For 30 years, authorities did nothing to stop Your Black Muslim Bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey’s sexual assault of minors and physical abuse of women, though at least six complaints were made to police and social workers and the attacks were well known within the bakery community.Then, one of the raped women told her story to Oakland police investigator Jim Saleda. In less than three months, Bey was arrested.

The story of Saleda’s methodical pursuit in 2002 of one of Oakland’s most prominent and influential leaders is detailed in a 22-page police investigative report obtained by the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Seemingly oblivious to the political power that others said had been protecting the owner of Your Black Muslim Bakery for years, Saleda undertook a step-by-step investigation of the woman’s claims.

He found earlier reports accusing Bey of child sexual abuse languishing in police files. He ordered DNA tests to prove Bey’s paternity. And along the way, he found about a dozen other people who said they knew about Bey’s assaults of children.

“Jim Saleda did a fabulous job of investigating the complaints of the victims,” said Alameda County District Attorney Teresa Ortega, who was assigned to prosecute the criminal case against Bey.

The charges of lewd conduct with minors that the Alameda County District Attorney’s office levied against Bey in 2002 have never been proven in a court of law. Bey died of colon cancer Sept. 30, 2003, before the case went to trial.

But a review of Saleda’s systematic investigation, the sworn testimony of four women who said Bey abused them, and hundreds of birth, police, court and county records, as well as interviews with at least a dozen people knowledgeable about the events, indicate that Bey had sex with children for years.

Authorities defend their years of inaction by pointing out that they were rarely told about Bey’s attacks on women and girls. When they were told, witnesses often wouldn’t testify. And in some cases complaints were raised with an agency that said it wasn’t its job to investigate.

But some of the women believe it was mainly Bey’s reputation as a powerful political figure in Oakland that protected him.

“The public image of political connections between the county of Alameda and Mr. Bey aided him in concealing a life of sexual assault against minors and vulnerable women,” Lathrop attorney David Washington wrote to the Alameda County board of supervisors in 2003 on behalf of three women who claimed Bey sexually assaulted them when they were children.

Bey’s concealed life ended in 2002, when Jane Doe 1 went to the Oakland police department for help. Doe 1’s name, and the names of other witnesses in the case, have not been released because of the sensitive nature of their allegations.

Doe 1 had been molested by Bey for 10 years as a child, she later testified, and she bore him three children when she was a minor, confirmed by DNA tests.

But on June 20, 2002, 14 years after she escaped the bakery, Doe 1, then 34, learned that Bey had molested their own teenage daughter. That very day, she went to the police department in downtown Oakland, ...