and charged with killing Bailey. After meeting alone with Bey IV in a police interview room, Broussard confessed to the slaying, telling police he killed Bailey because of the stories he was working on.
Bey IV would later tell police that he knew Saleem Bey was talking to Bailey about the bakery. Bey IV said he learned of it through Islam Bey, Esperanza Johnson's daughter whom Yusuf Bey had given to Yahudah to raise.
"Islam told me that Saleem went to see Chauncey the day before he died," Bey IV said, according to a police report written by Sgt. Derwin Longmire.
Yahudah said she talks to Islam Bey regularly, sometimes every day. But that she didn't think she'd talked to Islam about Bailey's story.
"She's a very good child," Yahudah said about Islam Bey. "She's never done anything but good."
After Bailey's slaying, Yahudah left the Oakland Post.
"When I got a threat from someone about her being here, I told her for her safety and for the paper's safety, it wasn't wise for her to be here, and she ought to take a sabbatical," Cobb said. "For 30 years, she's been involved in the Muslim bakery crowd."
Bailey and Bey were each, in their own way, strong and outspoken advocates for black people, Yahudah said. Both men were known for their caustic and often confrontational styles. But both were sensitive men on the inside, qualities they didn't often show to others. And both were misunderstood in their advocacy, she said.
That Bailey's death would be linked to Bey's legacy stuns Yahudah.
Bailey "did things to help Yusuf Bey in the past," Yahudah said. "I still haven't gotten over (Bailey's) death. I have tried to meditate and go over it many times in my mind. I don't understand why anyone would want to harm him."
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, December 31, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Convert's Unsolved Killing in 1982
THE ASSASSINATION OF CHAUNCEY BAILEY
CONVERT'S UNSOLVED KILLING
25 years later, family still suspects Ronald Allen was slain by fellow followers of Your Black Muslim Bakery - and now, police are taking another look
Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Franciso Chronicle Staff Writer, Monday, December 24, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/24/MNJFTKN17.DTL&tsp=1
Ronald Allen tried to show his minister father that the tenets of Your Black Muslim Bakery weren't that different from the precepts of the Bible.
His family would soon have cause to fear otherwise.
On Easter morning, April 11, 1982, a day after he went out for a meal with his bakery brethren, the 32-year-old father of five was found shot to death near the Berkeley dump.
Twenty-five years later, the case remains unsolved. But Allen's family remains convinced that his affiliation with the Oakland bakery was his undoing.
The bakery Allen joined two years before his death was dominated by the secret commands and public proclamations of one man, Yusuf Bey, who critics - including some former followers - say lorded over the group through threats and force. Women and even children in the bakery were given to Bey for his sexual pleasure, former followers have said.
As the revelations about Bey mounted before and after his death from cancer in 2003 - and as his would-be successors were slain or jailed in a string of violent crimes, including the killing of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey - Berkeley police decided to re-examine Allen's death.
They hope to finally pierce the secrecy that enshrouded the bakery and solve the slaying of a man who apparently stood up to Bey and may have been among the earliest victims of one of the bakery founder's cardinal laws: "If you do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up."
Allen was an unlikely convert to Your Black Muslim Bakery, his family recalled.
The favorite son of a Southern Baptist minister, skilled at cement masonry and tailoring, Allen grew up in Oakland and graduated from McClymonds High School.
After school, he worked in masonry and at a potato chip plant. He had little in common with the ex-cons and impoverished men and women drawn to the bakery's philosophy of self-reliance and empowerment.
His family thought he would follow his father to the pulpit.
"We thought he was going to be the next preacher," said his younger sister, Juanita Allen.
But for reasons his family still cannot fathom, Allen joined the bakery in 1980.
The religion of the bakery combined Bey's own vision with the Nation of Islam's creed of black empowerment and separatism. The result had little to do with Islam, the religion practiced by a billion Muslims around the world.
Allen's older brother Carl recalled that Ron had a hard time explaining his change of faith to his father, the Rev. Emimet Allen of Oakland's Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.
"When Ron was Muslim, he showed Dad his new Bible," Carl Allen said. "He would tell him that the Quran was the same as the Holy Bible. My brother showed my dad: There was no difference between his book and the other book."
The minister may not have been swayed by the argument, but he took some comfort in the message.
"That kind of relieved my dad, that Ron still worships God," Carl Allen said. But his mother, Jerry Dean Allen, remained ardently opposed to the idea of his joining the bakery.
"She didn't like it at all," Carl Allen said. He said he had told his mother, "Ron is a grown man. He has to make his own decisions, whether they're right or wrong."
Ron Allen was searching for something, his brother said. "Everybody was looking for the right God - everybody was looking for their identity, for love and acceptance. The Muslims provided that love."
Allen joined the bakery with Odessa Hamilton, a single mother he had met through his two younger sisters.
The couple had two daughters together before the family moved across from the bakery on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. They had a third daughter while they lived there.
Allen made dashikis - traditional African outfits that enjoyed a renaissance during the black power movements of the 1960s and '70s - for the men of the bakery. He also made cement masonry repairs on the bakery's brick buildings.
He soon met another woman in the bakery, Rashida Amin, whom he declared to be his Muslim wife. He also took the Muslim name Rashid.
His son from a previous relationship, Ron Jr., visited Allen at the bakery in 1981 at the age of 9. He remembers something strange, something he couldn't understand then.
His father kept a police-frequency radio scanner in his room. Other bakery members were "stationed within the vicinity, on walkie-talkies," Ron Jr. said.
Other members of the family have long wondered about the scanner and the walkie-talkies. They suggested that Allen knew the group wasn't just dealing in baked goods.
In the first week of April 1982, Carl Allen saw his brother for the last time.
At home in Vallejo on a day off from his work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Carl was washing his car when Ron showed up in the middle of the day.
"He was acting really, really weird," Carl Allen recalled. He remembers his brother saying, "I just came by to see you again. I just wanted to see you again."
"He just kept saying it," Carl Allen said. "I couldn't get why."
Ron told him, "I love you, brother," then went off to see his parents.
Juanita Allen was there when he arrived, unannounced, with Hamilton and the couple's daughters. He was saying goodbye, in his way, his sister said.
"It was really weird. I can't explain it," she said. "He hugged Mom, he hugged Dad, he hugged me."
Hamilton wanted to stay there, but Allen insisted they had to go.
Hamilton told police that on the night before Easter, men showed up at their quarters across from the bakery and wanted to go to a restaurant with Allen, according to a coroner's report. That was the last time she saw him alive.
Shalina Allen, one of Ron Allen's daughters, said she remembers the day she last saw her father. She was not yet 3 years old, but she says she clearly remembers men in bow ties were waiting outside.
"He gave us all a kiss," she said. "He told us all he had to go."
Juanita Allen says her brother told Hamilton goodbye. "He knew he wasn't going to be back," she said.
At 5 a.m. the next day, a passer-by found Allen's body at the Berkeley dump, which is now part of a waterfront park. Police found four shotgun shell casings at the scene.
Allen's parents were devastated by his death. His father, already in ill health, died two years later at age 70. Allen's mother died a few months after that; she was 53.
She never spoke about what happened to her son.
Over the years, the word around the bakery was that Allen was a driver and had been caught stealing from the bread trucks. The next day, it was said, he was shot and killed.
Two women - who said they were raped and impregnated by Bey as children - recounted that story in sworn depositions they gave to support a 2002 lawsuit against the bakery, Bey and others. They said they had heard about what happened but had not witnessed the killing.
In 2003, soon after the lawsuit was filed - and 21 years after Allen was killed - Berkeley police reopened the homicide investigation. Juanita Allen said an investigator had told her that Rashida Amin, the woman Allen considered his Muslim wife, had revealed a secret.
Amin had told the investigator that Bey had ordered Allen to give up both Hamilton and his oldest daughter, then just 4, to him, Juanita Allen said. Her brother refused, she said.
Bey's proclivity for sex with both women and children is depicted in depositions made by the women who filed the lawsuit as well as Esperanza Johnson, one of the numerous women Bey considered his wives.
But Amin, who reportedly identified at least one of the men involved in the killing, died of cancer not long after talking to police.
Recent revelations about the bakery have prompted Berkeley police to go back at the case. They say they will recheck the four shotgun shells found near Allen's body 25 years ago to determine whether they can be traced to any weapons used in bakery-related crimes over the years.
Carl Allen said the recent events of the bakery, including the arrest of its young leader, Yusuf Bey IV, on torture and kidnapping charges, have provided the family some solace.
"Justice came - the bakery is no more," he said.
Berkeley police say the bakery's collapse may be the event needed to trigger a resolution of the case.
"There is interest in the case now because it's an ongoing pattern of crimes and there's community interest in it," said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, Berkeley police spokeswoman. "The detectives would be very interested in speaking with anyone in the community who can shed more light on it or provide any viable leads."
Some of Allen's family members are still waiting for answers after a quarter of a century.
"Just from the way he was murdered, it was like they were doing that to send a message," said Ron Allen Jr. "Just to prove a point, that this is what happens if you cross the line with us.
"Nobody got behind the true story about how his life has been taken," he said. "I have grown up the last 25 years with his memory, and wondering is anybody going to be held accountable."
Some, however, gave up.
Odessa Hamilton is a victim of the bakery's legacy. "When my dad died, she died, too," said Shalina Allen, now 28.
Hamilton, left to raise the children on her own, became involved in a bad relationship and got hooked on drugs. She lost an eye in a domestic violence incident.
She eventually was forced to give up her children to foster care. Now she is homeless and wanders the streets.
"She is not even Odessa - she is somebody else," Shalina Allen said. "Odessa is gone - she has been dead for 25 years, too. She talks to herself, says she is talking to my dad."
As for her mother's time in the bakery and her father's death, Shalina Allen said, "she doesn't really discuss it with us."
"She doesn't want to tell us anything," the daughter said. "She would say, 'Your daddy is still alive.' "
How you can help
If you know anything about the killing of Ronald Allen, call the Berkeley police homicide detail at (510) 981-5741.
E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com.
CONVERT'S UNSOLVED KILLING
25 years later, family still suspects Ronald Allen was slain by fellow followers of Your Black Muslim Bakery - and now, police are taking another look
Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Franciso Chronicle Staff Writer, Monday, December 24, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/24/MNJFTKN17.DTL&tsp=1
Ronald Allen tried to show his minister father that the tenets of Your Black Muslim Bakery weren't that different from the precepts of the Bible.
His family would soon have cause to fear otherwise.
On Easter morning, April 11, 1982, a day after he went out for a meal with his bakery brethren, the 32-year-old father of five was found shot to death near the Berkeley dump.
Twenty-five years later, the case remains unsolved. But Allen's family remains convinced that his affiliation with the Oakland bakery was his undoing.
The bakery Allen joined two years before his death was dominated by the secret commands and public proclamations of one man, Yusuf Bey, who critics - including some former followers - say lorded over the group through threats and force. Women and even children in the bakery were given to Bey for his sexual pleasure, former followers have said.
As the revelations about Bey mounted before and after his death from cancer in 2003 - and as his would-be successors were slain or jailed in a string of violent crimes, including the killing of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey - Berkeley police decided to re-examine Allen's death.
They hope to finally pierce the secrecy that enshrouded the bakery and solve the slaying of a man who apparently stood up to Bey and may have been among the earliest victims of one of the bakery founder's cardinal laws: "If you do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up."
Allen was an unlikely convert to Your Black Muslim Bakery, his family recalled.
The favorite son of a Southern Baptist minister, skilled at cement masonry and tailoring, Allen grew up in Oakland and graduated from McClymonds High School.
After school, he worked in masonry and at a potato chip plant. He had little in common with the ex-cons and impoverished men and women drawn to the bakery's philosophy of self-reliance and empowerment.
His family thought he would follow his father to the pulpit.
"We thought he was going to be the next preacher," said his younger sister, Juanita Allen.
But for reasons his family still cannot fathom, Allen joined the bakery in 1980.
The religion of the bakery combined Bey's own vision with the Nation of Islam's creed of black empowerment and separatism. The result had little to do with Islam, the religion practiced by a billion Muslims around the world.
Allen's older brother Carl recalled that Ron had a hard time explaining his change of faith to his father, the Rev. Emimet Allen of Oakland's Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.
"When Ron was Muslim, he showed Dad his new Bible," Carl Allen said. "He would tell him that the Quran was the same as the Holy Bible. My brother showed my dad: There was no difference between his book and the other book."
The minister may not have been swayed by the argument, but he took some comfort in the message.
"That kind of relieved my dad, that Ron still worships God," Carl Allen said. But his mother, Jerry Dean Allen, remained ardently opposed to the idea of his joining the bakery.
"She didn't like it at all," Carl Allen said. He said he had told his mother, "Ron is a grown man. He has to make his own decisions, whether they're right or wrong."
Ron Allen was searching for something, his brother said. "Everybody was looking for the right God - everybody was looking for their identity, for love and acceptance. The Muslims provided that love."
Allen joined the bakery with Odessa Hamilton, a single mother he had met through his two younger sisters.
The couple had two daughters together before the family moved across from the bakery on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. They had a third daughter while they lived there.
Allen made dashikis - traditional African outfits that enjoyed a renaissance during the black power movements of the 1960s and '70s - for the men of the bakery. He also made cement masonry repairs on the bakery's brick buildings.
He soon met another woman in the bakery, Rashida Amin, whom he declared to be his Muslim wife. He also took the Muslim name Rashid.
His son from a previous relationship, Ron Jr., visited Allen at the bakery in 1981 at the age of 9. He remembers something strange, something he couldn't understand then.
His father kept a police-frequency radio scanner in his room. Other bakery members were "stationed within the vicinity, on walkie-talkies," Ron Jr. said.
Other members of the family have long wondered about the scanner and the walkie-talkies. They suggested that Allen knew the group wasn't just dealing in baked goods.
In the first week of April 1982, Carl Allen saw his brother for the last time.
At home in Vallejo on a day off from his work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Carl was washing his car when Ron showed up in the middle of the day.
"He was acting really, really weird," Carl Allen recalled. He remembers his brother saying, "I just came by to see you again. I just wanted to see you again."
"He just kept saying it," Carl Allen said. "I couldn't get why."
Ron told him, "I love you, brother," then went off to see his parents.
Juanita Allen was there when he arrived, unannounced, with Hamilton and the couple's daughters. He was saying goodbye, in his way, his sister said.
"It was really weird. I can't explain it," she said. "He hugged Mom, he hugged Dad, he hugged me."
Hamilton wanted to stay there, but Allen insisted they had to go.
Hamilton told police that on the night before Easter, men showed up at their quarters across from the bakery and wanted to go to a restaurant with Allen, according to a coroner's report. That was the last time she saw him alive.
Shalina Allen, one of Ron Allen's daughters, said she remembers the day she last saw her father. She was not yet 3 years old, but she says she clearly remembers men in bow ties were waiting outside.
"He gave us all a kiss," she said. "He told us all he had to go."
Juanita Allen says her brother told Hamilton goodbye. "He knew he wasn't going to be back," she said.
At 5 a.m. the next day, a passer-by found Allen's body at the Berkeley dump, which is now part of a waterfront park. Police found four shotgun shell casings at the scene.
Allen's parents were devastated by his death. His father, already in ill health, died two years later at age 70. Allen's mother died a few months after that; she was 53.
She never spoke about what happened to her son.
Over the years, the word around the bakery was that Allen was a driver and had been caught stealing from the bread trucks. The next day, it was said, he was shot and killed.
Two women - who said they were raped and impregnated by Bey as children - recounted that story in sworn depositions they gave to support a 2002 lawsuit against the bakery, Bey and others. They said they had heard about what happened but had not witnessed the killing.
In 2003, soon after the lawsuit was filed - and 21 years after Allen was killed - Berkeley police reopened the homicide investigation. Juanita Allen said an investigator had told her that Rashida Amin, the woman Allen considered his Muslim wife, had revealed a secret.
Amin had told the investigator that Bey had ordered Allen to give up both Hamilton and his oldest daughter, then just 4, to him, Juanita Allen said. Her brother refused, she said.
Bey's proclivity for sex with both women and children is depicted in depositions made by the women who filed the lawsuit as well as Esperanza Johnson, one of the numerous women Bey considered his wives.
But Amin, who reportedly identified at least one of the men involved in the killing, died of cancer not long after talking to police.
Recent revelations about the bakery have prompted Berkeley police to go back at the case. They say they will recheck the four shotgun shells found near Allen's body 25 years ago to determine whether they can be traced to any weapons used in bakery-related crimes over the years.
Carl Allen said the recent events of the bakery, including the arrest of its young leader, Yusuf Bey IV, on torture and kidnapping charges, have provided the family some solace.
"Justice came - the bakery is no more," he said.
Berkeley police say the bakery's collapse may be the event needed to trigger a resolution of the case.
"There is interest in the case now because it's an ongoing pattern of crimes and there's community interest in it," said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, Berkeley police spokeswoman. "The detectives would be very interested in speaking with anyone in the community who can shed more light on it or provide any viable leads."
Some of Allen's family members are still waiting for answers after a quarter of a century.
"Just from the way he was murdered, it was like they were doing that to send a message," said Ron Allen Jr. "Just to prove a point, that this is what happens if you cross the line with us.
"Nobody got behind the true story about how his life has been taken," he said. "I have grown up the last 25 years with his memory, and wondering is anybody going to be held accountable."
Some, however, gave up.
Odessa Hamilton is a victim of the bakery's legacy. "When my dad died, she died, too," said Shalina Allen, now 28.
Hamilton, left to raise the children on her own, became involved in a bad relationship and got hooked on drugs. She lost an eye in a domestic violence incident.
She eventually was forced to give up her children to foster care. Now she is homeless and wanders the streets.
"She is not even Odessa - she is somebody else," Shalina Allen said. "Odessa is gone - she has been dead for 25 years, too. She talks to herself, says she is talking to my dad."
As for her mother's time in the bakery and her father's death, Shalina Allen said, "she doesn't really discuss it with us."
"She doesn't want to tell us anything," the daughter said. "She would say, 'Your daddy is still alive.' "
How you can help
If you know anything about the killing of Ronald Allen, call the Berkeley police homicide detail at (510) 981-5741.
E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Assassination of Chauncey Bailey
THE ASSASSINATION OF CHAUNCEY BAILEY
Bakery leader defiant in sermons after arrest
Yusuf Bey asserted: 'You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up. I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.'
Matthai Kuruvila, San Francisco Chronicle Religion Writer, Sunday, December 23, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/23/MNSHU0LS1.DTL&tsp=1
Yusuf Bey stood before his followers at the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland one Sunday in 2002. In his familiar double-breasted suit, bow tie and fez, he delivered an emphatic sermon.
His message that afternoon was a vow of defiance in the face of his arrest on charges of raping young girls entrusted to his care - defiance, and a refusal to submit to any authority other than himself.
The message was at the core of Bey's gospel of black empowerment and self-determination, a creed to live by.
"You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up," he told the dozens of men and women attending the speech at the bakery, the business and religious seat of the multimillion-dollar empire Bey had founded. "I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.
"You lock me up if you want to, but I'm not going in with my head down," he declared in a videotape of the sermon obtained by The Chronicle.
"I'll be fighting all the way. I'll be scratching and fighting and putting anything in my hand for a weapon to defend myself. I want you to understand that. You ain't playing with no Uncle Tom and no house Negro. ... I don't turn no damn cheek."
Less than a year later, Bey was dead at 67, succumbing to cancer before his trial on sexual assault charges. But during his last year, while free on bail, he preached a new vision for his community, while seeking to reassure his worried followers in the face of unprecedented pressure from prosecutors and the press.
In his final sermons, Bey told his followers that God had specially sanctioned his actions and ideas. He said he was not answerable to anyone for his conduct - certainly not the police, whom he said no black person should ever trust. He railed at the media - "the powers at hand that destroy you," he called them. He said he was entitled to retaliate with violence if he was threatened with prison. And he expected his followers to help him fight.
"See, I can teach peace, or I can teach war," Bey declared. "I got young men behind me. If I say something, they will do it."
The final sermons of Yusuf Bey were followed by a bitter power struggle within the family. Bey's handpicked successor was mysteriously killed, and the successor's second-in-command was nearly assassinated.
A 19-year-old son ultimately rose to the top. He and his young followers, prosecutors say, would commit a series of violent crimes that culminated in the Aug. 2 assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working with another Bey family member on stories about the power struggle.
Bailey's brazen, execution-style slaying in downtown Oakland prompted extraordinary new scrutiny of the bakery, revealing the degree to which it had insinuated itself into the fabric of the city, gaining the blessing of politicians at every level - including the City Council, the mayor's office, county Board of Supervisors, state representatives and a member of Congress - even as some bakery members allegedly engaged in massive welfare fraud and, police say, the business operated as a front for organized crime.
A POWERFUL IMAGE
For more than three decades, Bey attracted followers, especially the poor and disenfranchised, with a message of black self-empowerment. He offered them a society unto its own, where black people could live free from what he saw as the crushing oppression of whites. At the bakery, he fed, housed and put dozens to work to help create this world, a realm he ruled with unquestioned authority.
But the bakery allegedly had a darker side. Bey beat, raped and impregnated girls at the bakery and forced them to become his "wives," prosecutors charged. He was suspected of ordering his followers to commit acts of violence, including homicides; and the bakery sustained itself financially by systematically defrauding county welfare and federal housing-subsidy programs set up to help poor people, three of those former wives testified in a lawsuit.
To the outside world, Bey projected an image of the bakery as a haven of black self-respect and self sufficiency. That powerful image resonated, even after his death, with both his followers and some of Oakland's most powerful political leaders.
Born Joseph Stephens in 1935 in Greenville, Texas, in the midst of the Depression, Bey moved with his family to Oakland when he was 5 years old, attended local schools and then served four years in the Air Force. He became attracted to the Nation of Islam, a black separatist religion founded in Detroit in the 1930s by the preacher W.D. Fard and popularized by Elijah Muhammad.
By 1968, Joseph Stephens had taken the name Joseph X and was second-in-command of the first Nation of Islam mosque in Oakland. His brother, Billy X., was minister. From the beginning, the brothers had a flashy style, according to former members of their mosque and other Nation of Islam members at the time.
Smooth-talking and slick, the brothers wore sharp suits, drove fancy cars and seemed to embody the "Superfly" image popularized by the 1972 movie about a flamboyant drug dealer with "a plan to stick it to the man," said Askia Muhammad, who at the time was a student minister at the Nation of Islam mosque in San Francisco.
The former Stephens brothers urged their followers to read the Mafia novel "The Godfather" to help explain their leadership style, said Muhammad, who later became editor in chief of Muhammad Speaks, the official Nation of Islam newspaper.
Eventually, Yusuf Bey, as he came to be known, broke both with his brother and with the Nation of Islam, and founded Your Black Muslim Bakery as an independent movement.
But his religious views were still strongly rooted in the Nation of Islam, as his sermons showed. To his last days, Bey was reciting the writings of Elijah Muhammad. And behind his lectern were large photographs of Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard, who Nation of Islam believers say was the messiah.
The sermons themselves were delivered at the bakery at 3 p.m. on Sundays, then rebroadcast as "True Solutions," paid programming on various cable channels, particularly the now-defunct Soul Beat channel in Oakland. Few video copies exist. According to a former Soul Beat producer, bakery members always picked up the master tapes, not letting copies be made. The Chronicle obtained videos of several sermons from a confidential source.
A VIEW OF SLAVERY
Bey preached that black people were divine and white people were "devils." The core of his sermons revolved around slavery.
He told his followers that the ravages of centuries of brutal mistreatment at the hands of whites - through slavery, Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs - still had a powerful psychological effect on black people. These effects were worst in the community's most wayward - drug addicts, felons and the downtrodden. Bey said society had "designed" them to go astray.
In his last sermons, Bey preached that a white man named Willie Lynch had gone to plantation owners in the South during the time of slavery and taught whites how to destroy the minds of the black people for "up to a thousand years," as he put it.
"Which means that everyone in this room that's black, you're not natural," Bey said. "You're unnatural people. You've been remade. You have lost the knowledge of self.
"And you're living as a Negro, which was made in America. What does that mean? That means we no longer have the feelings and the natural instincts that God created in us.
"We are white people with black skins - white minds. And it's not a color; it's a mentality that we're living today that has destroyed our people."
Bey said the bakery was a place where black people could be saved from wayward ways, "the slave mentality" as he called it. Whites feared his successful results, Bey claimed, and sought to bring him down.
"They're out to get me," he said in one sermon. "I don't know why, because I think I'm doing a very good job for them, too. I think that the people I get off the streets are the ones who want to burn up Oakland."
Bey bragged that with 25 of his followers, he could do more to keep the city safe than 100 Oakland police officers.
"Look, we go to drug dealers every week," he said. "We go to the crack houses. We go to the brothers that sell heroin. Why can't the police do that? Ain't no secret where nobody is. What are they talking about, 'war on drugs?' That's an illusion."
The dozens gathered burst into applause.
Bey preached that he identified with his followers' plight because it was also his own struggle.
"I'm a mentally dead person," he said in one of his sermons. "I'm an ex-slave. I have a slavery mentality because of the past, because of what my ancestors went through. So I got to undo that. I got to die as a past, and live for to now. It's hard to die. It's painful to die. But you must die in order to live."
But to his alleged victims and their families, virtually all of whom were black, Bey himself had recreated the condition of slavery within the bakery compound on San Pablo Avenue, inflicting physical violence and sexual depravities on some followers, and forcing others, including children, to work without pay.
Bey nonetheless manipulated the legacy of slavery as a tool to criticize black people, particularly his accusers in the rape case. Over the course of Bey's last year, prosecutors filed charges that he had raped four children - including two foster children in his household.
At one point in a sermon, Bey condemned his accusers for going to the police - the modern incarnations of white devils, he called them. Black women, he preached, were the weak link among black people - used in history by plantation owners to control and undermine black men.
"To see our women going to the authorities on their man for whatever case it might be is not as bad as what he did to you," Bey preached. "It's not as bad as what he did to you. How can you go to a lyncher, to a rapist, to a murderer, and turn in your brother? How can you do that?"
HIS FATHER'S SON
One Sunday in late 2002 Bey stood before his congregation with a young man - one of his sons.
Bey had recently been released on bail after his arrest for rape - the result of a former bakery family member's complaint that Bey had raped and impregnated her when she was 13 years old.
But rather than deny to his followers that he'd raped a child, Bey brought the son who was the product of rape up to the lectern and introduced him by name.
"Whatever I do, I can look back and see good in it," Bey said, gesturing to the young man, then age 20.
His mother, known as Jane Doe 1, said she'd been sexually assaulted by Bey when she was 8 years old, and raped by him at 11. She bore the first of three children by Bey when she was 13 - a fact confirmed by DNA evidence.
But Bey urged his followers simply to listen to the son.
"The brother tells the truth," Bey said. "I did not ask him to come. I don't ask him to lie. I never had to do that. He wouldn't do it anyway. He's a strong black man. He's just like his father. He's got his seed."
The son, who The Chronicle is not identifying because it might identify a sexual assault victim, then took the pulpit.
He said he had patterned his life after his father, praising him for what he had done for black people. But the son made pointed remarks about his mother, noting "at one time, I was able to call my mother a mother."
"We have devils," he said. "We have a black devil and a white devil. It's a mentality. A black devil could be a woman with a scarf on with a dark complexioned face. But I know who you are ... you reform the devil. And if you're not reformed, if you are not reformed, then I must take your head off."
Bey applauded. The audience joined him.
"I appreciate what you done, Daddy," the son said. "I appreciate it. I love you Daddy."
Then he burst into sobs, his face buried in Bey's chest as he clung to him. The father patted his back and the audience cheered.
LAWS AND ENEMIES
The rules Bey set down in his sermons had the force of law for his followers - and for outsiders he might encounter. Bey's laws were allegedly enforced by violence and the threat of more. He used his sermons to emphasize his ability to inflict extreme violence on his enemies, but professed restraint as one of his virtues.
In August 2003 Bey was accused of sending his accountant and confidant Waajid Aljawwaad and several other followers to beat up the owner of a barbecue restaurant that was located in a building the bakery owned on San Pablo Avenue. The restaurant was serving pork - a "filthy" meat that humans should never eat, Bey said. After the attack, the owner went to court and got a restraining order, but no charges were ever filed.
Claiming he was innocent, Bey brought Aljawwaad, who was short and stocky, to the pulpit during a sermon.
"Now look at this little man," Bey said. "Would I send this little man? Does it make sense that Dr. Bey would send this little man over there to jump on somebody. And I got big giants around here," he said, naming three people by name. "I've got brothers that would go over there and smash somebody." "That's right!" an audience member shouted.
"But why would I send this good bookkeeper here?" Bey continued. "That doesn't make mathematical sense ... That just goes to show how ridiculous people are."
Bey's laws were absolute. Even questioning his position on an issue could result in vicious beating, according to testimony from his former wives. That extended to even seemingly trivial matters.
Bey, for example, demanded that his children have short hair. A boyfriend of one former wife, however, believed that her son ought to have longer hair and went to talk to Bey about it - despite the warnings of the former wife, who knew not to question.
Bey's men beat the boyfriend up for daring to ask, according to a sworn deposition from the wife. Even though a police report was filed, the wife said no charges ever came.
After his arrest, Bey came under increasing scrutiny by the media. From the pulpit, Bey denounced the "lies" that were being printed. He urged followers to call newspapers directly to complain.
The East Bay Express was a chief target. In November 2002, writer Chris Thompson had recounted the bakery's darker history in a two-part expose that included details about rape and the bakery's ties to local political figures. The stories roiled bakery followers. Before Bey's next sermon, a woman identified as "Sister Fateemah" addressed his followers, criticizing Thompson, referring to his stories as "this piece of trash they call news."
As the year wore on, "Sister Fateemah" would be brought up again to talk about journalism. She warned that "the devil" uses "sensationalism in his media to lead many people and us away from the truth."
It wasn't always that way, "Sister Fateemah" said, noting a positive article about the bakery's private school, which included traditional courses like math alongside religious classes. The article she referred to was presumably the same one that had been celebrated on the bakery's Web site in 2000. It quoted her, and it was written by Chauncey Bailey, then a reporter for the Oakland Tribune.
That article by Bailey still hung inside the bakery, neatly pasted on a wall, well after the bakery was raided this summer on Aug. 3 - the day after Bailey was killed in downtown Oakland.
In one of his final sermons, Bey preached, "It's the powers at hand that destroy you through the power of the press, the media. (They) try you in the media, try you in the paper."
YUSUF'S LEGACY
As his legal problems deepened and cancer sapped his strength, Bey repeatedly consoled his followers, telling them, "Everything's going to be all right, brothers and sisters."
He told them his work was God's will.
"I like to fight," he said in one of his last sermons. "I like a war. I enjoy a war, you know. I believe that my God will be the winner. I believe righteousness will be the winner. Understand that. You want to fight? Here's your opponent right here. Oh, yes. I'll be here. God will keep me here until my job is done. And that's a long time from now."
Bey died a few weeks later, in September 2003.
Soon after the death of the patriarch, 51-year-old Aljawwaad, the stocky accountant Bey had selected to run the bakery, mysteriously disappeared and was later found slain. Aljawwaad's second-in-command was ambushed by a gunman, but survived. Bey's son Antar - the bakery "captain" seen in the background during the last year's sermons - seized power at the bakery. He pushed out rivals in the family, including many of the roughly 46 children Bey had fathered with 17 "wives" and others, like "spiritual son" Saleem Bey.
Antar Bey took to wearing his father's suits, rival family members say. A painting inside the bakery showed Yusuf Bey with his hand on Antar Bey's shoulder. Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard stand beside them, a self-proclaimed holy quartet.
But Antar Bey, too, was killed, shot in a botched robbery at age 23 in October 2005. His 19-year-old, full-blood brother, Yusuf Bey IV, assumed control.
The sermons were a metaphorical tool - "the only medium Dr. Bey had to strike back at his attackers," Saleem Bey said.
And the overwhelming majority of the siblings and family members did not engage in criminal behavior, and select reporters were trusted, said Saleem Bey, the primary source for the story Bailey was working on when he was killed.
"Every other family member that heard the same 'sermons' had enough sense to not literally apply the 'rhetoric,' " Saleem Bey said, adding that the responsibility for the bakery's violent end lies not with founder Yusuf Bey. "You have to lay it at the feet of the individual who made that choice."
Bey IV would cut and paste portions of his father's sermons into his own speeches, which he would deliver at the bakery, sources said. Police said he soon led a vandalism attack on liquor stores because they were selling alcohol in violation of religious laws Bey had proclaimed. Later, Bey IV was arrested for attempting to run over a bouncer outside a San Francisco strip club and also for shoplifting condoms at a drugstore. Bey IV always made bail.
The legacy of the father weighed heavily on Bey IV, said Lorna Brown, an attorney who represented Bey and Bey IV in various cases.
"He had a great deal of love for his father, and he wanted to keep the bakery going," she said. "At one point, he was even going in at 5 in the morning to bake."
Like his father, Bey IV would also tell followers that law enforcement was no obstacle to his power.
After Bailey, by then the editor of the Oakland Post, was shot and killed on Aug. 2, Bey IV would tell police that Bailey had written "slanderous things about my father."
Bey IV, now 21, was arrested the day after Bailey's slaying, charged with kidnapping and torturing two women in an unrelated case. Two younger half siblings of Bey IV, fathered by Bey's alleged rapes and subsequently living at the bakery under the leadership of Bey IV away from their mothers, were also arrested in that case. Another of Bey IV's followers, a handyman at the bakery, confessed to killing Bailey, saying he was trying to be a "good soldier."
We're at war. We've been at war for 400 years. And it's time that we understand this. And not make a mistake. That we can let down because the enemy is constantly trying to destroy the existence of our people, especially if you stand up and tell the truth. They will continue to try to harass and find fault and make up lies and slander. I see I must be doing a good job in Oakland. You can tell by the handwriting on the walls. They do not like a strong black man in Oakland, California. They try to do everything they can to remove the example or the model that we must take in order to be free and economically secure in this city.You know, brothers and sisters, it's going to be alright. Either way, it's going to be alright. Because I tell you one thing. If I go to jail. I'm going to raise up every prisoner in there.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says we have lost the knowledge of self. This is what we have lost. Black men are acting on ways of killing and destroying ourselves out of ignorance. There's no way possible that you could know the laws of science of God and go around destroying one another.
The country that provided the environment that caused that must pay, too. Understand, you not getting away. We are what we are because you made us this way. Whatever results you see, you must pay. You gonna reap what you sow. Praise is due to God.
We're the worst people in the world. We've been made this way by a system who has denied the knowledge of self. But now God is here, we have no excuse.
How can a people who did so much harm to us, sit on a bench and accuse me and judge me from allegations.
I'm dead. I'm a mentally dead person. I'm an ex-slave. I have a slavery mentality because of the past, because of what my ancestors went through. So I got to undo that. I got to die as a past, and live for to now. It's hard to die. It's painful to die. But you must die in order to live. Understand what we must change. We have to change. Every morning you get up, I rely on myself to change, to make myself a little bit better in the eyes of God.
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
Bakery leader defiant in sermons after arrest
Yusuf Bey asserted: 'You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up. I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.'
Matthai Kuruvila, San Francisco Chronicle Religion Writer, Sunday, December 23, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/23/MNSHU0LS1.DTL&tsp=1
Yusuf Bey stood before his followers at the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland one Sunday in 2002. In his familiar double-breasted suit, bow tie and fez, he delivered an emphatic sermon.
His message that afternoon was a vow of defiance in the face of his arrest on charges of raping young girls entrusted to his care - defiance, and a refusal to submit to any authority other than himself.
The message was at the core of Bey's gospel of black empowerment and self-determination, a creed to live by.
"You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up," he told the dozens of men and women attending the speech at the bakery, the business and religious seat of the multimillion-dollar empire Bey had founded. "I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.
"You lock me up if you want to, but I'm not going in with my head down," he declared in a videotape of the sermon obtained by The Chronicle.
"I'll be fighting all the way. I'll be scratching and fighting and putting anything in my hand for a weapon to defend myself. I want you to understand that. You ain't playing with no Uncle Tom and no house Negro. ... I don't turn no damn cheek."
Less than a year later, Bey was dead at 67, succumbing to cancer before his trial on sexual assault charges. But during his last year, while free on bail, he preached a new vision for his community, while seeking to reassure his worried followers in the face of unprecedented pressure from prosecutors and the press.
In his final sermons, Bey told his followers that God had specially sanctioned his actions and ideas. He said he was not answerable to anyone for his conduct - certainly not the police, whom he said no black person should ever trust. He railed at the media - "the powers at hand that destroy you," he called them. He said he was entitled to retaliate with violence if he was threatened with prison. And he expected his followers to help him fight.
"See, I can teach peace, or I can teach war," Bey declared. "I got young men behind me. If I say something, they will do it."
The final sermons of Yusuf Bey were followed by a bitter power struggle within the family. Bey's handpicked successor was mysteriously killed, and the successor's second-in-command was nearly assassinated.
A 19-year-old son ultimately rose to the top. He and his young followers, prosecutors say, would commit a series of violent crimes that culminated in the Aug. 2 assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working with another Bey family member on stories about the power struggle.
Bailey's brazen, execution-style slaying in downtown Oakland prompted extraordinary new scrutiny of the bakery, revealing the degree to which it had insinuated itself into the fabric of the city, gaining the blessing of politicians at every level - including the City Council, the mayor's office, county Board of Supervisors, state representatives and a member of Congress - even as some bakery members allegedly engaged in massive welfare fraud and, police say, the business operated as a front for organized crime.
A POWERFUL IMAGE
For more than three decades, Bey attracted followers, especially the poor and disenfranchised, with a message of black self-empowerment. He offered them a society unto its own, where black people could live free from what he saw as the crushing oppression of whites. At the bakery, he fed, housed and put dozens to work to help create this world, a realm he ruled with unquestioned authority.
But the bakery allegedly had a darker side. Bey beat, raped and impregnated girls at the bakery and forced them to become his "wives," prosecutors charged. He was suspected of ordering his followers to commit acts of violence, including homicides; and the bakery sustained itself financially by systematically defrauding county welfare and federal housing-subsidy programs set up to help poor people, three of those former wives testified in a lawsuit.
To the outside world, Bey projected an image of the bakery as a haven of black self-respect and self sufficiency. That powerful image resonated, even after his death, with both his followers and some of Oakland's most powerful political leaders.
Born Joseph Stephens in 1935 in Greenville, Texas, in the midst of the Depression, Bey moved with his family to Oakland when he was 5 years old, attended local schools and then served four years in the Air Force. He became attracted to the Nation of Islam, a black separatist religion founded in Detroit in the 1930s by the preacher W.D. Fard and popularized by Elijah Muhammad.
By 1968, Joseph Stephens had taken the name Joseph X and was second-in-command of the first Nation of Islam mosque in Oakland. His brother, Billy X., was minister. From the beginning, the brothers had a flashy style, according to former members of their mosque and other Nation of Islam members at the time.
Smooth-talking and slick, the brothers wore sharp suits, drove fancy cars and seemed to embody the "Superfly" image popularized by the 1972 movie about a flamboyant drug dealer with "a plan to stick it to the man," said Askia Muhammad, who at the time was a student minister at the Nation of Islam mosque in San Francisco.
The former Stephens brothers urged their followers to read the Mafia novel "The Godfather" to help explain their leadership style, said Muhammad, who later became editor in chief of Muhammad Speaks, the official Nation of Islam newspaper.
Eventually, Yusuf Bey, as he came to be known, broke both with his brother and with the Nation of Islam, and founded Your Black Muslim Bakery as an independent movement.
But his religious views were still strongly rooted in the Nation of Islam, as his sermons showed. To his last days, Bey was reciting the writings of Elijah Muhammad. And behind his lectern were large photographs of Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard, who Nation of Islam believers say was the messiah.
The sermons themselves were delivered at the bakery at 3 p.m. on Sundays, then rebroadcast as "True Solutions," paid programming on various cable channels, particularly the now-defunct Soul Beat channel in Oakland. Few video copies exist. According to a former Soul Beat producer, bakery members always picked up the master tapes, not letting copies be made. The Chronicle obtained videos of several sermons from a confidential source.
A VIEW OF SLAVERY
Bey preached that black people were divine and white people were "devils." The core of his sermons revolved around slavery.
He told his followers that the ravages of centuries of brutal mistreatment at the hands of whites - through slavery, Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs - still had a powerful psychological effect on black people. These effects were worst in the community's most wayward - drug addicts, felons and the downtrodden. Bey said society had "designed" them to go astray.
In his last sermons, Bey preached that a white man named Willie Lynch had gone to plantation owners in the South during the time of slavery and taught whites how to destroy the minds of the black people for "up to a thousand years," as he put it.
"Which means that everyone in this room that's black, you're not natural," Bey said. "You're unnatural people. You've been remade. You have lost the knowledge of self.
"And you're living as a Negro, which was made in America. What does that mean? That means we no longer have the feelings and the natural instincts that God created in us.
"We are white people with black skins - white minds. And it's not a color; it's a mentality that we're living today that has destroyed our people."
Bey said the bakery was a place where black people could be saved from wayward ways, "the slave mentality" as he called it. Whites feared his successful results, Bey claimed, and sought to bring him down.
"They're out to get me," he said in one sermon. "I don't know why, because I think I'm doing a very good job for them, too. I think that the people I get off the streets are the ones who want to burn up Oakland."
Bey bragged that with 25 of his followers, he could do more to keep the city safe than 100 Oakland police officers.
"Look, we go to drug dealers every week," he said. "We go to the crack houses. We go to the brothers that sell heroin. Why can't the police do that? Ain't no secret where nobody is. What are they talking about, 'war on drugs?' That's an illusion."
The dozens gathered burst into applause.
Bey preached that he identified with his followers' plight because it was also his own struggle.
"I'm a mentally dead person," he said in one of his sermons. "I'm an ex-slave. I have a slavery mentality because of the past, because of what my ancestors went through. So I got to undo that. I got to die as a past, and live for to now. It's hard to die. It's painful to die. But you must die in order to live."
But to his alleged victims and their families, virtually all of whom were black, Bey himself had recreated the condition of slavery within the bakery compound on San Pablo Avenue, inflicting physical violence and sexual depravities on some followers, and forcing others, including children, to work without pay.
Bey nonetheless manipulated the legacy of slavery as a tool to criticize black people, particularly his accusers in the rape case. Over the course of Bey's last year, prosecutors filed charges that he had raped four children - including two foster children in his household.
At one point in a sermon, Bey condemned his accusers for going to the police - the modern incarnations of white devils, he called them. Black women, he preached, were the weak link among black people - used in history by plantation owners to control and undermine black men.
"To see our women going to the authorities on their man for whatever case it might be is not as bad as what he did to you," Bey preached. "It's not as bad as what he did to you. How can you go to a lyncher, to a rapist, to a murderer, and turn in your brother? How can you do that?"
HIS FATHER'S SON
One Sunday in late 2002 Bey stood before his congregation with a young man - one of his sons.
Bey had recently been released on bail after his arrest for rape - the result of a former bakery family member's complaint that Bey had raped and impregnated her when she was 13 years old.
But rather than deny to his followers that he'd raped a child, Bey brought the son who was the product of rape up to the lectern and introduced him by name.
"Whatever I do, I can look back and see good in it," Bey said, gesturing to the young man, then age 20.
His mother, known as Jane Doe 1, said she'd been sexually assaulted by Bey when she was 8 years old, and raped by him at 11. She bore the first of three children by Bey when she was 13 - a fact confirmed by DNA evidence.
But Bey urged his followers simply to listen to the son.
"The brother tells the truth," Bey said. "I did not ask him to come. I don't ask him to lie. I never had to do that. He wouldn't do it anyway. He's a strong black man. He's just like his father. He's got his seed."
The son, who The Chronicle is not identifying because it might identify a sexual assault victim, then took the pulpit.
He said he had patterned his life after his father, praising him for what he had done for black people. But the son made pointed remarks about his mother, noting "at one time, I was able to call my mother a mother."
"We have devils," he said. "We have a black devil and a white devil. It's a mentality. A black devil could be a woman with a scarf on with a dark complexioned face. But I know who you are ... you reform the devil. And if you're not reformed, if you are not reformed, then I must take your head off."
Bey applauded. The audience joined him.
"I appreciate what you done, Daddy," the son said. "I appreciate it. I love you Daddy."
Then he burst into sobs, his face buried in Bey's chest as he clung to him. The father patted his back and the audience cheered.
LAWS AND ENEMIES
The rules Bey set down in his sermons had the force of law for his followers - and for outsiders he might encounter. Bey's laws were allegedly enforced by violence and the threat of more. He used his sermons to emphasize his ability to inflict extreme violence on his enemies, but professed restraint as one of his virtues.
In August 2003 Bey was accused of sending his accountant and confidant Waajid Aljawwaad and several other followers to beat up the owner of a barbecue restaurant that was located in a building the bakery owned on San Pablo Avenue. The restaurant was serving pork - a "filthy" meat that humans should never eat, Bey said. After the attack, the owner went to court and got a restraining order, but no charges were ever filed.
Claiming he was innocent, Bey brought Aljawwaad, who was short and stocky, to the pulpit during a sermon.
"Now look at this little man," Bey said. "Would I send this little man? Does it make sense that Dr. Bey would send this little man over there to jump on somebody. And I got big giants around here," he said, naming three people by name. "I've got brothers that would go over there and smash somebody." "That's right!" an audience member shouted.
"But why would I send this good bookkeeper here?" Bey continued. "That doesn't make mathematical sense ... That just goes to show how ridiculous people are."
Bey's laws were absolute. Even questioning his position on an issue could result in vicious beating, according to testimony from his former wives. That extended to even seemingly trivial matters.
Bey, for example, demanded that his children have short hair. A boyfriend of one former wife, however, believed that her son ought to have longer hair and went to talk to Bey about it - despite the warnings of the former wife, who knew not to question.
Bey's men beat the boyfriend up for daring to ask, according to a sworn deposition from the wife. Even though a police report was filed, the wife said no charges ever came.
After his arrest, Bey came under increasing scrutiny by the media. From the pulpit, Bey denounced the "lies" that were being printed. He urged followers to call newspapers directly to complain.
The East Bay Express was a chief target. In November 2002, writer Chris Thompson had recounted the bakery's darker history in a two-part expose that included details about rape and the bakery's ties to local political figures. The stories roiled bakery followers. Before Bey's next sermon, a woman identified as "Sister Fateemah" addressed his followers, criticizing Thompson, referring to his stories as "this piece of trash they call news."
As the year wore on, "Sister Fateemah" would be brought up again to talk about journalism. She warned that "the devil" uses "sensationalism in his media to lead many people and us away from the truth."
It wasn't always that way, "Sister Fateemah" said, noting a positive article about the bakery's private school, which included traditional courses like math alongside religious classes. The article she referred to was presumably the same one that had been celebrated on the bakery's Web site in 2000. It quoted her, and it was written by Chauncey Bailey, then a reporter for the Oakland Tribune.
That article by Bailey still hung inside the bakery, neatly pasted on a wall, well after the bakery was raided this summer on Aug. 3 - the day after Bailey was killed in downtown Oakland.
In one of his final sermons, Bey preached, "It's the powers at hand that destroy you through the power of the press, the media. (They) try you in the media, try you in the paper."
YUSUF'S LEGACY
As his legal problems deepened and cancer sapped his strength, Bey repeatedly consoled his followers, telling them, "Everything's going to be all right, brothers and sisters."
He told them his work was God's will.
"I like to fight," he said in one of his last sermons. "I like a war. I enjoy a war, you know. I believe that my God will be the winner. I believe righteousness will be the winner. Understand that. You want to fight? Here's your opponent right here. Oh, yes. I'll be here. God will keep me here until my job is done. And that's a long time from now."
Bey died a few weeks later, in September 2003.
Soon after the death of the patriarch, 51-year-old Aljawwaad, the stocky accountant Bey had selected to run the bakery, mysteriously disappeared and was later found slain. Aljawwaad's second-in-command was ambushed by a gunman, but survived. Bey's son Antar - the bakery "captain" seen in the background during the last year's sermons - seized power at the bakery. He pushed out rivals in the family, including many of the roughly 46 children Bey had fathered with 17 "wives" and others, like "spiritual son" Saleem Bey.
Antar Bey took to wearing his father's suits, rival family members say. A painting inside the bakery showed Yusuf Bey with his hand on Antar Bey's shoulder. Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard stand beside them, a self-proclaimed holy quartet.
But Antar Bey, too, was killed, shot in a botched robbery at age 23 in October 2005. His 19-year-old, full-blood brother, Yusuf Bey IV, assumed control.
The sermons were a metaphorical tool - "the only medium Dr. Bey had to strike back at his attackers," Saleem Bey said.
And the overwhelming majority of the siblings and family members did not engage in criminal behavior, and select reporters were trusted, said Saleem Bey, the primary source for the story Bailey was working on when he was killed.
"Every other family member that heard the same 'sermons' had enough sense to not literally apply the 'rhetoric,' " Saleem Bey said, adding that the responsibility for the bakery's violent end lies not with founder Yusuf Bey. "You have to lay it at the feet of the individual who made that choice."
Bey IV would cut and paste portions of his father's sermons into his own speeches, which he would deliver at the bakery, sources said. Police said he soon led a vandalism attack on liquor stores because they were selling alcohol in violation of religious laws Bey had proclaimed. Later, Bey IV was arrested for attempting to run over a bouncer outside a San Francisco strip club and also for shoplifting condoms at a drugstore. Bey IV always made bail.
The legacy of the father weighed heavily on Bey IV, said Lorna Brown, an attorney who represented Bey and Bey IV in various cases.
"He had a great deal of love for his father, and he wanted to keep the bakery going," she said. "At one point, he was even going in at 5 in the morning to bake."
Like his father, Bey IV would also tell followers that law enforcement was no obstacle to his power.
After Bailey, by then the editor of the Oakland Post, was shot and killed on Aug. 2, Bey IV would tell police that Bailey had written "slanderous things about my father."
Bey IV, now 21, was arrested the day after Bailey's slaying, charged with kidnapping and torturing two women in an unrelated case. Two younger half siblings of Bey IV, fathered by Bey's alleged rapes and subsequently living at the bakery under the leadership of Bey IV away from their mothers, were also arrested in that case. Another of Bey IV's followers, a handyman at the bakery, confessed to killing Bailey, saying he was trying to be a "good soldier."
We're at war. We've been at war for 400 years. And it's time that we understand this. And not make a mistake. That we can let down because the enemy is constantly trying to destroy the existence of our people, especially if you stand up and tell the truth. They will continue to try to harass and find fault and make up lies and slander. I see I must be doing a good job in Oakland. You can tell by the handwriting on the walls. They do not like a strong black man in Oakland, California. They try to do everything they can to remove the example or the model that we must take in order to be free and economically secure in this city.You know, brothers and sisters, it's going to be alright. Either way, it's going to be alright. Because I tell you one thing. If I go to jail. I'm going to raise up every prisoner in there.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says we have lost the knowledge of self. This is what we have lost. Black men are acting on ways of killing and destroying ourselves out of ignorance. There's no way possible that you could know the laws of science of God and go around destroying one another.
The country that provided the environment that caused that must pay, too. Understand, you not getting away. We are what we are because you made us this way. Whatever results you see, you must pay. You gonna reap what you sow. Praise is due to God.
We're the worst people in the world. We've been made this way by a system who has denied the knowledge of self. But now God is here, we have no excuse.
How can a people who did so much harm to us, sit on a bench and accuse me and judge me from allegations.
I'm dead. I'm a mentally dead person. I'm an ex-slave. I have a slavery mentality because of the past, because of what my ancestors went through. So I got to undo that. I got to die as a past, and live for to now. It's hard to die. It's painful to die. But you must die in order to live. Understand what we must change. We have to change. Every morning you get up, I rely on myself to change, to make myself a little bit better in the eyes of God.
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Bakery associate nabbed in St. Louis
Bakery associate nabbed in St. Louis
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_7715613
By Josh Richman, STAFF WRITER, Oakland Tribune
Article Last Updated: 12/13/2007 06:10:31 PM PST
An associate of Your Black Muslim Bakery who had been a fugitive from criminal charges in Alameda and Santa Clara counties has been arrested in Missouri and now awaits extradition.
Ajuwon Fardjamaal Muhammad, 23, of Oakland, also known as Ajuwon Jones, was arrested Nov. 30 on suspicion of identity theft but has been held since then on a California arrest warrant, St. Louis Metropolitan Police spokesman Richard Wilkes said Thursday.
Muhammad and two cohorts are charged in Alameda County with going on a car-buying spree using false IDs.
Muhammad was arrested Jan. 26, 2006, after trying to open a bank account at Golden 1 Credit Union on Grand Avenue with a fake driver's license in the name of "Kirk Summer;" employees spotted the bogus ID and summoned police, and Muhammad was unable to tell officers the date of birth on the card he had presented. He was charged with trying to file a false financial statement and possession of a forged driver's license, both felonies.
Then, in early June 2006, prosecutors filed new charges in that case against Muhammad as well as against bakery CEO Yusuf Bey IV, now 21, and Dyamen Namer Williams, now 21. All three were charged with two counts of car theft for using false IDs to buy cars from two Bay Area dealerships; a third car-theft count named only Muhammad and Williams, but not Bey IV.
And later in June 2006, still more counts were added to the case: All three men were charged with another car-theft count, while Muhammad alone racked up another false-financial-statement count, another false-ID count and a grand theft count.
Muhammad failed to appear for a May 23 court hearing and so a judge ordered his $20,000 bail bond forfeited, but the bail bond agency successfully argued the court had lost jurisdiction over the bond when prosecutors added new charges to the case without giving the bondsman a chance to better secure the bond against the new risk of flight.
When Muhammad again failed to appear Aug. 27, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest with bail set at $50,000.
In Santa Clara County, Muhammad and Williams were arrested Oct. 30, 2006, in San Jose after police allegedly saw Muhammad throw a 9mm handgun from the car in which they were sitting. Muhammad was arrested after a brief struggle, according to an Oakland officer's affidavit describing the San Jose police report: "Muhammad stated that he wished officers had `put a bullet in him' because he wanted to be a martyr."
It's a warrant from that case on which he was arrested in St. Louis, San Jose Police Department spokesman Officer Jermaine Thomas confirmed Thursday. Thomas said he doesn't know when Muhammad will be extradited to California.
In other cases, Oakland Police officers cited Muhammad and Yusuf Bey V for battery in August 2006 after they were seen beating a man on the 1400 block of High Street, in an area where Your Black Muslim Bakery or one of its associated businesses had a security-guard contract.
And Muhammad also is named as a suspect in an Alameda County District Attorney's inspector's report on a real-estate fraud investigation that has resulted in criminal charges against Bey IV and Tamon Oshun Halfin, 21; Muhammad hasn't been charged with any crimes described in that report, however.
Your Black Muslim Bakery, long an Oakland institution, now lies in bankrupt ruins. Bey IV and several other bakery associates are behind bars, facing kidnapping and torture charges for which they could receive sentences of life in prison if convicted. Oakland Police obtained a warrant to search Muhammad for a DNA sample, fingerprints and other evidence in connection with this case; that warrant's current status was unclear late Thursday.
And bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, 20, is accused of the Aug. 2 murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.
--Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@bayareanewsgroup.com or 510-208-6428.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_7715613
By Josh Richman, STAFF WRITER, Oakland Tribune
Article Last Updated: 12/13/2007 06:10:31 PM PST
An associate of Your Black Muslim Bakery who had been a fugitive from criminal charges in Alameda and Santa Clara counties has been arrested in Missouri and now awaits extradition.
Ajuwon Fardjamaal Muhammad, 23, of Oakland, also known as Ajuwon Jones, was arrested Nov. 30 on suspicion of identity theft but has been held since then on a California arrest warrant, St. Louis Metropolitan Police spokesman Richard Wilkes said Thursday.
Muhammad and two cohorts are charged in Alameda County with going on a car-buying spree using false IDs.
Muhammad was arrested Jan. 26, 2006, after trying to open a bank account at Golden 1 Credit Union on Grand Avenue with a fake driver's license in the name of "Kirk Summer;" employees spotted the bogus ID and summoned police, and Muhammad was unable to tell officers the date of birth on the card he had presented. He was charged with trying to file a false financial statement and possession of a forged driver's license, both felonies.
Then, in early June 2006, prosecutors filed new charges in that case against Muhammad as well as against bakery CEO Yusuf Bey IV, now 21, and Dyamen Namer Williams, now 21. All three were charged with two counts of car theft for using false IDs to buy cars from two Bay Area dealerships; a third car-theft count named only Muhammad and Williams, but not Bey IV.
And later in June 2006, still more counts were added to the case: All three men were charged with another car-theft count, while Muhammad alone racked up another false-financial-statement count, another false-ID count and a grand theft count.
Muhammad failed to appear for a May 23 court hearing and so a judge ordered his $20,000 bail bond forfeited, but the bail bond agency successfully argued the court had lost jurisdiction over the bond when prosecutors added new charges to the case without giving the bondsman a chance to better secure the bond against the new risk of flight.
When Muhammad again failed to appear Aug. 27, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest with bail set at $50,000.
In Santa Clara County, Muhammad and Williams were arrested Oct. 30, 2006, in San Jose after police allegedly saw Muhammad throw a 9mm handgun from the car in which they were sitting. Muhammad was arrested after a brief struggle, according to an Oakland officer's affidavit describing the San Jose police report: "Muhammad stated that he wished officers had `put a bullet in him' because he wanted to be a martyr."
It's a warrant from that case on which he was arrested in St. Louis, San Jose Police Department spokesman Officer Jermaine Thomas confirmed Thursday. Thomas said he doesn't know when Muhammad will be extradited to California.
In other cases, Oakland Police officers cited Muhammad and Yusuf Bey V for battery in August 2006 after they were seen beating a man on the 1400 block of High Street, in an area where Your Black Muslim Bakery or one of its associated businesses had a security-guard contract.
And Muhammad also is named as a suspect in an Alameda County District Attorney's inspector's report on a real-estate fraud investigation that has resulted in criminal charges against Bey IV and Tamon Oshun Halfin, 21; Muhammad hasn't been charged with any crimes described in that report, however.
Your Black Muslim Bakery, long an Oakland institution, now lies in bankrupt ruins. Bey IV and several other bakery associates are behind bars, facing kidnapping and torture charges for which they could receive sentences of life in prison if convicted. Oakland Police obtained a warrant to search Muhammad for a DNA sample, fingerprints and other evidence in connection with this case; that warrant's current status was unclear late Thursday.
And bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, 20, is accused of the Aug. 2 murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.
--Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@bayareanewsgroup.com or 510-208-6428.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Suspect in Bailey slaying urged to seek new attorney, plea bargain
Suspect in Bailey slaying urged to seek new attorney, plea bargain
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/08/BAAQTQ83R.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/08/BAAQTQ83R.DTL
Your Black Muslim Bakery officials are urging a handyman charged with murdering Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey to fire his lawyer in hopes a new one will negotiate a plea bargain for manslaughter, the attorney said Friday.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
3 ex-wives of Muslim bakery founder allege elaborate welfare scam
3 ex-wives of Muslim bakery founder allege elaborate welfare scam
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/18/MNR4TCBIN.DTL)
Matthai Kuruvila, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, November 18, 2007
As the late Yusuf Bey built Your Black Muslim Bakery into an empire of wealth and influence, he also orchestrated a systematic welfare fraud scheme at his Oakland compound, three of his former wives have testified.
By the wives' sworn account, Bey directed many of the 100 women whom he considered his wives to make fraudulent applications for government aid programs intended to assist poor families, then diverted the benefits to himself.
Bey's alleged fraud scheme began in the 1970s and continued in some form until his death in 2003, according to the women, who gave depositions in a negligence lawsuit against Alameda County that was settled out of court earlier this year.
The allegations prompted an extensive investigation by county officials, but incomplete county records and the complicated nature of the alleged scheme were key reasons the investigation stalled, and no civil suit to recover money was filed, said Alameda County Counsel Richard E. Winnie.
The revenue - thousands of dollars per month, perhaps more than $1 million over the course of the scheme, testimony in the case suggests - helped inflate the clout of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a business Bey proselytized as an icon of economic self-sufficiency.
The alleged fraud scheme was aided by two employees of the Alameda County Social Services Agency who were also Bey's sisters-in-law, the former wives testified. A welfare worker who was Bey's sister-in-law once tipped off the bakery that it might become the target of a fraud investigation, according to the testimony. As a result, the bakery's households jumped off the welfare rolls in an attempt to avoid scrutiny, a former wife testified.
The depositions and other evidence obtained by The Chronicle allege:
-- Bey's wives fraudulently obtained Aid to Families with Dependent Children payments and General Assistance monies that were then diverted into bakery coffers.
-- Bey family members fraudulently collected Section 8 vouchers - designed to help the poor with rent payments - despite owning houses in the Bay Area.
-- Bey's children fraudulently received medical coverage through Medi-Cal, a program for the state's neediest residents.
In all, roughly 100 women and many of the 46 children Bey is thought to have fathered were involved in the fraud scheme, according to the wives - a category, the depositions say, that included girls whom Bey allegedly raped and impregnated.
The fraud began with a simple fact, according to the testimony: Bey forced his wives to keep his name off his children's birth certificates. That allowed his wives to hide Bey's income and qualify for public assistance. Bey, meanwhile, drove a Mercedes, and his business had lucrative contracts to sell baked goods in dozens of places, including Whole Foods, Andronico's, the Oakland Coliseum and Oakland International Airport.
Two of the former wives who testified are sisters identified in court records as Jane Does 1 and 2, who as children were under the guardianship of one of Bey's wives during the 1980s.
In the lawsuit, they alleged negligent oversight by the county because they were repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted as minors by Bey, who died at age 67 of cancer in 2003 while awaiting trial on rape charges.
DNA evidence collected by the Oakland Police Department showed that children the women bore as minors were fathered by Bey. The other former wife who testified about the welfare scheme, Esperanza Johnson, was a defendant in the lawsuit who for a time in the 1980s was the guardian for Does 1 and 2. She was eventually dropped from the suit. Yusuf Bey's estate and the bakery also were dropped from the suit.
The county paid a settlement of $188,000 to the sisters and another alleged sexual assault victim of Bey's earlier this year.
The three former wives, in their depositions, identified the welfare workers allegedly involved in the fraud scheme as Dana McBurnie (she now goes by Dana Lynn Morgan) and Lisa McBurnie. County records show that Morgan, 50, and McBurnie, 46, have worked for the county since 1981 and 1988, respectively, and still work for the Alameda County Social Services Agency. They each earn roughly $50,000 annually. Their duties include determining who qualifies for welfare.
In an interview, Morgan denied wrongdoing, calling the former wives' testimony about her "lies." Until she was promoted six years ago, Morgan said she was a clerk who didn't have access to the kinds of personal records the alleged fraud required.
Morgan said the fact that her supervisors have never talked to her about the allegations is proof of her innocence.
"Evidently, they must think it's a hoax because I haven't heard anything about it," she said.
McBurnie did not return calls for comment.
Winnie, the county counsel, said in an interview that the testimony of the wives prompted an investigation into welfare fraud at Your Black Muslim Bakery. Hundreds of hours were spent on the probe, he said, but investigators didn't find enough evidence to justify a lawsuit against Bey family members to recover the funds. Winnie said incomplete record keeping at the social services agency hindered the investigation.
"They were fairly old facts by that point," he said, "and there were a lot of allegations involved."
Winnie declined to comment about the welfare workers who were Bey's sisters-in-law.
Winnie said material was forwarded to the district attorney's office to help it in a possible criminal case.
Prosecutor Thomas Barni, who handles welfare fraud cases, said no case involving the bakery had been referred to him since he took over the office a year ago, and he was not aware of any prior case involving the bakery.
Bey's fallen empire
Bey founded the bakery more than four decades ago, and built it into a controversial but enduring Oakland institution praised by politicians and preachers alike.
But after Bey's death, his business empire spiraled into disarray, as his heirs vied for control and bakery officials and employees were implicated in a series of increasingly violent incidents.
The crime spree allegedly culminated in the Aug. 2 street-corner assassination of Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly paper serving the black community. Bailey was working on stories about the battle for power within the Bey family.
A day later, more than 200 heavily armed police officers from multiple agencies raided the bakery compound and arrested Yusuf Bey IV, one of Bey's sons and the bakery's chief executive, on kidnapping and torture charges. A bakery handyman was arrested and charged with Bailey's execution-style slaying with a shotgun.
Meanwhile, the bakery's properties and assets are being liquidated in U.S. bankruptcy court.
Since the bakery's collapse, some of Bey's followers have suggested that Bey IV and his cohorts ruined a venerable institution that had provided jobs and inspiration to the poorest of Oakland's poor.
But the extensive scope of the welfare fraud scheme described in the depositions suggests that the bakery was an empire built on fraud.
In their depositions, the women never specify how much money Bey obtained through the alleged fraud scheme.
However, Edwin Wilson, the attorney who represented Alameda County in the negligence lawsuit, said in an interview that he estimated the payout on the allegedly fraudulent claims associated with the bakery exceeded $10,000 per month and went on for years.
According to the women's testimony, the fraud scheme was centered at the bakery's headquarters on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, which also functioned as a community center. There, Bey's followers would gather, particularly for his Sunday speeches proclaiming autonomy and self-empowerment for black people.
Bey, who was referred to in the bakery as "Brother Bey" and "Doctor Bey," also ran a school, and the business owned several buildings, apartments and houses, which were carved up into multiple housing units. Dozens of people, including Bey's many wives and numerous households, lived in the units. Several buildings connected to the back of the bakery forming a compound.
Fraudulently applying for public assistance, including county "general assistance" given to those without children, was part of the ethos of the compound, the women testified in the depositions, saying that bakery members had meetings to facilitate the commission of the fraud.
"If you came around there at the bakery, you had to apply for something to bring some type of money in," testified Doe 1, who said she was impregnated by Bey when she was 12 years old. DNA evidence obtained by Oakland police showed that she bore Bey's child when she was 13.
There was no question whose money it was.
"He took every dime that came in there," testified Johnson, another former wife, who also goes by the names Esperanza Johnson Thurman, Nora Bey and Noor Jehan Bey. Both Johnson and Doe 1 testified that Farieda Bey, Bey's legal wife, was most often the one collecting the checks and depositing them in a bakery account.
Johnson said that during her time with the bakery, as many as 100 women were considered to be Bey's wives. Asked which of the wives participated in the welfare fraud, Johnson testified, "Every last one of them."
Johnson said she was also forced to work long days at the bakery, sometimes 20 hours at a stretch.
Said Doe 2: "I know that the money went to Brother Bey. ... All I remember is them having me to sign the check because my name was on it." Instead of going to school, Doe 2 testified that as a child, she was forced to start working at the bakery at 5 a.m., making cookies, cupcakes and other baked goods. The children were never paid for their labor.
Fear of violence
Bey's wives feared violent retribution if they didn't do what he said, according to the depositions.
Johnson said she'd been beaten by Bey since she was 14 years old - more times than she could count, as she put it. The other two wives testified that Johnson was pummeled so badly with the hand piece of a rotary dial phone that the lumps on her face made her look like "the elephant man" and another wife was almost drowned in a bathtub.
Asked why she never reported the welfare fraud while Bey was alive, Johnson testified, "So that I can breathe like I'm breathing today."
Sometimes children would be taken from one wife and handed over to another, the women testified. The new mother would apply for aid as their guardian.
Johnson testified that she successfully applied at Alameda County Social Services to be the foster parent for the Jane Does and their brother, whose father had left them in the care of Bey. Even though the children did not live with her, Johnson testified that she collected up to $500 a month per child in county welfare during the 1980s. She said the money went to Bey.
To facilitate the alleged frauds, Bey ordered his wives not to list him as the father on the birth certificates of his children. They sometimes made up names of the fathers, according to the depositions. A copy of one birth certificate included as evidence in the case didn't list any father at all.
Johnson, the guardian for Does 1 and 2, also applied to be the guardian for the children they bore as Bey's alleged rape victims, civil court records show. She received public assistance for them as well, according to her sworn testimony.
Johnson, who had three children with Bey, also received welfare payments for them, according to Doe 1, who added that all the money went to Bey.
Once Bey's children became old enough, they, too, participated in the fraud scheme, according to the depositions.
Some of Bey's daughters concealed the paternity of their children to qualify for public assistance, according to the testimony. That allowed them to live with the fathers of their children and hide the joint income of the household.
The welfare workers
It could be hard to keep up with the lies.
To renew applications for aid each year, Bey's wives needed to know the names they'd fraudulently documented as the fathers of their children, according to the testimony. But with so many children and so many different names of fathers, that could be easy to forget. So the wives said they turned to Daulet Bey, the mother of Yusuf Bey IV and the sister of the two women who worked for the county. She would ask her sisters to look up county records to verify recorded names, they testified.
Daulet Bey declined to comment about any allegations other than to defend her sisters, saying they had never done anything wrong.
Doe 1 recounted a conversation she overheard in which another Bey wife, Madeeah Bey, asked Daulet Bey to call her sister, Dana Morgan, at the social services agency to find out the fraudulent name listed as the father of her children.
"Could you call your sister for me because I have a renewal coming up, and I don't remember what I put on the paper," Madeeah Bey asked Daulet Bey, according to Doe 1's testimony.
Daulet Bey laughed and said: "You know what? I have to call Dana when I have a renewal because I forget," Doe 1 testified.
Daulet Bey's sisters who work for the social services agency were intimately familiar with the bakery family, according to the depositions. Morgan left her own children in care of the bakery for at least two years and came by nearly every day, Doe 1 testified. After Doe 1 turned 18, she applied for welfare for herself. She said the person who took her application at the Social Services Agency office at the Eastmont Mall was McBurnie, Yusuf Bey's sister-in-law.
Wilson, the lawyer who represented the county, tried during the depositions to learn the extent of the alleged welfare fraud scheme.
"Is there any woman who was living in the bakery compound who had one of Yusuf Bey's children that you're aware of who did not apply to the county for welfare?" he asked Doe 1.
"Not a single one," she replied.
"Is there any woman that you're aware of who lived in the compound who told the truth in their applications for public assistance about who the fathers of their children were?" Wilson asked.
"Not that I know of," replied Doe 1. "Even his daughters ... all of them were beating the system. Every single last one of them."
The connection to the welfare department paid dividends in other ways, too, according to the testimony of the wives.
When authorities began investigating allegations of welfare fraud, the bakery was tipped off by Daulet Bey's sisters, and bakery women pulled their families off the rolls, according to Doe 1.
Daulet Bey denied the allegations in an interview and defended her sisters by saying, "They never did anything wrong." She also added: "I was never aware of any investigation of welfare fraud going on about the bakery."
When bakery family members moved off of welfare, Doe 1 said they also dropped off Medi-Cal, the state indigent health care program.
To qualify for Medi-Cal, households must have less than $3,000 in assets, and hiding the income and assets of the father is fraud, said Anthony Cava, a spokesman for the state Department of Health Care Services.
Cava said he could not address the allegations of fraud at the bakery because of privacy rules.
Section 8 housing
The wives of Yusuf Bey also often received Section 8 housing vouchers for properties they weren't renting, according to Jane Doe 1.
Section 8 housing vouchers are given by the federal government to increase the affordable housing options for poor families. The vouchers can pay up to the full amount of fair market rent, which can be thousands of dollars per month. The owner of the unit receiving the payments cannot be the parent of a child in the unit.
Daulet Bey had been living in a house owned by Bey for 15 years rent free when she obtained Section 8 vouchers, according to Doe 1's testimony. Daulet Bey had eight children by Bey, and was living with them in the unit at the time, Doe 1 testified.
Daulet Bey continued to receive Section 8 vouchers in 2005, according to Doe 1. Public records show the previous year she bought a $550,000, five-bedroom, 2.5 bath home in Antioch.
Daulet Bey declined to comment about the alleged Section 8 fraud.
Esperanza Johnson received Section 8 vouchers, despite owning property, according to testimony from Doe 1. Johnson testified that she left the bakery in 1988 and started a baking business. Johnson has maintained ties to former bakery employees and family members, in part because Yusuf Bey was the father of three of her children.
Attempts to reach Johnson, including at her home in Antioch, were unsuccessful.
Daulet Bey and Johnson are described in the depositions as once being powerless pawns in Yusuf Bey's schemes. But the two women have become entangled in its future as a U.S. Bankruptcy Court prepares to liquidate the assets of Your Black Muslim Bakery.
The court trustee is suing Daulet Bey, saying that her son, bakery chief executive Bey IV, fraudulently "gifted" her $2.28 million worth of bakery properties to avoid having them liquidated.
The properties that avoided the gifting - and are being liquidated - include the bakery headquarters. The top bidder is being represented as a broker by Esperanza Johnson.
Shown above is a portion of a birth certificate for one of Yusuf Bey's children that was an exhibit in a civil lawsuit. Bey allegedly ordered his wives to keep his name off of birth certificates.
The alleged scheme
Yusuf Bey allegedly masterminded a scheme to bilk welfare agencies by having the 100 women whom he considered his wives and their children draw public benefits, according to sworn depositions from three of his former wives.
The wives
Many of the wives were allegedly forced to lie about his paternity on birth certificates, according to the depositions. That allowed women to apply for various forms of public assistance - Section 8, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medi-Cal - that his income and assets would have disqualified them from receiving. Those who didn't have children were encouraged to apply for General Assistance, the depositions allege.
The children
Bey had an estimated 46 children with 17 of the wives. The children formed another source of income, as AFDC as well as monthly per-child payments for being a guardian were received by Bey's wives, according to the depositions.
Alameda County Social Services
The agency was the conduit for welfare payments and guardianship payments. Two sisters of one of Bey's wives worked at the agency, allegedly facilitating the concealment of his paternity and tipping off the bakery to possible investigations, according to former wives. The sisters deny the allegations.
Money and image
All of the local, state and federal money was then funneled back to Yusuf Bey and put into bakery accounts, the three former wives testified. The money bolstered the income and assets of Bey, who lionized his business' success as proof of self-sufficiency.
Source: Civil lawsuit depositions; Chronicle reporting.
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/18/MNR4TCBIN.DTL)
Matthai Kuruvila, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, November 18, 2007
As the late Yusuf Bey built Your Black Muslim Bakery into an empire of wealth and influence, he also orchestrated a systematic welfare fraud scheme at his Oakland compound, three of his former wives have testified.
By the wives' sworn account, Bey directed many of the 100 women whom he considered his wives to make fraudulent applications for government aid programs intended to assist poor families, then diverted the benefits to himself.
Bey's alleged fraud scheme began in the 1970s and continued in some form until his death in 2003, according to the women, who gave depositions in a negligence lawsuit against Alameda County that was settled out of court earlier this year.
The allegations prompted an extensive investigation by county officials, but incomplete county records and the complicated nature of the alleged scheme were key reasons the investigation stalled, and no civil suit to recover money was filed, said Alameda County Counsel Richard E. Winnie.
The revenue - thousands of dollars per month, perhaps more than $1 million over the course of the scheme, testimony in the case suggests - helped inflate the clout of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a business Bey proselytized as an icon of economic self-sufficiency.
The alleged fraud scheme was aided by two employees of the Alameda County Social Services Agency who were also Bey's sisters-in-law, the former wives testified. A welfare worker who was Bey's sister-in-law once tipped off the bakery that it might become the target of a fraud investigation, according to the testimony. As a result, the bakery's households jumped off the welfare rolls in an attempt to avoid scrutiny, a former wife testified.
The depositions and other evidence obtained by The Chronicle allege:
-- Bey's wives fraudulently obtained Aid to Families with Dependent Children payments and General Assistance monies that were then diverted into bakery coffers.
-- Bey family members fraudulently collected Section 8 vouchers - designed to help the poor with rent payments - despite owning houses in the Bay Area.
-- Bey's children fraudulently received medical coverage through Medi-Cal, a program for the state's neediest residents.
In all, roughly 100 women and many of the 46 children Bey is thought to have fathered were involved in the fraud scheme, according to the wives - a category, the depositions say, that included girls whom Bey allegedly raped and impregnated.
The fraud began with a simple fact, according to the testimony: Bey forced his wives to keep his name off his children's birth certificates. That allowed his wives to hide Bey's income and qualify for public assistance. Bey, meanwhile, drove a Mercedes, and his business had lucrative contracts to sell baked goods in dozens of places, including Whole Foods, Andronico's, the Oakland Coliseum and Oakland International Airport.
Two of the former wives who testified are sisters identified in court records as Jane Does 1 and 2, who as children were under the guardianship of one of Bey's wives during the 1980s.
In the lawsuit, they alleged negligent oversight by the county because they were repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted as minors by Bey, who died at age 67 of cancer in 2003 while awaiting trial on rape charges.
DNA evidence collected by the Oakland Police Department showed that children the women bore as minors were fathered by Bey. The other former wife who testified about the welfare scheme, Esperanza Johnson, was a defendant in the lawsuit who for a time in the 1980s was the guardian for Does 1 and 2. She was eventually dropped from the suit. Yusuf Bey's estate and the bakery also were dropped from the suit.
The county paid a settlement of $188,000 to the sisters and another alleged sexual assault victim of Bey's earlier this year.
The three former wives, in their depositions, identified the welfare workers allegedly involved in the fraud scheme as Dana McBurnie (she now goes by Dana Lynn Morgan) and Lisa McBurnie. County records show that Morgan, 50, and McBurnie, 46, have worked for the county since 1981 and 1988, respectively, and still work for the Alameda County Social Services Agency. They each earn roughly $50,000 annually. Their duties include determining who qualifies for welfare.
In an interview, Morgan denied wrongdoing, calling the former wives' testimony about her "lies." Until she was promoted six years ago, Morgan said she was a clerk who didn't have access to the kinds of personal records the alleged fraud required.
Morgan said the fact that her supervisors have never talked to her about the allegations is proof of her innocence.
"Evidently, they must think it's a hoax because I haven't heard anything about it," she said.
McBurnie did not return calls for comment.
Winnie, the county counsel, said in an interview that the testimony of the wives prompted an investigation into welfare fraud at Your Black Muslim Bakery. Hundreds of hours were spent on the probe, he said, but investigators didn't find enough evidence to justify a lawsuit against Bey family members to recover the funds. Winnie said incomplete record keeping at the social services agency hindered the investigation.
"They were fairly old facts by that point," he said, "and there were a lot of allegations involved."
Winnie declined to comment about the welfare workers who were Bey's sisters-in-law.
Winnie said material was forwarded to the district attorney's office to help it in a possible criminal case.
Prosecutor Thomas Barni, who handles welfare fraud cases, said no case involving the bakery had been referred to him since he took over the office a year ago, and he was not aware of any prior case involving the bakery.
Bey's fallen empire
Bey founded the bakery more than four decades ago, and built it into a controversial but enduring Oakland institution praised by politicians and preachers alike.
But after Bey's death, his business empire spiraled into disarray, as his heirs vied for control and bakery officials and employees were implicated in a series of increasingly violent incidents.
The crime spree allegedly culminated in the Aug. 2 street-corner assassination of Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly paper serving the black community. Bailey was working on stories about the battle for power within the Bey family.
A day later, more than 200 heavily armed police officers from multiple agencies raided the bakery compound and arrested Yusuf Bey IV, one of Bey's sons and the bakery's chief executive, on kidnapping and torture charges. A bakery handyman was arrested and charged with Bailey's execution-style slaying with a shotgun.
Meanwhile, the bakery's properties and assets are being liquidated in U.S. bankruptcy court.
Since the bakery's collapse, some of Bey's followers have suggested that Bey IV and his cohorts ruined a venerable institution that had provided jobs and inspiration to the poorest of Oakland's poor.
But the extensive scope of the welfare fraud scheme described in the depositions suggests that the bakery was an empire built on fraud.
In their depositions, the women never specify how much money Bey obtained through the alleged fraud scheme.
However, Edwin Wilson, the attorney who represented Alameda County in the negligence lawsuit, said in an interview that he estimated the payout on the allegedly fraudulent claims associated with the bakery exceeded $10,000 per month and went on for years.
According to the women's testimony, the fraud scheme was centered at the bakery's headquarters on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, which also functioned as a community center. There, Bey's followers would gather, particularly for his Sunday speeches proclaiming autonomy and self-empowerment for black people.
Bey, who was referred to in the bakery as "Brother Bey" and "Doctor Bey," also ran a school, and the business owned several buildings, apartments and houses, which were carved up into multiple housing units. Dozens of people, including Bey's many wives and numerous households, lived in the units. Several buildings connected to the back of the bakery forming a compound.
Fraudulently applying for public assistance, including county "general assistance" given to those without children, was part of the ethos of the compound, the women testified in the depositions, saying that bakery members had meetings to facilitate the commission of the fraud.
"If you came around there at the bakery, you had to apply for something to bring some type of money in," testified Doe 1, who said she was impregnated by Bey when she was 12 years old. DNA evidence obtained by Oakland police showed that she bore Bey's child when she was 13.
There was no question whose money it was.
"He took every dime that came in there," testified Johnson, another former wife, who also goes by the names Esperanza Johnson Thurman, Nora Bey and Noor Jehan Bey. Both Johnson and Doe 1 testified that Farieda Bey, Bey's legal wife, was most often the one collecting the checks and depositing them in a bakery account.
Johnson said that during her time with the bakery, as many as 100 women were considered to be Bey's wives. Asked which of the wives participated in the welfare fraud, Johnson testified, "Every last one of them."
Johnson said she was also forced to work long days at the bakery, sometimes 20 hours at a stretch.
Said Doe 2: "I know that the money went to Brother Bey. ... All I remember is them having me to sign the check because my name was on it." Instead of going to school, Doe 2 testified that as a child, she was forced to start working at the bakery at 5 a.m., making cookies, cupcakes and other baked goods. The children were never paid for their labor.
Fear of violence
Bey's wives feared violent retribution if they didn't do what he said, according to the depositions.
Johnson said she'd been beaten by Bey since she was 14 years old - more times than she could count, as she put it. The other two wives testified that Johnson was pummeled so badly with the hand piece of a rotary dial phone that the lumps on her face made her look like "the elephant man" and another wife was almost drowned in a bathtub.
Asked why she never reported the welfare fraud while Bey was alive, Johnson testified, "So that I can breathe like I'm breathing today."
Sometimes children would be taken from one wife and handed over to another, the women testified. The new mother would apply for aid as their guardian.
Johnson testified that she successfully applied at Alameda County Social Services to be the foster parent for the Jane Does and their brother, whose father had left them in the care of Bey. Even though the children did not live with her, Johnson testified that she collected up to $500 a month per child in county welfare during the 1980s. She said the money went to Bey.
To facilitate the alleged frauds, Bey ordered his wives not to list him as the father on the birth certificates of his children. They sometimes made up names of the fathers, according to the depositions. A copy of one birth certificate included as evidence in the case didn't list any father at all.
Johnson, the guardian for Does 1 and 2, also applied to be the guardian for the children they bore as Bey's alleged rape victims, civil court records show. She received public assistance for them as well, according to her sworn testimony.
Johnson, who had three children with Bey, also received welfare payments for them, according to Doe 1, who added that all the money went to Bey.
Once Bey's children became old enough, they, too, participated in the fraud scheme, according to the depositions.
Some of Bey's daughters concealed the paternity of their children to qualify for public assistance, according to the testimony. That allowed them to live with the fathers of their children and hide the joint income of the household.
The welfare workers
It could be hard to keep up with the lies.
To renew applications for aid each year, Bey's wives needed to know the names they'd fraudulently documented as the fathers of their children, according to the testimony. But with so many children and so many different names of fathers, that could be easy to forget. So the wives said they turned to Daulet Bey, the mother of Yusuf Bey IV and the sister of the two women who worked for the county. She would ask her sisters to look up county records to verify recorded names, they testified.
Daulet Bey declined to comment about any allegations other than to defend her sisters, saying they had never done anything wrong.
Doe 1 recounted a conversation she overheard in which another Bey wife, Madeeah Bey, asked Daulet Bey to call her sister, Dana Morgan, at the social services agency to find out the fraudulent name listed as the father of her children.
"Could you call your sister for me because I have a renewal coming up, and I don't remember what I put on the paper," Madeeah Bey asked Daulet Bey, according to Doe 1's testimony.
Daulet Bey laughed and said: "You know what? I have to call Dana when I have a renewal because I forget," Doe 1 testified.
Daulet Bey's sisters who work for the social services agency were intimately familiar with the bakery family, according to the depositions. Morgan left her own children in care of the bakery for at least two years and came by nearly every day, Doe 1 testified. After Doe 1 turned 18, she applied for welfare for herself. She said the person who took her application at the Social Services Agency office at the Eastmont Mall was McBurnie, Yusuf Bey's sister-in-law.
Wilson, the lawyer who represented the county, tried during the depositions to learn the extent of the alleged welfare fraud scheme.
"Is there any woman who was living in the bakery compound who had one of Yusuf Bey's children that you're aware of who did not apply to the county for welfare?" he asked Doe 1.
"Not a single one," she replied.
"Is there any woman that you're aware of who lived in the compound who told the truth in their applications for public assistance about who the fathers of their children were?" Wilson asked.
"Not that I know of," replied Doe 1. "Even his daughters ... all of them were beating the system. Every single last one of them."
The connection to the welfare department paid dividends in other ways, too, according to the testimony of the wives.
When authorities began investigating allegations of welfare fraud, the bakery was tipped off by Daulet Bey's sisters, and bakery women pulled their families off the rolls, according to Doe 1.
Daulet Bey denied the allegations in an interview and defended her sisters by saying, "They never did anything wrong." She also added: "I was never aware of any investigation of welfare fraud going on about the bakery."
When bakery family members moved off of welfare, Doe 1 said they also dropped off Medi-Cal, the state indigent health care program.
To qualify for Medi-Cal, households must have less than $3,000 in assets, and hiding the income and assets of the father is fraud, said Anthony Cava, a spokesman for the state Department of Health Care Services.
Cava said he could not address the allegations of fraud at the bakery because of privacy rules.
Section 8 housing
The wives of Yusuf Bey also often received Section 8 housing vouchers for properties they weren't renting, according to Jane Doe 1.
Section 8 housing vouchers are given by the federal government to increase the affordable housing options for poor families. The vouchers can pay up to the full amount of fair market rent, which can be thousands of dollars per month. The owner of the unit receiving the payments cannot be the parent of a child in the unit.
Daulet Bey had been living in a house owned by Bey for 15 years rent free when she obtained Section 8 vouchers, according to Doe 1's testimony. Daulet Bey had eight children by Bey, and was living with them in the unit at the time, Doe 1 testified.
Daulet Bey continued to receive Section 8 vouchers in 2005, according to Doe 1. Public records show the previous year she bought a $550,000, five-bedroom, 2.5 bath home in Antioch.
Daulet Bey declined to comment about the alleged Section 8 fraud.
Esperanza Johnson received Section 8 vouchers, despite owning property, according to testimony from Doe 1. Johnson testified that she left the bakery in 1988 and started a baking business. Johnson has maintained ties to former bakery employees and family members, in part because Yusuf Bey was the father of three of her children.
Attempts to reach Johnson, including at her home in Antioch, were unsuccessful.
Daulet Bey and Johnson are described in the depositions as once being powerless pawns in Yusuf Bey's schemes. But the two women have become entangled in its future as a U.S. Bankruptcy Court prepares to liquidate the assets of Your Black Muslim Bakery.
The court trustee is suing Daulet Bey, saying that her son, bakery chief executive Bey IV, fraudulently "gifted" her $2.28 million worth of bakery properties to avoid having them liquidated.
The properties that avoided the gifting - and are being liquidated - include the bakery headquarters. The top bidder is being represented as a broker by Esperanza Johnson.
Shown above is a portion of a birth certificate for one of Yusuf Bey's children that was an exhibit in a civil lawsuit. Bey allegedly ordered his wives to keep his name off of birth certificates.
The alleged scheme
Yusuf Bey allegedly masterminded a scheme to bilk welfare agencies by having the 100 women whom he considered his wives and their children draw public benefits, according to sworn depositions from three of his former wives.
The wives
Many of the wives were allegedly forced to lie about his paternity on birth certificates, according to the depositions. That allowed women to apply for various forms of public assistance - Section 8, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medi-Cal - that his income and assets would have disqualified them from receiving. Those who didn't have children were encouraged to apply for General Assistance, the depositions allege.
The children
Bey had an estimated 46 children with 17 of the wives. The children formed another source of income, as AFDC as well as monthly per-child payments for being a guardian were received by Bey's wives, according to the depositions.
Alameda County Social Services
The agency was the conduit for welfare payments and guardianship payments. Two sisters of one of Bey's wives worked at the agency, allegedly facilitating the concealment of his paternity and tipping off the bakery to possible investigations, according to former wives. The sisters deny the allegations.
Money and image
All of the local, state and federal money was then funneled back to Yusuf Bey and put into bakery accounts, the three former wives testified. The money bolstered the income and assets of Bey, who lionized his business' success as proof of self-sufficiency.
Source: Civil lawsuit depositions; Chronicle reporting.
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Bakery handyman ordered to stand trial for Chauncey Bailey killing
Bakery handyman ordered to stand trial for Chauncey Bailey killing
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/22/BAG7TH1KQ.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/22/BAG7TH1KQ.DTL
In an Oakland courtroom Wednesday, Deputy District Attorney John Jay played tapes of two phone calls that Broussard made from jail. In them, Broussard said he would be behind bars for the rest of his life and that a top official of the Oakland bakery had "told me to tell on myself."
The judge also heard the taped confession that Broussard made to investigators and rejected defense arguments that police had obtained it through coercion. Defense attorney LeRue Grim has said Broussard falsely confessed at the prompting of bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV.
...
In a second call two hours later from jail, Broussard told an unidentified man, "You ain't gonna never see me again" because they "got me for murder."
"I don't got nobody else to call," Broussard said. The man then launched into an expletive-filled tirade at Broussard for having talked to police.
Broussard began weeping, and the man told him, "Quit crying." The man demanded to know why Broussard would let people "send you to go do something" when they "ain't did (anything) for you. (They) did nothing for you, man! They wasn't even taking care of you. So why would you risk yourself for someone else?"
Broussard replied, "I don't know."
Outside court, Grim maintained that Broussard was being unjustly accused for a killing that someone else at the bakery committed. "Things will be much clearer" when Broussard testifies at the trial and identifies the real killer, Grim said.
"He was manipulated from different angles by different people," Grim said. "He was confused."
...
In other testimony Wednesday, AC Transit bus driver Antoinette Carroll testified that she had seen a masked man carrying a large gun approaching her bus the morning of the killing, and that she had sped off.
Two witnesses to the killing, Jia Hong Chou and Yai Ling Lau, testified that they had seen a masked man dressed all in black shoot Bailey. Neither was asked by the prosecutor to identify Broussard as the gunman.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Oakland man convicted of killing Black Muslim bakery leader
Oakland man convicted of killing Black Muslim bakery leader
(11-19) 11:30 PST OAKLAND - An Oakland man was convicted today of first-degree murder for fatally shooting the head of Your Black Muslim Bakery in 2005 during a failed carjacking.
Alfonza Phillips III, 22, smirked as the guilty verdict on the special-circumstances murder charge was read in an Oakland courtroom. Phillips faces life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing Antar Bey, 23, when he is sentenced Dec. 14 by Judge Jon Rolefson of Alameda County Superior Court.
The 10-man, two-woman jury deliberated about two days after a three-week trial. The panel also convicted Phillips on charges that he personally used and discharged a gun in the slaying.
Defense attorney Leonard Ulfelder had argued that Bey was killed by someone other than Phillips as a result of a power struggle within the Oakland bakery. He declined to discuss the verdict.
Phillips used a .44 Magnum revolver to shoot Bey in the back at a North Oakland gas station Oct. 25, 2005, in hopes of stealing the $5,000, 22-inch rims on his car, Deputy District Attorney Colleen McMahon told jurors during the trial.
She said Phillips had left a fingerprint on the car, boasted of the shooting to a friend who testified against him, admitted the slaying to his girlfriend and had been identified by a bystander as the killer.
...
Sunday, November 18, 2007
3 ex-wives of Muslim bakery founder allege elaborate welfare scam
Your Black Muslim Bakery. (YBMB)
3 ex-wives of Muslim bakery founder allege elaborate welfare scam
3 ex-wives of Muslim bakery founder allege elaborate welfare scam
The other former wife who testified about the welfare scheme, Esperanza Johnson, was a defendant in the lawsuit who for a time in the 1980s was the guardian for Does 1 and 2. She was eventually dropped from the suit. Yusuf Bey's estate and the bakery also were dropped from the suit.
The county paid a settlement of $188,000 to the sisters and another alleged sexual assault victim of Bey's earlier this year.
The three former wives, in their depositions, identified the welfare workers allegedly involved in the fraud scheme as Dana McBurnie (she now goes by Dana Lynn Morgan) and Lisa McBurnie. County records show that Morgan, 50, and McBurnie, 46, have worked for the county since 1981 and 1988, respectively, and still work for the Alameda County Social Services Agency. They each earn roughly $50,000 annually. Their duties include determining who qualifies for welfare.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)