\ The usual fun and games in Oaktown.
Posted on 08/10/2007 10:51:16 PM PDT by LdSentinal
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, says she's ending her longtime support of the Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland and would have ended her support sooner if she'd known it had problems.
The bakery has been in the news in the past eight days because Oakland police and other agencies raided it on Aug. 3 and arrested seven members and shut it down for health and safety violations.
On Thursday, a federal bankruptcy court judge refused a request by a lawyer for the bakery, Fayedine Coulter, to reverse his previous decision to liquidate the bakery.
In a motion filed with the bankruptcy court on Tuesday, Coulter said the bakery had obtained Lee's assistance.
Coulter said, "Congresswoman Lee considers the bakery to be an asset and institution of the community and has offered her assistance in facilitating the resolution of issues with the Internal Revenue Service by directing the debtor to the proper source in order to keep the bakery functioning."
Among those arrested in the raid last week was the bakery's handyman, 19-year-old Devaughndre Broussard, who told Oakland police that he killed veteran Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, 57, the day before because he was upset that Bailey was researching a story on the bakery's financial woes.
Also arrested were Yusuf Bey IV, 21, the grandson of bakery founder Yusuf Bey, and two other bakers associates on charges that they kidnapped and tortured two women in Oakland in May.
In a statement issued late Thursday, Lee said, "At the request of representatives of Your Black Muslim Bakery, my office provided a letter to a federal agency related to the bankruptcy."
Lee said, "Like many people, I historically supported the bakery because it has been an important institution in the community, but it is clear that this is no longer the case."
Lee said, "Knowing what I know now, we would not have provided such support, and we are reviewing our casework intake process in an effort to avoid any such circumstance in the future."
Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums also wrote a letter on the business' behalf this summer.
Problems associated with key people at the bakery date back to at least 2003.
Yusuf Bey, who founded the bakery in 1968, was charged with raping and having sex with minors but died in October 2003 before he could stand trial.
At a news conference after last week's raid, Oakland police Lt. Ersie Joyner said he believes Bey's death set off a struggle over power over the bakery's operations and triggered at least several murders which remain unsolved.
Bey's successor, Waajid Aliawaad, 51, disappeared in March 2004 and his body was found months later in a shallow grave in the Oakland hills.
Antar Bey, the patriarch's son, took over but was killed during an attempted carjacking as he was filling the tank of his BMW 745, a custom-made car worth at least $75,000, at a gas station at the corner of Martin Luther King Way and 56th Street on Oct. 25, 2005.
Yusuf Bey IV then took over the bakery's operations, but one month later he was arrested and charged with leading vandalism attacks on two West Oakland liquor stores.
Bey and four other men are still waiting trial on charges stemming from those incidents.
Two other men pleaded no contest to felony vandalism and were sentenced to probation.
One of them, 21-year-old Tamon Halfin, was arrested in the raid last week and is charged in connection with the kidnapping and torture incident that Bey allegedly masterminded.
Bey was arrested again in February 2006 and charged with using phony identification and phony credit to obtain a $55,000 luxury car from a Vallejo used-car lot.
Two months later, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly trying to use his BMW to run down several bouncers after being thrown out of a San Francisco strip club.
Asked today if Lee should have known about problems at the bakery before the events of the last eight days, her spokesman, Nathan Britton, said, "In hindsight."
LMAO, Lee sure is cutting edge...
She didn’t want to know. Wonder if any of the money was laundered to her.
\ The usual fun and games in Oaktown.
The rat is a selectively blind animal. It can see imaginary wrong doing by Republicans but can never see the wrong doing of its fellow crap wallowers unless its snout is rubbed into a hot steaming pile of it. I guess murder was a big enough pile.
It is little wonder that gun grabbers like Perata support all sorts of violent criminals.
So would this be analogous to the breaking of the Ribbentrop pact, or is this a simple and temporary spat among Marxists.
why??? it's just Your Black muslim MURDERERS!!!
How much longer do we pretend?
Sounds like most New York City boroughs. That’s why we can never remove the electoral college.....
WOW!! That bakery must be REALLY bad!!! Barbara Lee is a COMMUNIST ANti-American.
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