Steven “Steve” McBee Sr. made his first appearance on season 2 of The McBee Dynasty — seven episodes in — after the patriarch remained largely offscreen while weathering an FBI investigation.
During the Monday, August 11, episode of the hit Bravo series, Steve appeared on the show for the first time this season after reuniting with his sons in Nashville. Steven Jr., Jesse, Cole and Brayden were joined by Galyna Saltkovska, who previously dated their father before he struck up a romance with her friend Masha.
“Seeing my dad for the first time [in a while] is obviously amazing,” Jesse said in a confessional. “I miss him and I miss hanging out with him.”
Steve revealed that he hadn’t seen his sons “for months.”
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Steve originally played a large role on the show when season 1 aired on Peacock. The first season, which concluded in 2024, ended with McBee Farming Operations failing to secure a venture capital loan. As a result, Steve chose to step away and left McBee Farm & Cattle to Steven Jr. to handle.
Season 2 moved to Bravo earlier this summer, and most of the McBee family continued to film. Steve, however, was missing for several episodes before Steven Jr. confirmed that his dad was being investigated by the FBI.
“We’ve leaned into family. We take it day by day,” Steven Jr. exclusively told Us Weekly in July. “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.’”
He added: “The hard part about it is it’s so unknown. We don’t know what it’s going to look like, so we’re preparing. We’re eating dinner together as a family with my dad, including my mom driving up to the farm three to four nights a week, enjoying the time with the grand babies. Just really cherishing time as a family because we don’t know what it’s going to look like afterwards.”
Jesse recalled learning about the scandal on screen. “It was a shell shock just seeing the weight that Steven had been [dealing with],” he shared with Us at the time. “It made a lot of things make a lot more sense, just the way that Steven was stressed out and we were trying to figure out why we thought we knew all of his stresses, and obviously he was holding that in and bearing that weight on his shoulders.”
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In November 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office Western District of Missouri announced in a press release that Steve was charged with one count of federal crop insurance fraud. Steve was accused of making a false report to an insurance provider in 2018, where he underreported his “corn crop by approximately 674,812 bushels” and “his total 2018 soybean crop by approximately 155,833 bushels,” per the DOJ.
Steve allegedly received more than $2.6 million in federal crop insurance benefits plus an additional $552,000 in federal crop insurance premium subsidies after providing the false numbers. He was also accused of committing fraud in 2019 and 2020 when Steve allegedly misrepresented that his soybean crops were “the first crop in certain fields” when he was also using the same space to grow wheat.
That same month, Steve pleaded guilty for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar fraud scam using federal crop insurance. According to the press release, Steve signed a plea deal where he agreed to pay restitution that will be determined by the court. He waived his right to a grand jury and is currently facing up to 30 years in a federal prison without parole. His sentencing is slated for September.
The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys airs on Bravo Mondays at 9 p.m. ET.
