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BOOK REVIEW
AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER’S TAKE ON DWIGHT YORK
Have you heard this one before? Charismatic cult boss settles
his legions in an out-of-the-way spot. They live weird and undis
turbed until criminal misdeeds—white-coliar tax fraud, building
code violations, grotesque cases of prurience—begin leaking out
to authorities. The feds come in, bring down the group, and di
vulge a laundry-list of Biblical abominations perpetrated by the
pious leader. Remind you of David
Koresh and the Branch Davidians?
Beyond just being the template for
cult activity, the story should have
a ring of familiarity to denizens of
Athens since it happened in Georgia,
outside Eatonton to be exact, and
one remnant of its legacy still stands
here in the Classic City: in the de
serted bunker daubed with neo-Egyptian pictographs on Broad
Street. This particular local tale is about Dwight York, “Grand
Master Teacher" of the Nuwaubians, thief, misogynist and mon
strous pederast, as told in Atlanta Journal-Constitution investiga
tive reporter Bill Osinski's new book.
With its catalog of incest, molestation and even cannibal
ism, Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil (Indigo Custom
Publishing, 2007) is a grimacing read, and it takes a ponderous
kind of self-motivation to push through each example of sexual
assault. Osinski s brisk style reflects his day job: his phrases are un
nal life. Preying on their anxieties, he both dressed and decorated
for the part. As Osinski describes it, his various fiefdoms in Mew
York and Georgia were a farrago of atrocious kitsch, modeled after
the tackiest T.G.I. Friday's between Morocco and Zimbabwe. But
they also utilized ornamental and architectural signatures intended
to evoke lost historical roots. Thus, the compounds were popu
lated with totems of African pnde:
inflatable palm trees in upstate
Mew York; leopard skins; big-game
heads mounted on the walls; Moorish
domes and minarets; and eventually
in Georgia, an Egyptian fantasy-land
of tarpaper, particle board and poly
urethane foam called Tama Re. York's
relocation to the old plantation
country of the Peach State, in actuality just an attempt to retrench
and renew where the money went farther and more covertness
could be had, was construed as a move back to origins.
The giant, flashing question, which Osinski can only guess
at, is why intelligent people stuck with it through exponential
evidence of bizarreness and depravity. The United Nuwaubian
Nation of Moors was just the last, most sensationalist phase of the
illustrious career of Dwight York, when both he and his cult mu
tated into something so larded with cultural refuse it was past all
resemblance—like a religious junk store of doctnne and imagery,
piling up curios of UFOs, Native Americans. Freemasons,
Illuminati and leprechauns. Osinski is quick to point out
that York originally started out as a community activist
with high ideals and good intentions in New York City.
He was drawn to Islam in his own search for authentic
ity. and Mohammed's faith seemed to offer an alternative
to the colonial whiteness of Christianity. Nevertheless.
Osinski paints York's fall from grace like Satan's precipi
tous tumble from heaven. Outward generosity and social
concern devolved into self-grandiosity and delusion as
York's talent for persuasion ran amok. Minions hocked his
plagiarized, stream-of-consciousness manifestos on city
street corners. His Ansaru Allah Community annexed parts
of the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. According
to Osinski, they extorted 'security payments” from lo
cal shop owners Mafia-style and acquired real estate by
torching it first to reduce the price (religious and racial
sensitivity would keep the cops away). A self-appointed
mullah, York interpreted the Koran liberally. He took extra
wives and concubines. When he got bored, he went after
the kids, even his own. By the time York had made his
lair in Georgia, Tama Re was a playground of perversion,
where stuffed animals had been equipped with sex toys
for grisly initiation purposes.
A WORLD UNRAVELED
York's evil finally caught up to him. Finally, some of
the mothers of his hundreds of children could no longer
stand his deviance. As Osinski enumerates the victims
and the sins, it becomes almost impossible to com
prehend why dissent took so long. But inside the cult,
York's followers truly lived a world apart. Some, who had
been born into the life, did not understand the value of
money. Everything percolated down from York: he was
their source of spiritual guidance and earthly sustenance.
Dethroning him would literally mean the end of their exis
tence, and he galvanized his people by appropriating con
venient bogeymen, the last of which were the local build
ing inspector and sheriff of Putnam County. Borrowing a
political tactic from the Religious Right York portrayed his com
munity as being constantly under siege from the outside, "secular'
world. Gruesome accusations could always be attributed to the
prejudice and racism of the Nuwaubians' unanimous enemy.
Osinski only hints at it, but there is an infinitesimal apology
that could be made for York. A recurring motif continues popping
up throughout his biography: York as the lead singer of an R&B
band called Passion, the Back-street recording studio in Brooklyn,
the recording studio at Camp Jazzir in the Catskills, the recording
studio at Tama Re, and the adjoining discotheque in Club Ramses.
One has the sense that Dwight York just wanted to be some famous
musical somebody, like Don Cornelius or Diddy, enjoying limos,
magnums of champagne, easy sex, and all the glamorous trap
pings of celebrity. In the end. York got many of his wishes, but
his Faustian deal earned him 135 years in federal prison for child
molestation and racketeering. That's where York remains, but as
Osinski takes noble pains to illuminate, the uncountable victims
remain scattered with us, living savagely disfigured lives.
Donn Cooper
adorned and breathless. A sentence often constitutes a paragraph.
His reportorial method dispenses with the gruesome facts as expe
ditiously and efficiently as possible; but neck-deep in moral filth,
the reader is left gasping for air. Such excruciating content begs for
the author to pull back and editorialize, to posit and italicize his
or her own subjective humanity as a foil to the evil on the page. As
it is, Osinski gives us very little in this department. We're not even
rescued by the pneumatically-sealed analysis of the social sciences.
UNDERSTANDING AN EVOLUTION
Osinski does expertly detail how Dwight York gathered his
African-American congregation. With their communities and fami
lies undermined by crime, drugs, AIDS and dead-end jobs, and
struggling to find their racial identity in postmodern America,
they came looking for anything that smacked of authenticity and
righteousness in a fallen world. Fashioned as a wise man, doctor,
prophet, ccwboy, priest, quasi-rabbi, god and, lastly, “guest sav
ior' from Planet Rizq, York offered the keys to heaven through the
mirage of religious virtue and the austerity of a separatist, commu
The giant, flashing question, which Osinski
can only guess at, is why intelligent people
stuck with it through exponential evidence
of bizarreness and depravity.
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