McBee Dynasty’s Steve McBee Sentenced to 2 Years in Prison for Fraud

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 four separate times.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen R. Bough ordered McBee to two years in prison and an additional two years on supervised release, according to court documents obtained by Us.

The former McBee Farm & Cattle CEO will also have to pay $4,022,124 in restitution for his crimes. According 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 first season followed Steve and his four 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 full of twists and turns, including Steve’s romance 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 making a false report to his 2018 insurance provider, Rain and Hill, underreporting his “corn crop by approximately 674,812 bushels” and “his total 2018 soybean crop by approximately 155,833 bushels,” per the DOJ.

He also allegedly received more than $2.6 million in federal crop insurance benefits plus an additional $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 first crop in certain fields” in 2019 while using the same land to grow wheat. The 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 new insurance policy after planting corn past the last planting date that year.

Steve, for his part, pleaded guilty in November 2024. He confessed that his farm sold “more than 1.2 million bushels of corn and nearly 416,000 bushels of soybeans” to another party in 2018, according to the DOJ press release.

He proceeded to sign a plea deal where Steve agreed to pay restitution after the government reportedly lost more than $4 million at the hands of Steve.

Steve’s plea served as an admission of guilt 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, but it was changed 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 money judgement” that Steve still owes.

The court order cited a U.S. code that allows them to seek forfeiture “of all property, real and personal, constituting, or derived from, proceeds traceable to the offenses, directly or indirectly, as a result of the violations alleged.” The filing explained that “The United States has located assets belonging to the defendant Steve A. McBee that were not directly obtained through the offenses alleged in the Information.”

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 by 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 is still ongoing. We’re hoping to have it wrapped up and have some finality to it before the end of the year. That’s the goal, just so we can move on and say, ‘OK, we’ve got this figured out. We can start life again now.’”