Yusuf Bey had juice
Matthai Kuruvila, Kevin Fagan,Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writers
Politicians knew it. The community knew it. The police knew it.
If you really wanted to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1985 Bakery on San Pablo Avenue.
Bey and his http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1427 knew they had political clout. They used it to great advantage in obtaining money from the city, lenient sentences from judges, and a virtual hands off approach from the Police Department even though evidence now shows that the bakery’s leadership was implicated in serious crimes.Jerry Brown, former governor, now state attorney general, understood the importance of the bakery during his successful run for mayor in 1998. He gave a stump speech at the bakery and spent an hour in Bey’s private quarters. Elihu Harris, mayor before Brown, made the same pilgrimage to the bakery during his campaign.
Among others seeking audiences with Bey over the years were City Council members Nate Miley, Ignacio De La Fuente, Larry Reid and Dezie Woods-Jones, according to Saleem Bey and John Bey, so-called “spiritual sons” of the bakery founder. U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and state Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, each wrote testimonial letters for the bakery. Former Police Chief Joseph Samuels depended on Yusuf Bey to help improve police relations with the neighborhoods.
After the slaying in August of journalist Chauncey Bailey, allegedly killed by a bakery handyman, the story of city leaders genuflecting at the door of the now-disgraced bakery seems troubling. But those politicians willing to discuss the issue – and most declined to be interviewed – say that during the bakery’s heyday, to ignore Bey and his business, let alone disdain them, would have been foolish.
For most of its existence from roughly 1968 to 2007, the bakery was a symbol of black enterprise and empowerment, setting a good – if sometimes intimidating – example in impoverished, crime-plagued North and West Oakland. The allegations of wrongdoing that have spilled out since Bey was charged with child rape in 2002 – vicious abuse of his numerous wives, systematic welfare fraud and unsolved killings – were mostly rumor before then, some politicians say, and they were rarely investigated by police.
It wasn’t a matter of official corruption, say many looking back on the bakery era. Instead, the bakery benefited from what those in rough and tumble neighborhoods would call “juice.”
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