Your Black Muslim Bakery / Bey organization (historical)

Yusuf Bey, born Joseph Stephens, converted to the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad in 1964 and opened Your Black Muslim Bakery in Santa Barbara in 1968, relocating to Oakland in 1971, where it grew by the mid-1970s into the Bay Area's largest natural-foods bakery, selling through 150 stores. Bey built local standing via a weekly cable sermon show and self-reliance rhetoric, running unsuccessfully for mayor in 1994 (5% of the vote) while keeping a household of "spiritual wives" and dozens of children behind that public image. A separate 1994 incident foreshadowed the organization's private violence: members Nedir and Abaz Bey tortured and beat a Nigerian home-seller inside a Bey-controlled apartment complex police described as functioning like a private compound, an assault escalating into 90 Oakland officers fighting 30 Black Muslims hand-to-hand; prosecutors, unable to secure tenant testimony, accepted no-contest pleas to false imprisonment, and the two Beys served six and eight months of home detention.

In September 2002, DNA-supported charges accused Bey of 27 counts of raping four girls under 14, including a woman who said Bey had coercively raped her from age ten while in his and his wife's foster care; records later compiled from births, depositions and interviews found at least 42 children by 14 women and girls, one impregnated at 12. Bey died of cancer in October 2003, at 67, before any case reached trial. Succession turned violent: CEO Waajid Bey disappeared in March 2004 and was found months later in a shallow grave, a ruled homicide; successor Antar Bey was shot dead in October 2005 in a suspected failed carjacking, for which Alfonza Phillips III was later sentenced to life imprisonment. Yusuf Bey IV then took control at 19, presiding over escalating violence: a November 2005 arson and vandalism campaign against Muslim-owned liquor stores selling alcohol to Black customers, for which he was charged as leader and separately convicted of stealing a shotgun later used in a murder; a May 2007 kidnapping and torture of a mother and daughter he believed carried bakery cash; and, within one week in July 2007, two further murders he ordered.

On August 2, 2007, Bey IV ordered the daylight assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey to stop his reporting on the bakery's finances; gunman Devaughndre Broussard shot Bailey twice, returned to fire a third, fatal shot on Bey's insistence Bailey be confirmed dead, and drove back to report "it's done," per People v. Mackey. Broussard pleaded guilty and testified against Bey and accomplice Antoine Mackey; on June 9, 2011, a jury convicted Bey IV of three counts of first-degree murder (Bailey and the two July 2007 killings) and Mackey of two, and both were sentenced on August 26, 2011 to life without parole, upheld on appeal in 2015. Broussard received 25 years and was paroled in 2025. The bakery, in Chapter 11 bankruptcy since October 2006 and kept alive briefly by supportive letters from Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Mayor Ron Dellums, later regretted, was closed the day after Bailey's murder and converted to liquidation days later.