Robert Shumake featured in scandals that brought down ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Ebony magazine. Now he's charged in a scheme involving a magic-mushroom stock.
Shaman Shu said his inspiration for opening a psychedelic church in Detroit came to him during a spiritual journey to Costa Rica.
When he first returned to Michigan, he proposed a ballot initiative to decriminalize the use of magic mushrooms in the city, which passed overwhelmingly in 2021. Then he acquired the historic Bushnell Congregation Church and transformed it into the Soul Tribes International Ministries, where psilocybin mushrooms served as part of a holy sacrament.
"We're a small indigenous belief system that believes we can heal the world with these techniques and our plants," Shaman Shu told the Detroit Metro Times in 2023 - just days before city officials moved to shut the church down.
But the church was just one part of Shaman Shu's grand psychedelic plan, which federal authorities say expanded into the realm of financial fraud.
On Wednesday, Shaman Shu, who was born Robert Shumake but recently changed his name to Bobby Shumake Japhia, was hit with criminal and SEC charges of securities fraud, for allegedly running a pump-and-dump scheme involving an obscure penny stock for company he claimed would become a major producer of psychedelic mushrooms to be used for therapeutic purposes.
Prosecutors say Shumake pocketed $8 million in the scheme by hyping up the prospects of the company, Minerco Inc., through phony press releases, after he had secretly acquired 1 billion shares which he later dumped for a huge profit. Shumake also obscured his role in the company to hide the fact that he had a criminal record for mortgage fraud, prosecutors allege.
The company also launched its own cryptocurrency called the Shru Coin.
An attorney for Shumake declined to comment.
The charges are the latest in a long history of legal entanglements for Shumake, who over the past 15 years has been tied to a variety of scandals including those that brought down former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Ebony magazine. Shumake has also served prison time for mortgage fraud, been hit with separate SEC charges for a cannabis investment scheme, and fought with authorities over hundreds of thousands of dollars of suspected drug money seized by the government.
Shumake first came into the public eye in the mid-2000s in Detroit as a real-estate and mortgage broker who also presented himself as an entrepreneur working on charitable projects in Africa.
Around that time, Shumake became the recipient of over $70 million in public-pension money for a real-estate investment - one of several pension deals that would fall under scrutiny from prosecutors and eventually lead to Kilpatrick's corruption conviction, for which he was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 30 years in prison.
Shumake was never charged, but it emerged that he had misrepresented his credentials to the city's pension board and had failed to disclose that he was being sued by Fifth Third Bank (FITB), which alleged he had played a role in a $10 million mortgage-fraud scheme. He settled with the bank in 2008 and agreed to pay $750,000.
In 2021, then-President Donald Trump commuted Kilpatrick's sentence in response to a petition submitted by Shumake and others.
In between, Shumake has had several other run-ins with the law.
In 2016, he was arrested in Northern California after being found carrying a large amount of marijuana and $121,000 in cash in what authorities alleged was a drug transaction. He was later acquitted and the money was returned.
In 2017, Shumake pleaded guilty to defrauding the customers of a mortgage-assistance business he ran, in which prosecutors alleged he promised to help people in threat of losing their homes but then just pocketed their money. He was initially sentenced to probation but violated the terms of his sentence and served 18 months in prison.
In 2018, federal agents seized more than $250,000 in cash belonging to Shumake after an associate of his was stopped at an airport carrying the money "packaged in a manner and in denominations consistent with drug trafficking," prosecutors alleged. Shumake insisted the money was for his charitable group to build homes in Africa. He was never charged, but after a years-long legal fight, a judge ruled that the government could keep most of the money.
Then, in 2020, he surfaced at the center of a bruising fight over control of the iconic Black media brand, Ebony. At the time, Ebony's primary debtholder forced the magazine into bankruptcy in order to seize control after discovering Shumake had been secretly brought in as an investor by the company's chief executive and principal owner, Willard Jackson, without the board's or the lender's approval.
The lender said it had discovered that Jackson and Shumake had created a number of subsidiary entities that used the Ebony name - such as Ebony Entertainment LLC, Ebony Capital Partners and the Ebony Foundation - without permission from the board.
The following year, Shumake and Jackson were hit with SEC charges related to a crowdfunded cannabis business they had started, although Shumake's role was allegedly obscured to hide his criminal past. Regulators accused them of taking $2 million they had raised purportedly for cannabis-related real-estate deals and instead using the money for other things, including helping keep Ebony afloat. Jackson later settled with the SEC.
It was around this time that Shumake began reinventing himself as Shaman Shu after his trip to Costa Rica, where he experimented with ayahuasca, a psychoactive concoction used by indigenous faith healers for spiritual journeys.
Shumake said he wanted to bring this kind of awakening to people living in Detroit.
"I wanted the people to have liberation. Everybody can't afford to go to Costa Rica. I want people to have access to it in urban areas," he told the Detroit Metro Times.
He said part of his mission was to take the second chance he received after his criminal conviction to help people.
"Thank God for America that we live in a system where we get second chances, and I used my second chance to turn around and heal our community," he said about his past. "That's what I'm doing."
-Lukas I. Alpert
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