aka: Tony Alamo Christian Ministries
Tony Alamo is a well-known evangelist who, after a radical conversion to
Christianity, founded what is now called Tony Alamo Christian Ministries with his
wife, Susan, later establishing its headquarters in Dyer (Crawford County).
Widely regarded as a cult, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries has been at the
center of a number of lawsuits and government actions, and its leader has been
jailed on a variety of charges, including income tax evasion and the theft of
his late wife’s body.
Much of the information on Alamo’s early, pre-conversion life is spurious at
best, on account of Alamo’s constant exaggerations of his importance and/or
sinfulness. He was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman on September 20, 1934, in Joplin,
Missouri. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Romania who, Alamo claims, had
been dance instructor for Rudolf Valentino. When he was a teenager, Alamo left
Joplin for the West Coast. He apparently adopted the name Marcus Abad for some
time and achieved some modicum of success as a “big band crooner” in Los
Angeles, California. Alamo went on to own a health club and work in the music
industry. He claims that he recorded a hit record single in the early 1960s,
“Little Yankee Girl,” and that he was asked to manage musical acts including
the Beatles, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones; there is no evidence for any of
this.
In 1966, after serving jail time for a weapons charge, Alamo married Edith
Opal Horn from Alma (Crawford County), also of Jewish descent. Nine years his
senior, Edith Horn, a two-time divorcée who already had a daughter, had moved
to Hollywood to become an actress but ended up supporting herself partly by
scamming churches into believing her to be a missionary in need of money. Some
sources say that they changed their names to Tony and Susan Alamo after their
marriage, though Tony Alamo has claimed that he changed his own name earlier to
mimic the Italian-American singers who were popular at the time.
According to Alamo, while he was in a meeting at a Beverly Hills investment
firm, Jesus came to him and told him to preach the second coming of Christ.
After both he and Susan converted to Christianity, they established the Music
Square Church and began a Hollywood street ministry, passing out religious
tracts and preaching especially to drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes.
Their ministry was part of the “Jesus People” movement, in which many of those
involved in the counterculture of the 1960s began proclaiming a spiritual
transformation and an allegiance to Jesus.
Alamo’s Pentecostal theology includes a virulent paranoia and extreme
anti-Catholicism that places the Vatican as the real power broker behind the
White House, the United Nations, and the media. The various publications his
ministry offers, such as The Vatican Moscow Washington Alliance,
detail his conspiracy theories. Alamo has also claimed that UFOs are divine
messengers from heaven and signs of the end times.
Communal living was a staple of the Music Square Church. The church quickly
expanded its holdings, buying several businesses and establishing a compound in
nearby Saugus. Members usually lived in a commune and worked at an Alamo-owned
business, turning over much of their salaries to the church. With the labor of
their followers, the Alamos turned their church into a hefty financial empire,
even as many members had to scavenge food from supermarket dumpsters and were
forbidden from flushing the toilets more than every two or three days.
In 1975, the Alamos purchased land in Dyer, near Alma, and there established
the main branch of the Music Square Church, which later was called the Holy
Alamo Christian Church Consecrated before its present name was adopted. At one
time, Alamo owned as many as twenty-nine businesses in nearby Alma, including
Alamo Western Wear, as well as Alamo Restaurant and Alamo Discount Grocery.
Again, followers worked in these businesses for practically nothing. Soon, the
organization established yet another compound in Nashville, Tennessee.
In 1976, the U.S. Department of Labor brought charges against Alamo for
violations of the Fair Labor Standard Act. Alamo had not been issuing checks to
his employees and offered only the most menial financial recompense, leading
some disgruntled followers to begin reporting his activities. He lost the suit
as well as an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985, the same year that the
IRS retroactively revoked the tax exempt status for his church for the years
1977 to 1980. Alamo’s attorneys kept the issue before the courts from 1985 to
1992, arguing that church-owned enterprises were exempt from federal income
taxes because they were churches in disguise. Special Trial Judge Larry L.
Nameroff ruled, however, that the organization was essentially “operated for
Tony’s and Susan’s private benefit.” On June 8, 1994, he was convicted on one
charge of filing a false income tax return and three charges of failing to file
a tax return. The IRS demanded $10.2 million in back taxes and seized some of
the church’s property for an auction; in addition, the judgment against Alamo
showed him owing another $5 million to former church members for unpaid work.
Alamo quickly declared bankruptcy, and his related businesses collapsed. In September
1994, Alamo was sentenced by the Federal District Court for the Western
District of Tennessee to six years in the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana
(Miller County). In July 1998, he was transferred to a Texarkana halfway
house, from which he was released on December 8 of the same year.
While Alamo was tied up in the courts on federal tax evasion charges, other
allegations were levied against him from various quarters. Acting upon reports
of child abuse, on March 25, 1988, sheriff’s deputies raided the Saugus,
California, compound in order to reunite three boys with their natural fathers;
the fathers had been members of the Arkansas compound but had been
excommunicated. Their wives had remarried more loyal subjects of Alamo, and
their families had relocated to California. U.S. District Judge Morris Arnold,
finding that they had indeed been abused, later awarded damages to the boys in
question. Alamo claimed that he and his followers had no assets and were living
“hand to mouth”; he also apparently issued a death threat against Arnold,
though he was later acquitted of that charge. One of the fathers, Robert
Miller, had previously overseen the church’s trucking company and alleged that
Alamo had embezzled $100,000 from it. In 1990, Alamo failed to appear in court
to answer these charges and was ruled guilty in default.
Probably the strangest incident surrounding Tony Alamo Christian Ministries
has to do with the body of Susan Alamo, who died of cancer on April 8, 1982.
Tony Alamo quickly predicted that she would be resurrected and kept her
embalmed body on display at the Arkansas compound for approximately six months
before placing it in a mausoleum. In February 1991, Alamo ordered his followers
to vacate the Arkansas compound prior to a federal raid and to bring along the
body of Susan Alamo. A chancery court judge ordered Alamo to return the body in
1995 in response to a suit filed by Christhiaon Coie, Susan Alamo’s estranged
daughter. On July 23, 1998, after a three-year legal battle, his followers
brought the body to a funeral home in Van Buren (Crawford County). The
following month, Susan Alamo was re-interred in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Alamo’s various marriages are controversial and difficult to number.
Following Susan’s death, rumors spread that he had taken two fifteen-year-old
girls as “wives.” On June 23, 1984, he married Swedish native Birgitta
Gyllenhammar in Las Vegas, Nevada, though this marriage ended two years later;
she later claimed that Alamo wanted her to have plastic surgery to look like
Susan and that he regularly beat and drugged her. In the midst of his supposed
third marriage, a 1986 Arkansas Gazette report concluded that
Gyllenhammar had actually been Alamo’s sixth wife, as he had apparently been
married four times prior to Susan. Between 1986 and 1990, the preacher
remarried twice.
When Alamo was released from federal prison in 1998, he quickly reassumed
his status as the head of a now smaller Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, which
is currently headquartered in Miller
County, with branches in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Los Angeles. He
currently can be heard on over a dozen radio stations in the U.S. and more in
Africa, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. He has claimed that the government
actions against him were merely the machinations of Satan, and his followers
still attract controversy for distributing his printed literature across the
U.S. and beyond.
For additional information: Fisher, G. Richard, with M. Kurt Goedelman. “‘Remember the Alamo!’ The
Second Coming of Tony Alamo.” Personal Freedom Outreach. http://www.pfo.org/rememberalamo.htm
(accessed July 8, 2006).
Franke, Eric W. “A Brief History of the Alamo Christian Foundation.” New
England Institute of Religious Research. http://neirr.org/alamohist.htm
(accessed July 8, 2006).
McNeil, Betsy. “Nailing Tony Alamo.” This Rock 1 (October 1990).
Online at http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1990/9010fea1.asp
(accessed July 8, 2006).
“Tony Alamo.” Rick A. Ross Institute. http://www.rickross.com/groups/alamo.html
(accessed July 8, 2006).
Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. http://www.alamoministries.com/ (accessed July 15, 2006).
Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture _______________________________________________________________________
Enriquez, Sam. “Alamo Christian Ministries: Is He a Prophet, Promoter, or
Profiteer?” Los Angeles Times. July 11, 1993. Online at http://www.religionnewsblog.com/8506
(accessed July 8, 2006).
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