Yank Barry

Barry was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1948 to Arthur Falovitch and Ruth (née Reznick) Falovitch-Pickholtz. He grew up in the Jewish community of Montreal and had five siblings.

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.

During 1968–1969, while the main band lineup was on hiatus, Barry was the lead singer of the garage rock band The Kingsmen (a band most well known for their 1963 raucous hit rendition of Richard Berry's "Louie Louie").

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

In 1972, Barry ran a record company.

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.

Barry is married to Yvette Barry, formerly an appraiser at an art gallery in Sarasota, Florida. He is a resident of the Bahamas, and a part-time resident of the Sarasota area.

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.

Barry founded and heads the Global Village Champions Foundation. The foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States, with self-reported net assets for 2016 of about US$7,000 and gross receipts of about US$3,000. The foundation was especially active in 2013, for which it reported net assets of about US$226,000 and gross receipts of about US$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 and had spent more than US$1 million feeding and housing Syrian refugees in Bulgaria during 2012–2013. The foundation said it had supplied more than 1 billion meals to the needy by early 2015, based on its shipping documents and estimated portion sizes.

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. After Barry's involvement in disaster relief in the Philippines, his foundation work also received support from Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.

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 US$3 million.

In 1982, Barry was convicted of extortion from and conspiracy against John Royden McConnell, the man who financed the record company that he was running, and Barry served 10 months of a 6-year prison term on the charges.

In a 1982 civil case, a separate court ruled that Barry had extorted money from McConnell, requiring a financial award of C$285,000. In 1987 he declared bankruptcy, voiding the award. 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 US$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. He was then acquitted in 2008 after a bench retrial. Barry said the charges were politically motivated.

In 2014, Barry filed a defamation lawsuit against four named Wikipedia editors and other anonymous editors ("Does 1–50") who he said had defamed him in articles on Wikipedia. He then withdrew the suit after about a month.