Arrest of Black Hebrew cult leader suspected of murder sheds light on shadowy sects preparing for apocalyptic race war

Charlotte Observer   -  North Carolina     April 24, 2011

Arrest opens window into black cult

Durham police suspect man charged with kidnapping, assault belongs to radical sect.

By Mandy Locke and Jesse James DeConto

[see news update below]


DURHAM --  Peter Lucas Moses Jr. collected women over the past six years, rekindling a high school flame and romancing others he met in Durham and Colorado.

He patched together a sordid family. He fathered children with the women who could have them and kept his brood under lock and key.

For five years, Moses, 27, and his band bounced from place to place in Durham and Colorado, chased by eviction notices or their fear of police.

Now, Moses is charged with kidnapping, assault and threatening a girlfriend with a gun; a girlfriend, Vania Sisk, faces a marijuana charge.

But police also are searching for two people they believe were killed by Moses and Sisk.

In February, an officer's knock on Moses' door unraveled his world. Durham police were looking for Antoinetta McKoy, reported missing by her family. Moses' high school sweetheart had gone to Durham to visit him in December.

Instead, police met Zayna Thomas, another Moses girlfriend who told them an unimaginable story.

Thomas, identified in court documents as "ZT," said that Moses killed 5-year-old Jadon Higganbothan, Sisk's son. She said that Sisk, under Moses' order, shot and killed McKoy.

Thomas also described beliefs and a lifestyle that Durham police have labeled a cult affiliated with Black Hebrews, a radical sect that believes a race war will result in blacks' dominance.

Thomas, who according to court records is the mother of an infant Moses fathered, acknowledged her role in the investigation by phone last week but declined to speak further.

Moses' father, Pete Moses Sr., denied the allegations.

"He ain't in no cult," the father said. "Them girls just crazy like that."

According to search warrants, police found evidence inside Moses' house on Pear Tree Lane to suggest foul play: spots that looked like blood, a fired bullet and shell casing and signs that areas had been vigorously cleaned.

Past arrests

As police search drainage ditches and forests for the bodies of McKoy and Jadon, families of the women who've survived want their daughters back in their world.

Willie Harris saw his daughter, Lavada Harris, a week ago for what he said was the first time in nearly a year. She seemed small and frail outside a courtroom at the Durham County jail, where she had come to see Moses appear before a judge.

Harris hugged his daughter and told her to come home. She told her father she loved Moses and needed to take care of some things.

"It's like she can't hear me," Harris said. "Like she's under some sort of spell."

Moses spent his early years in Durham. His family moved to the Washington area when he was young, but he moved back in 2000 when his mother divorced his father. He and his siblings lived with their mother in Raleigh through 2005. In 2006, he was living in Durham when he met Lavada Harris.

Willie Harris noticed his daughter changing soon after she began dating Moses.

The Harrises heard that Moses had many girlfriends.

"I told her that she deserved better, that she was too smart to do that," Willie Harris said.

But the more he pressed, the more Lavada Harris retreated.

Her visits became scarce; her phone conversations stilted. When she did come by, several women and children waited for her in the parking lot.

In January 2007, on his birthday, Lavada Harris showed up to tell her father goodbye. The group was moving to Colorado to be near Moses' brother, she told him. He saw the moving truck behind her, women and children loaded inside.

Willie Harris didn't know that Moses had a history of hurting women.

In 2004, Raleigh police arrested Moses and a juvenile on charges of sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, according to court records. Moses pleaded guilty to assault on a female and got two years' probation.

The following year, Moses was arrested and charged with assaulting his mother and his younger brother and sister. Those charges were dismissed.

More women

In 2007, Moses reconnected in Colorado with Vania Sisk, whom he met when she lived in North Carolina, said Sisk's aunt, Denise Garing. Sisk was recently divorced and a single mother to Jadon.

Sisk split from Jadon's father, Jamiel Higganbothan, shortly after Jadon was born, said Higganbothan's aunt, Susan Dean.

Higganbothan's family grew concerned about the child after Sisk moved in with Moses. Soon, Jadon would be out of their reach.

Sisk told Jamiel Higganbothan she was moving back to North Carolina but refused to give him her new address and phone number, Dean recalled.

Sisk pulled away from her family, too. She sent her sister an email recently advising her to stop calling and said the group was moving to the country to store up guns for the world-ending race war.

McKoy disappears

Antoinetta McKoy reconnected with Moses over the Internet last summer.

She lived in Washington. When she visited Moses in Durham a few times, he told her the other women were his sisters whom he refused to abandon as the fathers of their children had, said McKoy's sister, Janayia Dubose.

She also had no concept of his religious beliefs.

"My sister is a devout Christian," Dubose said. "There's no way she would have been fooled by any sort of cult."

Last December, McKoy traveled to North Carolina again to talk to police about someone stealing her identity, Dubose said. She packed a few changes of clothes and her Bible, Dubose said.

McKoy last talked to her family a few days after she arrived. in early December.

"It is unlike my sister to go silent," Dubose said. "When Christmas came and she hadn't returned, we knew something was wrong."

Dubose and her family reported her missing. They tracked down a phone number for Moses, and when they called, he told them McKoy was fine but wouldn't put her on the phone.

More Information

Black Hebrews

Durham police have identified Moses' group as Black Hebrews. The group's beliefs are rooted in Black Judaism, in which black Christians believed African slaves freed in America were God's chosen people. The Hebrew Israelite sects, of which Black Hebrews are a part, believe that a race war is coming that will leave blacks dominant and supreme.

Cast of characters

Peter Lucas Moses Jr.: Center of the supposed cult. He had lived with at least four lovers and fathered many children. He is a longtime Triangle resident with a history of violence.

Vania Higganbothan Sisk: One of Moses' lovers and mother of Jadon, a 5-year-old whom Moses is suspected of killing. Sisk is suspected of killing Antoinetta McKoy at Moses' urging.

LaRonda Smith: Has lived with Moses since at least 2006.

Lavada Harris: Durham resident who lived with Moses.

Zayna Thomas: Lived with Moses and has become an informant for police. Moses was charged with kidnapping her, abusing her and threatening her life should she leave him.

Sources: Court documents, police in Colorado and Durham, interviews with relatives of group members

(Raleigh) N&O news researcher Brooke Cain contributed.


This article was found at:

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/04/24/2245605/arrest-opens-window-into-black.html

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WTVD-TV       Raleigh-Durham, N.C.       May 10, 2011

Cult leader linked to missing boy appears in court



DURHAM (WTVD) -- Suspected cult leader Peter Moses, who police believe is linked to the disappearance of a woman and a 5-year-old boy, appeared in court Tuesday on unrelated charges

Missing boy Jadon Higganbothan

Moses, 27, faces numerous charges including one count of second-degree kidnapping, one count of assault by pointing a gun, one count of assault on a female, one count of communicating threats and failure to appear in court on earlier charges.

During his court appearance Tuesday, a judge raised Moses' bond from $50,000 to $75,000, saying the charges against him are very serious.

Defense attorneys had asked the judge to lower his bond to $30,000 or $40,000 and offered to place Moses on electronic house arrest. They criticized prosecutors for not presenting enough evidence to hold their client in jail.

"The bottomline is, the state rushed to arrest this man," attorney Woodrena Baker-Harrell told the court during the hearing. "They arrested. They rushed to indict him. They indicted him. And now we're in court and we still don't have a single shred of evidence against this man."

According to search warrants obtained by ABC11, Moses - who is believed to be the leader of the "Black Hebrew Israelites" cult - is possibly a suspect in the death of 5-year-old Jadon Higganbothan, who was last seen in October 2010. A second missing person, 28-year-old Antoinetta McKoy, is also believed to be dead.

A police informant claims Moses killed Higganbothan and then ordered Higganbothan's mother, 25-year-old Vania Sisk, to kill McKoy. No bodies have been found.

Moses and Sisk were arrested during a raid last month and have been asked to submit DNA to investigators. They both submitted hair, saliva and fingerprints.

Sisk is charged with failure to appear in court on an earlier misdemeanor marijuana possession charge. The state has yet to bring charges against Moses and Sisk in connection with the disappearances of Higganbothan and McKoy.

Higganbothan and McKoy reportedly lived in a home with Sisk and several other women and children, who were members of Moses' so-called cult, before the group suddenly moved to Colorado.

Authorities have searched a Durham residence on Pear Tree Lane several times looking for evidence that could help them crack the case. Police searched a second home on So Hi Drive Monday in addition to a sewer system in the neighborhood. It is not known if anything was found.

A Durham search warrant made public last month says blood, a spent bullet, and shell casings were found at the home in a previous search. The warrant also states there were signs of "overt cleaning in the areas of the residence where these crimes were stated to have occurred."

Click here to read the warrant (.pdf)

Meanwhile, Durham police continue to maintain their investigation is a missing person's case.


This article was found at:

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=8122840

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WTVD-TV ABC11  -  North Carolina         April 13, 2011

Cult leader, mother of missing boy arrested



DURHAM (WTVD) -- Durham police arrested suspected cult leader Pete Moses and Vania Sisk, the mother of a missing Durham boy, Tuesday evening.

Officers raided a house on Dunstan Avenue around 9 p.m. Several other men and women were taken from the home and placed into police custody.

Moses, 27, faces numerous charges including one count of second-degree kidnapping, one count of assault by pointing a gun, one count of assault on a female, one count of communicating threats and failure to appear in court on earlier charges.

Police did not say if any of the charges against Moses are related to the Jadon Higganbothan and Antoinetta McKoy cases.

Sisk, 25, is charged with failure to appear in court on an earlier misdemeanor marijuana possession charge.

Moses is possibly a suspect in the death of 5-year-old Higganbothan, who was last seen in October 2010. A second missing person, 28-year-old McKoy, is also believed to be dead. According to a police informant, Moses killed Higganbothan and then ordered Sisk to kill McKoy.

ABC11 spoke with Jamiel Higganbothan, Jadon's father, Tuesday evening after he learned about the arrests.

Jamiel, who lives in Georgia, says the ordeal has been hard on his family.

"[There's] a little relief because they have the main suspects in custody," he said. "They're the only ones who know where my son is, where this young lady is ... it's hard on my family ... now that we have those two in custody, it's a big relief for everybody, but it still doesn't take away the pain."

Despite news of the arrests, Jamiel says it doesn't take away from the pain he feels having lost his son. Jamiel says the last time he saw his son was about two years ago, but now he knows why he didn't get to see him as often as he would have liked.

"It's hard to think of what could have happened to him and what could have been avoided," Higganbothan said.

Jadon and McKoy reportedly lived in a home with Sisk and several other women and children, who were members of a so-called cult known as the "Black Hebrew Israelites," before the group suddenly moved to Colorado.

Authorities have searched a Durham residence on Pear Tree Lane several times looking for evidence that could help them crack the case. Police searched a second home on So Hi Drive Monday in addition to a sewer system in the neighborhood. It is not known if anything was found.

Search warrants previously obtained by ABC11 from Colorado indicate that investigators believe the boy was killed possibly by Moses, who police believe is the leader of the group.

A new Durham search warrant made public last week says blood, a spent bullet, and shell casings were found at the home in a previous search. The warrant also states there were signs of "overt cleaning in the areas of the residence where these crimes were stated to have occurred."

Click here to read the warrant (.pdf)

While Durham police continue to maintain their investigation is a missing person's case, the warrant says "according to numerous witnesses ... Moses and Sisk were directly involved in the murder of a juvenile and an adult."

ABC11 asked Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez about the case at a news conference Tuesday -- hours before the arrests of Moses and Sisk. He said there was no information at that time to share with the public that could help crack the case.

No additional details were released about Tuesday's raid.

In the meantime, Moses is being held without bond, while Sisk's bond has been reduced to $2,000.

This article was found at:

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=8069228

**********************************************************************
NBC17  -  North Carolina   April 19, 2011

Suspected Durham cult leader faces new charges

By NBC17 STAFF


Durham, N.C. - The man linked to the disappearance of a 5-year-old Durham boy faces new charges.

On Monday, a grand jury indicted Peter Moses with second degree kidnapping, assault by pointing a gun and assault on a female communicating threats.

Last week, police arrested Moses, the alleged leaderof a cult known as the Black Hebrews, and Vania Sisk, Jadon Higganbothan’s mother.

Warrants suggest Moses and Sisk are connected with the disappearance of Higganbothan and 28-year-old Antoinetta McKoy, who are both believed to be dead.

An informant previously told authorities that Moses ordered Sisk to shoot Antoinetta McKoy.

Higganbothan has been missing for months.

This article was found at:

http://www2.nbc17.com/news/durham-county/2011/apr/19/suspected-durham-cult-leader-faces-new-charges-ar-960245/

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Fulton County Daily Report - Georgia    July 27, 2007

Writer: cult leader duped politicians

By R. Robin McDonald, Staff Reporter


DWIGHT “MALACHI” YORK was a false prophet, a psychotic thug, a con man extraordinaire and a sexual predator who headquartered his religious cult in rural Georgia, then used his position as a religious leader to deflect scrutiny from his criminal activities, a newly published book asserts.

York’s brazen willingness to attack his skeptics as racist, while portraying himself as a victim of racial and religious persecution, enabled him to con politicians, law enforcement authorities, civil rights organizations, academics and journalists, according to Bill Osinski, the author of “Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil.” “Among the dupes,” Osinski writes, “were a mayor of New York and a governor of Georgia.”

“Ungodly” is the story of York’s rise and fall and the sordid secret behind York’s professed dreams to build a black Utopia in Putnam County, Georgia and take global a new religion with him as its self-styled savior. Inside Tama-Re, the faux Egyptian compound he had built on a 440-acre farm in Putnam County, York turned his female followers into concubines and their children into sex slaves.

Today, the man who set himself up as The Master Teacher of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and the Pharaoh of Tama-Re is in federal prison, serving a 135-year term for racketeering and transporting minors in interstate commerce for unlawful sexual activity.

York’s appeals have failed but his followers still maintain his innocence on a Web site, www.hesinnocent.com.

F. Maxwell Wood, U.S. attorney for Georgia’s middle district, called his office’s prosecution of York “without a doubt the most significant and powerful case I ever prosecuted.”

In an interview with the Daily Report, Wood said that York’s cult and the criminal activities that it engendered “was an incredible instance of an individual manipulating large numbers of people. … The evidence was overwhelming.”

Wood said Howard Sills, the Putnam County sheriff who initiated the investigation of York and the Nuwaubians, “is one of the best sheriffs in this state. I think he showed a great deal of patience with that situation.”

Osinski’s book explains why Sills needed patience and perserverance. For more than three decades—first in New York City and, eventually, in Georgia—York flaunted authorities, declared Tama-Re and the Nuwaubian sect to be a sovereign nation not subject to federal, state or local laws. When challenged, York engaged in vicious “smear campaigns” against his detractors, Osinski writes.

But York’s adeptness at recruiting high-profile political allies and the utter control he exercised over his acolytes masked what Osinski bluntly calls the underlying evil at the heart of York’s growing empire whose followers worshipped him as both a savior and an alien god.

For nearly a decade, Osinski—a former staff writer with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—pursued the story of York. In his preface, Osinski writes that the York case illuminates the political and social conditions “that allowed a monster to operate with virtual impunity for more than three decades.”

In chronicling that story, Osinski interviewed dozens of former Nuwaubians, including York’s own son, Malik, and many of York’s victims. “That means delving into the ugly depths of what happened to the children,” Osinski writes.

“There is simply no way to soften the harsh reality that Dwight York repeatedly raped dozens of children, some of them on a daily basis, and some of those assaults continued over a period of years,” he writes.

“Some of the girls who were adolescents when he started to molest them grew up to be women who bore him children; and, in a few cases, they groomed younger children to be receptive to be his next generation of victims. In some cases, the adult concubines participated in the sex crimes.”

It was one of those victims who first told her story to Osinski, who later became a witness in the child molestation investigation of York by Sills and the FBI.

Because some of York’s victims remain traumatized, afraid, or ashamed, Osinski has made a commitment to donate half of any royalties he receives from the sale of “Ungodly” to a fund to aid the victims—who he calls “the lambs who brought down the wolf.”

At a recent lecture at the Margaret Mitchell House, Osinski said that reporting on York and the Nuwaubians “was a difficult story from day one.”

Editors at the AJC and other papers around the state “were never enthused about the story,” Osinski said, while local authorities—Sills, foremost among them—came under political attack whenever they raised questions about the man they privately referred to as “the black David Koresh.”

Osinski writes that for years state and federal agents feared that York was spoiling for a violent confrontation with authorities much like the 1993 stand-off in Waco, Texas, that eventually destroyed the Branch Davidians, a remarkably similar, but far smaller, cult headed by Koresh.

Sills, who joined Osinski at the lecture, said he started investigating York in September 1998 after receiving reports from local medical professionals that a large number of York’s female followers were pregnant—and that some of them were terribly young. By then, Sills said he was aware of a secret FBI report documenting York’s activities in New York that linked him or his followers to illegal gun purchases, suspected firebombings, assaults, bank robberies, extortion and an unsolved murder.

In response to the investigations, the Nuwaubians asserted continually that, as citizens of a separate sovereign nation, they were outside the law. This defiance provoked angry confrontations with county officials over liquor licenses, building permits, fire safety standards and zoning. Nuwaubians, encouraged by York, threatened county inspectors even as they barred them from the expanding, motley collection of plastic stucco temples and pyramids they had built, Sills said.

Sills said the local battles over county ordinances were among York’s attempts to provoke an armed confrontation with law enforcement authorities and so gain sympathy for the cult, Sills said. “York wanted to offer up some of his people in an armed conflict with us,” he asserted.

But the sheriff said that when he approached the GBI, the FBI and, eventually, then-Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes for help, he found little in the way of support. As the investigation grew, Sills said “The hardest thing I had to deal with were the politicians who didn’t want to believe what was going on in this case. … Political correctness and playing the race card, you don’t know how powerful that is.”

Said Osinski: “What happened here in Georgia was the continuation of a pattern well-established in New York that authorities left this guy alone. It happened here. It happened up there. By acting so as not to be perceived as racist or intolerant of religion, they enabled this guy to enjoy a long life of crime.”

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, a longtime civil rights activist, was one of York’s supporters.

Brooks said this week that he was first invited to York’s compound by Joe Beasley, Southeast Region director of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Beasley told Brooks he had received reports that Sills was subjecting the Nuwaubians to profiling “based on appearances, based on their looks,” Brooks recalled in an interview with the Daily Report.

Brooks said that when he, Beasley and other leaders of Georgia’s civil rights community met with Sills, he urged the sheriff and his deputies “to be very careful about their conduct” with regard to the Nuwaubians. Brooks said he also took issue with Sills’ involvement as an enforcer of county zoning violations at York’s compound.

“We were concerned that the Nuwaubians were being mistreated and harassed because of the way they looked,” Brooks explained. “They were being perceived as a religious cult.”

Brooks said he always objected to the “cult” designation, one that—according to “Ungodly”—York himself had embraced. Brooks, a Baptist, said that he was always taught, “You’ve got to have tolerance of other religions that you may not even understand”—a principle that was strengthened by his work with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the course of four years, Brooks visited York’s compound several times—often with members of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, and once with Jesse Jackson. Brooks said he always experienced “good fellowship, good food, a very wonderful experience,” at Tama-Re. “We didn’t see any alcohol. We didn’t see any tobacco products. We didn’t hear any profanity. … There was never anything to indicate there was anything wrong. No one said anything about children being mistreated. Nothing ever came up.”

Brooks said that Sills intimated, during one of their meetings, that there was “another angle to the investigation” of the Nuwaubians that the sheriff declined to share with Brooks. But he never confided that he suspected York was molesting children, the legislator said.

Brooks said that, while he had heard rumors that York might be stockpiling guns—a charge that York denied—if he had been told of allegations that York was molesting children, he would have confronted York. “There’s no way I would ever condone harming children,” he said.

“I have a pretty good knack for knowing when people are telling me the truth. … There’s always two sides to a story, then the truth is in the middle. Just because someone makes an allegation doesn’t make it valid. I don’t necessarily take the word of one person … whether its law enforcement or a civil rights leader. I want to get the facts,” Brooks said.

Former Gov. Barnes declined an interview with the Daily Report about Osinski’s book, referring all questions to his former top aide, Bobby Kahn.

In an interview this week, Kahn said that Barnes had been in office less than three months when he first learned of trouble brewing between the Putnam County sheriff and the Nuwaubians.

Kahn confirmed that the Georgia governor was “taking his cues” about York and the Nuwaubians from Brooks, and from the GBI, which “was concerned we would have another Waco.”

Kahn also said that the Putnam County sheriff didn’t apprise Barnes of the child molestation allegations and that the governor was made aware only that a potentially violent confrontation was brewing over local code enforcement.

“Our approach to this wasn’t who’s right and who’s wrong, and whose fault it is,” Kahn said. “Our concern was how do we avoid a blow-up?”

“Osinski has determined that Sills was a hero,” said Kahn. “Anything that gets in the way of that, he basically ignores. … If he [Sills] were a hero, he would have told us and would have told the GBI he suspected there was child molestation going on.”

But Sills did try, unsuccessfully, to talk to Barnes directly about the Nuwaubians, according to Osinski.

“He wanted to go to Barnes personally and directly. He didn’t want to go through the GBI,” the journalist said in an interview. But Sills feared that the GBI “might have been compromised” and might leak information about the investigation to York, Osinski explained, because the sheriff was aware that GBI agents had gone to Tama-Re to go fishing. “He simply did not want the GBI to know what the real investigation was.”


http://www.dailyreportonline.com/Editorial/News/new_singleEdit.asp?individual_SQL=7%2F27%2F2007%4015591_Public_.htm


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Athens Banner-Herald, USA June 22, 2007

by Joe Johnson

[posted on ReligionNewsBlog http://www.religionnewsblog.com/18535/nuwaubians-8]


A former Clarke County jailer will ask a jury to decide his claim that Sheriff Ira Edwards fired him because he is white, Christian and launched an investigation into a racist cult whose criminal leader met with the sheriff and donated money to his political campaign.

Brett Hart alleges that Edwards “subscribes” to the black supremacist beliefs of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and hired Nuwaubian deputies in return for a large campaign contribution the group made when Edwards first ran for sheriff in 2000, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court.

“This contribution was made … as part of the Nuwaubian effort to ensure the placement of Nuwaubian members or supporters in the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office and the propagation of Nuwaubian beliefs and tenets among the staff and inmates under (Edward’s) control,” the lawsuit claims.

As chief jailer, he consistently received favorable job performance reviews, Hart claims in the lawsuit, but that quickly changed after he began investigating Nuwaubian activities at the jail.

Edwards told Hart in April 2006 he was fired as part of a “change in management of jail operations” following a review of “the totality of jail operations,” the lawsuit states. But, the lawsuit alleges, a 2004 Georgia Sheriff’s Association report praised the local lock-up as “one of the best managed jails in the state.”

Edwards wouldn’t immediately dispute any of Hart’s allegations, releasing a statement that said, “The Clarke County Sheriff’s Office does not wish to comment on pending litigation.”

Hart is seeking an unspecified amount in damages, claiming that when Edwards fired him, the sheriff violated Hart’s constitutional rights as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The sheriff’s office and county government are named as co-defendants in the civil action.

In addition to lost pay, the lawsuit seeks “punitive damages to be determined by the enlightened conscience of the jury to deter (the) defendants and others from similar misconduct in the future.”

The lawsuit hints at evidence of Edwards’ support of the Nuwaubians, branded as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The complaint alleges that Edwards made trips to the group’s Egyptian-themed 146-acre compound in Eatonton, called “Tama-Re,” where he met with the sect’s leader, Dwight “Malachi” York, before and after his election in 2000. Edwards “knew or suspected” at the time that York was a felon, having been convicted in New York of statutory rape, resisting arrest and weapons possession, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit even mentions a set of pyramid-shaped paper weights on Edward’s desk in his office at the Clarke County Courthouse, saying that “pyramids are commonly known Nuwaubian paraphernalia.”

In return for the $2,000 campaign contribution made by “Z. York,” one of the Nuwaubian leader’s many aliases, the lawsuit alleges, Edwards hired at least six known Nuwaubians, knowing that five of them had resigned from the Macon Police Department out of allegiance to York, now serving a 135-year federal prison sentence.

The deputies quit their jobs in Macon in 2004 after the city’s mayor refused to publicly support York while the Nuwaubian leader was prosecuted in federal court on charges of racketeering, money laundering and child molestation.

Prosecutors said York sexually assaulted his followers’ children, some as young as 8 years old, both at the Nuwaubian’s Putnam County compound and at a mansion York owned off Timothy Road in Athens, prosecutors said.

York still commands fierce loyalty while behind bars, the lawsuit says, and non-Nuwaubian deputies feared that sect members wouldn’t come to their aid if trouble broke out at the jail.

“Although York is imprisoned and Tama-Re destroyed, the Nuwaubian Nation remains an intact organization,” the lawsuit says. “Its members adhere to York’s teachings, including the superiority of the Nuwaubian faith and the inferiority of non-African American races.”

Hart alleges that his employer turned on him after he began investigating deputies for distributing Nuwaubian literature, recruiting prisoners and writing to York in prison, which the lawsuit claims violated jail policy, as well as state and federal law.

Soon after the investigation began, Edwards refused Hart’s request to sign a verification of employment Hart needed to maintain standing with the American Jail Association as a certified jail manager. Edwards had signed an earlier employment verification “without hesitation,” the lawsuit says.

“Edwards terminated Hart because he is white and (participated) in the internal investigation of the Nuwaubian deputies’ letters to York that threatened the Nuwaubians’ efforts to infiltrate the Athens-Clarke County Sheriff’s Office,” the lawsuit states.

The internal investigation Hart initiated found no policy violations, Edwards said at the time. But two months later, the sheriff’s office launched a second internal probe in the wake of “intense scrutiny” by the media and a Clarke County grand jury into the circumstances surrounding Hart’s firing, the lawsuit says.

But Edwards and other county officials later revised that report, removing as many as 40 pages, and ordering the deputy who led the investigation to destroy all copies of his original report.

After the second internal investigation, which concluded that deputies’ Nuwaubian activities had compromised security at the jail, Edwards fired four Nuwaubian deputies and allowed a fifth to resign.

Before he filed suit, Hart lodged a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging he was a victim of reverse-discrimination.

The lawsuit says Hart was initially replaced as jail commander by a sheriff’s captain who is black and also subscribes to Nuwaubian beliefs, but Edwards later filled the post with a white employee with no jail experience “to shield himself” from Hart’s EEOC complaint.

Nuwaubians Protest in Macon

Submitted by Heather Graf on Thu, 06/14/2007

On Thursday, members of the religious group, the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors held a demonstration at Macon City Hall.

On their agenda, two issues: to protest their leader, Malachi York's imprisonment, and the firing of four of their members from the Clark County Jail in Athens.

One member says they chose to demonstrate in Macon because it's where York's trial began.

"We need to get the story out so that other people can realize what is happening to us as Nuwaubians could happen to them as well." - William York, Nuwaubian Nation

Malachi York is currently serving a life sentence in prison, for molesting 14 boys and girls whose parents were members of the Nuwabian group.

More than 20 people attended today's protest, which comes on very the same day that an Atlanta author unveiled a new book, he says tells the true story of Malachi York and the Nuwaubian people.

Bill Osinski held a book signing at the Barnes & Noble on Tom Hill Senior Boulevard.

Bibb County Sheriff's deputies were on-hand, just in case members of the Nuwaubian group showed up.

They did not make an appearance at the store, but Osinki had this to say, about their protest at city hall.

"At some point, they've got to get beyond their delusions. This man has been convicted of perhaps the worst child molestation case in United States history, and you know, to defend him at this point is unconscionable." - Bill Osinski, Author

Osinki's book, "Ungodly," hit bookstore shelves today.

The author, who is also an investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, began researching the Nuwaubian group more than nine years ago.

You can learn more about the book at www.ungodlybook.com.