Dr. Frank's What's-it

Street Terror

Chris Thompson writes in the Village Voice about the death threats and intimidation that followed his East Bay Express articles on the Your Black Muslim Bakery crime syndicate (#1 here, #2 here.) YBMB thugs were threatening Chauncey Bailey's life in retaliation for articles he had written at least as far back as 2002, when Thompson interviewed him for his story.

Also, this article tells the story of the horrific carjack-torture-kidnapping of a mother and daughter on their way home from a bingo parlor, for which Yusuf Bey IV and two YBMB associates were charged yesterday. This attack occurred in May; the arrests were made last week in the Chauncey Bailey sweep. I presume this case would have been investigated and prosecuted eventually even if the Bailey murder hadn't been on CNN and in the NYT. But there is a cynical part of me that wonders. The list of the broadly similar activities these people have largely got away with till now is pretty substantial and impressive. Christopher Hitchens has the wrong end of the stick when he tries to bring sharia law and jihadism into it, but his point about "complacency amounting to collusion" on the part of city authorities rings true. Thompson makes the same point even more forcefully about "official Oakland."

In the carjack-kidnap-torture case, they threatened to set one of the women on fire and of course that made me think of poor Sandra Tellis. I assume that case is still unsolved, whether or not anyone has been actively trying to solve it. Television crime dramas have based their plots on far more tenuous "leads" than that, but I know this is real life. At least I'm pretty sure it is.

Posted by Dr. Frank at August 8, 2007 06:20 PM | TrackBack