A to Z 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.
In 1993, Dwight York, later known as Dr. Malachi Z York, leader of the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, arrived in Putnam County from New York City. York had paid nearly a million dollars for 476 acres of land fronted by Shady Dale Road in the northwest corner of the county.
Five years later, and a year after Howard R. Sills took over as Putnam’s new sheriff, the position he still holds, York was well into the construction of Tama-Re, his Egyptian-themed compound where more than 200 Nuwaubian adherents eventually lived, worked, and prayed.
Sills freely admits he was no fan of the pseudo-religious sect and especially of its leader, the self-declared Dr. Malachi Z York.
“Right before I took office, I decided I need to know something about this, so I met with the FBI and learned a great deal about York’s operations in New York,” Sills said in an interview last month while parked in the former Tama-Re’s driveway. “I learned that he was a Black Panther, that he’d gone into the Nation of Islam, that he created his own Muslim sect, and they were financed primarily by organized bank robberies and just all kinds of things.
He was also suspected of murder in Brooklyn … so I knew I had a problem when I first took office.”
Still, the sheriff recognized a subtle approach was required in dealing with people who believed York to be a religious deity that created a sovereign nation for them. Sills even instructed his deputies to ignore Nuwaubian infractions like speeding unless it was egregious and to avoid confrontation unless literally attacked.
As Tama-Re took shape under York’s direction, complete with pyramids, a crude Sphinx-like replica, and other disjointed, Egyptian-influenced structures and monuments, he also had his followers perform some decidedly bizarre tasks.
By December 1998, Sills recalls medical professionals calling him to describe several Nuwaubian men accompanying young women – girls in their early teens – to local hospitals where they gave birth, and then immediately left.
“The men would not allow the woman, these very young underage women, to even talk hardly to the doctors,” Sills said. “They would answer for her, they’d have a baby, they’d leave, and they’d take the placenta with them. Just bizarre stuff.
And they would not let [hospital staff] do the appropriate tests – that were required by law – and that’s when I started going, this is beyond just being odd; that was clear evidence of child molestation. That’s when it all started.”
Sills said he made it his business to learn all he could about how cults operate, with his investigation taking him as far afield as Oregon, where he met with a sheriff and district attorney who had dealt with a similar situation there in the early 1980s. It required a lengthy, methodical approach, though, as Sills said he still didn’t want any violent confrontations with the Nuwaubians, who by the late-‘90s were a common presence in Eatonton and Putnam County.
The Nuwaubians had friends in high places, too, as prominent Black activists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson each visited Tama-Re, Sharpton in 1999 and Jackson two years later, in very public shows of support against Putnam County’s alleged racism.
Eventually, though, a few Nuwaubians grew disillusioned by York, tired of seeing him come and go in luxury cars to his onsite two-story home on the fringes of the Tama-Re complex while they remained packed into double-wide trailers when not toiling beneath the hot Georgia sun. Sills said sometime in 2000, someone provided him with an anonymous letter that included a crude map of Tama-Re depicting where York’s child victims were supposedly housed.
Without hard proof, though, there was little the sheriff could do.
Sills said his big break came in 2001 when Jacob York, one of York’s oldest sons, who had turned away from his father’s teachings more than a decade earlier, arrived at Tama-Re to confront York about his ongoing poor treatment of Jacob’s mother. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center report, Jacob said his father told him then, “I don’t believe in any of this (stuff). If I had to dress up like a nun, if I had to be a Jew, I’d do it for this type of money.”
Rebuffed, Jacob York soon met with Sills and FBI representatives in Atlanta and spilled the beans. A plan began to develop to finally take down Dwight York and his elaborate criminal enterprise.
To be continued: Part III next week will describe the takeover of Tama Re, as well as Dwight York’s fate.