Bakery associate calls land transfers legitimate

Daulet Bey, left, at Oakland courthouse with Bey family member.
Daulet Bey, left, at Oakland courthouse with Bey family member.
By
Josh Richman, Thomas Peele, G.W. Schulz and A.C. Thompson, Chauncey Bailey Project
The mother of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s CEO claims she did nothing wrong in having three bakery properties worth $2.28 million transferred to her name — moves that a bankruptcy trustee claims were meant to hide those assets from creditors.
Daulet Bey, 50, of Antioch, did not retain a lawyer to help her file a five-page answer Jan. 4 to trustee Tevis Thompson’s November complaint about the transfer.
In that answer, she admits the bakery’s property at 5873 and 5877 San Pablo Avenue in Oakland — across the street and up the block from the bakery’s longtime headquarters — was deeded to her by the bakery, at the time under the control of her son, Yusuf Ali Bey IV, in February 2006, “but was only transferred to her in order to save it from foreclosure sale.”
The bakery owed about $70,000 in mortgage and insurance payments on those buildings, she wrote; she said she paid those debts from her own pocket and renovated the buildings to make them habitable.
A bakery-owned property at 541 Merrimac St. in Oakland was originally bought in her name at the direction of bakery founder Yusuf Ali Bey, she wrote.
Daulet Bey, whose birth name is Diane Marie McBurnie, wrote that she “desired to leave the bakery organization and transferred the property back to the bakery because she would not have been allowed to leave with the property in her name.”
But in May 2004, she wrote, Antar Bey — one of her eight children by patriarch Yusuf Ali Bey, then the bakery’s CEO — transferred the property back to her “based on viable claims” that it had been bought in her name, that she had spent 30 years serving the bakery and that she had mothered the patriarch’s children. “(T)herefore it was unanimously agreed upon by the then corporation,” she wrote.
The trustee’s November complaint claimed the 2004 and 2006 transfers to Daulet Bey “were done with the actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud creditors” of the financially wrecked bakery, for decades an Oakland community institution wracked in recent years by allegations of violence and fraud against its associates.
Alameda County property records indicate that since 1999, Daulet Bey and Bey IV have taken $1.5 million in loans against the properties now at issue — $900,000 against the Merrimac Street property, which also was used to secure Yusuf Ali Bey IV’s release from jail on bail in May 2006; and about $600,000 against 5877 San Pablo Ave. The last of those loans — a meager $650 taken against 5832, 5873 and 5877 San Pablo Avenue in December 2006 — seems to indicate how deeply drained of equity those properties were, and perhaps how desperate the family had grown as the bakery’s debts mounted.
Antar Bey was slain in an attempted carjacking in 2005; Bey IV, the bakery’s most recent CEO, took the bakery into voluntary bankruptcy in October 2006, and U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Edward Jellen converted the case to involuntary liquidation in August. Bey IV, 21, is now in jail on kidnapping, torture and real-estate fraud charges.
Jellen in November approved sale of the bakery’s longtime headquarters at 5832 San Pablo Ave. for $1.052 million.
Alaia Bey, left, Yusuf Bey IV’s wife, leaves Alameda Superior Court with an unidentified companion on Aug. 7, 2007. (D. Ross Cameron, Oakland Tribune)
It’s now being renovated for use by a nonprofit serving people with HIV/AIDS, and was never among the properties at issue with Daulet Bey.
A hearing on Thompson’s claim against Daulet Bey’s properties is scheduled for Jan. 28.
Jellen on Monday also granted a discharge to Alaia Raina Bey — Bey IV’s wife, born Tiffany Shenelle Wade and now sharing an Antioch address with her mother-in-law — in her personal bankruptcy case, preventing certain creditors from trying to collect.
Within a year before seeking bankruptcy protection last August, Alaia Bey, 22, had bought three properties — two in Richmond, one in Oakland — and then failed to make any mortgage payments, according to default notices. Jellen signed orders in October letting the mortgage holders foreclose on those properties.
Alaia Bey filed her bankruptcy petition less than two weeks after her husband was arrested by police raiding the bakery headquarters. That Aug. 3 raid also led to the arrest of bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, 20, who is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.