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Raid on Your Black Muslim Bakery came a day late for Oakland editor
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Matthai Chakko Kuruvila,Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle
Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/09/MNF2SLVBJ.DTL
In the spring of last year, security guards from Oakland's Your Black
Muslim Bakery got unlikely new jobs: protecting students at a local
charter school from gang members.
Officials at California College Preparatory Academy - just down the
block from the bakery's San Pablo Avenue headquarters - said they knew
little of the bakery's troubled history.
"They were really good at defusing everything in our neighborhood," said
former Principal Michael Prada, who hired them.
That Your Black Muslim Bakery had managed to land a $37,000 public
contract - to protect vulnerable children, no less - was one more
seeming insult to long-frustrated Oakland police. For years they had
investigated the bakery's leaders and employees for serious crimes as
local politicians and bureaucrats celebrated the bakery as an important
civic institution and turned a blind eye to its transgressions.
Since 1994, investigators had linked bakery officials and employees to
dozens of violent crimes, including assault, torture and murder.
Twice, police had made high-profile arrests - in 2002, when bakery
founder Yusuf Bey was charged with raping underage girls, and in 2005,
when Bey's son and successor, Yusuf Bey IV, allegedly directed the
trashing of two liquor stores. Authorities say he chastised the owners
for selling alcohol in the black community.
But many crimes associated with the bakery went unsolved, and police
were unable to take down an organization that some had come to regard as
a criminal enterprise.
Witnesses often refused to testify, recalled former Police Chief Richard
Word, and police never managed to infiltrate the bakery's
extraordinarily closed world.
"It was difficult to get into the group," he said. "We have dismantled
groups before. But in this case, you couldn't. I don't think it was
possible."
Complicating the task for police was the bakery's reputation as an icon
for Oakland's betterment, a profitable business that employed and
empowered poor black people.
Even as police investigated the bakery, a long list of local leaders,
including Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland,
wrote letters of support for the organization.
"Over the past 45 years, the bakery has established itself as an
integral part of the community and its loss would have a huge impact on
the residents of Oakland and the greater Bay Area," Dellums wrote in a
letter to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court dated July 30, 2007.
That glowing public image masked a darker side: The bakery's leaders
were allegedly committing an increasing number of crimes even as they
were reaping public monies. They won government contracts, received
welfare benefits by allegedly falsifying applications, and obtained a
$1.1 million collateral-free loan from the Oakland City Council. When
bakery employees were convicted of crimes, probation officers said, two
officials and even a police officer asked the courts for leniency.
It was only this year - when the alleged criminal acts of a new
generation of bakery leaders intensified - that police finally obtained
a warrant to search the bakery's headquarters. Three days later, they
raided the bakery.
That was one day too late for Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, who
was assassinated while walking to work, allegedly by a bakery employee
who was upset about stories Bailey had been working on.
SIGNS OF TROUBLE
T o some police, the threat posed by the bakery was made clear one night
in March 1994.
Officers summoned to 24th Street and Telegraph Avenue found an injured
man who said he had been tortured with a red-hot knife and beaten with a
heavy-duty flashlight by four bakery workers who said he had cheated
them in a real estate deal.
When police tried to enter the apartment complex where the crime
occurred, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by about 30 men from
the bakery. The men began grappling with officers, and one officer was
assaulted, police said. An emergency call was made for every on-duty
officer in the city to come to the scene.
A bakery leader named Basheer Muhummad exhorted followers, yelling that
"death would be 'an acceptable sacrifice if it meant the death and
downfall of the white race,' " according to a police report. Current
Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan, who was at the scene as an officer
at the time, said he and other black police officers were called "house
n-s."
"We were very, very concerned that we were in over our heads," said Sgt.
David Cronin, who said he was one of roughly 45 officers who responded
to the call. "This time, they had the upper hand."
Eventually police managed to calm the scene, and four men were arrested
in the torture case. No one was charged with assaulting the officer.
"It was a turning point in the way the Police Department looked at the
(Black) Muslims," Cronin said. "Instead of just being a group of angry
young men hostile to the Police Department, I think many of us saw them
as something more organized, structured and more dangerous. We took them
more seriously."
After that, police took care at even minor traffic stops near the bakery
to avoid possible confrontation. Supervisors asked for several police
cars to be on hand for even routine arrests.
"You'd be there writing a ticket, and two or three carloads of (bakery
members) would stand around you and create this real intimidating kind
of environment," said Cronin. "That had happened many, many times."
According to Word, the former chief, officers were concerned that bakery
employees "would take matters into their own hands."
LETTER FROM POLICE
I n the mid-1990s, other confrontations were avoided through the efforts
of a beat officer, Emelington Reese. He says he acted as a go-between,
facilitating arrests of bakery employees suspected of crimes.
Reese, who grew up around Black Muslims in Brooklyn, N.Y., said he
understood that they "tend to distrust the police automatically."
Reese said he also recognized that the bakery was organized as a
"soldier unit," with Bey Sr. as patriarch. And so, when an officer had a
warrant for a bakery employee, Reese said he would inform Bey. He said
Bey always produced the wanted man.
"I told him, 'if we have some problems here, we'll resolve it,' " Reese
said. "We don't need news cameras and SWAT teams. If guys got arrest
warrants, everybody will be treated fairly. There'll be no brutality.
But they got to go."
Reese said he personally saw nothing to indicate the bakery was the
headquarters of a criminal gang. He believed it was a positive influence
on the community.
In March 1995, Reese wrote to a judge urging probation instead of jail
time for Nedir Bey, Abaz Bey and Basheer Muhummad, three bakery workers
who pleaded guilty in the 1994 torture incident.
"The above citizens pose no danger or threat to society," he wrote.
Nedir Bey also listed as references Alameda County Supervisor Keith
Carson and Larry Reid, then-Mayor Elihu Harris' chief of staff and now
an Oakland City councilman. Reid has told others that his name was used
without permission. Carson acknowledged vouching for Nedir Bey, whom he
knew through community work.
"He seemed to be a standup kind of guy," Carson said. "He appeared to be
fairly educated, stable and businesslike."
Nedir Bey and Abaz Bey served five months in the county work furlough
program. Basheer Muhummad served four months in work furlough.
Reese, who worked the beat until 1997, said he did not regret writing
the letter to the judge - the only time he said he ever wrote a letter
of support in a criminal case.
"That's like saying 'Do you regret watching O.J. play football?' " Reese
said. "I would say, 'they were doing community work on beat 11,' the
area where I was at."
FUNDS FROM COUNTY
For years, Alameda County's Social Services Agency also took a tolerant
view of the bakery. As a result, a lawsuit says, some of Oakland's most
vulnerable citizens - foster children who lived in the home of Yusuf Bey
Sr. - were raped and brutalized by the patriarch himself. While the
abuse continued, the county paid Bey public funds for the children's
support, says the suit, which was filed in 2003 by three women who claim
they were among Bey's victims.
According to the lawsuit, in 1978 two sisters and their brother came to
live with Nora Bey, one of an estimated 17 wives of Yusuf Bey Sr. The
county paid Nora Bey for the children's support, the suit says.
The sisters alleged that Yusuf Bey Sr. raped them repeatedly and forced
them to work long days in the bakery for no money. While they were
minors, the girls bore four children by Bey Sr., according to DNA tests.
One victim, known in her lawsuit as Jane Doe 1, told The Chronicle that
she had complained to a county case worker early on that "I wasn't going
to school, and I wasn't being educated and I was being made to work 10-
to 15-hour days.
"I told her the conditions I was living in, but I never (saw) her
again," she said.
Once, when the girls were approximately 11 and 12 years old, the lawsuit
says their biological father learned of their abuse and took them to
live with him at Lake Tahoe. But Bey Sr. complained to the county, the
victims allege, and the girls were put in a vehicle with a locked, caged
barrier and driven back to Oakland.
Bey Sr. and his family "didn't care about my well being," Jane Doe 1
said. "They wanted a slave who was down there working in their bakery, a
check (from the county) coming in for myself, my brother, my sister.
That's a nice little income."
Several months after she gave birth to Bey's child, an investigator from
Child Protective Services visited. Jane Doe 1 said she believed her baby
would prove her mistreatment.
"I thought he was finally going to get caught - thank God he was finally
going to get caught," she remembers thinking.
But the investigator interviewed her in front of Bey Sr., and she said
she was too terrified to say anything.
When she turned 18, Doe 1 fled. By then, she'd had three children by Bey
Sr. Years later, she and her sister were among four women who complained
about Bey Sr. to police. In 2002, he was charged with raping the girls.
Bey Sr. pleaded not guilty and died of cancer in 2003 before the case
went to trial.
According to Edwin Wilson, an attorney representing Alameda County, Bey
Sr. collected Aid to Families With Dependent Children checks for the
girls as well as the five children they had by him, one of them born
after the mother turned 18.
Alameda County, which recently paid $188,000 to settle the lawsuit,
disputes many of the claims made by the women, Wilson said. Social
workers interviewed the girls privately, he said, and they never
complained that they were being mistreated. Instead, he said they told
social workers "how much they loved it there and how excited they were
to be doing things."
Wilson acknowledged that Bey Sr. had orchestrated a massive fraud
scheme. For years, he was defrauding county taxpayers of more than
$10,000 per month in AFDC and welfare payments, Wilson said.
Doe 1 said the settlement left her even angrier at government officials.
"They don't help victims," she says. "They don't help victims at all.
Defendants have more rights than victims do.
"Yusuf Bey said no one's going to help me, and no one's going to believe
me. He was right, he was."
SECURITY CONTRACTS
M ore than a decade ago, Yusuf Bey Sr. began setting up security
companies in which bakery workers served as guards. Even as bakery
employees and officials were implicated in serious crimes, the companies
continued to get contracts. Executives who hired them sometimes say they
weren't familiar with the bakery's problems.
That's the case with California College Preparatory Academy, a charter
middle school set up by the nonprofit Aspire Public Schools chain and
the Academic Talent Development Program at UC Berkeley. In 2006, the
school hired Your Black Muslim Bakery Security to patrol its San Pablo
Avenue campus before and after school.
"They really served probably as a deterrent, more than anything else,"
said Frank Worrell, a UC Berkeley educator who headed the school's faculty.
He said that then-Principal Michael Prada had recommended awarding the
$37,000 contract, saying bakery guards were "known in the neighborhood,
and they are for nonviolence."
Prada said he had no idea of any problems with the bakery.
"We needed to have security services," he said. "But we didn't want
students to feel they were in the prison environment."
The bakery guards "presented themselves like any other company. But they
didn't have a uniform and gun," he said.
There were no incidents at the school. But the bakery's contract to
patrol a parking lot at the corner of High Street and International
Boulevard in East Oakland was violently problematic.
In August 2006, a motorist told police he was beaten by Yusuf Bey IV,
who accused him of double-parking in the lot. The bakery security guards
said the motorist had a gun, but two witnesses told officers that the
man was unarmed. The next month, the victim told police he did not want
to pursue the case, records show.
Four months later, another man said he had been assaulted in the same
lot by guards. When he tried to flee, the man said the guards used a
decommissioned police car emblazoned with the words "Your Black Muslim
Bakery Security" to chase him down. When police arrived, they found the
man sitting on a curb, bleeding from the head, surrounded by five
security guards.
Some witnesses "would not provide written statements for fear of
retaliation from the Black Muslim Bakery security officers," a police
report noted. Bey IV and his brother, Joshua Bey, were among those
detained, but when the victim did not cooperate, the case was dropped,
records show.
POLITICIANS' SUPPORT
D espite mounting evidence that bakery officials and employees were
involved in violent crime, some local politicians continued to promote
and support the bakery - up to the week Chauncey Bailey was slain.
Councilmember Reid said he supported the bakery until the elder Bey was
charged with raping minors. But he said it's unreasonable to expect
officials to renounce the bakery when "the people that have the
responsibility of gathering evidence and presenting it to the district
attorney" - the police - often couldn't find hard evidence of wrongdoing.
To politicians like Reid, the bakery was a complex institution, one that
for all its faults had provided important community services over the
years. And if some bakery officials were involved in crime, Reid said
that others - he named Saleem and John Bey, "spiritually" adopted sons
of the late Yusuf Bey - obviously were reputable.
After Yusuf Bey's death, Saleem and John Bey said that ownership of the
bakery had been illegally seized and its assets squandered by Yusuf Bey
IV and his brother, Antar.
This summer, after Yusuf Bey IV put the bakery into bankruptcy, Saleem
and John Bey made a frenzied attempt to get politicians to persuade the
bankruptcy judge not to order the bakery sold to pay its debts. But the
letters from politicians made no distinction between the bakery's
criminal and noncriminal leaders.
"The loss of this bakery would be devastating to the entire community at
large because it provides not only delicious food items, but vital job
opportunities for our local residents," wrote Assemblyman Sandré Swanson.
Swanson said in an interview that the bakery business was independent of
its owners and their problems with police.
"During the 30 years I served for Barbara Lee, Ron Dellums and as a
legislator, we hadn't received any complaints about bakery service to
the public, only that they provided healthy food and employment," said
Swanson. "The legal problems that some of the sons have found themselves
in are a separate matter. ... I don't think anyone is claiming that the
business and the service it was providing was involved in any criminal
activity. To try to hook those is very shallow."
At times, the support from politicians went beyond testimonials.
In 1997, three years after he pleaded guilty in the torture case, bakery
leader Nedir Bey received a $1.1 million city loan for a home health
business that would dispatch nurses and aides for in-home medical care.
Today, the business doesn't exist, and the loan was never repaid. City
Attorney John Russo's office said the loan was found to be
"unrecoverable" because it was not tied to any assets.
In 2002, after the city loan had gone into default and at the same time
the police were investigating Yusef Bey Sr. on the rape charges, Senate
President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland wrote to Bey, saying: "The
leadership you provide should be an inspiration to all concerned over
the city's future." Perata didn't respond to a request for comment.
In the days before Bailey's killing, Rep. Barbara Lee's office convened
a 40-minute meeting to try to hash out the dispute over the bakery's
bankruptcy filing, Saleem Bey said. Saleem and John Bey were there. So
was Yusuf Bey IV.
"We all met and we put our evidence on the table," Saleem Bey said.
After the meeting, Lee's office sent a letter to the bankruptcy judge
describing the bakery as a "historical landmark business that has
provided jobs and outreach to many for 45 years." Lee's office later
retracted the letter, and a spokesman called it a mistake.
REIGN OF VIOLENCE
A fter Yusuf Bey's death in 2003, the bakery's new generation of leaders
turned increasingly to violent crime, police believed. But former Chief
Word, who left Oakland in 2004, said lack of evidence stymied investigators.
"I got a briefing that some members in the group engaged in illegal
behavior and were possibly responsible for some deaths in Oakland," he
said. "You just couldn't make the case, there wasn't physical evidence.
It just wasn't there. That didn't mean we didn't try."
He said that doing more to stop the organization was difficult, given
the department's other duties.
"Those types of long-term investigations are extremely labor intensive,"
Word said. "We just didn't have the resources for that. Considering the
other demands for our services, especially in homicides, were huge.
There is so much to do in Oakland."
There were 114 homicides in Oakland in 2003 and 88 homicides in 2004.
In July 2004, the body of Yusuf Bey's chosen successor, Waajid
Aljawwaad, was found in a shallow grave in the Oakland hills.
Lt. Ersie Joyner, the head of the homicide section, recalled that police
had gathered "circumstantial as well as physical evidence" linking some
bakery members to the killing - but not enough to bring charges.
Joyner said police were frustrated but not discouraged when the case
didn't go forward.
"Our job is to be fact finders," he said. "We play the cards we have."
Saleem Bey criticized police for failing to bring Aljawwaad's killers to
justice. He made the same complaint in June 2005, when gunmen ambushed
and shot John Bey as he walked out of his Montclair home. He survived
and went into hiding. The case remains unsolved.
On Nov. 23, 2005, a group allegedly led by the new leader of the bakery,
Yusuf Bey IV, then just 19, smashed up two Muslim-owned West Oakland
stores blamed for selling alcohol to the community.
In one of the attacks, a Mossberg shotgun was stolen. But police
declined to raid the bakery to seize the weapon. Police would say later
that they couldn't justify seeking a search warrant to try to recover
the weapon.
"I don't think we felt at the time that a vandalism and a weak stolen
gun case was enough to go smashing in the door," said Assistant Chief
Howard Jordan.
THE RAID ON THE BAKERY
By this summer, Oakland detectives investigating the kidnap-torture of a
mother and daughter in May had strong evidence that the masked suspects
were tied to the bakery. The fleeing kidnappers - interrupted when an
officer happened by - left behind two cars linked to the bakery and a
cell phone belonging to a bakery employee.
As they built that case, the violence continued. In July, two men were
gunned down near the bakery in separate unsolved slayings. Tests showed
that in each case, the killers had used an AK-47 that had been fired in
a yet another attack that police believe was linked to the bakery.
Finally, police decided to raid the bakery, searching for more evidence
in the killings and the kidnapping cases - 13 years after the
confrontation on 24th and Telegraph.
Concerned about leaks, officers took extraordinary measures to keep the
raid plan a secret. After a judge signed off on the search warrants on
July 31, police went so far as to issue an internal bulletin suggesting
that the raid target was in fact gang territory in East Oakland.
Police pushed back the date for the raid to Aug. 3. Coordinating the
operation was "extremely labor-intensive," said Deputy Chief Dave Kozicki.
Then, on the morning of Aug. 2, Chauncey Bailey was assassinated in
broad daylight as he walked to his office at the Oakland Post.
The following day, police raided the headquarters of Your Black Muslim
Bakery and three residences. They were prepared for extreme violence.
More than 200 officers participated in the raid; snipers were positioned
on nearby rooftops. The suspect in Bailey's killing, Devaughndre
Broussard, was arrested as he tossed a shotgun out of a window.
It turned out to be the same Mossberg taken from the liquor store
vandalism two years before. Test results would later show that it had
been used to kill Bailey.
Read the first two installments of The Assassination of Chauncey Bailey
online at sfgate.com:
Sunday: Chauncey Bailey builds a newspaper and television career to tell
stories about the black community, but he dies before he tells his last one.
Monday: The fiefdom of Yusuf Bey crumbles as secrets of his rape of
children emerge and, after his death, his sons take on an increasingly
violent and criminal path - including alleged fratricide.
E-mail the writers at jvanderbecken@sfchronicle.com,
mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com and lfulbright@sfchronicle.com.
CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....
CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.
every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com
Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS
Perpetrators of Maltreatment
Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5
Imagine that, 6.4 children die at the hands of the very agencies that
are supposed to protect them and only 1.5 at the hands of parents per
100,000 children. CPS perpetrates more abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse
and kills more children then parents in the United States. If the
citizens of this country hold CPS to the same standards that they hold
parents too. No judge should ever put another child in the hands of ANY
government agency because CPS nationwide is guilty of more harm and
death than any human being combined. CPS nationwide is guilty of more
human rights violations and deaths of children then the homes from which
they were removed. When are the judges going to wake up and see that
they are sending children to their death and a life of abuse when
children are removed from safe homes based on the mere opinion of a
bunch of social workers.
CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT
FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...
BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Matthai Chakko Kuruvila,Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle
Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/09/MNF2SLVBJ.DTL
In the spring of last year, security guards from Oakland's Your Black
Muslim Bakery got unlikely new jobs: protecting students at a local
charter school from gang members.
Officials at California College Preparatory Academy - just down the
block from the bakery's San Pablo Avenue headquarters - said they knew
little of the bakery's troubled history.
"They were really good at defusing everything in our neighborhood," said
former Principal Michael Prada, who hired them.
That Your Black Muslim Bakery had managed to land a $37,000 public
contract - to protect vulnerable children, no less - was one more
seeming insult to long-frustrated Oakland police. For years they had
investigated the bakery's leaders and employees for serious crimes as
local politicians and bureaucrats celebrated the bakery as an important
civic institution and turned a blind eye to its transgressions.
Since 1994, investigators had linked bakery officials and employees to
dozens of violent crimes, including assault, torture and murder.
Twice, police had made high-profile arrests - in 2002, when bakery
founder Yusuf Bey was charged with raping underage girls, and in 2005,
when Bey's son and successor, Yusuf Bey IV, allegedly directed the
trashing of two liquor stores. Authorities say he chastised the owners
for selling alcohol in the black community.
But many crimes associated with the bakery went unsolved, and police
were unable to take down an organization that some had come to regard as
a criminal enterprise.
Witnesses often refused to testify, recalled former Police Chief Richard
Word, and police never managed to infiltrate the bakery's
extraordinarily closed world.
"It was difficult to get into the group," he said. "We have dismantled
groups before. But in this case, you couldn't. I don't think it was
possible."
Complicating the task for police was the bakery's reputation as an icon
for Oakland's betterment, a profitable business that employed and
empowered poor black people.
Even as police investigated the bakery, a long list of local leaders,
including Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland,
wrote letters of support for the organization.
"Over the past 45 years, the bakery has established itself as an
integral part of the community and its loss would have a huge impact on
the residents of Oakland and the greater Bay Area," Dellums wrote in a
letter to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court dated July 30, 2007.
That glowing public image masked a darker side: The bakery's leaders
were allegedly committing an increasing number of crimes even as they
were reaping public monies. They won government contracts, received
welfare benefits by allegedly falsifying applications, and obtained a
$1.1 million collateral-free loan from the Oakland City Council. When
bakery employees were convicted of crimes, probation officers said, two
officials and even a police officer asked the courts for leniency.
It was only this year - when the alleged criminal acts of a new
generation of bakery leaders intensified - that police finally obtained
a warrant to search the bakery's headquarters. Three days later, they
raided the bakery.
That was one day too late for Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, who
was assassinated while walking to work, allegedly by a bakery employee
who was upset about stories Bailey had been working on.
SIGNS OF TROUBLE
T o some police, the threat posed by the bakery was made clear one night
in March 1994.
Officers summoned to 24th Street and Telegraph Avenue found an injured
man who said he had been tortured with a red-hot knife and beaten with a
heavy-duty flashlight by four bakery workers who said he had cheated
them in a real estate deal.
When police tried to enter the apartment complex where the crime
occurred, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by about 30 men from
the bakery. The men began grappling with officers, and one officer was
assaulted, police said. An emergency call was made for every on-duty
officer in the city to come to the scene.
A bakery leader named Basheer Muhummad exhorted followers, yelling that
"death would be 'an acceptable sacrifice if it meant the death and
downfall of the white race,' " according to a police report. Current
Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan, who was at the scene as an officer
at the time, said he and other black police officers were called "house
n-s."
"We were very, very concerned that we were in over our heads," said Sgt.
David Cronin, who said he was one of roughly 45 officers who responded
to the call. "This time, they had the upper hand."
Eventually police managed to calm the scene, and four men were arrested
in the torture case. No one was charged with assaulting the officer.
"It was a turning point in the way the Police Department looked at the
(Black) Muslims," Cronin said. "Instead of just being a group of angry
young men hostile to the Police Department, I think many of us saw them
as something more organized, structured and more dangerous. We took them
more seriously."
After that, police took care at even minor traffic stops near the bakery
to avoid possible confrontation. Supervisors asked for several police
cars to be on hand for even routine arrests.
"You'd be there writing a ticket, and two or three carloads of (bakery
members) would stand around you and create this real intimidating kind
of environment," said Cronin. "That had happened many, many times."
According to Word, the former chief, officers were concerned that bakery
employees "would take matters into their own hands."
LETTER FROM POLICE
I n the mid-1990s, other confrontations were avoided through the efforts
of a beat officer, Emelington Reese. He says he acted as a go-between,
facilitating arrests of bakery employees suspected of crimes.
Reese, who grew up around Black Muslims in Brooklyn, N.Y., said he
understood that they "tend to distrust the police automatically."
Reese said he also recognized that the bakery was organized as a
"soldier unit," with Bey Sr. as patriarch. And so, when an officer had a
warrant for a bakery employee, Reese said he would inform Bey. He said
Bey always produced the wanted man.
"I told him, 'if we have some problems here, we'll resolve it,' " Reese
said. "We don't need news cameras and SWAT teams. If guys got arrest
warrants, everybody will be treated fairly. There'll be no brutality.
But they got to go."
Reese said he personally saw nothing to indicate the bakery was the
headquarters of a criminal gang. He believed it was a positive influence
on the community.
In March 1995, Reese wrote to a judge urging probation instead of jail
time for Nedir Bey, Abaz Bey and Basheer Muhummad, three bakery workers
who pleaded guilty in the 1994 torture incident.
"The above citizens pose no danger or threat to society," he wrote.
Nedir Bey also listed as references Alameda County Supervisor Keith
Carson and Larry Reid, then-Mayor Elihu Harris' chief of staff and now
an Oakland City councilman. Reid has told others that his name was used
without permission. Carson acknowledged vouching for Nedir Bey, whom he
knew through community work.
"He seemed to be a standup kind of guy," Carson said. "He appeared to be
fairly educated, stable and businesslike."
Nedir Bey and Abaz Bey served five months in the county work furlough
program. Basheer Muhummad served four months in work furlough.
Reese, who worked the beat until 1997, said he did not regret writing
the letter to the judge - the only time he said he ever wrote a letter
of support in a criminal case.
"That's like saying 'Do you regret watching O.J. play football?' " Reese
said. "I would say, 'they were doing community work on beat 11,' the
area where I was at."
FUNDS FROM COUNTY
For years, Alameda County's Social Services Agency also took a tolerant
view of the bakery. As a result, a lawsuit says, some of Oakland's most
vulnerable citizens - foster children who lived in the home of Yusuf Bey
Sr. - were raped and brutalized by the patriarch himself. While the
abuse continued, the county paid Bey public funds for the children's
support, says the suit, which was filed in 2003 by three women who claim
they were among Bey's victims.
According to the lawsuit, in 1978 two sisters and their brother came to
live with Nora Bey, one of an estimated 17 wives of Yusuf Bey Sr. The
county paid Nora Bey for the children's support, the suit says.
The sisters alleged that Yusuf Bey Sr. raped them repeatedly and forced
them to work long days in the bakery for no money. While they were
minors, the girls bore four children by Bey Sr., according to DNA tests.
One victim, known in her lawsuit as Jane Doe 1, told The Chronicle that
she had complained to a county case worker early on that "I wasn't going
to school, and I wasn't being educated and I was being made to work 10-
to 15-hour days.
"I told her the conditions I was living in, but I never (saw) her
again," she said.
Once, when the girls were approximately 11 and 12 years old, the lawsuit
says their biological father learned of their abuse and took them to
live with him at Lake Tahoe. But Bey Sr. complained to the county, the
victims allege, and the girls were put in a vehicle with a locked, caged
barrier and driven back to Oakland.
Bey Sr. and his family "didn't care about my well being," Jane Doe 1
said. "They wanted a slave who was down there working in their bakery, a
check (from the county) coming in for myself, my brother, my sister.
That's a nice little income."
Several months after she gave birth to Bey's child, an investigator from
Child Protective Services visited. Jane Doe 1 said she believed her baby
would prove her mistreatment.
"I thought he was finally going to get caught - thank God he was finally
going to get caught," she remembers thinking.
But the investigator interviewed her in front of Bey Sr., and she said
she was too terrified to say anything.
When she turned 18, Doe 1 fled. By then, she'd had three children by Bey
Sr. Years later, she and her sister were among four women who complained
about Bey Sr. to police. In 2002, he was charged with raping the girls.
Bey Sr. pleaded not guilty and died of cancer in 2003 before the case
went to trial.
According to Edwin Wilson, an attorney representing Alameda County, Bey
Sr. collected Aid to Families With Dependent Children checks for the
girls as well as the five children they had by him, one of them born
after the mother turned 18.
Alameda County, which recently paid $188,000 to settle the lawsuit,
disputes many of the claims made by the women, Wilson said. Social
workers interviewed the girls privately, he said, and they never
complained that they were being mistreated. Instead, he said they told
social workers "how much they loved it there and how excited they were
to be doing things."
Wilson acknowledged that Bey Sr. had orchestrated a massive fraud
scheme. For years, he was defrauding county taxpayers of more than
$10,000 per month in AFDC and welfare payments, Wilson said.
Doe 1 said the settlement left her even angrier at government officials.
"They don't help victims," she says. "They don't help victims at all.
Defendants have more rights than victims do.
"Yusuf Bey said no one's going to help me, and no one's going to believe
me. He was right, he was."
SECURITY CONTRACTS
M ore than a decade ago, Yusuf Bey Sr. began setting up security
companies in which bakery workers served as guards. Even as bakery
employees and officials were implicated in serious crimes, the companies
continued to get contracts. Executives who hired them sometimes say they
weren't familiar with the bakery's problems.
That's the case with California College Preparatory Academy, a charter
middle school set up by the nonprofit Aspire Public Schools chain and
the Academic Talent Development Program at UC Berkeley. In 2006, the
school hired Your Black Muslim Bakery Security to patrol its San Pablo
Avenue campus before and after school.
"They really served probably as a deterrent, more than anything else,"
said Frank Worrell, a UC Berkeley educator who headed the school's faculty.
He said that then-Principal Michael Prada had recommended awarding the
$37,000 contract, saying bakery guards were "known in the neighborhood,
and they are for nonviolence."
Prada said he had no idea of any problems with the bakery.
"We needed to have security services," he said. "But we didn't want
students to feel they were in the prison environment."
The bakery guards "presented themselves like any other company. But they
didn't have a uniform and gun," he said.
There were no incidents at the school. But the bakery's contract to
patrol a parking lot at the corner of High Street and International
Boulevard in East Oakland was violently problematic.
In August 2006, a motorist told police he was beaten by Yusuf Bey IV,
who accused him of double-parking in the lot. The bakery security guards
said the motorist had a gun, but two witnesses told officers that the
man was unarmed. The next month, the victim told police he did not want
to pursue the case, records show.
Four months later, another man said he had been assaulted in the same
lot by guards. When he tried to flee, the man said the guards used a
decommissioned police car emblazoned with the words "Your Black Muslim
Bakery Security" to chase him down. When police arrived, they found the
man sitting on a curb, bleeding from the head, surrounded by five
security guards.
Some witnesses "would not provide written statements for fear of
retaliation from the Black Muslim Bakery security officers," a police
report noted. Bey IV and his brother, Joshua Bey, were among those
detained, but when the victim did not cooperate, the case was dropped,
records show.
POLITICIANS' SUPPORT
D espite mounting evidence that bakery officials and employees were
involved in violent crime, some local politicians continued to promote
and support the bakery - up to the week Chauncey Bailey was slain.
Councilmember Reid said he supported the bakery until the elder Bey was
charged with raping minors. But he said it's unreasonable to expect
officials to renounce the bakery when "the people that have the
responsibility of gathering evidence and presenting it to the district
attorney" - the police - often couldn't find hard evidence of wrongdoing.
To politicians like Reid, the bakery was a complex institution, one that
for all its faults had provided important community services over the
years. And if some bakery officials were involved in crime, Reid said
that others - he named Saleem and John Bey, "spiritually" adopted sons
of the late Yusuf Bey - obviously were reputable.
After Yusuf Bey's death, Saleem and John Bey said that ownership of the
bakery had been illegally seized and its assets squandered by Yusuf Bey
IV and his brother, Antar.
This summer, after Yusuf Bey IV put the bakery into bankruptcy, Saleem
and John Bey made a frenzied attempt to get politicians to persuade the
bankruptcy judge not to order the bakery sold to pay its debts. But the
letters from politicians made no distinction between the bakery's
criminal and noncriminal leaders.
"The loss of this bakery would be devastating to the entire community at
large because it provides not only delicious food items, but vital job
opportunities for our local residents," wrote Assemblyman Sandré Swanson.
Swanson said in an interview that the bakery business was independent of
its owners and their problems with police.
"During the 30 years I served for Barbara Lee, Ron Dellums and as a
legislator, we hadn't received any complaints about bakery service to
the public, only that they provided healthy food and employment," said
Swanson. "The legal problems that some of the sons have found themselves
in are a separate matter. ... I don't think anyone is claiming that the
business and the service it was providing was involved in any criminal
activity. To try to hook those is very shallow."
At times, the support from politicians went beyond testimonials.
In 1997, three years after he pleaded guilty in the torture case, bakery
leader Nedir Bey received a $1.1 million city loan for a home health
business that would dispatch nurses and aides for in-home medical care.
Today, the business doesn't exist, and the loan was never repaid. City
Attorney John Russo's office said the loan was found to be
"unrecoverable" because it was not tied to any assets.
In 2002, after the city loan had gone into default and at the same time
the police were investigating Yusef Bey Sr. on the rape charges, Senate
President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland wrote to Bey, saying: "The
leadership you provide should be an inspiration to all concerned over
the city's future." Perata didn't respond to a request for comment.
In the days before Bailey's killing, Rep. Barbara Lee's office convened
a 40-minute meeting to try to hash out the dispute over the bakery's
bankruptcy filing, Saleem Bey said. Saleem and John Bey were there. So
was Yusuf Bey IV.
"We all met and we put our evidence on the table," Saleem Bey said.
After the meeting, Lee's office sent a letter to the bankruptcy judge
describing the bakery as a "historical landmark business that has
provided jobs and outreach to many for 45 years." Lee's office later
retracted the letter, and a spokesman called it a mistake.
REIGN OF VIOLENCE
A fter Yusuf Bey's death in 2003, the bakery's new generation of leaders
turned increasingly to violent crime, police believed. But former Chief
Word, who left Oakland in 2004, said lack of evidence stymied investigators.
"I got a briefing that some members in the group engaged in illegal
behavior and were possibly responsible for some deaths in Oakland," he
said. "You just couldn't make the case, there wasn't physical evidence.
It just wasn't there. That didn't mean we didn't try."
He said that doing more to stop the organization was difficult, given
the department's other duties.
"Those types of long-term investigations are extremely labor intensive,"
Word said. "We just didn't have the resources for that. Considering the
other demands for our services, especially in homicides, were huge.
There is so much to do in Oakland."
There were 114 homicides in Oakland in 2003 and 88 homicides in 2004.
In July 2004, the body of Yusuf Bey's chosen successor, Waajid
Aljawwaad, was found in a shallow grave in the Oakland hills.
Lt. Ersie Joyner, the head of the homicide section, recalled that police
had gathered "circumstantial as well as physical evidence" linking some
bakery members to the killing - but not enough to bring charges.
Joyner said police were frustrated but not discouraged when the case
didn't go forward.
"Our job is to be fact finders," he said. "We play the cards we have."
Saleem Bey criticized police for failing to bring Aljawwaad's killers to
justice. He made the same complaint in June 2005, when gunmen ambushed
and shot John Bey as he walked out of his Montclair home. He survived
and went into hiding. The case remains unsolved.
On Nov. 23, 2005, a group allegedly led by the new leader of the bakery,
Yusuf Bey IV, then just 19, smashed up two Muslim-owned West Oakland
stores blamed for selling alcohol to the community.
In one of the attacks, a Mossberg shotgun was stolen. But police
declined to raid the bakery to seize the weapon. Police would say later
that they couldn't justify seeking a search warrant to try to recover
the weapon.
"I don't think we felt at the time that a vandalism and a weak stolen
gun case was enough to go smashing in the door," said Assistant Chief
Howard Jordan.
THE RAID ON THE BAKERY
By this summer, Oakland detectives investigating the kidnap-torture of a
mother and daughter in May had strong evidence that the masked suspects
were tied to the bakery. The fleeing kidnappers - interrupted when an
officer happened by - left behind two cars linked to the bakery and a
cell phone belonging to a bakery employee.
As they built that case, the violence continued. In July, two men were
gunned down near the bakery in separate unsolved slayings. Tests showed
that in each case, the killers had used an AK-47 that had been fired in
a yet another attack that police believe was linked to the bakery.
Finally, police decided to raid the bakery, searching for more evidence
in the killings and the kidnapping cases - 13 years after the
confrontation on 24th and Telegraph.
Concerned about leaks, officers took extraordinary measures to keep the
raid plan a secret. After a judge signed off on the search warrants on
July 31, police went so far as to issue an internal bulletin suggesting
that the raid target was in fact gang territory in East Oakland.
Police pushed back the date for the raid to Aug. 3. Coordinating the
operation was "extremely labor-intensive," said Deputy Chief Dave Kozicki.
Then, on the morning of Aug. 2, Chauncey Bailey was assassinated in
broad daylight as he walked to his office at the Oakland Post.
The following day, police raided the headquarters of Your Black Muslim
Bakery and three residences. They were prepared for extreme violence.
More than 200 officers participated in the raid; snipers were positioned
on nearby rooftops. The suspect in Bailey's killing, Devaughndre
Broussard, was arrested as he tossed a shotgun out of a window.
It turned out to be the same Mossberg taken from the liquor store
vandalism two years before. Test results would later show that it had
been used to kill Bailey.
Read the first two installments of The Assassination of Chauncey Bailey
online at sfgate.com:
Sunday: Chauncey Bailey builds a newspaper and television career to tell
stories about the black community, but he dies before he tells his last one.
Monday: The fiefdom of Yusuf Bey crumbles as secrets of his rape of
children emerge and, after his death, his sons take on an increasingly
violent and criminal path - including alleged fratricide.
E-mail the writers at jvanderbecken@sfchronicle.com,
mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com and lfulbright@sfchronicle.com.
CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....
CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.
every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com
Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS
Perpetrators of Maltreatment
Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5
Imagine that, 6.4 children die at the hands of the very agencies that
are supposed to protect them and only 1.5 at the hands of parents per
100,000 children. CPS perpetrates more abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse
and kills more children then parents in the United States. If the
citizens of this country hold CPS to the same standards that they hold
parents too. No judge should ever put another child in the hands of ANY
government agency because CPS nationwide is guilty of more harm and
death than any human being combined. CPS nationwide is guilty of more
human rights violations and deaths of children then the homes from which
they were removed. When are the judges going to wake up and see that
they are sending children to their death and a life of abuse when
children are removed from safe homes based on the mere opinion of a
bunch of social workers.
CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT
FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...
BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...
