Held out at the time as a model of African-American economic self-sufficiency, the business fell apart after Bey's death and a series of murders linked to criminal activities.

He first obtained a cosmetology degree and ran beauty salons in neighboring Berkeley and then in the southern city of Santa Barbara before going into the bakery business instead.

[2] The baked goods Bey sold were in accordance with strict Muslim diets and free of refined sugar, fats, and preservatives.

He named the business Your Black Muslim Bakery on the personal recommendation of his spiritual guide, the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

26B, Joseph Stephens (he had not yet changed his name to Bey) and his brother, Minister Billy X, opened a mosque in Santa Barbara, California.

Minister Henry retaliated by ordering his members to confiscate any copies of the newspaper if they saw any of Bey's group selling them downtown to whites.

[4] By the mid-1980s, Bey appeared regularly on a local Oakland Soul Beat cable television lecture program,[3] True Solutions, during which he broadcast his hour-long sermons every week on station KSBT.

On the program Bey also promoted the bakery and frequently expounded on the need for the economic self-reliance and "knowledge of self" of African-Americans, whom he lectured the audience as being the "Original Man", a racially charged idea deriving from Nation of Islam doctrine.

Bey repeated the NOI doctrine of Yakub, which teaches that the non-black races are the result of a 6,000-year-old genetic experiment conducted in a mythic black utopia on the Arabian peninsula, which "peopled the world with "blue-eyed devils."

"[2] In 1994, Yusuf's son Akbar Bey was shot four times and killed by a local drug dealer associate outside the old Omni nightclub near the corner of Shattuck Avenue and 50th Street.

[3] Court records showed the pathologist's conclusion that Akbar Bey was high on heroin or morphine at the time of his death.

Many accusations of physical and sexual abuse, including rape and incest, sustained by DNA evidence, were made against Bey, culminating in felony charges that were pending at the time of his death.

In her request for a temporary restraining order one month prior to the arrest, the woman claimed that Bey's wife also knew of the serial rapes, but did nothing.

Investigative reports in 2006 and 2007 uncovered his links to at least three murders, widespread housing and welfare fraud, indentured servitude, and physical and sexual abuse.

In 1997, he moved to Los Angeles and worked with the Wayans family to run and eventually own Quick N Shine Auto Detail.