Shaman Shu said that a spiritual trip to Costa Rica gave him the idea to open a trippy church in Detroit.
When he first went back to Michigan, he put forward a vote measure to make using magic mushrooms in the city less illegal. It was passed by a large majority in 2021. Then he bought the old Bushnell Congregational Church and turned it into Soul Tribes International Ministries. There, psilocybin mushrooms were used as a holy meal.
Shaman Shu told the Detroit Metro Times in 2023, “We’re a small indigenous belief system that believes we can heal the world with these techniques and our plants.” This was just a few days before the city tried to shut down the church.
But the church was only one part of Shaman Shu’s big psychedelic plan. According to the FBI, the plan also included financial theft.
Shaman Shu, whose real name is Bobby Shumake Japhia but was born Robert Shumake, was charged with securities fraud by the SEC and the criminal justice system on Wednesday. He is accused of running a pump-and-dump scheme involving a small-cap stock in a company he said would become a major producer of psychedelic mushrooms for medical use.
Prosecutors say Shumake got $8 million from the plan by using fake press releases to hype up the prospects of the company, Minerco Inc., after he had bought 1 billion shares in secret and then sold them for a huge profit. Prosecutors say Shumake also hid his role in the business to hide the fact that he had a criminal record for mortgage theft.
The business also came out with its own coin, which it called the Shru Coin.
An agent for Shumake wouldn’t say anything.
The charges are the latest in a long line of legal problems for Shumake. In the past 15 years, he has been linked to a number of scams, such as the ones that brought down former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Ebony magazine. Shumake also went to jail for mortgage fraud, is being charged by the SEC for a cannabis investment scheme, and fought with the police over hundreds of thousands of dollars they thought were drug money.
People first heard of Shumake around the middle of the 2000s, when he was working as a real estate and mortgage salesman in Detroit. He also said he was an entrepreneur doing good works in Africa.
Around that time, Shumake received over $70 million in public pension money for an investment in real estate. This was one of several pension deals that prosecutors would look into, which led to Kilpatrick’s conviction for corruption and his sentence of nearly 30 years in prison in 2013.
Shumake was never charged, but it turned out that he lied to the city’s pension board about his credentials and didn’t tell them that Fifth Third Bank FITB 0.97% was suing him for allegedly being involved in a $10 million mortgage fraud scam. In 2008, he made a deal with the bank to pay $750,000.
Kilpatrick’s sentence was commuted in 2021 after Shumake and others sent a letter to then-President Donald Trump.
Between those times, Shumake has been in trouble with the police more than once.
In 2016, he was caught in Northern California when police found him with a lot of marijuana and $121,000 in cash. They thought he was there to buy drugs. He was later found not guilty, and the money was given back to him.
Shumake pleaded guilty in 2017 to stealing from customers of a mortgage-assistance business he owned. Prosecutors said he told them he would help people who were in danger of losing their homes but instead took their money. Initially, he was given probation, but he broke the rules of his sentence and had to spend 18 months in jail.
In 2018, Shumake’s more than $250,000 cash was taken by federal agents after a friend of his was caught at an airport with the cash “packaged in a manner and in denominations consistent with drug trafficking,” according to prosecutors. He claimed that the money was for his charity’s work to build homes in Africa. They never charged him, but after a long court case, the judge said the government could keep most of the money.
Then, in 2020, he showed up in the middle of a nasty fight over who would run Ebony, a famous Black media brand. In that time, Ebony’s main debtholder filed the magazine for bankruptcy to take control after learning that Willard Jackson, the CEO and main owner of the company, had secretly brought in Shumake as an investment without the board’s or the lender’s permission.
The lender said that Jackson and Shumake had set up several separate businesses using the Ebony name without approval from the board. These businesses included Ebony Entertainment LLC, Ebony Capital Partners, and the Ebony Foundation.
The next year, Shumake and Jackson were charged by the SEC for a cannabis business they had started with crowdsourced money. Shumake’s part was said to have been hidden to hide his criminal past. Authorities said they stole $2 million they said they were going to use for cannabis-related real estate deals but instead did other things with the money, like helping Ebony stay alive. Jackson later made a deal with the SEC.
Around this time, Shumake started using ayahuasca, a drug used by indigenous faith doctors for spiritual journeys, to change his identity. He started going by the name Shaman Shu after his trip to Costa Rica.
Shumake told them that he wanted to wake up people in Detroit in this way.
“I wanted freedom for the people.” It’s too expensive for everyone to go to Costa Rica. “I want people in cities to be able to get it,” he told the Detroit Metro Times.
He said that one of his goals was to help other people with the second chance he got after being convicted of a crime.
He talked about his background and said, “Thank God for America that we live in a system where we get second chances. I used my second chance to turn around and heal our community.” “That is what I am doing.”
