Judge clears sale of Your Black Muslim Bakery property

A federal bankruptcy judge approved the $1.052 million sale of the Your Black Muslim Bakery property in Oakland to a corporation backing AIDS support center Vital Life Services.
Once the sale closes, the center will have its first permanent home at 5832 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. Founded in 1987, Vital Life Services has been operating in a rented 4,500-square-foot former Safeway building at 5720 Shattuck Ave.
The center provides services ranging from meals to counseling for about 400 East Bay residents living with AIDS, mostly in the Interstate 880 corridor, Executive Director Peggy Bush said. "It's just like heaven. It doesn't get any better than this."
U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Edward Jellen on Nov. 29 approved a motion by bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson to accept the high bid of $1,052,000 by NCK LLC, an entity formed by Vital Life Services benefactors. NCK representative Kurt Zimmerman declined to provide any further details about the corporation, citing the violent history associated with the bakery organization.
The ruling gave NCK has the right to purchase the two-story, 6,000-square-foot bakery property, with a second bidder, Paulette Arbuckle, a resident of the neighborhood, as backup purchaser at a bid of $1,051,000. According to news reports, Arbuckle was represented by a broker with ties to the family that founded Your Black Muslim Bakery.
The bids were entered during a four-round private auction at a lawyer's office Nov. 28. In court the following day, Thompson told Jellen he was confident the "overbid" process that started with an $899,000 offer from Arbuckle Sept. 10 resulted in the best possible price for a property with "a lot of warts and blemishes."
The trustee verified each bidder's ability to carry out an all-cash transaction for the property, Thompson said.
The bakery purchase price will go toward paying off more than 25 liens against the property totaling more than $900,000, said Equistone Partners broker Michael Harrison, who represented NCK.
NCK expects to spend another $800,000 to $1 million to renovate the building, using commercial interiors specialist R.N. Field Construction of San Francisco, where Zimmerman is a partner.
Zimmerman and Harrison bid on the bakery after spending months looking for a new home for Vital Life Services after Zimmerman received an unsolicited offer to buy the center's Shattuck Avenue location, Harrison said. The sale of that property was contingent on relocating Vital Life Services.
Once the centerpiece of a family-run, community-based string of businesses credited with creating job opportunities in an impoverished neighborhood, Your Black Muslim Bakery deteriorated in the past decade amid charges of violence and the deaths of its founder, Yusuf Bey, and the murders of two successors. A journalist investigating the business, Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, was shot to death Aug. 2 in Oakland, and Devaughndre Broussard, a handyman at the bakery, was charged with his murder.
The court moved Your Black Muslim Bakery into Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings in August after representatives of the business failed to file reports and pay fees required under Chapter 11 voluntary reorganization. The bankruptcy was one of the topics being researched by Bailey when he was killed.
credted by: bizjournals.com