Jerry Lewis Bey: The Moorish Kingpin Who Ruled St. Louis From Behind A Religious Temple D
What’s up, everybody? Welcome to Hood Archives. Today, we getting into the story of Jerry Lewis Bay, St. Louis, 1991, January, cold. Somewhere inside the Thomas Eagleton Federal Courthouse, a grand jury just handed down an indictment listing 15 people, murders, racketeering, drug conspiracy, the whole menu.
The name at the top, Jerry Lewis Bay. Before we get into what the government said, let me tell you what everybody else was saying first. Mayors gave him proclamations, Harold Washington, Marion Barry, the mayor of St. Louis himself. He stood in the Royal Palace of Morocco and met a cousin of King Hassan II.
He incorporated a religious temple. He held prayer services inside the city jail. He called himself a sheik. The streets called him something else. The federal government, after years of watching him, called him the head of a violent drug enterprise controlling between 35% and 45% of cocaine in North St.
Louis for over a decade. 11 murders, a cousin who admitted in open court to killing a man for $10,000, a brother who took the witness stand against him, a jury that sat 9 months whose own names nobody in that courtroom ever learned because the defendants were considered too dangerous. Sheik, kingpin, political prisoner, if you ask him, I’ll let you decide.
October 7th, 1950, Jerry Lewis is born at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, St. Louis, third of eight children. His father, Sylvester, a United States Army veteran, World War II. His mother, Ada, a housekeeper. 1957, the family moves to Pruitt-Igoe. If you don’t know Pruitt-Igoe, take a second.
33 high-rise towers built in the early 50s as a government answer to poverty. Segregated, underfunded from day one. By the time Jerry Lewis was coming up walking those hallways, the place was already falling apart. Elevators didn’t work. Heat came and went. Violence was just part of the day.
And then the city made its decision. Between 1972 and 1976, they tore it all down. Blew up the first buildings on live television. Called it a failed experiment. But the people who actually lived there, nobody asked them what to call it. Jerry Lewis came out of Pruitt-Igoe and went directly into the streets.
By the early 70s, he was dealing heroin. The trade of that era, that block, that zip code. 1972, convicted of heroin possession with intent to distribute. Federal time. And then the turn, September 3rd, 1977. FCI Milan Federal Prison, Michigan. A man named George Walton Bay of Detroit introduces him to the Moorish Science Temple of America, a religious movement founded in 1913.
It teaches that so-called African-Americans are Moorish by nationality, descendants of the ancient people of Northwest Africa. The movement asks its members to reject the names given to them under slavery, add Bay or El to their surname, and reclaim an identity that was taken. Jerry Lewis became Jerry Lewis Bay.
April 10th, 1978, he walks out on parole. Six months later, he is legally incorporating the Moorish Science Temple in Missouri. Holding worship services inside the St. Louis City Jail. His cousin, Ronnie Thomas, later testified they had been selling heroin together since 1974. That relationship did not end when Jerry found religion. It changed shape.
Here is what the government spent nearly a decade trying to prove that underneath the robes, underneath the fez, the proclamations, the diplomatic delegations to Morocco, there was a criminal enterprise. That subordinate Temple Number 1 of the Moorish Science Temple of America in St. Louis was functionally the headquarters of the Jerry Lewis organization, the JLO.
Federal prosecutors argued the JLO controlled between 35% and 45% of St. Louis cocaine for over a decade. T’s and blues, a synthetic drug combination that flooded the Midwest in the ’80s as a cheap heroin substitute. All of it moving through a network that Lewis Bey sat above. His cousin, Ronnie Thomas Bey, testified about something they were doing operationally.
And I’m not going to lie, when I first saw it, I had to stop and read that line again. After a killing, the JLO held structured reviews, debriefs what went right, what went wrong, how to improve next time. Thomas Bey testified that JLO leaders convened after shootings specifically to improve the methods used to kill rivals and informants.
Not grief, not reaction, deliberate, organized assessment, the kind of thing you read about in military after action reports, not street organizations in 1980 St. Louis. The JLO used payphones, pagers, and two-way radios to communicate. They compiled intelligence files, police reports, news clippings, surveillance patterns, seized later as trial evidence.
Lewis Bay sat above all of it, clean, insulated. His own younger brother, Michael Lewis, testified to this directly. Said he joined the JLO in 1980-81. Said Jerry directed everything. Said JLO members carried weapons and murdered people they suspected of cooperating with law enforcement.
$100,000 in cocaine money was stored, according to Michael’s testimony, at a co-defendant’s house. Michael Lewis, Jerry’s blood, on the stand for the prosecution. And then Rudy Weaver, who moved from Kansas City to St. Louis in fall 1987, was recruited into the JLO, rose to a trusted position, and turned federal informant.
He set up meetings at a Ponderosa restaurant, received cocaine deliveries at a convenience store, watched everything, told the grand jury. The operation was still running in November 1990. Colombian supplier, Juan Alfaro Gonzalez, delivered cocaine to Lewis that month. Two months later, Gonzalez tried to deliver four more kilograms to Weaver, who was by then cooperating.
Gonzalez was arrested. The machine kept running even as the walls closed in. Confidence, arrogance, probably both. While all of that was happening, hold both things at once, Jerry Lewis Bay was doing something genuinely remarkable. January 8th, 1985, St. Louis Mayor Vincent Schoemehl presents him with an official proclamation.
That same year, proclamations from the mayors of Newark and Hartford, a resolution from the National Conference of Mayors signed by Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. December 16th, 1985, a proclamation from Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago. Harold Washington, one of the most respected figures in Black American political history.
Chicago’s first Black mayor giving proclamations to Jerry Lewis Bey. August 20th, 1988, Lewis Bey leads an official delegation to the Royal Kingdom of Morocco, two full weeks. March 1990, a second delegation. The Moorish Science Temple of St. Louis presented a formal resolution to Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, Minister of State to His Majesty King Hassan II, a cousin of the king, a man from Pruitt-Igoe, federal heroin conviction, in the Moroccan Royal Court.
And the federal investigation that had been running since May 1983 officially closed by the ATF, April 7th, 1987. Four years, multiple agencies, zero arrests, zero indictments. Not long after, a second investigation opened. What changed between April ’87 and early ’88? A new informant? A new prosecutor? A new Washington appetite for the war on drugs? The public record does not answer this.
That silence means something. I want to take a second and name them, cuz in a lot of these stories, the victims get pushed to the background, and all you hear about is the people who did it. July 23rd, 1987, Bruce Henry, Hat to everyone who knew him, was walking through the Darst Web housing complex when gunmen opened fire.
He died right there. The following month, Harold Johnson, Count, killed by masked gunmen in military fatigues. The fatigues were specifically identified at trial as the preferred attire of JLO members on what they called missions. Count was not a random target. He was a connection to a rival operation the JLO was systematically dismantling.
10 days after Johnson, David Grady, Kiki, shot at a service station parking lot, killed because the JLO believed he might retaliate for Count’s murder. Kiki was Count Johnson’s half-brother. They killed him preemptively for a retaliation that had not yet happened. The jury also found Lewis Bay responsible for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Antar Tiari, a law enforcement officer, and for the murder of a grand jury witness whose name does not appear in any public record I could find.
The cousin, Ronnie Thomas Bay, testified he had been promised $10,000 for one of the killings. He had actually been tried for that murder in state court and acquitted. Then he sat in a federal courtroom and admitted he had done it. You don’t just make up testimony like that.
A man admitting to a murder he already beat? At that point, it doesn’t cost him anything new. But for Lewis Bay, that was devastating. And then there’s this part. After at least one killing, Lewis Bay reportedly complained not because someone died, but because it was bringing too much police attention to the operation. That detail right there, it stays with you.
Late 1992, the trial begins. 9 months. The longest criminal trial in Missouri history. A record that still stands today. The jury, 12 people sitting through 9 months of testimony, were never given names. They were juror five, juror nine, juror 13, juror 15, juror 19, juror 28, juror 44, juror 66, juror 68.
Numbers only because names were too dangerous. Each defendant was watched by two personal security officers at all times. Outside on Walnut Street, armed federal marshals blocked traffic every time the defendants moved. The defendants were held not locally, but across the river in Belleville, Illinois, St.
Clair County Jail for the entire duration. Moved each day in US Marshal vans, armed escort, a convoy of police vehicles, helicopter surveillance overhead, and on the roof of the United States Court and Custom House, snipers. For a drug trial. Snipers. Two months into proceedings, marshals searched the defendants’ cell and found a handcuff key.
Nobody could explain where it came from or how long it had been there. Marshal Willie Greason told reporters he was actively investigating a plot to break the defendants out of custody while the trial was underway. Reported once in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, then forgotten. June 20th, 1993. Verdict. Seven convicted, two acquitted.
Sam Petty, 45 from the infamous Petty brothers family, acquitted. Malik Muhammad, 50, the oldest man at the defense table, acquitted. He walked out free. The jury deliberated for 12 days. They drew a line. Two people on one side, seven on the other. September 24th, 1993. The federal sentencing guidelines, the legal framework governing punishment, calculated Lewis Bay’s sentence on the jury’s actual findings.
His criminal history, the specific charges the grand jury brought, the facts the trial jury weighed. That calculation produced a number, 17 and 1/2 years. The judge looked at that number and went somewhere else entirely. Using a preponderance of the evidence standard, a lower bar than the beyond a reasonable doubt standard the jury applied, the judge determined Lewis Bay was personally responsible for first-degree murder and for over 213 kg of cocaine, not charged by the grand jury, not presented to the trial jury, not weighed by any of the 12 people who sat there for 9 months. Found by the judge alone at sentencing, life in prison without the possibility of parole. 17 and 1/2 years became life. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Apprendi versus New Jersey in 2000 and United
States versus Booker in 2005 substantially changed how judges could use facts not found by a jury at sentencing. Lewis Bay was sentenced in 1993, 7 years before Apprendi, 12 before Booker. The law that made his life sentence legally possible no longer operates the same way. The jury’s verdict stands.
That does not change, but the distance between 17 and 1/2 years and life, that distance was created by the judge on facts no jury ever touched. Nobody in a position to change that outcome ever changed it. Most men handed a life sentence in federal court in 1993 go quiet. Jerry Lewis Bey went the other way. From inside FCI Marion, Illinois, he filed Freedom of Information Act requests against the FBI, the ATF, the Department of Justice.
He wanted the surveillance files, the informant records, the original 1983 investigation, the one that ran 4 years and produced absolutely nothing. He filed post-conviction motion after motion. Every court denied him, citing overwhelming evidence of guilt. 2007, he published his autobiography, Government’s Target or Gangster, still maintaining innocence, still pushing.
June 2015, 22 years after the verdict, he published an open letter to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. He wrote about Pruitt-Igoe, about watching police plant drugs and weapons on residents, about officers lying under oath, about prosecutors filling federal prisons with men convicted on what he called ghost drugs, evidence that never existed outside a report.
He connected his 1991 indictment to the Dred Scott decision and the Ferguson uprising in a single continuous line. He wrote, “Slavery is alive and well in America, and you have become the merchandise.” That letter received almost no mainstream press. Whatever you believe about his guilt, and the jury spoke clearly on that, a man convicted of four murders and multiple murder conspiracies writing from a federal cell in 2015 and tying his case to the same St.
Louis that produced Ferguson is not making a small argument. Whether it is true is a separate question from whether it is worth hearing. Federal court records show him filing motions as recently as July 2016. Find a Grave list a March 1996 death. Both cannot be correct. Nobody has resolved this publicly.
The longest trial in Missouri history, life in prison, and unconfirmed death date. St. Louis has never fully decided what Jerry Lewis Bay was. Maybe the Shake and the Kingpin were never two different people. Maybe they were always the same one.
