Missouri reality TV star sentenced to prison for fraud & ordered to pay millions

Reality TV personality Steve McBee Sr., the family patriarch from the series The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys, based in northwest Missouri, has been sentenced to two years in prison.

McBee admitted to receiving federal crop insurance benefits he was not entitled to as part of a plea agreement, and was ordered to pay out a total of about $7.2 million to the federal government as part of his sentence.

McBee pleaded guilty to one count of federal crop insurance fraud last year in U.S. District Court in Kansas City and was sentenced Thursday. He was ordered to surrender on Dec. 1 to begin serving his sentence.

McBee was ordered to pay back about $3.2 million, the total amount of federal crop insurance benefits and subsidies he fraudulently received, according to prosecutors, and to pay about $4 million more in restitution to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency, which provides crop insurance for farmers.

According to his plea agreement, the case focused on improper insurance benefits McBee received by making false claims during three farming seasons, including by underreporting harvest amounts on forms for the 2018 season, misrepresenting “double cropping” in the 2019 season and by providing inaccurate planting dates for crops in the 2020 season.

An attorney for McBee did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

On Instagram on Thursday, McBee posted a pair of quotes, one from President Theodore Roosevelt and the other from playwright William Shakespeare.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,” McBee wrote to his 118,000 followers, quoting the Bard.

In a sentencing memorandum, McBee’s attorneys asked for a sentence of supervised release, casting him as a hard-working family man who was the victim of success. They wrote that between 2016 and 2020, the family’s farming operations grew dramatically to about 40,000 acres owned and leased with crops in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas and that operations were “haphazard” and poorly organized under McBee.

Prosecutors asked for 41 months in prison, saying he had been “motivated by pure greed” and lined his own pockets with millions of dollars he did not earn at the expense of taxpayers.

The USA Network/Bravo drama has featured McBee, his family and their farm outside Gallatin, Missouri, about an hour north of Kansas City. The last episode of the show’s second season, which aired Sept. 1, shows McBee’s sons mulling the future and a FBI investigation ahead of his sentencing hearing.

“I have no idea what the future holds with my dad’s situation,” son Steve McBee Jr. said at the end of the episode. “There’s a lot of tough times ahead. My end goal is to make sure that this farm is here, not only for our kids, but our kids’ kids.”

The show, which is streaming on Peacock, was recently renewed for a third season.

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