Steven “Steve” McBee Sr. has finally been sentenced for his part in a multimillion-dollar crop fraud scam after pleading guilty in 2024.
McBee, 52, was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Thursday, October 16, after his previous hearings were pushed back 4 separate times.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen R. Bough ordered McBee to 2 years in prison and an extra two years on supervised release, based on court documents obtained by Us.
The previous McBee Farm & Cattle CEO may even must pay $4,022,124 in restitution for his crimes. In response to the filing, McBee must self-surrender before 2 p.m. on Monday, December 1.
McBee gained public attention in early 2024 when he and his family made their reality TV debut on The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys. The primary season followed Steve and his 4 sons, Steven McBee Jr., Jesse McBee, Cole McBee and Brayden McBee, as they ran their farm and cattle company in Gallatin, Missouri.
While the show was stuffed with twists and turns, including Steve’s romance along with his company’s CFO Galyna Saltkovska — whom he had an affair with while married to his sons’ mother, Kristi McBee — it wasn’t until after the cameras stopped rolling that he found himself in real trouble.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office Western District of Missouri announced in a November 2024 press release that Steve had been charged with one count of federal crop insurance fraud following an FBI investigation into his dealings in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Steve was accused of constructing a false report back to his 2018 insurance provider, Rain and Hill, underreporting his “corn crop by roughly 674,812 bushels” and “his total 2018 soybean crop by roughly 155,833 bushels,” per the DOJ.
He also allegedly received greater than $2.6 million in federal crop insurance advantages plus an extra $552,000 in federal crop insurance premium subsidies following the false report.
The DOJ claimed that Steve also committed fraud in 2019 and 2020, which consisted of allegedly misrepresenting that his soybean crops were “the primary crop in certain fields” in 2019 while using the identical land to grow wheat. The federal government explained that by allegedly double cropping, Steve was “not entitled” to the insurance claim he later filed.
In 2020, Steve allegedly gave NAU Country Insurance “false plant dates” to fraudulently obtain a brand new insurance policy after planting corn past the last planting date that 12 months.
Steve, for his part, pleaded guilty in November 2024. He confessed that his farm sold “greater than 1.2 million bushels of corn and nearly 416,000 bushels of soybeans” to a different party in 2018, based on the DOJ press release.
He proceeded to sign a plea deal where Steve agreed to pay restitution after the federal government reportedly lost greater than $4 million by the hands of Steve.
Steve’s plea served as an request for forgiveness that he “engaged in fraudulent activity from 2018 to 2020 that caused an economic loss to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” the press release added.
Steve was initially set to be sentenced in March, however it was modified multiple times before landing on Thursday’s date. Following his fourth resentencing delay in September, Steve was ordered to relinquish three of his designer watches.
People reported last month that the watches — a Tag Heuer Formula 1 watch, a Tag Heuer Grand Carrera watch and a Rolex Daytona watch — were considered “substitute assets in partial satisfaction of the cash judgement” that Steve still owes.
The court order cited a U.S. code that enables them to hunt forfeiture “of all property, real and private, constituting, or derived from, proceeds traceable to the offenses, directly or not directly, because of this of the violations alleged.” The filing explained that “The US has positioned assets belonging to the defendant Steve A. McBee that were indirectly obtained through the offenses alleged within the Information.”
The McBee Dynasty’s Steven “Steve” McBee Sr. took a step back from the Bravo series during season 2, later revealing his FBI investigation was guilty. Because of this, his sons, Steven McBee Jr., Jesse McBee, Cole McBee and Brayden McBee, took over his responsibilities on their family farm in Missouri and in addition helmed their […]
Ahead of sentencing, McBee Dynasty fans watched as Steve’s sons learned of his FBI investigation during season 2 of the Bravo series.
“We’ve leaned into family. We take it day-to-day,” Steven, who took over as CEO of the farm amid his dad’s legal woes, exclusively told Us Weekly in July of the family’s mindset pre-sentencing. “The situation remains to be ongoing. We’re hoping to have it wrapped up and have some finality to it before the top of the 12 months. That’s the goal, just so we are able to move on and say, ‘OK, we’ve got this found out. We are able to start life again now.’”