Chauncey Bailey in the United States

Chauncey Bailey was the editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly African-American newspaper. He was murdered. This is the story. For more information and his legacy, read about the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Chauncey Bailey Lawyer and Crime Scene

By Thomas Peele. He is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group and the Chauncey Bailey Project. His book about Black Muslim beliefs and the murder, Killing the Messenger, was published by the Random House imprint Broadway Books in 2012.

(…) the cultish Bey family, which ran a self-described black empowerment organization from Your Black Muslim Bakery in North Oakland. Bailey, 57, had been writing a story about its bankruptcy filing.

Broussard–the child of an absent father and drug-addicted, gun-toting mother, who shuffled between institutions for most of his childhood while she was in prison–had drifted in and out of the bakery for a year. (…)

In the Chauncey Bailey murder case, one of the first things Grim did was to give the media recordings of police statements and jail phone calls made by his client Devaughndre Broussard and others. By late 2007 the San Francisco Chronicle was crediting Grim as the source for at least one conversation it reported between police and Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV.

Eventually, (Broussard attorney, LeRue J. Grim) admitted to Alameda County Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson in open session that he had given hundreds of pages of police reports he obtained through discovery to reporters, including me. (Prior to Grim’s admission, the consortium of journalists I work with–the Chauncey Bailey Project–had not attributed the documentation to anyone by name.) Judge Jacobson called Grim’s actions “deplorable behavior,” but he imposed no sanctions.

Other than cross-examining a few witnesses during Broussard’s preliminary hearing in November 2007 on the murder charge, Grim apparently did little work on the case. He tried to file one document–a Pitchess motion seeking records involving a cop who had written an affidavit for a search warrant–but instead of sending it to the police department, where it should have gone, he sent it to the prosecutor’s office. He didn’t hire an investigator and he didn’t apply for court appointment, which would have assured him modest compensation.

Broussard initially denied to detectives that he’d killed Bailey. Still, he was their lead suspect, having tossed the murder weapon out of his bedroom window as officers stormed the bakery compound. (Bey was quick to tell police that Broussard had admitted the killing to him, but Bey denied any involvement himself.)

But when Broussard would not confess to detectives after his arrest, they brought in Bey to help badger him for about 20 minutes. Then they left the two men alone in an interview room for 6 minutes–and didn’t record their conversation. Broussard promptly confessed, insisting that he had acted alone in killing Bailey because the journalist was going to write “bad things” about Bey and the bakery, which was in bankruptcy proceedings at the time.

One detective later testified that it was his idea to use Bey to “confront” Broussard and force a confession. He also had written, in search warrant affidavits, that he suspected Bey was lying when he denied involvement in Bailey’s murder.

Broussard eventually claimed that during his six-minute conversation with Bey, the latter promised him money, a lawyer, and a light sentence if he confessed to the killing as a solo act. Broussard said Bey also told him, as his religious leader, that it was God’s will that he protect the bakery.

All of that information was available to Grim by the time his client’s preliminary hearing concluded. Yet he filed no motions about the circumstances surrounding Broussard’s confession.

Then in early 2008, Grim received a call from a CBS News producer. The magazine show 60 Minutes was interested in doing a piece about Bailey’s murder. Would Grim allow his client to be interviewed by Anderson Cooper? The lawyer said yes.

In February of that year Broussard denied on national television that he killed Bailey, but he said he knew who did–and pledged to reveal that person’s identity at trial. Later, Broussard would testify that Grim had counseled him to lie.

“I wouldn’t say, ‘lie,’ ” Grim told me when I asked about Broussard’s 60 Minutes assertion and subsequent testimony. “Defense lawyers sometimes tell clients to muddy the waters.”

A year passed while Grim waited for the trial, in which he intended to have Broussard testify. But as he sat with his client at a hearing in early 2009, Broussard whispered to him the words Grim must have longed to hear: His client wanted to talk to the prosecutor.

After that, Broussard testified, weeks passed with no word from Grim, and he wanted to fire him.
Then one day in March 2009 Broussard was taken from his cell in Oakland’s North County Jail and put on a bus headed for court. He said he figured it was a mistake; he knew he wasn’t scheduled for an appearance.

But instead of being delivered to court, Broussard was taken to a jury deliberation room where Grim sat with the deputy district attorney assigned to the case. Broussard was handed a proffer agreement to sign, later testifying that Grim had not consulted him about it before that moment (Grim disputes this). There was a digital recorder on the table.

Police had come to suspect that members of the bakery were responsible for two separate killings a few weeks before Bailey’s murder. If Broussard were truthful about Bey’s role in Bailey’s killing–and told investigators all he knew about the other deaths–he was advised, the prosecutor would let him plea bargain.

“I told them to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and they did,” Grim says. “They wanted to clear the whole thing up.”

Eventually, prosecutors said they would recommend a 25-year determinate sentence in exchange for Broussard’s testimony.

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who was chief assistant to District Attorney Tom Orloff when the deal was struck, declined to be interviewed for this story.

In the proffer statement Broussard signed, he admitted to one of the earlier killings–of a homeless man named Odell Roberson who was related to the killer of Bey’s older brother. Bey wanted Roberson dead as “eye for an eye” retribution, Broussard said.

Broussard also declared that Bey and another bakery member, Antoine Mackey, bragged that the latter, on Bey’s order, had killed a white man named Michael Wills in a tribute to the 1973-74 so-called Zebra murders of random “white devils” in the Bay Area by Black Muslims.

The killing of Bailey was equally cold-blooded. Broussard said Bey had learned that he would be criticized in a story the journalist was preparing about the bakery’s financial problems, and he ordered Broussard and Mackey to “take out” the writer. The next morning, Broussard came upon Bailey walking to work and shot him twice with a shotgun–first across his torso and then in his lower abdomen. As Bailey lay dying on the sidewalk, Broussard stood over him and fired a load of double-ought buckshot into his face.

A month after signing the statement, Broussard related the same events to a grand jury impaneled in the basement of an Oakland courthouse. Grim wandered through the lobby, speaking to reporters. His blue Rolls-Royce was parked outside, a parking ticket tucked under one of its windshield wipers.

Grim told me and other reporters that day that his client was “a human being seeking redemption. He has been living in a hell. He’s really suffered from this.”

The attorney was supposed to be available throughout Broussard’s testimony, but he left the courthouse long before his client finished. “I think I’ll beat the traffic,” he said, and slipped outside.

When he testified at the murder trial of Bey and Mackey this spring, Broussard struggled to keep his versions of the story straight. Over the course of four years, he’d denied killing Bailey; then said he did so alone; then said he didn’t kill anyone; then said Bey put him up to two killings that Mackey had helped him with. Defense lawyers Gene Peretti and Gary Sirbu battered him with questions. Grim attended the first few hours of Broussard’s testimony and told me he would be back each day that his client was on the stand. He wasn’t.

As a witness, Broussard did little to endear himself to jurors. At one point he burst into laughter, turning his head and trying to bury his face in the crook of a shackled arm as he described ordering his earlier victim Roberson to stop running away, then emptied the clip of an AK-47 into him at close range.

Soon, the defense lawyers were playing the unedited version of Broussard’s 60 Minutes interview for the jury, pointing out how earnest and sincere he seemed on camera as he denied killing Bailey. In the video, Grim keeps wandering in and out of view, looking for a place to sit.

Outside of court Peretti, Bey’s counsel, told reporters he was so confident jurors wouldn’t find Broussard credible that he was going to put on only a token defense; he called one witness, and his client never took the stand. Codefendant Mackey testified that he didn’t participate in any killings, telling jurors that Broussard had lied to get revenge for sexual encounters Mackey had with women Broussard was interested in.

During closing arguments in mid-May, Peretti and Sirbu attacked Broussard’s credibility and urged jurors to disregard his entire testimony. Without it, they insisted, the state’s case would vanish.

Grim says that Broussard’s family has never paid him for his work. His representation became, in effect, a pro bono case, one in which he claims his client was well served. He expects a judge to conclude that Broussard fulfilled his obligation to testify truthfully and sentence him to the terms of the agreement. “He’s going to get his deal,” Grim told me well before the trial concluded.

The verdicts, delivered in early June, seemed to cement Broussard’s plea bargain. Bey was convicted of three counts of first degree murder for ordering the killings of Bailey, Roberson, and Wills. Mackey also was convicted of first degree murder, for helping Broussard hunt down and shoot Bailey and for pulling the trigger on Wills himself. Both codefendants face life in prison without parole.

The day of the verdicts I phoned Grim several times for his reaction. He didn’t call back, so the next morning I trudged over to Bryant Street, as I had so many times in the past few years. The Rolls-Royce wasn’t there, and Grim didn’t answer the door. As I was leaving, a man and a woman came up the stairs. They spoke broken English in Eastern European accents, the dark skin under the man’s eyes sagging, the woman’s head covered in a red scarf. They, too, were looking for Grim, who had been elusive for weeks, they said. The man and I exchanged knowing shrugs.

Hours later, Grim finally answered his cell phone. He was off in court, in another county. The Bey and Mackey verdicts did not surprise him, he said. He had not spoken to his client in some time, but told me he was certain that Broussard had committed “a little bit of fabrication”–about what, he wouldn’t say. Nor would he say whether he was referring to trial testimony or earlier statements.

Grim was obviously satisfied with the outcome.

During closing arguments, Peretti said Broussard had “won the lottery” with his deal. But did Grim buy him the ticket? Would Broussard have agreed to turn state’s evidence if Grim had waged an aggressive defense? Or if Broussard had held to the “no snitch” code of the street, what would Grim have done then?
On the phone that afternoon Grim said he didn’t have time to discuss scenarios. He had a law practice to run, he insisted, and needed to get back to Bryant Street. I thought of the couple looking for him there earlier and had no doubt that he would continue to survive.

Chauncey Bailey Trial

In the summer of 2007, Thomas Peele joined a team of reporters from around the San Francisco Bay Area to launch what would become a multiyear investigation into the murder of fellow journalist Chauncey Bailey. The editor of a small Oakland weekly, Bailey was 57 years old at the time he was gunned down and had been asking a lot of questions about the financial problems of a certain bakery in the area. This bakery was owned by the Bey family, which also headed a cult-like group of Black Muslims.

Bailey was shot three times on his way to work, and as news of the murder spread, attention was drawn to the story he had been working on. Did one of the Beys order the hit? On June 9, a jury convicted Yusuf Bey IV of just that.

It was a big win for the prosecution. But Peele and his colleagues clearly played a pivotal role, as well.

One of the sources for Peele’s reporting was, a lawyer named LeRue Grim (see the entry) whose client was the accused triggerman in the killing.