Key witness disappeared before grand jury hearing in $22 million Richmond fraud case, defendant remanded to custody

OAKLAND — A Richmond man facing dozens of fraud charges in an alleged $22 million scheme was detained by U.S. Marshals at a court hearing Wednesday, after prosecutors blamed him when a key witness vanished for two months after being subpoenaed to testify.

Dahood Sharieff Bey, also known as Attila Colar, was hit with a superseding indictment last month, alleging that he continued to make fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loan applications even after he was charged with fraud last year and released on bond. But days before the grand jury proceedings, a key witness named Mansoor Bey disappeared, and didn’t surface again until after federal agents came looking for him, according to authorities.

In court records asking for Dahood Bey’s bond to be revoked, prosecutors blamed him for Mansoor Bey’s disappearance, writing that Mansoor Bey had a stroke two years ago and requires assistance for his day-to-day life. He arranged for his social security checks to go to Dahood Bey, and was subpoenaed to testify with immunity right before he vanished, prosecutors said.

When federal agents showed up at Dahood Bey’s Richmond home looking for Mansoor Bey, they were greeted with a sign on the outside that said the occupants were all quarantining due to COVID-19. They left a note asking for Mansoor’s whereabouts, and within a day were contacted by a federal public defender who said he’d been retained to represent Mansoor Bey.

“This sequence of events demonstrates, as government counsel had proffered during the February 8, 2022, hearing that the missing witness was indeed under the (Dahood Bey’s) control,” two U.S. Attorneys wrote in court papers.

Mansoor Bey eventually turned up in person. According to Richmond police, he was arrested Tuesday evening after showing up to the police department to re-register as a sex offender. When an officer ran his name, they realized Bey had an active arrest warrant as an absconded federal witness and took him into custody.

Dahood Bey’s attorney responded in court records by saying prosecutors fell far short of their burden to prove that Mansoor Bey’s disappearance had anything to do with Dahood Bey or the grand jury subpoena.

“The United States must make a showing by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Colar tampered with any witness. An assertion of ‘possibility’ is insufficient,” defense attorney Mark Axup wrote.

Dahood Bey was originally charged last October with PPP fraud, tax fraud, and other offenses. Last month, prosecutors secured a 31-count indictment alleging that he continued to engage in wire fraud schemes as recently as Feb. 1, and that he destroyed evidence after learning of the investigation against him.

The charging documents reference Bey’s most recent fraud conviction, in 2015, which stemmed from a security company he created called BMT International Security Services. The firm submitted bogus bid documents to the Port of Oakland and other agencies while seeking — and sometimes winning — millions of dollars in public contracts.

In November 2015, after pleading no contest to a fraud charge, Bey was sentenced to five years in state prison.

At the time, Dahood Bey was the leader of a Your Black Muslim Bakery spinoff group that formed after the bakery’s leader, Yusuf Bey IV, was arrested for ordering the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post. Bailey was murdered because he was working on a story about the bakery’s financial problems, and because Bey IV harbored a grudge against the longtime Bay Area journalist who covered the child molestation trial of the elder Yusuf Bey, who founded the bakery in the 1960s.

Dahood Bey posed as a former FBI agent named David Johnson, claiming at various times to be a graduate of Harvard, Princeton and Golden Gate universities and a “military marshal.” He was charged by Alameda County prosecutors after an investigation into BMT by this newspaper.