Killing the Messenger : A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist

When a nineteen-year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Oakland newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the United States in thirty years—the question was, Why? “I just wanted to be a good soldier, a strong soldier,” the killer told police. A strong soldier for whom? K illing the Messenger is a searing work of narrative nonfiction that explores one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment and free speech in American history and the small Black Muslim cult that carried it out. Award-winning investigative reporter Thomas Peele examines the Black Muslim movement from its founding in the early twentieth century by a con man who claimed to be God, to the height of power of the movement’s leading figure, Elijah Muhammad, to how the great-grandson of Texas slaves reinvented himself as a Muslim leader in Oakland and built the violent cult that the young gunman eventually joined. Peele delves into how charlatans exploited poor African Americans with tales from a religion they falsely claimed was Islam and the years of bloodshed that followed, from a human sacrifice in Detroit to police shootings of unarmed Muslims to the horrible backlash of racism known as the “zebra murders,” and finally to the brazen killing of Chauncey Bailey to stop him from publishing a newspaper story. Peele establishes direct lines between the violent Black Muslim organization run by Yusuf Bey in Oakland and the evangelicalism of the early prophets and messengers of the Nation of Islam. Exposing the roots of the faith, Peele examines its forerunner, the Moorish Science Temple of America, which in the 1920s and ’30s preached to migrants from the South living in Chicago and Detroit ghettos that blacks were the world’s master race, tricked into slavery by white devils. In spite of the fantastical claims and hatred at its core, the Nation of Islam was able to build a following by appealing to the lack of identity common in slave descendants. In Oakland, Yusuf Bey built a cult through a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, beating and raping dozens of women he claimed were his wives and fathering more than forty children. Yet, Bey remained a prominent fixture in the community, and police looked the other way as his violent soldiers ruled the streets. An enthralling narrative that combines a rich historical account with gritty urban reporting, Killing the Messenger is a mesmerizing story of how swindlers and con men abused the tragedy of racism and created a radical religion of bloodshed and fear that culminated in a journalist’s murder. THOMAS PEELE is a digital investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group and the Chauncey Bailey Project. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. His many honors include the Investigative Reporters and Editors Tom Renner Award for his reporting on organized crime, and the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage. He lives in Northern California. Excerpt1There Goes Lucifer"Why do I recall, instead of the order of seed bursting in springtime,only the yellow contents of the cistern spread over the lawn'sdead grass? Why? And how? How and why?"--Ralph Ellison, InvisibleManSeveral times a day, Yusuf Bey IV would make a hard U-turn on SanPablo Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street and gun his black BMW 745i towarddowntown Oakland. He drove by no known rules, swinging in and out oflanes, accelerating, ignoring red lights, other cars, whatever stoodin his way. He couldn't go anywhere without scaring people, andhe was always going somewhere, a cell phone pressed to his ear as theBMW coursed through the city's streets, three or four impassiveyoung men whom he called his soldiers dressed in cheap dark suits piledin with him. He'd speed away from the fading red and black brickwalls of the compound that housed Your Black Muslim Bakery, away from thefrenzied pit bull and mastiffs that guarded it, away from the steamingindustrial ovens, assault rifles leaning against them, spent cartridgesand banana clips scattered on the rat shit-flecked kitchen floor.Beneaththe bakery's signature black star-and-crescent sign looming over thestreet was an awning with words printed on it in block letters: taste of. . . the hereafter. That the kind of Islam--or what they called Islam--that the Beys and their followers practiced was based on teachingsthat rejected belief in an afterlife escaped most passersby. Despitethose words, Black Muslims didn't believe in heaven. "Ihave no alternative than to tell you that there is no life beyond thegrave," Elijah Muhammad once wrote. "There is no justice inthe sweet bye and bye. Immortality is NOW, HERE. We are the blessed ofGod and we must exert every means to protect ourselves."The now,here for Yusuf Bey IV was the sagging, blood-splattered ghetto.Fourthreferred to himself as the bakery's chief executive officer, as ifthat meant much for someone who had barely graduated from high schoolthanks only to social promotion and administrators' unrelentingdesire that he be gone. He lacked even basic business skills. But asprosecutors would one day lean over lecterns and impress upon jurors, thebakery was much more than a bakery, so he had much more to do than justkeep shop anyway. Sure, the Beys churned out sugarless cakes and sold tofuburgers on whole-grain buns. But they also churned out scores of convertsto their cause who helped them run innumerable criminal enterprises. Manyof those people had worshipped Fourth's father, Yusuf Bey, as God,and those who remained were ready to follow his son's commands totheir deaths.By late 2005, a few months before his twentieth birthday,Fourth stood at the head of the remnants of his father's cult. Heclaimed that his ascension to leadership and greatness at such a young agehad been prophesied in the book of Genesis. Allah had chosen him--and himalone--for greatness. The correct interpretations of the Bible and theHoly Qur'an made plain his destiny.The facts of his life, though,seemed to destine him for something else.Fourth grew up as one of thelast believers in W. D. Fard's divinity. Despite claims dating to1930 that followers of Fard and the man who claimed to be his messenger,Elijah Muhammad, simply sought freedom, justice, and equality, theNation of Islam they founded had largely collapsed under the weightof hate and violence that equaled those of Klansmen and Fascists. Itsmore well-known members, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Elijah's son,Wallace Muhammad, had renounced and abandoned its rhetoric for OrthodoxIslam. The Nation had been left, since 1980, under the leadership of LouisFarrakhan, a man of frequent, incoherent rants whose former spokesman,Kahlid Abdul Muhammad, had called for Hitleresque mass slaughters ofwhites and Jews. But despite Farrakhan's occasional feints towardmoderation, the Black Muslims had, by the end of the twentieth century,become an afterthought, a bizarre, fading fringe group.Yet in Oakland,Yusuf Bey had clung to their rhetoric and preached their radical faithto his breakaway sect. From behind brick redoubts at his compound inthe city's northwest corner, he ruled a small, cloistered cadre ofbelievers with inviolable authority.Fourth, the third-oldest child andsecond son of a woman who had borne Yusuf Bey eight children, had grown upin a compound where his father bellowed about self-determination yet heldabsolute power over his followers, controlling when they worked, ate, andspoke, when and where they slept, what they wore, where they went. Throughridicule and beatings or pretenses of love and praise, he convinced themto give themselves totally to him. Many were but indentured servants,working only for room and board. In that compound, on any given day,Bey could point to a dozen or more women and say that each, under hisfictive version of Islam, was his wife; those women were taught thattheir lives were but the floor upon which their leader walked. In thatcompound children were forced to work endlessly; some were kept fromschool and lived in constant terror of what Bey did to them when he gotthem alone. Guns were omnipresent and violence was the routine way to dealwith even the most minor transgression; hate was preached continuously,as was the inferiority of other races, especially whites and Jews,who were devils created by the mad scientist Big-Headed Yakub. So wasthe idea that the mother plane was always on the brink of launchingArmageddon.As his father's son, Fourth was raised to believe thathe was among the last true Black Muslims. He was told he was entitled towhatever he wanted and should obtain it by any means necessary, that hisvalue was based upon how much money he had in his pocket at any momentand what he could make others do for it. It was instilled in him thathis father was a God-king, and so he called himself "the prince ofthe bakery."Those who feared Fourth called him something else.Whenhe drove away from the compound, he sometimes banged a quick left orright from San Pablo and cruised along residential streets, passing amishmash of yardless, vinyl-sided houses that made up North Oakland,iron grates covering nearly every window and door. When he wasn'ton the phone, music thumped from the car, Usher, Tupac, 50 Cent. Peoplehad long since accepted that living near the bakery meant being underthe constant dint of vigilantism and terror. They would hear the blaringhip-hop, inch curtains aside, recognize the BMW's twenty-two-inch,five-thousand-dollar rims, and mutter the name no one dared call Fourthto his face. "There goes Lucifer," they'd say.WhenFourth stayed on San Pablo Avenue, North Oakland's main drag,he rolled past coin laundries, check-cashing joints, and neon-glowingliquor stores, street-corner drug hawkers and prostitutes scurryinginto the darkness when they saw or heard the BMW approach. It would bejust like Fourth to swing sharply to the curb, doors flying open beforethe car stopped, his soldiers swarming, kicking, beating, filling theirpockets with money, sometimes tossing tiny glass vials of rock cocaineor heroin in the gutter and grinding their feet over them, sometimes,depending on Fourth's whim and the girth of his own roll of bills,stealing them so they could be sold elsewhere.Railing about drugs--theywere but the devil's way of suppressing and destroying Blacks--hadalways been a cornerstone of the mantra that enabled the Beys to controlNorth Oakland. It was Hoover, Fourth's father would preach, thatmotherfucking devil J. Edgar Hoover and his motherfucking FBI, whofirst enabled the flow of heroin (he pronounced it "hair-on")into Black communities to push them further toward destruction, knowingthat the already hopeless conditions that African Americans faced madenarcotics a desperate form of escapism. Regardless of his theories(and history has proven that Hoover's clandestine campaigns hadfew limits), Bey's antidrug screeds helped bolster his image as aniron-willed civic reformer.Bey's soldiers frequently attacked drugsellers, beating them senseless in the name of Allah. They were unlikelyto steal their wares, though. To them, it was about righteousness:They would leave cheap, clip-on bow ties on the blood-speckled cementas calling cards: The Beys were here.Fourth aspired to that same image,but if he had a chance to sell drugs stolen on the street, or to dispatchhis soldiers to do muscle work for those who sold them wholesale, he wouldsidestep his self-righteous spiels in favor of what mattered most to him:money.Fourth drew his superbia from the fealty of the grim-faced youngmen, their suits freshly pressed, their hair shaved in military crops,who flanked him at every turn. They lived on his largesse, nearly beggingfor his attention and approval. Inside the bakery, he ordered them tosalute him like privates passing a general. They did little without hisauthority. If a drug dealer was beaten and robbed, it was because Fourthwanted that drug dealer beaten and robbed. Soldiers follow orders. YetFourth knew that keeping his charges close to him meant his own conductstood under constant scrutiny. The highest disgrace a Black Muslim couldface was being labeled a hypocrite. Fourth had to be careful about whowas around when he ordered drugs stolen. He needed his men as close tohim as intimate brothers, but he couldn't let the exposure corrodehis authority, lest his followers learn his true nature: Just like hisfather, Fourth falsely claimed to be motivated only by a desire to helphis people, when his true obsessions were greed and power.Fourth andhis men had little to fear from police. If an officer happened pastand saw Fourth's men blitzing a corner, that officer was likelyto keep driving. If the cocaine or heroin being stolen ended up beingsold elsewhere, it would probably be way out in East Oakland, where itbecame another officer's problem. To the cops, they were just punksbeating up other punks. Maybe luck would prevail and someone would getshot; one less scumbag to worry about.Oakland's police departmentwas chronically understaffed despite the city's soaring crimerates--higher per capita than Detroit, New York, or Los Angeles--mostlybecause voters rejected property-tax levies to pay for more cops,landing the department in a perpetual catch-22: It needed more money foradditional officers and better equipment with which to fight crime, butbecause it did a poor job of fighting crime in the first place, voterslacked the faith to provide more resources.To many cops, the job wassimply about racking up overtime, collecting paychecks, and surviving. In1999, then-governor Gray Davis signed laws that doled out the mostlucrative law-enforcement pensions in the country to California'spolice officers and prison guards. Ostensibly, Davis's plan wasdesigned to attract and retain better-qualified and better-educatedapplicants to law-enforcement by providing a back-loaded incentive. Acop who retired at fifty could then embark on a second career knowingthat hefty government checks were a monthly certainty for life. But,as in nearly all of his dealings, Davis was mostly motivated by the quidpro quo of campaign cash and union endorsements.(Continues...) When a 19-year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Oakland newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey in 2007, the question was, Why? "I just wanted to be a good soldier, a strong soldier," the killer told police. This book explores one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment in American history and the small Black Muslim cult that carried it out. Investigative reporter Thomas Peele examines the Nation of Islam movement from its founding in the early 20th century, to how the great-grandson of Texas slaves reinvented himself as a Muslim leader in Oakland and built the violent cult that the young gunman eventually joined. Peele delves into how charlatans exploited poor African Americans with tales from a religion they falsely claimed was Islam and created a radical religion of bloodshed and fear that culminated in a journalist's murder.--From publisher description __When a nineteen-year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Oakland newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the United States in thirty years—the question was, Why? “I just wanted to be a good soldier, a strong soldier,” the killer told police. A strong soldier for whom?____illing the Messenger__ __Killing____the Messenger__