Yank Barry

Yank Barry (born 29 January 1948 as Gerald Barry Falovitch) is a Canadian businessman and musician. He 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, to Arthur Falovitch and Ruth (née Reznick) Falovitch-Pickholtz. He grew up in the Jewish community of Montreal and had five siblings.

Musical career Barry was singer and bass player of a band called The Footprints during 1966–1968 using the stage name Gerald Barry. The band released three singles through Columbia and Capitol Records before breaking up.

In 1971, he recorded a rock opera entitled The Diary of Mr. Gray.

Barry wrote the song "Christmas Time Again" that was performed by Engelbert Humperdinck on his 1977 album Christmas Tyme.

In 1979, he produced performances of the 1974 sexually explicit musical play Let My People Come, in Montreal.

VitaPro 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.

Barry developed VitaPro in 1989 or 1990. It was originally a South African venture.

When asked about VitaPro earnings, Barry said: "My company is terribly private in a bunch of countries. I'm a resident of the Bahamas. I don't pay tax. I'm not American. Let's say we do over a billion dollars in business. How much I earn is up to me. I give it to kids. I made a deal with God that whatever I save in tax, I give to kids."

Barry also owns another venture called ProPectin, a Bulgarian company he purchased in 2009 that manufactures a pharmaceutical-grade apple pectin, which Barry credits for having cured his Type II diabetes. The foundation was especially active in 2013, for which it reported net assets of about 226,000 and gross receipts of about 835,000. The foundation, which is funded by the profits from his VitaPro food business, said it had supplied 772 million meals to the needy worldwide by April 2012

He has befriended several boxing champions who have supported his charitable work. Retired champion boxer Evander Holyfield became Global Village Champions's "Goodwill Ambassador" in 2013. Retired boxer Muhammad Ali was also his personal friend and worked with Barry on some of his humanitarian projects.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post via Skype in July 2014, Barry said that he has provided lodging in Bulgaria for 782 refugees from the Middle East, mostly from Syria, in two hotels he secured for 3 million.

Degas bronzes In 2010, Barry obtained a set of 74 bronzes for the Global Village Champions Foundation that were created from plaster casts attributed to Edgar Degas. The legitimacy of the plasters, which were reportedly discovered in a foundry (Fonderie Valsuani) outside of Paris, has been questioned by experts, and some have intentionally omitted them in their published description of Degas's body of work. Barry said he paid between 7 million and 20 million for the bronzes, (The dispute was later settled under undisclosed terms.) Conditioned on the presumption that the bronzes were fully authenticated and made from Degas's own plasters, the bronzes were estimated as being worth 37 million by a New York dealer in an appraisal Barry obtained in 2011 which the appraiser said was intended for Barry's private use only. In 2010, 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.

In a 1982 civil case, a separate court ruled that Barry had extorted money from McConnell, requiring a financial award of C$285,000. 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.

In 1998, Barry was indicted on corruption charges related to a VitaPro contract worth 34 million with the Texas prisons. In 1999, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the VitaPro contract with the Texas prisons was invalid. After a trial in 2001, he was initially declared guilty, but the verdict was thrown out by a US district court judge and a new trial was ordered in 2007. Barry said the charges were politically motivated. He then withdrew the suit after about a month.

Personal life Barry is married to Yvette Barry, formerly an appraiser at an art gallery in Sarasota, Florida. He 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.