He was born March 13, 1944, as Warren Tartaglia in
Mt. Vernon, New York. His maternal grandfather, Harry Frank, was the first son of a
rabbi and his maternal grandmother was Ida Frank. Ida and Harry Frank were the parents of Ruth. Ruth married Warren's father Vincent Tartaglia, and became Ruth Frank Tartaglia. She almost died from post-partum bleeding at his birth and was in the hospital for a month, too sick to care for him, while Warren was in an incubator, for almost a month. Tartaglia graduated from Mt. Vernon's A.B. Davis High School where he was friends with
Mike Maggid Bey and other future MOC founders. His friend Mike Maggid was the official photographer for the Noble Order of Moorish Sufis. When he enrolled at
N.Y.U. (
Washington Square), Tartaglia ran a temple there and became the head of Orissa Province (New York State). His friend Ghulam El Fatah, aka Gregory M. Foster, would head Temple #14 in Newark, N.J., and be Governor of Behar Province (New Jersey). Tartaglia was also responsible for the chartering of Noble Order Temples 7, 22, and 23. Later, in 1965, some initiates of those temples would start the Moorish Orthodox Church at
Columbia University. The
Sultan Rafi Sharif Bey, brought him into the Noble Order of Moorish Sufis in Baltimore in 1959 after being introduced by a mutual friend and Noble Order member — his cousin's friend Jane Raquel Jacobs (Yacoubi El). Tartaglia was 15 or 16 at this point and learned about Hassan Sabah and the
Hashshasheen Ismaili Dervish Order. Like the Bey and Bey's father, Tartaglia was a jazz musician and shared interests in worker rights. In November 1965, he collapsed into a coma in a NYC city park, was handcuffed, and was taken to a hospital where he died ten days later. Today he is memorialized by having NOTMS Temple #2 named Walid al-Taha Memorial Temple. An obituary was published in the
New York Times on November 18, 1965. ==References==