Dwight York (born June 26, 1935, also reported as 1945), also known as Malachi Z. York, Issa Al Haadi Al Mahdi, et alii, is an American musician, writer, black supremacist, and leader of the Georgia-based "Nuwaubian" movement, currently imprisoned on a 135 year sentence for child molestation.
York's "ministry" began in the late 1960s, from 1967 preaching to the "Ansaaru Allah" (viz. African Americans) in Brooklyn, and he founded numerous esoteric or quasi-religious fraternal orders under various names during the 1970s and 1980s, at first centered on pseudo-Islamic themes, Judaism (Nubian Islamic Hebrews), and later moving to a loose "Ancient Egypt" theme, eclectically mixing ideas taken from black nationalism, cryptozoological and UFO religions and popular conspiracy theory now called "Nuwabians".
York and the Nuwaubians came under increased government scrutiny in the early 1990s after they built Tama-Re, an Egyptian-themed "city" featuring pyramids, temples, and living quarters for about a hundred of his followers, in Putnam County, Georgia. York was arrested in May 2002, and in 2004 convicted for transporting minors across state lines in the course of sexually molesting them, racketeering, and financial reporting charges. York's case was reported as the largest prosecution for child molestation ever directed at a single person in the history of the United States, both in terms of number of victims and number of incidents. The case was described in the book Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil (2007) by Bill Osinski, a reporter who had covered the Nuwaubians in Georgia during the late 1990s.
Famous quotes containing the word york:
“New York is full of people ... with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that’s not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)