Part One: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is mourning the temporary loss of its producer today,

Sophie got into a little bit of a kerfuffle with the FTC. Some shots were exchanged. Anyway, she's on the run now, but we're expecting her to report back in from her mountain hideaway any day. But until she gets back, Samantha McVeigh is with me today, this week. Samantha, how are you doing? Good.

Good. I was just saying, I feel like Sophie is our adult that supervises, so I'm a little nervous that she's not here, but it's okay. Because I also did another show with Margaret and Sophie wasn't there either. So maybe she, is she mad at me?

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. She's just running. It's just she's on the run from the law. That's fair. Yeah, yeah. That's fair. It's fine. Once she gets to our hidden mountain fastness in an undisclosed location in the Rockies, she'll be back on the calls. Everything will be fine.

So get some Morse code. I like it. Yeah, we're going to be doing the podcast via Morse code. Yeah, that is going to be the only way to communicate. Yeah. We're going to get some code talkers, but with like maybe maybe Klingon based. I don't think the feds can crack that one yet. Not anymore. They got all those feds out. Those are the first people the Trump folks fired.

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Samantha, Stuff Your Mom Never Told You is your podcast. You got anything else you want to plug up at the top here before we get into our subject for the week? I don't think so. Yeah, I'm on a podcast. It has a book. It's been around for a bit. It has been. That's it.

An O.G. And speaking of O.G.'s, we're going to be talking about one of the O.G.'s of being an abusive Christian cult leader in the United States. The worst preacher of all time. A guy that Los Angeles residents might be are going to be aware of, as well as most of our Alabama listeners. Tony Alamo.

What? Have you heard of this guy? Do you know Tony Alamo? I don't. I don't know, which is what I'm kind of surprised by because I was really deep into the Christian world. So I don't know this one. He is. Well, he's one of the weirder ones and he's one of like the worst people wherever. This guy. Oh, man. He does all of the evil cult leader things. Child trafficking.

slave labor, you know, all, all, all the good stuff, abuse of a corpse. It's great. We got a lot of fun stuff today. So modern day Christianity, let's go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, again, his last name is a Lamo, but it's spelled Alamo, but that's not how it's pronounced. Uh, because the state of Texas would have come after him. Then he, he would have had the Rangers on him long before, uh, the FBI finally took him down. He'd, if he'd been weakening Texas's brand, uh,

But yeah, Tony Alamo. And this is kind of a weird one in that he is not the initial leader of his cult. That's kind of his wife.

So it starts out as him being almost like you used by this cult that he later winds up running. Like he's always one of the people running it. But like his wife is definitely much more like the driving force of the cult when they get started, which is interesting. You don't see that a lot, you know? You know, so this is a we're going to be talking about a feminist icon in the world of establishing a cult that traffics children across state lines. Yeah.

Well, that's exciting. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Girls can do everything the boys can do. Including trafficking. Including trafficking. That's right. Obviously. We're always saying that.

Equal opportunity. I love it. Yeah. So one of my favorite things about this is that these guys, the people we're talking about today were very good friends of one of our friends of the pod who had a run in of his own with law enforcement in a town called Waco. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Okay. I was wondering. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. A little bit. There's some Waco that comes in here. Yeah. Alamo, Waco. This all seemed too convenient. That's right. Yeah.

Now, Tony was not just the leader of the cult. You know, again, he was basically its first member or maybe co-leader with the woman who became his wife, who we're going to talk about before we talk about Tony, because she is fascinating to Edith Opal Horn.

Which is, you know, she's got that serial killer name starting. I know Opal, there's something sinister about that as a middle name. It's sinister and it's also bless your heart. Like she's going to poison you, but it's going to be a really great pie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes. And she is, she is, this is a, she is a down home girl. Yeah.

Now, if your first thought when I said Tony Alamo was that like, oh, well, that's way too good a name of a cult leader to be a real cult leader's name. You are correct. And Tony was not born Tony Alamo. He was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman on September 20th, 1934 in Joplin, Missouri. So again, this is kind of rare for evangelical Christian cult leaders, but he was born into a Jewish family.

His parents were immigrants from Romania. And while this may seem like an unlikely background, again, for an evangelical Christian cult leader, Bernie's family was never religious. And as a boy, his parents told him, hey, you should tell people that you're Romanian, not Jewish, because if you tell them you're Jewish, you're going to get beaten up, right? Like we're in Joplin, Missouri in the 40s and 50s. You really don't want to be dropping that too much. Right.

Now, Edith was also born into a Jewish family on April 25th, 1924 in Alma, Arkansas, a small town about the same size as Dyer, Kansas, where the family moved shortly after her birth. Her

Her father was a convert or her family was mixed religion. It's a little unclear to me because she told her daughter later that she first encountered the Bible reciting passages from it at her father's sickbed. He'd been sent home from the military early due to contracting tuberculosis. And over the course of several years, he wasted away and tried to stay outside to avoid spreading the illness to his family. So he's like camping out to try to stop from getting his family sick.

Okay. Interesting technique. Yeah. I mean, that's some real like 30s shit right there. Let's just quarantine you out there. Yeah. Dad lives in the yard because otherwise they'll get us all killed. Edith would later claim to have refused to listen to what he said because she was convinced that she could heal him by reciting Bible passages. So she insisted on sitting next to his cot or whatever at night.

This may have been later myth-making after she converted because our only source on her childhood is her. Either way, what we can confirm is that from an early age, Edith dreamed of being a star in the newly forming film industry, which had just come to be centered in Hollywood, California.

But her dreams were interrupted by the normal patterns of life in a small southern town, by which I mean she got pregnant extremely young. Obviously, right? Like she's a dire like Arkansas in the fucking 30s and 40s. What else is there to do? Well, I mean, literally, there is nothing else that you can do aside from get pregnant early and have your brothers and husband die of various coal related diseases. Right.

or farming-related accidents, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. Yeah, obviously. Like, people there have numerous different things that they can do with their lives, all of which involve dying young. Dying young. Yeah, so Debbie Scrivener describes what happened next in the book Whispering in the Daylight, which is about the Alamos.

Quote,

And she just straight up abandons her son right now. This is her son that she has at 15. But yeah, she she just kind of bounces on the family she's got over there, moves to Hollywood and starts trying to make it.

And the one daughter that she has with Saul Lipowitz is named Christian, like Christ, H-I-A-O-N, Coy. I'm guessing Coy was, I mean, I don't actually know where Coy comes from here. That must be her married name. That's what she writes under as an adult. I have never heard of the name Christiane.

This may be a misspelling of the name Christon, like Christ O-N, which is a Latin girl's name that means follower of Christ. But I don't know. Christon doesn't appear to be anything, right? It sounds like it's an amalgamation of saying Christ and then like Thessalonians and one of the chapters of the Bible or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody's flipping through a Bible on an epidural and it's like, I got a name. I'll take that.

These two things, splice them together. Beautiful. Yeah, perfect. No problems here. Yeah. Now, according to Chris, we're going to call her Chris because I'm not going to try to pronounce that name the whole time. And that's generally what she seems to go by. Edith, her mom, makes a living during this period primarily as a con woman because she's trying to find work in the movie. She does some acting gigs, but they do not. Her career doesn't take off. Right. Right.

Um, her daughter will credit this to the fact that she just does not have the look that Hollywood's going for in this period. She was per, per her daughter, quote, beautiful in the weirdest way. Not like you would look at her and go, wow, a striking beauty. But when she walked in a room, she had so much command that people stopped talking.

So she's not the kind of she doesn't have the right look to get the big Hollywood gigs, but she does have the right look to, like, make people pay attention to her and kind of gravitates naturally to conning them as a result. I mean, this all tracks to where she goes. I mean, it feels like it's very on point. Perfectly natural. Yes. I'm seeing the A to B here very easily. Very quickly.

When she managed to get work or successfully work a con, the family would have money. And so during Chris's childhood, they swung wildly between mild solvency and absolute poverty with such regularity that it made Chris's childhood kind of dizzying.

Also dizzying was the violence that Edith employed on a near daily basis. And I'm not going to read a lot of detailed stories of physical abuse here. Chris has a book that she's going to write later about her childhood. And her book, Mama said, has some of the worst and most descriptions of like the beating and psychological abuse of a little kid that I've ever read. Edith is a very bad mother. Like I, I cannot overemphasize how abusive this woman is to her daughter.

Or at least that's how Chris relates it. I don't know why she would lie about the specific things that she's lying about, given that they comport entirely with the life that Edith is going to live from this point forward. Right. So Edith, now living as Susan and her daughter, spent years on the margins.

Once Chris is 13, Edith is like, hey, you got to start earning your keep, right? You're basically an adult woman. It's time for you to start going out for parts and recording demo tapes as a singer. And, you know, you kind of get the feeling that part of what she's doing is like, hey, you know, you're the age that a lot of creeps in Hollywood are interested in. If you can make that work for us, go do it, right? Yeah.

It's a bad, again, childhood. The two live in a one-room apartment with a pull-down Murphy bed and survive primarily off of what Chris describes as mystery cans, which are canned foods with the labels removed that sold for cheaper than regular food. Quote, you would open these cans and whatever you opened, you ate. Yeah.

It's like a surprise. It's like a surprise. Yeah, exactly. You're keeping your life interesting. Probably just pounding a lot of pure fucking coconut oil or whatever. Right. I'm imagining some kind of pie and milk, maybe. Yeah. Pie meat. Expired soups. If you're lucky, pie meat. Yeah. A lot of expired soups. Soups. Oh, my God. Yeah.

That's like that. That's such a perfect, like absolute poverty story right there. Yeah. Just just eat mystery cans with my mom as she tries to pit me out to the music industry. She beats me, tells me. Yeah. Yeah. Get pregnant or drop an EP. Right. Like those are your options.

So by this point, by the time Chris is 13, Edith has aged out of most of the roles that interested her. Right. She is, again, particularly for this period of Hollywood, too old to become a leading lady. Right. And the bulk of her earnings now come from con artistry. And here is how Debbie Scrivener describes her most successful and repeated con.

She developed her evangelical skills by scamming churches under the pretense of being a missionary seeking funds. She would say to Chris, put on a dress. We're going to do a church. They would go. And during the service, Susan would stand and say, I have a message from the Lord and I need to speak.

Susan would speak, Chris would sing, church members would pass a love offering, and mother and daughter would leave with money. And so at age 34, Edith Opal Horn gave birth to a new persona, Susan Lipowitz, with business acumen, powers of persuasion, and gritty determination well in place. There's some disagreement in my sources over when she starts going by Susan, but...

It appears to be something she takes on as part of this, like, I'm going to be scamming churches. And I think it's interesting, again, that she comes from like a background that is very much not evangelical Christianity, which may be why she knows how to manipulate these people so well. Maybe it's just the simple fact that none of this is sacred to her in the way it is to these people. So she's able to kind of look in from the outside and like, oh, I know how to fuck with these. I know how to get their money, right? Yeah. I know what they want to hear.

They want to see my daughter singing. Yeah.

I mean, if she truly was trying to heal her father, realize it doesn't work and this is BS, they're like, I'm going to just take their money then. I'm going to take their fucking money. They lied to me when my dad was sick. But yeah, maybe there's something there too. Just say it. Trauma. If I'm greenlighting the HBO miniseries, that's at least how I try to like give her- That's how we're going to begin. Yeah, that's how we're going to start. Give her a little- That's her villain origin. Right, right. So Susan nursed clear ambitions of turning her daughter into a money ticket. And Chris's initial ambition was music.

But Susan was the kind of mom who was more than capable of acting on opportunity. One day in 1964 or 65, when Chris was in eighth grade, she rode home on a city bus. Now, this was during a time, again, we're talking 64 or 65. This is a time of a heightened racial tension, particularly in Los Angeles. The way Chris describes it decades later says,

And again, Chris is not being raised what we would call racially open-minded, right? Her mom grows up in the South in the 20s and 30s. She is raised believing some very racist things. So she sees, Chris sees this group of black girls on the bus and quote, I may have given them a look they didn't like. I'm not sure.

One of the girls responds by sticking out her foot and Chris trips and falls. And then what the girls laugh at her and other people on the bus start laughing too. And so Chris runs for the exit and then trips herself on her way out. Right. So she winds up with like scraped up bloody knees and everything. And that's,

As Chris says it, that's all that happened, right? Like, you know, she's probably this girl who's raised very racist, gives a mean look to a black girl who trips her and the encounter ends, right? In the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal.

But when Chris gets home, Susan sees that she has bloody hands and knees, mostly from the second time that she fell on her own. And Susan's like, what happened? And Chris told her, right, I got tripped on the bus by this black girl. And Susan responds, you let a bunch of and then she dropped several slurs in a row, run you off a public bus.

Chris tries to explain, I couldn't do anything, but Susan is drunk. So she beats her daughter mercilessly, breaking her nose badly enough that she has to go to the hospital because there's blood coming out of her ears, right? So we're talking like very serious abuse here. So when they get to the hospital-

They can't. Susan doesn't want her daughter saying, well, I got tripped on the bus and scraped up my knees and then my mom beat me so bad I have a concussion. Right? Because then mom's going to get arrested. Right? I mean, that's not great. That's not great. Yeah. That's like even in this period of time in the mid-60s, that's child abuse. Just saying. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so because in her injuries require an explanation, Susan on the way over to the hospital is coaching her daughter who has a head injury. Like, Hey, you gotta, you gotta say it was those girls on the bus. You gotta say it was like a race thing that they beat you up because you're white. And in her book, mama said, Chris writes quote,

Those six black girl and this is her talking about like how she what she tells the hospital those six black girls beat me up on the bus I told them I got on the bus and that girl tripped me uttered racial slurs knocked me down and kicked me mom chimed in to add another fantastic detail every time I retold the story you know what they said to her they were screaming at her screaming we're going to take over America you white bitch they told her this is their city the nurses all white with gasp and cluck and

And then even more racist things get said. I think you get the idea, right? Like she is, Susan is very much leaning into like the, the like racial animus of the time in order to try and like make this a story that she can sell, not just to these like white people.

hospital workers, but to the media, which is where she's going to go next. Because when she calls the cops, the cops are like, we don't really care about some kids getting into a fight on a bus. This is where the LAPD and this is the 60s. There's so much else going on right now. And we're the LAPD. So we don't really care about much anyway. So she starts reaching out to every newspaper in town.

to tell them increasingly elaborate lies about the hate crime her daughter had suffered. The only reporter who shows up is a guy from the Herald Examiner, and the next day Chris is on the front page of the paper. Now this ignites a response from the local community, and that's what brings the cops out. A whole bunch of particularly the most racist people in LA start sending bouquets of flowers to Chris, often with very racist messages in them. Susan at

Because, again, this is all about money for Sue. She tries to sue the bus company and eventually gets her daughter on local TV, which turns her into, in Chris's words, a martyr for the cause. The John Birch Society gets interested, and Susan and Chris are enrolled in the organization.

Yeah. So this is like the kind of the first big con Susan realizes she can play with her daughter is like, I'm going to try and make her like the face of the anti-integration movement. Right. And, you know, this works for a little while spurred to action by media attention. The LAPD takes to the field with the usual degree of competence you would expect. This is from Chris's book.

So...

Pretty bad. Pretty bad story. Yeah. She didn't beat her. That's nice. But she didn't beat her. She just nearly drowned her with salt water. It's fine. Fine. Waterboarding. It's fine. Saline solution. Everything's great. You know, I'm actually surprised that the police didn't jump in and be like, oh, racial stuff?

Let's go beat some people. That seems like something they would want to do because they don't actually want to work. Yeah. I mean, I think that's my expectation. But also you have to note that a big motivator for them is always not doing anything. So when they first get the phone call, they're going to be like, well, I don't care. Like, what are you trying to get me to do? Why are we doing this? Okay. Yeah.

Anyway, so that's what's happened so far. Pretty fun story of outrageous child abuse. What a beautiful fairy tale. Yeah, what a beautiful fairy tale. This is a little bit, there's a little bit of a fairy tale feel, except for instead of like Chris getting rich and powerful, her evil and abusive mother does right after this point. But before we hit that, let's do some ads.

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And we're back. How you holding up there, Sam?

I'm just thinking about this. It seems like, have you ever heard the story of Gypsy Rose? Yes. The child star, the mother. This sounds like the redneck version of that, except church, which makes sense if you want to be real honest. And I'm not going to lie. I'm sorry to those who live in Arkansas. I know it's not your fault, but Arkansas is one of the top four states that I'm terrified to go through as a person of color. If I can, I will never go through there.

I mean, yeah, it's and again, we're talking like 70 years ago. Yeah. Like even now, the words Susan grows up knowing, like, yeah, it's it's like a whole different level of racism. So, yeah, Chris thinks that these girls who get arrested based on her mom's lies get acquitted.

Again, she's like in her early teens at this point in time. In her book, she speaks of feeling deep shame for the incident, particularly the damage it may have done to those girls. She claims it opened her eyes to the kind of systemic bias that black people face. And I have no reason to disbelieve her. In her autobiography, she expresses pretty honest guilt and sorrow over this and says,

Given that she is an eighth grader when this happens, I hope we can agree none of this is her fault. So they found the right girls. They didn't just pick random black girls that they were like, yeah, this suits. I think surprising. She describes it as them finding the girls, but I don't actually know that that's the case. Again, her memory is not going to be perfect of anything happening. Right, right.

Anyway, that's Susan's background. This is the woman who becomes Susan Alamo. What a delight. And she's not going to be our primary character. So the fact, again, she's going to be kind of

running the cult for its early years, but she'll be out of the picture after a while. And I just need to prep you with her story because Tony's is so much worse. And this gets us, and part of why we're doing this is because I have a lot more detail on her early life and young adulthood than I do the early life of Bernie Hoffman, who becomes the future Tony Alamo.

He's about this is interesting as a male cult leader who has a lot of sex crimes later. He's about 10 years younger than Susan. So, hey, there you go. You know.

He's not going to be consistent about that sort of thing the rest of his life. But in this case, Susan is in more of a position to take advantage of him than he is of her, right? Sure, sure. I think she's also just much smarter and savvier. Bernie also moves to Los Angeles as a young adult, I think in his late teens with a dream of striking it famous. He seems to have always wanted a career in entertainment. He was a good dancer and became an instructor for Rudolph Valentino as a young man.

While still a teenager, he moves to L.A. to break into the music industry. He records several songs at the height of the British invasion in like 63, 64, where he's like trying to sing like a British person, but he doesn't really know how to. It's an odd it's an odd set of choices that he's making.

Interesting. Yeah. But he is working with some actual people. Like one of the songs he records, Little Yankee Girl, had been written by Bobby Jameson, who is a prominent songwriter for hire in the area, and was produced by Kim Fowley, who co-wrote and produced songs for Kiss, Chris Christopherson, Alice Cooper, and others. So he is working with some people who are real music industry folks. Okay. Yeah.

In conversations at parties and bars, Bernie, who by this point had started going by the name Tony Alamo, would claim to have ushered the Beatles into fame and worked with the Rolling Stones as well as Sonny and Cher.

The only musician that we can prove that he promoted was Pete Best, a former member of the Beatles. But he promotes Best after Best leaves the band. And primarily what he seems to be doing is like conning people who want to be musicians out of their money by showing them this letter from Pete Best and being like, see, I helped get the Beatles started, even though the letter he's got from Best is after Best left the Beatles. That's

So he's trying to let everybody know, I have connections. I did this. I can do this for you. Yeah. You know the guy who fumbled the bag bigger than anyone has ever fumbled a bag? I worked with that guy. The person you have to Google because you're not sure why you've heard of him, but then you figure it out. Yeah, a guy who fucked up being in the Beatles. Yeah.

Sorry, Pete. So Tony's usual spiel involved bragging about traveling on the road with the Beatles and the Stones. Here's an excerpt from one such recitation of his speech. The bodyguard would open the door, throw down a big velvet pillow, and we would step into the velvet pillow. The barber would comb our hair. The nurse would take our pulse. One of the fellows would spray us with cologne and other strew flowers in our path, and the cops would stand at attention.

And like, there'd be some video of this. If anything like this ever happened to you, Tony, like I know people were crazy for the video, the Beatles, but this wasn't how they did it. I,

I can't imagine because it's just the thought of that. I was like, I would immediately trip. That does not sound like a safe way to walk about. A velvet pillow is a terrible thing to walk on. Why are they taking your pulse? What is wrong with you? What is the pulse thing? I don't get it. I don't get this. Yeah. So this was not particularly believable to anyone with real experience in the music industry, but those people aren't Tony's target. He is trying to get the attention of dumb, inexperienced young wannabes who have some cash in their pocket

pocket and who he can convince like, oh, hey, you got like, if you've got a couple of grand, that's all it's going to take for me to get this demo tape into the hands of a DJ who's going to put it on the air or something like that. Right. Like these are, these are the kinds of cons that he is carrying out. Right.

And he makes a living doing this. Not a good one. He is not super successful. He is just kind of on the edge of not starving to death all the time as a result of his income from this. Now, later in life, he would claim that this year, 1964, during a business meeting, God struck him deaf and gave him an order. Start preaching the gospel or he'd be killed then and there.

This is what he's going to claim later. Absolutely not what happens. And we know that because Susan's daughter, Chris is there when Tony meets her mother for the first time. And the account she gives is a lot more believable one day. And I think 1966 that the timeline's a little fluid here.

Tony steps into a bar that she and her mom are drinking at, right? Now, at this point, Chris is kind of making some money as a recording artist. She's not huge, but she's doing like backup vocals and stuff. So she understands a little bit about the industry and she knows people in the industry and she's been warned about Tony. And that should tell you something. In 1966, it

If you're a 16 year old girl in the music industry, people warn you about Tony Alamo. And like you have to be really bad to cross that line in 1966. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you know enough people or the right people, you'll get good information. Yeah. Yeah. And she she does. She gets warned about this guy. And so she warns her mom because he starts walking up to their table and she's like, I've heard about this guy. Do not talk to him. He's a fucking creep.

But Tony walks right up to their table. And my read on what happened is that, weirdly enough, Tony and Susan are kind of made for each other. They're both con artists. I think initially they both identify each other as a good mark, right? Yeah.

Because Chris claims they immediately both start lying to each other, right? Trying to get money out of the other, you know? Tony starts talking about the stars that he was promoting. And Susan is like, I'm an actress. You know, my daughter's a singer. We've got connections.

When she says that, Tony's like, oh, I can make your daughter a star. And Chris would later recall, I'm watching them and it's like a tennis match of horse crap. They both think the other's got money. He gets up to go to the bathroom and I turned to my mother and I said, listen to me, this guy is an absolute bum. He's living with that little pregnant girl. She puts her finger in my face, which she often did, and said, you mind your fucking business. When he gets back, you wait a few minutes and politely excuse yourself from the table and don't come home tonight.

So again, mom of the year, mom of the year. Mama had a plan. At least she told her to get out of the house, I guess. I mean, yeah, I could have gone really arrived very quickly. So it's going to go awry. Not much longer than this, unfortunately. Of course. But yeah, I mean, you are right. Mama had a plan, right? Like Tony is not going to wind up taking advantage of Susan. Like she is going to wind up kind of looping him into her thing. Um,

So he comes back and he sits down at the table and Chris looks at him or, and sorry, and Susan looks at him and says, Tony, I've got to ask you a question. Did you know that Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again? And Tony looks deep into her eyes and says, of course I know that Susan, but how did you know? And she's like, let's go to my apartment to talk about it, which is the like evangelical con man and con woman flirting is I've never really heard that story before. Oh,

Amazing. Oh, okay. We need to advertise that as the perfect pickup line for other Christians. Crime date. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. Are you looking to like rob a bunch of MAGA people? Like this is the dating site where you can find your person.

Oh, man. So to make a show, how did you know that they just it's it's almost supernatural, right? They can feel the vibrations of each other like, oh, this is a man who, you know, is there's just nothing inside of him, but it's a desire to fleece people for their money. And that's all I've got inside me.

It's beautiful. I love it when people find each other, you know, it's better than a soul. Yeah. Oh yeah. No, a soul is just going to weigh you down. Right. True. Yeah. If you're just completely hollow inside, you float like a witch in, in the fucking 1600s or whenever. So to make a short story, even shorter, the two hit it off and got married three separate times over the course of 48 hours. Now,

It's intercessive. Why do they get married three times in two days? It's intercessive. Yeah, it does. It does. They first go to Mexico where they get hitched. But then like right when they're about to have sex, Susan's like, actually, I worry that Mexican marriage isn't legal. And I'm not going to sleep with you until we're legally married. And Tony is apparently hard up enough that he drives them from Mexico to Vegas without sleeping.

and purchases two marriage licenses and pays for two different marriage ceremonies. Just in case she backs out. He's like, I got another one. I got another one. I really, really need to fuck. This is the real one. This is for real. For real. This is the real one. And eventually Susan's like, all right, I guess we're married enough.

I think this might make him the only person I've ever read out about who is bigamously married to his one wife. I was going to ask, is that bigotry? But I didn't know for sure. It might be bigamy. How does that work? He is going to do lots of bigamy. He does so much bigamy in the future.

But he kind of does start by getting bigamously married to a single woman. He's a practice round. Yeah, this is his practice round of bigamy. Yeah, he's the chosen one of bigamy. He's the fucking Luke Skywalker of bigamy. Perfect.

He's got to do it right. And he's got to practice it and get it through. And then, like, you know, it perfects everything. That's right. That's right. You can't just start, you know, and assume you're going to be good at it. Like, I don't know, surgery or something easy. So the two change their names to Tony and Susan Delamo, and they start preaching the word.

Now, in the beginning, this is just an iteration of Susan's extant con work at churches, right? The new couple would trawl the streets of Los Angeles for starving hippie kids, generally kids who were like coming down from bad trips or who were living on the street because they had too many bad trips. And since these kids were broke, they were

preaching to them. Wasn't there's no like money from these kids, right? So they, they get a bunch of followers, but those followers are just kind of eating them out of house and home. So the Alamos tell them, Hey, go get jobs and mail us the money. We've got to move to Las Vegas for unclear reasons. Um,

And so they do that. And Chris, Susan just kind of leaves her daughter behind in L.A., which is, I would say, maybe the best thing for Chris at this point in time. Keep your mom away from you. I was really confused where she was. Okay. She dropped her. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Susan's not super committed to being a mother.

So Susan and Tony are in Las Vegas. Chris eventually travels there because she misses her mom. And as soon as she shows up, she claims Tony rapes her. Right. She would have been 15 or 16 at this point. Susan walks in as it's happening, calls her a whore, accuses her of trying to steal Tony and sends her back to Los Angeles. Right.

And then a couple of months later, Tony and Susan returned to L.A. because they found another wannabe celebrity to promote. This guy's name was Rovan. He was a motorcycle riding opera singer.

And talented. Yeah, very multi talented. Right. I don't think his career takes off, but there's enough there that Tony is able to get a lot of backer money. He's able to convince people, hey, this guy's going to be huge. Give me some money to get his career started. And then he buys jewels, furs, leather jackets with that.

But this business is not doing well. And so even though their first stab at becoming cult leaders hadn't really made them a lot of money, they returned to that grift as soon as they get back to Los Angeles. So they start expanding their recruitment from just some down and out hippie kids to prostitutes, to other homeless people, to failing actors, to musicians and stuff who are kind of on the margins and like government housing and the like.

Like some of their first marks are because they burst back into Susan's life and they take all of her friends and roommates and put them into a cult, basically convert them by being like, hey, you'll get regular meals, which they provide via diving and dumpsters for expired food.

So they get all of these kids to start working, you know, just kind of bullshit jobs and funneling that money, donating their salaries to an entity that the Alamos established in 1969, the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. So fascinating grift so far. You're just kind of I mean, all they're ever doing is abusing poor people. Right. Like that's the that's the Alamo con.

Particularly her daughter's boyfriend. Right. This is interesting. Yeah. It's pretty bleak. And a big part of what they're doing is they're finding poor Jewish kids who are living on the streets.

Some of whom who had converted to Christianity and others who they converted. Tony particularly was really good at converting these like down and out former hippie kids. And the more people they bring in, the more money starts to come in. Some of it's coming from members handing over salaries or like inheritances and savings accounts. But the real money comes in when Susan figures out what is their first really brilliant con. So.

So then, like today, Southern California has a massive homelessness problem, right? And specifically, the kind of people who are filling the streets are the kind of people that the Alamos make their business preaching to and converting. And then as now, affluent middle class and middle class people are disgusted by homelessness and eager to support anyone who promised to take these people off the street.

So once they get followers and they're, they're pulling these people off the street and they're putting them up in like rented spaces and stuff, they're warehousing them. Basically they'll pile their followers into vans on the weekends and drive to mega churches in rich areas. And then Susan,

will line up with, they'll clean these hippie kids up and Susan will line up with them and she'll start preaching the word and she'll go down the line and have them all give like a version of like, I was on the street, you know, doing heroin or whatever. And then I got found by the Alamos, right? And then Susan would conclude by being like, hey, does this church support work like this, right? Getting these indigent kids off the streets and backed

to God, right? Well, if you want to see me continue to do this, give some money to the Susan and Tony Alamo Foundation, right? And that's the grift, right? We're getting these homeless kids off the street. And the actual money is coming in from churches where they don't have followers, right? But they do have a lot of people who hate seeing homeless people. That's how they get their money. Wow. I mean...

A little respect. They really did pull people off the streets. They are pulling people off the streets. They're not completely wrong. They are accurately describing to an extent what they're doing. They're not giving these kids a better life or a safer life, really. But they're not on the streets. They're not on the streets. Yeah. Well, it's such a fascinating, like,

Through line of, okay, I can see why that works, right? Because you're able to say, hey, what are kind of like conservative Christians more scared about than anything in the early 70s? The hippie movement, right? 69 was not that long ago. We're cleaning up after the hippie movement, right? Like that's- Drugs, hippie movement. Exactly. Anybody of different colors or a different race. Right. And we're taking these people and putting them where you don't have to see them, right? Perfect.

Perfect. Yeah. And they start making a lot of money doing this. Soon the Alamos have enough cash to make the dream that every cult leader has real, buying land and starting a compound. In 1971, they purchase acreage in Saugus, California, and an old restaurant that they convert to a church. Their followers are made to live in chicken coops. Married couples get to live in shacks.

And once it was known that the Alamos are doing the good work of cleaning up the shrapnel of the hippie movement off the streets, more money and followers start to flow in. This is part of a broader trend in evangelicalism, a counterswing to the summer of love and this sort of leftward tilt of culture at the end of the 60s. I think we're all familiar with the way in which this kind of stuff kind of yins and yangs out, right? Like you have your big sort of leftward shift and then this huge reactionary shift and

Well, the Alamo's grift hits right at the peak of that reactionary shift. Perfect timing. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, the worst people always have pretty good timing. Speaking of Samantha, let's let's listen to the incredible timing of some of our advertisers.

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Oh, man. Good stuff. So in her book, Betty Shriver cites an article, The Great Guru Hunt, by columnist Art Kunkin, who documented at the time this kind of reactionary shift occurring and the space that it was making for cult leaders like the Alamos.

There is very definitely something in the air, and it is not, as I originally thought last year, just the cycle of individualism and personal mystical search that could have been expected to fill the vacuum left by the failures of mass political activism in the 1960s. A certain cat is being let out of the bag, accidentally or by design, which will either result in the creation of many socially motivated individuals of great personal energy who can stop mankind from destroying itself...

or the widespread dispersal of these same energies utilized by egoistic persons who will accelerate the crises. Which one of those would you say we got? All? Yeah. Like,

I mean, I find that so familiar to what we saw happened after 2020, right? Yeah. You have all of these energies that get mobilized and then dispersed into these different sort of like cultic movements and disinformation streams that the internet and social media has really enabled. Yeah. By egoistic persons who accelerate the crises that the mobilization had existed initially to fight. Right.

And then they're the only ones profiting off of anything. Yes, yes. Like, we can... Oh, boy. I mean... It's sad. I don't like it. I go back and forth between, like, I guess it's comforting that this happened back then, too. Like... Isn't it? Or is it just frustrating that this cyclical thing has to continue to happen and we just have to never learn? Like, we never fucking learn. Or the people that...

have learned really well. And so they bring it back so they can make that profit. I'm gonna throw this computer. Keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that's, yeah, fair. As the money flowed in, the Alamos constructed a new facility, Music Square Church in Hollywood and started filling it with street kids. So,

Susan handled much of the Foundation's outward-facing communications to what we might call normies, the big donors and leaders of other churches, while Tony handled converting new followers and took point on actually creating a belief system for their teeming legions to follow. From a book by Greta P. Allendorf, quote, "...the Alamo ministry preached a wide range of ideas, in times paranoia, UFOs as divine messengers, and Vatican conspiracy theories."

Tony hated the Catholic Church and blamed them for everything bad that had ever happened, including Nazism. One Alamo tract entitled The Pope's Secrets read, The Vatican is posing as Snow White, but the Bible says that she is a prostitute.

And I mean, he's not 100% wrong about the Catholic Church being particularly fucked up in this period of time, given what we're going to find out in the late 90s and early 2000s. But it's also like not more responsible for that kind of thing than his own church is going to be, right? Like Tony's also, you know, a prostitute of people's souls, you know, like he's a pimp of people's souls, I should say. That's how he makes his money, right? Yeah.

So in her book, Betty does a pretty good job of explaining how the conversion process worked for new inductees after they were picked up, generally hungry on the streets of Hollywood. They'd be promised a meal and taken by bus to Saugus. Quote, "...from the moment Brenda and Daniel arrived at the corner of Hollywood and Highland to catch a bus, the brothers and sisters separated them. A woman known as Sister Cynthia ushered Brenda to a seat. For the next 45 minutes, Cynthia fervently explained that all the signs of the end times written in the Bible were currently happening."

She pointed out the vapors of smoke covering Los Angeles. She mentioned earthquakes and wars. Cynthia told her that God was looking for dedicated laborers to preach and save souls before Jesus returns. The bus pulled off on Sierra Highway in Saugus, the heart of Canyon Country. Hundreds of people were milling about, greeting the buses and leading people about the grounds.

brenda daniel and the others were ushered into a large hall where they sat on benches and waited expectantly the room was packed with people standing room only brenda was a bit uneasy but cynthia assured her that she was in for a treat a man who called himself brother michael stepped up to the podium and gave a hearty welcome to the gathering

You are as welcome as the flowers of May and the noonday sun. Praise the Lord. Amen. He continued with a few rules that included no talking during services and a ban on literature from other places. Brothers walked through the rows to collect forbidden materials. Brothers and sisters called overseers monitored the physical needs and functions of the community, such as water supply, electricity usage, and even the distribution of toilet paper, often pages torn from telephone books.

They had to seek permission from Tony and Susan for every aspect of their existence. One evening after dinner, Sister Cynthia sharply reprimanded Brenda for overstepping the authority of an overseer when she turned on the lights in a building. Brenda said, but I thought I should turn on the lights since I was the first to arrive. Cynthia retorted, there you go thinking again. Oh, fuck. That's a good classic cult banter. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, this is the thing about cults, I think, and this is kind of one of the big problems, especially a cult like this. You know, you want to sit back and say, man, they were crazy. But those rules apply for so many of the churches. Like literally the type that I grew up in, they wouldn't say necessarily you couldn't turn on the lights. But the idea, don't bring in literature, don't learn things on your own, was very much like placed and told us like things like seminary and being any of those places were against God and not having faith.

So, like, unfortunately, that because this cult is so crazy, it makes the other things look normal. And it's not. Yeah. OK, though. No. Yeah. You sound very OK with all that. I'm OK, though. So physical punishments were common, as is sexual violence from Tony, who really seems to prefer young teenagers to adult women, including his wife. What keeps people from leaving is.

you're not going to be surprised to hear this, is a fear of hell, which is inculcated daily from sermons by the Alamos and their followers. Every day they would tell new inductees and their old followers stories about people who had joined the church, left, and immediately died, right? If you leave the church, basically, you are instantly going to be dead, right? And then you go to hell. You go straight to hell, right?

It's not new, but it serves, right? This is a functional, functional cult thing to be doing. This method is proven. It's sound. Let's keep going with it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like driving a Volvo. Why fuck with what works occasionally? So the only reason normal believers would need to leave the property was to work, and more and more of them worked for businesses owned and operated by the Alamos.

They also had to travel to churches and civic centers to deliver what the Alamos called popcorn testimony. These are the little speeches by former hippies and homeless people that opened up donor pocketbooks, right? You know, where they're saying like, hey, if I hadn't, if the Alamos hadn't found me, I'd be dead or in jail or in a mental institution, you know? These are the popcorn speeches. By the mid-1970s, the Alamos are wealthy. They're outwardly respectable.

They're operating several successful businesses that were keeping, according, you know, in the eyes of a lot of Angelenos, the riffraff off the streets and, you know, where they belong locked up somewhere away from the people with expensive houses. Susan and Tony then got to live the life of high rolling multimillionaires. On one famous occasion, Susan showed up for an interview wearing a Lynx jacket and a floor length dress telling the interviewer God wants his children to go first class.

And I guess to have lynx fur jackets. I mean, you got to show off when you're blessed. That's right. That's right. Hashtag blessed. That's right. If you don't do that, people might not really believe that God has blessed you. And that endangers their souls. Yeah. What's the point? Yeah. You're not going to be blessed. I'm glad you understand it. Right. You're really doing this for their souls. Right. I mean.

I'm not going to show you my jacket right now. I'm just saying. No, no, but you have a lot of links. You're heavy into linkses, which who isn't? Yeah, exactly. That's all I wear is linkses. This is 100% links hoodie. It's really hot though. It's incredibly warm. Yes. Not at all comfortable, especially when I've got the heat on. So in 1975, we finally get some good news, which is that Susan gets diagnosed with cancer.

Now, as a little girl, she had claimed to have been struck. Sometimes she would claim that she caught tuberculosis from her father, right, and that she had been healed by God after praying. And as a result, when she gets sick, she prescribes herself and as well as prescribing Tony and most of their followers that they're going to pitch up stakes and move back to Arkansas where they'll be healed, right?

They still keep the Saugus compound open. They still have their followers there, like recruiting people off the streets of LA and raising money, working some businesses.

But kind of the core of their best followers and they take most of their money to a place called Dyer, Arkansas, which is where she'd grown up and they buy a compound. So this is a little town, population less than 500. And they make people notice when they suddenly drive in because they only have black Cadillacs. That's the only car his followers drive.

So he has like suddenly this huge fleet of new black Cadillacs and dozens of converted hippies move into this very small town. Their compound is centered around the home that had been Susan's home when she was a little girl. They expanded it and updated it with all of the least classy adornments their new riches could buy. Greta Allendorf writes, the couple was fond of red carpeting, chandeliers, and velvet wall coverings and installed them in every space they occupied.

Just the most hideous place you could imagine. I need it to be shaggy carpeting. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I need some like bare skin rugs. That's right. I need all of those. And then golden candles. Yes. Golden candles. Every wall is pure velvet. Like, I mean, the instant you drop a cigarette in this place, it goes up. Right. Just beautiful stuff.

So at this time, they also begin construction on a sprawling Victorian home on the mountain, complete with dormitories for their followers and a heart-shaped pool for Susan. A grand church hall is constructed for their evangelical TV show, where Tony sang love songs for Susan, such as my personal favorite, I Love You So Much It Hurts Me.

Now, one of the things that's interesting is that a lot less of his songs than you'd expect given who he is are actual religious songs. Again, this is just him talking about how much he loves his wife.

His horrible, evil wife. But I do feel like I'm legally bound to show you a video of the Alamos playing this song. Now, this should tell you something about the level of... Because I'm talking about these people. They are a cult. They're very abusive. That's not how they're treated. They are treated as mega church pastors who are widely beloved. Yeah.

The clip that I'm about to play is from a performance that they make at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a very real, very major venue for country western musicians. This is not like a fringe thing. If you're at the Grand Ole Opry, you have a degree of legitimacy within the music, within at least the country western chunks of the music industry at the time.

Or did they just pay a lot of money? I mean, I think that may be what they did. But in terms of people looking out from the from the outside in, you just see like, well, they're on the Grand Ole Opry. So they must be legit, right? Legitimate. Yeah. Dolly Parton right there. Right. Well, Dolly Parton will show up in this story, unfortunately. Oh, yeah. It's not it's not all that bad in terms of her involvement, but she's not completely uninvolved with the Alamos either. Yeah.

Great stuff. So I'm going to... Oh. Oh, yeah. Look at them. Aren't they beautiful? They're an off-brand like Johnny Cash. He is. So Tony Alamo, if you're not able to look at the video of this, I would recommend checking some of them out on YouTube. They're all over YouTube. Tony looks like...

Off-brand Johnny Cash, if he put on about 40 pounds of just water weight and a wig. Also shipped from Timu. Yeah, shipped from Timu. Because he got a little melted in the shipping container. And then, I don't know. Honestly, Susan and I, she's wearing a fucking opalescent white, pure white, but it's like a shiny opalescent white suit. That looks...

So uncomfortable. It looks horribly uncomfortable. She is dying of cancer at this point. Legitimately? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. She's sick by this point. It's going to take her a while to actually fucking die. Like years. But she is sick at this point. She... Her head...

The shape of it, she looks kind of like one of those gray aliens wearing a skin suit. Like that's how Susan Alamo looks, except for like a lot of makeup, too. Yeah. What is that one movie? I already forgot that has the aliens and obviously the White House is involved. Like what is that one? Shit. Glenn Close is in it.

And I think, like, do you know? I'm going to get corrected later. One sec. Let's look this up real quick. Could be wrong. There's those aliens that's so bad, like, digitally. I don't know. That doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Wait, are you speaking of Mars Attacks? Yes. Yes. She does look like she's got, like, if those aliens were wearing, like, a rubber human suit. Face. Right? Because her head has that shape. It's fascinating. Yeah.

What I want to get across is that they really don't look like regular people, like real people. Like they both look like almost CGI humans. Yes, and she scares me. They are both frightening, I would say. But her particularly, yeah. Yeah. Like I see her beating people. I see that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And pipping people out. Not hard. She is. So now that we've said that, let's listen to them play beautiful music together.

...to be dedicated to a message in songs. And it's Tony Alamo, J.D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet. And we're gonna try to preview as much of this album as we possibly can. So if you'll just stay right here with us. And now, Tony Alamo, J.D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet, I love you so much, it hurts me. She's definitely expiring. This song is dedicated to my wife Susan.

It's a message and song that's so very dear to my heart because I lived every word of this song during a very long illness with my Susan. This is so painful. During those long, dark years, I cried out to God every day of my life to let my sweetheart live. God, in his divine mercy, heard my cries and he answered my prayer. I love you so much. It hurts me.

Okay. I think we're good. It went away. Oh, I stopped it. We didn't need to keep going. I just wanted you to hear his singing voice. It felt like a really bad SNL skit from the 70s. It feels like a parody of Johnny Cash as a fucking scam preacher. Yes. His outfit is amazing. He's standing alone on this- The background? Yeah. It's so good.

They're going to haunt me. Yeah, it's a haunting vibe, right? I need someone to come sage my house. Yeah. In my brain. It's a deeply evil vibe. Yes. Yeah. Like, I can... I'm so glad the cancer came back, which it does. Susan dies in 1982 from the same cancer that had inspired the move back to Arkansas. Now...

Sam, this creates real issues for Tony because by this point, he and Susan, they had spent seven years or so since she got sick preaching that she and he couldn't die, right? Susan had described herself because they have a TV station by this point. She would call herself the Lamb of God and would say that she and Tony were both had to be alive on earth to act as witnesses for the end times, right? So the fact that she is dead now

creates a real pickle for Tony Alamo and the cult. One that they're going to have to resolve in part two. You got any ideas about how they resolve it? I'm thinking like Weekend at Bernie's level. Oh my God. Yes, you've got it. You saw where this is heading. Oh yes. Oh,

Yes, indeed. Absolutely. Like an R-rated Weekend at Bernie's. Unless Weekend at Bernie's was rated R. I was going to say, I think it was in the 80s. Then like an X-rated Weekend at Bernie's. Okay. Samantha, before we record that, you want to throw out your pluggables here? Because we're done with part one.

Yeah. Again, you can find me on Stuff Mom Never Told You with my co-host Annie. We talk about a lot of intersectional stuff. So that means really sad stuff right now until like, you know, we're actually on the list and people come at us. But anyway, that's a podcast that I'm on. And then you can find me on Blue Sky, McVeigh, Sam.

And that's about it. Yep. Yep. Check out Sam. Find her on the blue sky. Listen to her podcast and, you know, listen to this podcast that you just listened to. Go back in time and listen to it a second time so that we start trending in the other time streams, you know, or also listen to that song and listen to that song. Your love.

You know what? Put that song on and listen to nothing else for the next like 48 hours, right? You'll be fine. You're going to be great. You're going to do good. You're not going to lose your mind.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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