UNGODLY -- The true story of the Brooklyn street kid who morphed from the Pimp Imam of Bushwick Avenue into the Black Pharaoh of Putnam County, Georgia. Based on my non-fiction book of the same title.

SYNOPSIS:

UNGODLY is the true story of the Pharaoh of Putnam County.

What were those dazzling gold-and-black pyramids doing in a fallow cotton field in rural Georgia? Who were all these black folks moving down from Brooklyn, NY? And how did they all come to follow a former street kid named Dwight York, aka Imam Isa, Doctor Love, The Man from Planet Rizq, Chief Black Eagle of the Lost Tribe of the Yamassee, and Doctor Malachi Z. York?

The answers are in UNGODLY, by journalist and author Bill Osinski, based on his non-fiction book of the same title.

In 1998, as soon as Bill turned a bend in Shadydale Road and first saw Tama-Re, the Egypt of the West, York’s Egyptian-style theme park, he knew he was onto a very strange story – and for the next 10 years, every time he thought the story could not become any stranger, it always did. His pursuit of the story first took him to York’s old power base on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn. There he learned that York had built his pseudo-Muslim cult, called Ansaru Allah Community, into an international empire, literally built by his slaves who operated his bookstores, restaurants, clothing stores, jewelry stores and printing plants.

Bill also learned York had been allowed to operate with almost total impunity for about 25 years, even though an FBI intelligence report had attributed to the group a long list of crimes, including massive welfare fraud, extortion, arson, bank robberies, and the broad-daylight assassination of a community leader who had tried to oppose York. With the information Bill provided, NYPD detectives reopened the investigation into the 1979 murder and named one of York’s thugs as a suspect.

Bill left New York on a high, thinking he’d helped crack a long-cold murder case. He went to a fancy restaurant to celebrate and told the story to the bartender, who wanted to nominate him for a Pulitzer. Unfortunately, the bartender was not Bill’s editor. It would take another six years before York was stopped, after what would become the nation’s largest child molestation prosecution ever directed at one person.

The effort was marked by repeated interference from the highest levels of politics and law enforcement, all the way up to the Governor of the State of Georgia and the Attorney General of the United States. No one in power wanted to be perceived as religiously intolerant or racially prejudiced.

It took a coalition of discarded concubines, courageous child victims, and a determined small-town sheriff – a white man who was for a long time the only advocate for the victimized black children – to bring York down; and it is primarily through their eyes that Bill’s script reveals the horrible truths at the heart of UNGODLY.

The narrative begins on Savior’s Day (York’s birthday) in June, 1998. A black woman named Alima and her two sullen children drive through the Tama-Re gate, an arch decorated with Egyptian pictograms. She is handed an envelope for her donation to “Dr. York”; as soon as she drives into the compound, she crumples it and throws it out the window. She brings the children to York, who fathered then abandoned them. “These mine?” he asks. He gives her a little money and dismisses her. Later, a young child comes to Alima and tells her, “Baba (York) does bad things to us.”

While York holds court for the press at the same festival, Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills spoils the party by driving up with riot-gear-clad deputies and padlocking York’s large and totally illegal nightclub, Club Rameses. Both antagonists know there will be more confrontations. York fumes that such an intrusion would never have happened back in the day in Brooklyn. Alima, standing nearby, muses about what “back in the day” means to her.

The scene shifts to Brooklyn, 1979. Alima comes to Ansaru Allah Community as a runaway teenager. She is given a tour of York’s domain by Zubayda, York’s first and only legitimate wife. When she is introduced to York, he correctly intuits that her homelife was unhappy. He renames her Alima and tells her, “Now, you got a Daddy who loves you.”

Life in the cult is revealed through Alima’s character. She bears him two children, then watches as the younger women in the harem compete for his attention. She goes with him to a nightclub, where as “Doctor Love”, front man for the band “Passion”, he sings disco songs while performing on roller skates, purportedly an effort to recruit prospective Muslim converts. She attends a Savior’s Day parade, which includes a group of about 20 young women who had given birth to York’s children during the past year. Pregnant with her third child by York, Alima is thrown out of the cult, mostly because the other women learn Alima’s baby will be born profoundly deformed.

After becoming disgusted by York’s behavior, Zubayda leaves the cult, along with her teenage son Malik. Believing he is threatened by real Muslims who regard him as a heretic, York moves with a select group of followers to his new Promised Land, Putnam County, Georgia. His sexual predations devolve darkly. He has taken his most loyal followers’ money, labor, and devotion; now, there is nothing left for him to take but their children.

Alima writes an anonymous letter to local authorities, begging for help to stop York from molesting the girls and the boys. Sills now knows he’s dealing with a major criminal, but the FBI is reluctant to join the case; in fact, USAG Janet Reno, fearful of Tama-Re becoming another Waco, states a raid will only happen “over my dead body.”

The stalemate is broken by York’s son Malik, who, after eight years of separation, confronts his father, who admits to being “The Prince of Darkness.” Malik stays in Georgia and helps cult members escape his father. He calls Sills and sets a meet with the FBI, to which Malik brings Jennifer, a former girlfriend of his whom his father made a concubine. Jennifer gives the investigators names, dates, and places; and York’s downfall has begun.

In 2002, a force of more than 200 federal agents and a like number of sheriff’s deputies from Putnam and surrounding counties assemble for the strike. They wait until York leaves the property to take some of his girls out for a fish dinner, and they arrest him. Then, using helicopter cover and armored personnel carriers, they crash into Tama-Re. Among other evidence, they confiscate a life-sized Pink Panther stuffed animal, with a plastic penis sewn into the appropriate place, from York’s private chambers. The child victims will later identify it, evidence they’d been in the then 57-year-old man’s bedroom.

York’s 2004 trial is shown in four brief scenes of the victims’ testimony. During one, a jury member rushes out of court, sick to her stomach. York is convicted and sentenced to 135 years in a federal supermax prison.

The epilog scenes show the main characters moving on to uncertain and apparently unhappy futures. For the finale, Sills is shown puffing on a victory cigar. He revs up the front-end loader he’s driving and plows into the gate of Tama-Re, exploding the cheap stucco into dust.