Action 9: Religious sect accused of filing bogus property deeds

Nov 22, 2016
WFTV Orlando

VIDEO

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. - Action 9 exposed a little-known religious sect that's accused of using bogus property deeds to torment local homeowners.

The deeds were filed within the last three years.

The anti-government group uses its own courts and laws, but Todd Ulrich found it can do real damage.

Valerie Edwards had just bought an Altamonte Springs home when her family received a troubling document. It was a lawsuit that threatened to take away the house.

“It certainly had all the trappings of a legal document,” said Edwards.

The Moorish Science Temple, an obscure religious sect, sued for a default judgment to take over the property. But the lawsuit was filed in the Temple's own Supreme Court, so it seemed ridiculous until Edwards researched the group.

“I was thinking this is really a serious situation and it needs to be stopped,” said Edwards.

Action 9 placed a hidden camera at the Casselberry Public Library, which is where Moorish Temple Supreme Court holds its hearings.

The judge, Reginald Bruton of Melbourne, was dressed in a temple hat. Bruton leads the anti-government group.

Critics call it a “kangaroo court.” But once the Moorish followers have their judgment, they turn up at real courthouses and can do damage.

Habitat for Humanity in Seminole County knows firsthand what trouble it can cause.

“It was a double whammy for us,” said executive director Penny Seater.

Seater said the agency had renovated an Oviedo home for a qualified family, but then could not sell it.

The Moorish Temple filed a bogus deed in Seminole County court, leaving the Habitat family homeless.

“They couldn't move in because they couldn't close. They didn't have clear title,” said Seater.

It took Habitat’s lawyers months to remove the phony deed.

Action 9 found out that the Moorish Temple filed lawsuits against a dozen properties, attempting to take possession.     

Todd Ulrich talked to Bruton in Melbourne.

“I'm here about fake lawsuits and deeds you're filing. They hurt real people,” said Ulrich.

“False lawsuits?” replied Bruton. “You say they're fake.” 

“You think they're real?” asked Ulrich.

 “Yeah, they are,” Bruton said.

Bruton claimed his group has constitutional rights to take over foreclosed properties.

“Can you set up your own government?” asked Ulrich. “Can you be the judge and jury?” 

“We select a jury,” said Bruton.

After Action 9’s investigation started, government-backed Fannie Mae won a court injunction, which was filed in October, against the Moorish Temple.

The injunction ordered the group to stop all claims against 11 local properties.

http://www.wftv.com/news/action-9/action-9-religious-sect-accused-of-filing-bogus-property-deeds-1/469544167

Baton Rouge Shooter Gavin Long's Bizarre Sect

Gavin Long adhered to a separatist religious movement that followed a self-declared ‘Empress.’

The Daily Beast.

Katie Zavadsk

July 18, 2016

Like any new religious movement, the Washitaw Nation—to which Baton Rouge shooter Gavin Long adhered—has a fantastical origin story.

Its empress was born encased in her own placenta as the Louisiana bayou flooded. “I kicked out of [the placenta] on my own, and then [the placenta] rolled up on my head like a crown,” Vediacee Turner—known by followers as Empress Veriacee “Tiari” Waashitaw-Turner Goston El-Bey—claimed, according to a profile of the movement by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After a career that included being the twice-elected mayor of Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, Turner would go on to declare herself an indigenous American Washitaw, and claim that she was the rightful owner of land sold in the Louisiana Purchase. (The Washitaw Nation is not recognized as an indigenous tribe.) She also founded the movement that inspired Long to legally change his name and declare himself a sovereign citizen, not bound by the laws of the United States. Police reportedly found an identification card for the Washitaw nation in his pocket.

Documents obtained by the Kansas City Star on Monday show Long filed notarized documents to “correct” his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra in May 2015. The vaguely legalese-sounding document carried the name of the United Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah Mu'ur Nation. He also attached a certificate of Live Claim Birth—a type of birth certificate—from the group.

It’s not clear who the supreme leader of the Washitaw currently is; Turned died in 2014. But a website proclaiming to be the “official” site of the movement says that Turner’s primary concern was asking people, “Have ya’ll read my book?” The Return of the Ancient Ones laid out the foundations for the movement.

“[The Washitaw] are, in the weird language of the empress, ‘indigenous’—descendants of the ‘Ancient Ones,’ the ‘black ones’ who Goston insists peopled this continent tens of thousands of years before white Europeans arrived,” according to the SPLC.

The SPLC’s Ryan Lenz told The Daily Beast the Washitaws are best described as “a black sovereign citizen group.”

Their self-proclaimed sovereignty means they offer identification cards and birth certificates, and members believe they don’t have to pay state or federal taxes, and that the laws of the United States do not apply to them. A passport from the group cost $250 in the 1990s, according to a 1999 report on the group by the SPLC.

The “official site” run by Alim El-Bey includes numerous references to the Moorish Science Temple of America, a religious movement founded in the United States in early 20th century, and widely believed to have inspired the Washitaw Nation and other Moorish separatist movements. (Alim El-Bey shared at least one of Long’s posts on his Facebook page, as The Daily Beast reported on Sunday.)

The MST was the “first mass religious movement in the history of Islam in America,” according to a book by religion scholar Richard Brent Turner, though its similarities with mainstream Islam were quite limited. In fact, self-appointed prophet Noble Drew Ali even created his own Qur’an and clung to Islam as a way to distance himself from his Christian oppressors.

“It was urban, anti-Christian, and multicultural, and it developed as a distinct missionary and Pan-Africanist political agenda,” Turner wrote.

Drew Ali incorporated aspects of Marcus Garvey’s beliefs, Islamic movements from the Indian subcontinent, and ideas from the black Freemason movement into his new creation. Fundamental to the Moorish Science Temple’s ideology is the understanding of black people not as black, but members of a greater “Moorish” nation that is supposedly part of the Asiatic race. Through such an understanding, members essentially shed designations given to them by white people and created another identity as part of a mythically powerful nation.

In Drew Ali’s heavily modified Circle Seven Koran, Marcus Garvey is hailed as a sort of minor prophet.

“In these modern days there came a forerunner of Jesus, who was divinely prepared by the great God-Allah and his name is Marcus Garvey, who did teach and warn the nations of the earth to prepare to meet the coming Prophet,” it reads, referring to Drew Ali as the prophet who “was prepared and sent to this earth by Allah, to teach the old time religion and the everlasting gospel to the sons of men.”

While the Washitaw Nation would later claim to be descendants of the “Ancient Ones” who dwelled on American land, according to some legends, Drew Ali was raised by Cherokee Indians, though he didn’t claim Native heritage. And, just like the Washitaws, Drew Ali’s organization issued “nationality cards,” while members wore the national uniform of fezzes and turbans—in part because of Drew Ali’s belief that they came from Moroccans. Drew Ali gave his followers names like El and Bey, which seemed to come together in the Washitaw empress’s chosen name of El-Bey.

Drew Ali’s attempt to rebrand his African-American adherents as Asiatic Moors, however, clashed with the Washitaw Nation’s vision in that it was fundamentally an attempt at assimilation. Drew Ali hoped that “he could change the political and economic fate of African Americans in the Jim Crow era by ethnicizing the name of the race and by changing the names of his followers, thereby erasing the stigma and slavery and distancing them from ordinary Negroes who were not respected as Americans,” Richard Turner, the religion scholar, wrote. As the Moorish nation, Drew Ali thought they would be able to integrate and assimilate, just like everyone else.

Drew Ali died under mysterious circumstances in 1929, and the organization sprouted offshoots after his death. Member Wallace Fard Muhammad would go on to found the Nation of Islam, which would preach its own distinctive form of Islam to African Americans.

In the 1990s, some members of the MST proclaimed themselves Moorish sovereign citizens, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. They adapted the ideas of the largely white—and often racist—sovereign citizen movement for their own needs.

Their members intermingled with those of the Washitaw nation, seeking to establish black personhood “through means that are powerfully upending, and at the same time completely fictional,” Lenz said.

And Long is not the first sovereign citizen in recent years to shoot at police. Father and son duo Jerry and Joseph Kane shot and killed two police officers during a West Memphis, Arkansas traffic stop in 2010. Under sovereign citizen logic, the government can’t stop them at traffic stops, because those laws do not apply.

“It’s a person who doesn’t want to be ruled,” Lenz said. “This is the most free country in the world. And yet this is a revolt against the concept of government.”

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/18/baton-rouge-cop-killer-gavin-long-s-bizarre-sect.html

 

Moorish Scientists struggled with tainted reputation even before Baton Rouge

Religion News Service

By Amanda Abrams 

2016/07/18 

The man police say killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday reportedly identified with black power groups. Many trace their lineage back to the Moorish Science Temple of America, a quasi-Islamic religion founded in the early 1900s. Even before the shooting, the temple’s current leaders were already frustrated by so-called sovereign citizens who cite its influence in their rejection of U.S. government authority.

WASHINGTON (RNS) Up on a dais, several men — all black, each clad in a colorful robe and fez — take turns acknowledging the assembled congregants with a raised right hand and the greeting “Islam.”

Those participating in this esoteric worship service are not ordinary Muslims. They belong to the Moorish Science Temple of America, established almost a century ago around principles of self-reliance.

“We got to get together, Moors!” a congregational leader tells the roughly 250 attendees at a festival earlier this year, where people laughed and hugged one another, exchanging gifts and dancing to funk and soul tunes.

One of them is Donald Draffin-El, an Uber driver. It’s been 40 years since he became a Moorish Scientist.

“I found a part of myself I hadn’t known until then, something that felt more right than anything else had,” he says. Other black movements are “just like potatoes or bread — it’s just starch for people. It’s not protein, not something you can grow with.”

In contrast, he says, Moorish Science, with its message of personal dignity and connection to one’s roots, continues to give him sustenance.

“We are not black!” says R. Jones-Bey, whose title is grand sheik, repeating a theme he comes back to often. “Black people have no rights. No one who is without a nationality is recognized in America.”

In recent years, reports have surfaced around the country of people — including Gavin Eugene Long, the man police identify as being the Baton Rouge gunman — claiming to be Moorish nationals and therefore “sovereign citizens” immune to U.S. laws. Though their claims have been debunked, the phenomenon has tainted Moorish Science’s name.

“We’ve put out statements and taken legal actions, asking people to cease and desist from using the name of the Moorish Science Temple of America,” Phillip Chase-El, the grand sheik’s deputy, said in an interview several months ago.

What Moorish Science followers do assert is that racial labels — black, Negro, colored – were given to them by others. And they feel that losing their fundamental identity, with its traditions and roots in the past, has meant a loss of power for African-Americans.

The founder, Prophet Noble Drew Ali, aimed to make up for that loss. Born Timothy Drew in 1886, he started what was first known as the Canaanite Temple in 1913 in Newark, N.J. Twelve years later, he moved to Chicago and renamed it the Moorish Science Temple of America.

Observing the indignities of African-American life at the time, as well as the ease with which immigrant groups of that era assimilated into mainstream culture, Drew set about creating a new identity for black Americans based on ethnicity, not race. Those who joined his religion were called Moorish-Americans, or Moors, a word historically used to describe Africans and their descendants.

“In the mid-1920s, Noble Drew Ali was articulating a spot-on critique of race and racism, and laying out a religious explanation for the possibility of full citizenship for African-Americans,” says Spencer Dew, a professor of religious studies at Centenary College of Louisiana who is writing a book on the history of the MSTA. He adds, “I’d argue that it was an ethnic model, that he patterned Moorish-American identity and social and political possibilities off of immigrant ethnic communities in Chicago.”

Ali’s religion came with a wide swath of rituals, holy days, ceremonial clothing, songs and titles, as well as its own sacred text, which bears little resemblance to the standard Islamic Quran. Influences came from far and wide — from esoteric religions popular during Ali’s time to Christianity and Freemason customs. Together, they grounded MSTA’s followers in a framework of culture and meaning.

Moorish-Americans say the religion’s main tenets are love, truth, peace, freedom and justice. But at its heart, they say, Moorish Science is about hard work, self-empowerment and civic responsibility rather than blaming others for one’s troubles.

It’s the politics of respectability, says Dew — another facet of Ali’s effort to give blacks a new identity. “He didn’t just say, ‘Respect yourself and display yourself in all ways with dignity, as deserving of full citizenship,’ but he also said, ‘Put on a fez and change your name, and explicitly be something other than black, colored, Negro, etc.’”

****

In the late 1920s, Moorish Science had tens of thousands of adherents, many of them newly urbanized migrants who were seeking fresh starts after fleeing the South. But after Drew Ali’s death in 1929, the group began to struggle. There was infighting, with at least three men calling themselves his successor. It’s rumored that Wallace Fard Muhammad, who later founded the Nation of Islam, was an early member of the group. And the FBI began investigating the religion for subversive activities, as it did other Afrocentric organizations, despite little proof that the group had malicious intent.

The leader of one of the factions, Charles Kirkman-Bey, eventually earned the official stamp of leader and became a grand sheik — one of only five who’ve existed since Drew Ali. However, the others continued to practice and their followers also call themselves Moorish Scientists today, though they utilize slightly different principles. That’s one reason it’s almost impossible to get a sense of the religion’s current size and also why it has been easy for people to identify with it.

Another, says Patrick Bowen, who is writing a book on conversion to Islam in the United States, is that Moorish Science “is extremely fragmented and there is no central record system.”

Indeed, the temples operate democratically, with adherents voting directly for their leaders, rather than decisions being made from the top down. Though the internet has numerous web pages about Moorish Science, there isn’t a single, authoritative site representing the whole group.

“There are temples up and down the East Coast, in the Midwest, on the West Coast — all over. We get inquiries on a daily basis,” said Chase-El. “We have thousands of followers.”

In Washington, as in many other large cities, MSTA leaders proselytize in jails. And, they say, there are many people who attend services only rarely who profess to be Moorish Scientists.

(Amanda Abrams is a contributor to RNS)

http://religionnews.com/2016/07/18/moorish-scientists-struggled-with-tainted-reputation-even-before-baton-rouge/

 

Orange Co. couple facing fraud charges gets attention of Homeland Security

July 16. 2014

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — An Orange County couple facing fraud charges got the attention of Homeland Security.

According to reports, the couple claims to be part of a religious group called Sovereign Citizens.

It took investigators seven months to piece together the investigation against Dexter Martin and his wife, Lelawatie Sookhoo.

The investigation started when Martin got in a car accident and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper found Martin was going by the name Mushon Martin-Bey, and claimed to be part of the Moorish Religious Society.

The group’s parishioners often claim sovereign citizenship, and change their names without filing legal documents, as investigators discovered in this case.

They said Martin-Bey visited a car dealership on Orange Blossom Trail and got a fraudulent title for a car using his new name.

They also found Sookhoo used a modified version of her name to get eight different IDs from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Reports said the couple racked up liens on three homes under their fake names, totaling nearly $25,000.
Leaders with the Moorish Science Temple of America said in a statement that radical fringe groups are giving their religion a bad name with these types of crimes.

A spokesperson said the group “is in no form or fashion a Sovereign Citizen Movement” and “all members must obey the laws of the government.”

One of the homes the couple owned is being foreclosed on.

WFTV contacted Homeland Security after investigators mentioned their assistance in the arrest reports for the couple, but officials have not commented.

http://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/orange-co-couple-facing-fraud-charges-gets-attenti/ngg7h/