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The Alamo Christian Foundation was an American cult which was founded in 1969 by Tony Alamo and his wife, Susan Alamo.[1][2] Susan Alamo died in April 1982.
After years of legal troubles during which he engaged in abusive behavior against his followers,[3] Alamo was convicted of 10 child rape offenses in 2009. He received a maximum sentence of 175 years and was imprisoned until his death in May 2017.
Tony Alamo (September 20, 1934 – May 2, 2017) was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman to a Jewish family in Joplin, Missouri.[1][2] He grew up there and he also went to local schools but later, he migrated to the West Coast.
By the 1960s, he had settled in Hollywood, where he performed as a pop singer under the names Mark Hoffman and Marcus Abad. Also, he claimed to be a music promoter[1] and owned the Little Mark, Alamo, and Talamo Records record labels.[4][5][6][7]
Susan Alamo (April 25, 1925 – April 8, 1982) was born Edith Opal HorninAlma, Arkansas. Twice married and with a daughter, she moved to Hollywood and attempted to become an actress.[8] Converting from JudaismtoChristianity, she became an itinerant evangelist before she met Hoffman.[4]
After the couple divorced their respective spouses, Hoffman and Horn got married during a ceremony which was performed in Las Vegas in 1966. They legally changed their names to Tony Alamo and Susan Alamo.[9]
Tony and Susan Alamo founded the Alamo Christian Foundation in 1969 in Hollywood, California.[10][11] The church became the subject of controversy, especially as its members were active in trying to recruit new members in Hollywood but their building was more isolated, located about an hour away.
It was frequently criticized for its manner of evangelization, which frequently involved requiring young members of the congregation to walk around Hollywood, inviting people to convert to Christianity. They would take them to the church in Agua Dulce – roughly an hour away – for evening services, consisting of a meeting and a meal. Many of these individuals chose to stay on to become Bible students and lay ministers.[11]
In 1976, the church relocated to Dyer, Arkansas, where Susan Alamo had been raised. There, in the small town which is located in the western part of the state, the church grew to several hundred members. It established printing facilities, a school, and a tabernacle. It also operated a drug rehabilitation facility.
Members of the church developed several businesses in the Alma area. As the church expanded, it established other churches in Nashville, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Miami Beach.
Alamo started a business of decorating denim jackets and airbrushing them with bright, colorful designs. Many Hollywood celebrities were seen wearing them, including Michael Jackson. He wore a modified leather Alamo jacket on the cover of his album Bad.[11]
The church's projects included Nashville's largest country and western clothing store.[12]
The church published religious tracts and it also distributed tapes of sermons by the Alamos. With the help of some church members, they also produced records and tapes, and they also launched a national television ministry in the 1970s.[11]
Susan Alamo died of breast cancer on April 8, 1982, 17 days short of her 57th birthday, at the City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the reported belief that she would rise from the dead,[4] her embalmed body was kept on display for six months.[8] It was then entombed in a heart-shaped marble mausoleum on church property.[13]
In 1991, the federal government confiscated the property. Its agents learned that Susan's remains had been removed. Her estranged daughter, Christhiaon Coie, filed a lawsuit against Tony Alamo because he had stolen the body. Her stepfather (by an earlier marriage of her mother) obtained a court order which required Tony Alamo to return the body.[14]
In 1982, the same year that Susan Alamo died,[15] Alamo discontinued the foundation in their name.
He replaced it with the newly incorporated Music Square Church (MSC).[11] MSC had been granted 501c tax-exempt status in 1981.[16] After the federal government had started investigation of the entity, the IRS retroactively revoked that tax-exempt status on April 5, 1996.
The IRS Commissioner found that "MSC was so closely operated and controlled by and for the benefit of Tony Alamo that it enjoyed no substantive independent existence; that MSC was formed and operated by Tony Alamo for the principal purpose of willfully attempting to defeat or evade federal income tax; and that MSC was inseparable from Tony Alamo, and failed to operate for exclusively charitable purposes."[16] MSC sued and lost in the United States Court of Federal Claims. It lost on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals in 1999.[16]
Alamo was arrested several times throughout his life, beginning with an illegal-weapons-possession charge in 1966 for which he served time before he married Edith Opal Horn (later known as Susan Alamo.)[15][11] He encountered increasing problems after Susan's death. Women said that he had sexually abused them and minor children. In 2009, Alamo was convicted of 10 counts of transporting minors as young as 9 years old across state lines for sex. Alamo received the maximum sentence for his crimes, 175 years in prison.[17][18][19][1][2]
In June 2013, the federal government filed forfeiture and collection actions in federal court on 27 properties which were owned by members of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, in an attempt to collect $2.5 million in restitution that Alamo was ordered to pay to his victims. The U.S. Attorney's Office argued that the owners were "owners in name only" because the properties were still under Alamo's control.[20]
Alamo died on May 2, 2017, while he was in custody at the Federal Medical Center, ButnerinButner, North Carolina.[1][2] He was 82 years old.[1][2]
The Alamo Ministries posted a notice of his death on its website's homepage, but it did not post a notice of succession nor did it state its future plans.[21] The site, along with this notice, was still live, but it was inactive, as of 2024[update].
The church was Protestant and Pentecostal in nature. It was frequently referred to as a sect of the Jesus movement. It was also extremely anti-Catholic. Additionally, it only accepted the King James Version of the Bible.
Its members adhered to a moral code which condemned and forbade the use of drugs, homosexuality, adultery, birth control, and abortion.[11] Individuals who sought to join the church and become involved in its rehabilitation program took a vowofpoverty and they also agreed to turn all of their money and property over to the church. In return, their own needs would be met and their children would receive a basic education through high school.[11]
In 2016, playwright Ernest Kearney produced his one-man show My Alamo War for the Hollywood Fringe FestivalinLos Angeles, California. The show recounted his four-year struggle against the Alamo church in Hollywood. He succeeded in getting the high-end jackets which were designed by Alamo and manufactured by unpaid cult members removed from a majority of the clothing stores which were located on Hollywood Boulevard. He and his supporters also gained the attention of the local media by informing it about the abuses of the cult. The show won the Fringe's Encore Producer Award.[22]
In 2019, Sundance TV broadcast a four-part miniseries, Ministry of Evil: The Twisted Cult of Tony Alamo, based on the lives of Tony and Susan Alamo. It described their founding and running of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation – it also called the foundation a "cult". It also described how the couple became rich by exploiting their followers who truly believed in them. Following his conviction, the program charged Tony Alamo with being a child abuser, a polygamist and a pedophile.
The documentary series includes archival footage, including Alamo's videotaped deposition, and interviews with former members of the cult and the FBI agent who brought Alamo down.[23][24] The series of four 40-minute episodes was also broadcast on BBC Four and in April 2024, it was broadcast on the iPlayer.[25]
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