Washtenaw County Gave $1.2 Million to a Group Called Supreme Felons to Stop Crime. Crime Went Up 56% Where It Operated. The CEO Paid Himself $90K. The Records Are Still Sealed.

The county's largest community violence intervention grant went to an organization whose president murdered an Eastern Michigan University student, whose co-founder is a registered sex offender, and whose grant application contained fabricated school partnerships. Commissioners voted unanimously. The record came out months later. They kept defending it anyway.

In July 2022, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to give $1.2 million in federal pandemic relief money to an organization called Supreme Felons, Inc. The vote was framed as an investment in community violence intervention — paying people with "lived experience" in the criminal justice system to interrupt violence before it happened in the county's most affected neighborhoods.

The lived experience was real. Supreme Felons' president had murdered a 24-year-old Eastern Michigan University student. Its co-founder was a registered sex offender. Its grant application claimed partnerships with two local school districts that did not exist. It had never filed a federal tax return.

Not one commissioner asked about any of it before voting yes.

The Vote

Supreme Felons gave three different accounts of its own founding, depending on the audience. Its website credits Billy Cole, Bryan Foley, and Jeannette Haddenen as co-founders in 2019. An August 2022 proposal to the Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority lists Alan Fuqua as president and Cole as vice president. The proposal that went to the county in April 2022 lists Cole alone as founder. Fuqua — the registered sex offender who legally incorporated the nonprofit with the State of Michigan in May 2020 — is the version county commissioners never saw.

The proposal that did reach commissioners claimed partnerships with Ypsilanti Public Schools and the Washtenaw Intermediate School District. Both were confirmed false via FOIA request. Neither district has any record of a partnership with Supreme Felons.

Cole — convicted of murder and armed robbery, sentenced to life in prison, and paroled in August 2019 — signed the county contract and every subsequent fund request. At the time commissioners voted, he was on parole and simultaneously employed by the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office as a community outreach worker, supervised by Derrick Jackson, the Sheriff's Director of Community Engagement, who co-authored Supreme Felons' grant application alongside him.

The Money

The county began disbursing funds in January 2023. Supreme Felons reported $493,279 in revenue for fiscal year 2023 on its first IRS Form 990 since incorporating in 2020 — filed in November 2024, years late. Of that, Cole took home $82,295 in executive compensation. The following year his pay rose to $90,456, even as the organization's total revenue essentially flatlined at $504,143.

On May 15, 2023, the IRS revoked Supreme Felons' nonprofit status entirely, for failing to file required returns for three consecutive years. The county kept paying anyway — in apparent violation of the contract's own terms, which required the organization maintain nonprofit status as a condition of continued funding.

Add up Supreme Felons' reported revenue across both fiscal years and it comes to $997,422 — roughly $200,000 short of the full $1.2 million the county approved. The Ypsilantian could not reconcile that gap using the records available. It may reflect disbursement timing the 990s don't capture cleanly, or gaps in the organization's own filings its board has never explained. Absent new documentation, that particular figure may simply never square.

Alan Fuqua's status after his sex-offender record became public is similarly unresolved. Prior reporting indicates he was removed from Supreme Felons' public-facing leadership once his record was exposed, but no public document establishes when that happened, at whose direction, or whether Fuqua — like Derrick Jackson has been alleged to do from inside the Sheriff's Office — has continued to exert influence over the organization from outside its official leadership roster. The Ypsilantian could not confirm this either way. If you have direct knowledge of Fuqua's current role, or lack of one, contact tips@theypsilantian.com. We will not print your name without your permission.

The Record

Crime in the two Ypsilanti zip codes Supreme Felons was funded to serve — 48197 and 48198 — did not go down during the grant period. It went up. Violent crime rose 56% and firearm offenses rose 83% between 2022 and 2024, according to the Washtenaw County Sheriff's own public data dashboard. Those two zip codes account for roughly 75% of all verified crime in Washtenaw County — a share that has not meaningfully changed.

Asked about the numbers, Cole's response, per prior reporting, was to refer questions to his lawyer. Supreme Felons has separately sued The Ann Arbor Independent to block release of public records related to the organization.

In August 2023 — ten months after Cole's and Fuqua's criminal records had already become public through reporting — four county commissioners appeared at a Ypsilanti Charter Township board meeting to defend an organization connected to Supreme Felons: Annie Somerville (D-6, whose district includes Ypsilanti directly), Caroline Sanders (D-4), Justin Hodge (D-5), and Crystal Lyte (D-2). Township attorney Doug Winters, who has separately criticized the county's handling of violent offenders, put it this way at the time:

The Foley Question

Bryan Foley has identified himself publicly — including in an April 25, 2026 Facebook post tagging Billy Cole directly and using first-person plural language ("we," "us," "our") throughout to describe Supreme Felons' finances and operations — as a representative of the organization. He addressed the Board of Commissioners in a managing capacity on July 6, 2022, one meeting before the $1.2 million vote, to advocate for the grant, and presented Supreme Felons' work to the Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority board in August 2022, one month after the grant was approved.

Foley is now a candidate for Ypsilanti's Ward 1 City Council seat in the August 4 Democratic primary, running against incumbent Me'Chelle King. He continues to serve on the Washtenaw County Public Safety Millage Advisory Committee, which advises on the same category of community violence intervention funding that went to Supreme Felons.

Reached for comment on July 13, 2026, Foley gave four different responses over the course of one evening, none of which answered a simple, repeated question: when did he end his affiliation with Supreme Felons? He first denied the affiliation outright: "I am not with S.F.I." Asked when he left, he shifted to acknowledging past affiliation and citing his candidacy as the reason for stepping back, without a date. Asked again, he called the exchange an honor and offered a full interview — contingent on it taking place after the August 4 primary. Presented directly with a May 16, 2026 photo of himself in Supreme Felons apparel working alongside Cole — weeks after his own stated timeline would place him already departed — Foley did not address the photo. Instead he wrote that he could not give "the precise date the grant ended," pointing to when the county's ARPA Community Priority Funds were spent rather than when his own involvement ended, and referred back to his April 25 Facebook post as containing "everything" a reader would want to know.

The question of when Foley's personal affiliation with Supreme Felons ended remains unanswered. Public photos from his own account — dated May 16 and June 30, 2026, both well after his April 20, 2026 candidacy filing — are the most recent documented evidence of his association with the organization and its president.

The University of Michigan Report: What It Says, What It Omits, and How Supreme Felons Is Using It

On April 25, 2026, Foley posted a lengthy defense of Supreme Felons on Facebook, tagging Cole. The post was a response to what he called "purposeful falsehoods, lies, misinformation, misrepresentations" from critics, journalists, podcasters, public officials, and "a banker." His evidence was a 73-page impact evaluation produced by the University of Michigan's Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being — the same report whose pages he attached to the post.

"Not in our words," Foley wrote, "but from the highly qualified professionals from the University of Michigan, who were hired to directly oversee that taxpayer money was not misspent, misused or engaged in acts of malfeasance."

That is not what the report says. And there is a great deal the report does not say at all.

The Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being was hired by Washtenaw County — the same county that gave Supreme Felons $1.2 million — and paid roughly $1 million to evaluate how the county's own grant recipients were performing. Its mandate, per the university's own project description, was to produce "Impact Statements for each grantee which they can share with the community." That is a marketing-document function. It is not a forensic audit, and the evaluators were not tasked with running criminal-background investigations on grantee leadership. Every member of the evaluation team was paid from the same pool of ARPA money that funded Supreme Felons.

The University of Michigan's 73-page report does not contain the words "murder," "sex offender," "parole," "IRS revocation," "fabricated," or "crime increase" anywhere in its text. The evaluators recorded Supreme Felons' self-reported outputs — 885 community interactions, 109 conflict interventions, 500 returning citizens served — without independently verifying those figures against any external data source, cross-referencing crime statistics in the target zip codes, or reviewing the backgrounds of organizational leadership.

The report's own conclusion undercuts Foley's reading of it: the evaluators warned that county funding "abruptly ended" in December 2024 with no sustainability plan, and that the county "risks losing the nascent successes" it had incubated. That is not a vindication. It is a request for more money, written in academic language.

Foley's post also references "unsuccessful suits filed against us in the State of Michigan's Courts, including the Appellate Courts of Law" — an acknowledgment, in his own words, that litigation involving Supreme Felons has proceeded to the appellate level, and that he considers himself party to it ("against us"). His reference to critics including "a banker" has never been publicly explained.

What They Said

The Ypsilantian sent right-of-reply requests by email on July 13, 2026 to Billy Cole and Supreme Felons Inc., to Bryan Foley, and to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners' communications office, in advance of publication.

The requests to Foley and to the Board of Commissioners' office both failed to deliver by email — automated bounce notifications were received for both addresses. The Ypsilantian followed up with Foley directly and publicly, tagging him in a Facebook post on July 13 outlining the same questions, visible to his network of roughly 2,000 connections.

Foley responded publicly, at length, over four separate comments. Asked directly and repeatedly when he ended his affiliation with Supreme Felons, he did not, at any point, provide a date. His final response conflated the timing of the organization's grant spending with the timing of his own departure, and directed The Ypsilantian back to his own April 25, 2026 Facebook post — the same post in which he used "us" and "we" to describe Supreme Felons' operations.

Billy Cole and Supreme Felons Inc. did not respond to The Ypsilantian's July 13 request by the Friday, July 17 deadline, or at any point before publication. The Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners' communications office never received the request — the email bounced — and no response arrived through any other channel before publication. As of publication, no reply has been received from Cole, Supreme Felons Inc., or the Board of Commissioners' office.