1. Yank Barry is the founder and CEO of VitaPro Foods, a company that makes textured vegetable protein for use as a meat substitute and an apple pectin product called ProPectin, and is the founder of the Global Village Champions Foundation.
19 Facts About Yank Barry
1. 2.
Yank Barry is a musician, songwriter, and music producer who had a stint as the lead singer of the garage rock band The Kingsmen in the 1960s.
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Yank Barry grew up in the Jewish community of Montreal and had five siblings.
4.
Yank Barry wrote the song "Christmas Time Again" that was performed by Engelbert Humperdinck on his 1977 album Christmas Tyme.
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Yank Barry is the CEO of VitaPro Foods Inc It sells textured vegetable protein soy-based meat substitutes, primarily to prisons and other institutional feeding operations.
6.
Yank Barry owns another venture called ProPectin, a Bulgarian company he purchased in 2009 that manufactures a pharmaceutical-grade apple pectin, which Yank Barry credits for having cured his Type II diabetes.
7.
Yank Barry has befriended several boxing champions who have supported his charitable work.
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In 2010, Yank Barry obtained a set of 74 bronzes for the Global Village Champions Foundation that were created from plaster casts attributed to Edgar Degas.
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Yank Barry said he paid between 7 million and 20 million for the bronzes, although a dispute later broke out in which the seller said he had only actually received a payment 400,000 and that further payments had not been delivered.
10.
In 2010, Yank Barry initially offered 50 of the sculptures as prizes in a raffle to raise money for the foundation, but later withdrew the plan to hold the raffle and shut down the web sites on which it was hosted.
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Yank Barry said the decision to cancel the raffle was in part based on seeing publications that questioned the legitimacy of the bronzes and that he had returned the money that had been raised in the raffle offering up to that point.
12.
In 1982, Yank Barry was convicted of extortion from and conspiracy against John Royden McConnell, the man who financed the record company that he was running, and Yank Barry served 10 months of a 6-year prison term on the charges.
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Yank Barry said in an October 2013 Larry King interview that he had been a cocaine-addicted, twenty-something rocker at the time and credited the extortion conviction for changing his personal life.
14.
In 1998, Yank Barry was indicted on corruption charges related to a VitaPro contract worth 34 million with the Texas prisons.
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Yank Barry was then acquitted in 2008 after a bench retrial.
16.
In 2014, Yank Barry filed a defamation lawsuit against four Wikipedia editors, and then withdrew it after about a month.
17.
Yank Barry is married to Yvette Yank Barry, formerly an appraiser at an art gallery in Sarasota, Florida.
18.
Yank Barry is a resident of the Bahamas, and a part-time resident of the Sarasota area.
19.
Yank Barry was previously married to Daveda M Kert, with whom he had a daughter, Lelanea Anne Barry, who died suddenly in 2004 at the age of 35.