St. Louis CofCC Blog

YBMB update.

The trouble with having so many wives is that some of them will feel jilted, and rat you out. And the trouble with having 100 wives and 46 children is that, when you die, there’s going to be blood shed within the “family” to figure out who gets to run the operation.

San Francisco Chronicle:

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.

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.

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