Editor’s note: The symmetry of 52 weeks in a year and 26 letters in our alphabet inspired us here at The Eatonton Messenger to embark on an alphabetical journey of Putnam County every other week this year, looking at something – or someone – unique, significant, unusual, or just plain interesting.
On, Feb. 28, 1993, federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents arrived at the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, based on reports of child endangerment and exploitation within, as well as suspicion of the alleged cult’s stockpiling of illegal weapons.
Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed in the initial assault, leading to a 51-day standoff until April 19 when a two-hour gun battle and devastating fire killed another 76 Branch Davidians (including 25 children). It remains among the deadliest law enforcement events in U.S. history.
Nearly a decade later, in the wee hours of May 8, 2002, Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills woke up worried, hoping – praying – that he and his men were not about to enter a similar situation.
After receiving disturbing reports, and then gathering evidence of sexual grooming, exploitation, interstate sex trafficking, and sexual assault of young boys and girls, some of whom gave birth in local Georgia hospitals, the sheriff of Putnam County had seen enough.
Sills and two of his deputies – he said he hand-picked two ex-Marines since he knew they could handle adversity – had been maintaining round-the-clock surveillance, rain or shine, for three months across the road from Dwight “Dr. Malachi Z” York’s Nuwaubian Nation complex – the Egyptian-themed Tama-Re – built over 19 acres of a 476-acre spread in the northwest reaches of the county.
They called it “The Perch,” a foxhole-like depression cut into the land about 40 feet off the road, opposite of and a little to the left of the main gate to Tama-Re. As armed guards controlled who went in and who went out, Sills and his men took notes.
The sheriff also said he personally infiltrated the Nuwaubian complex twice, literally crawling through the grass to within earshot of York performing before his followers.
“I wanted to understand this guy, what he was all about, and to be honest, I’ve never figured that out,” Sills said during a recent visit to the Tama-Re site. “What I saw was a low-rent Richard Pryor show, just this perpetual racist ranting.”
Regardless, armed with testimony about his father’s criminal enterprise from Jacob York, one of York’s “legitimate” sons (the Nuwaubian leader was rumored to have fathered as many as 200 illegitimate children), as well as evidence of interstate transport of minors for sexual exploitation and financial structuring – both federal offenses – Sills felt ready by early May to raid the Nuwaubian compound and finally arrest York.
That it was a federal raid and not state-related was important, too, Sills explained, because property cannot be seized and sold based on molestation convictions, but being found guilty of structuring, which refers to deliberately splitting large sums of money into a series of smaller bank deposits in order to avoid taxation, triggers federal seizure of a convicted felon’s assets.
“And I wanted this guy and this place gone,” Sills declared.
Also, the sheriff said he didn’t want the GBI involved in the operation, as he felt state agents – up to its highest officers and elected officials – were involved, maybe even intertwined, with York and his organization. That’s partially why he was so concerned immediately before May 8th dawned in 2002.
“The most amazing thing about this whole investigation was our ability to keep it a secret. In law enforcement that’s the hardest thing in the world to do,” Sills stated. “And we had to keep it a secret from the state. If some of them in the GBI had found out about it, we’d have never gotten to where we were.
“I had actually heard someone in the GBI had been asking about something going on Wednesday morning down here and I thought, ‘Oh no, they’re going to ruin everything.’ That’s why I was so worried about things right before we had to come out here, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop.”
The operation also caught a break early that morning after the deputy in The Perch reported York had left the complex in an SUV, accompanied by Kathy Johnson, his “main wife,” and York’s alleged primary groomer of young girls to satisfy her husband’s illicit desires.
They drove to Milledgeville, apparently to buy groceries, where Sills confirmed York’s identity after a phone call description, and both were arrested. Between a personal stash at his Putnam County lair and what he carried, York apparently had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash at his disposal when arrested.
Shortly afterward, a pair of armored personnel carriers belonging to the Rockdale Sheriff’s Department, headed southeast down Shady Dale Road, leading FBI agents from Miami and Atlanta in several SUVs – a couple equipped with metal ramps affixed to allow one to drive up on top of the other in order to quickly breach second-story entry points – Sills in his own SUV, and several police cars carrying sheriffs and deputies from Putnam, Baldwin, Columbia and Jones counties, among others.
“And right overhead was a Huey helicopter gunship, flying right down this road, right over our trucks, with a door gunner in it,” Sills recalled. “The Nuwaubians, they didn’t know what to think. We rammed right through both their gates.”
Sills claimed one of the armed guards literally defecated in his pants.
“There was no resistance at all, it was all over too fast,” he said. Approximately 125 people were at Tama-Re the day of the raid, mostly women and children, Sills said, and within 15 minutes or so, every adult on the grounds was handcuffed and in custody without a single shot being fired.
“It could not have gone any better,” Sills stated. “Nobody got hurt, no Nuwaubians and none of my guys, and York was in jail. It really could not have gone any better.”
According to Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil, written by former Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Reporter Bill Osinski about York, “When he was finally indicted, state prosecutors literally had to cut back the number of counts listed – from well beyond a thousand to slightly more than 200 – because they feared a jury simply wouldn’t believe the magnitude of York’s evil … believed to be the nation’s largest child molestation prosecution ever directed at a single person, in terms of number of victims and a number of alleged criminal acts.”
A Putnam County grand jury in the summer of 2002 led to 177 counts of child molestation being laid against York, in addition to several RICO and tax evasion charges. One grand juror was reported to be so disturbed by some of the allegations against York, they became physically ill after reviewing the evidence.
York initially pled guilty in Eatonton on Jan. 24, 2003, and was given a 15-year sentence by U.S. Magistrate Judge Claude Hicks.
That sentence was overturned later that spring, however, after a pre-sentencing investigation report – standard for all federal cases – was issued by penal system officials to U.S. District Court Judge Hugh Lawson, who felt 15 years was far too lenient for crimes of York’s magnitude.
During a hearing in front of Lawson in July 2003, York claimed Native American status, calling himself Chief Black Eagle Thunderbird and saying he could not get a fair trial. Lawson then ordered him to undergo mental competency testing and he was ultimately deemed fit for trial.
It began on Jan. 13, 2004, in front of U.S. District Court Judge Ashley Royal in a closed-to-the-public courtroom on “neutral ground” in Brunswick, on the South Georgia coast.
York ultimately was convicted after a three-week trial, then received his sentence from Royal in April 2004: 135 years in maximum security confinement.
He now resides in solitary within a 12-by-7-foot cell at the Florence ADMAX prison in Colorado, where York is allowed one hour a day to walk alone outside in a concrete-walled exercise area. His next-door cellmates include the likes of Eric Rudolph of Atlanta Olympics bombing infamy, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzeman, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, sentenced to death for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, among many other infamous neighbors.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, York, 78, has a scheduled release date of July 13, 2119.