Part One: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher

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.
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 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.
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.

We're going to be doing the podcast

via Morse code. Yeah, that is going to be the only way

to communicate.

We're going to get some code talkers,

but with 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.
That's it. Yeah.
An OG. And speaking of OGs, we're going to be talking about one of the OGs of being an abusive Christian cult leader in the United States, the worst preacher of all time, a guy that Los Angeles residents 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 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 again, his last name is Alamo, but it's spelled Alamo, but that's not how it's pronounced because the state of Texas would have come after him then.
He would have had the Rangers on him long before the FBI finally took him down if he'd been weakening Texas's brand. But yeah, Tony Alamo.
And this is

kind of a weird one in that

he I finally took him down if he'd been weakening Texas's brand. 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 used by this cult that he later winds up running. Like he's always one the people running it, but his wife is definitely much more the driving force of the cult when they get started, which is interesting.
You don't see that a lot. Right.
We're going to be talking about a feminist icon in the world of establishing a cult that traffics children across state lines. An icon? Well, that's exciting.
Yeah, it's good. Girls can do everything the boys can do.
Correct. 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 of... There's some Waco that comes in here.
Yeah, Alamo, Waco. These all seem too convenient.
That's right. Now, Tony was not just the leader of the cult.
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 too. Edith Opal Horn, which is – 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 gonna poison you but it's gonna be a really great pie yeah yeah exactly yes and she is she is this is a she is a down-home girl um now if you're 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 know? You really don't want to be dropping that too much. 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 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 um 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 or farming related accidents you know yeah obviously yeah Like people, 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, she married at 14, had a baby at 15 and divorced at 16.
It was then that Edith Opel decided to take charge of her own journey to stardom and headed to California. When she reached Hollywood, Edith Opel changed her name to Susan Fleetwood.
After failed attempts at a singing and acting career, she married and then divorced Saul Lipowitz and converted from her Jewish roots to evangelical Christianity. She began to preach and teach informally.

And she just straight up abandons her son, right?

Now, this is her son that she has at 15.

But yeah, 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 Christion, like Christ, H-I-A-O-N, Koi. I'm guessing Koi was, I mean, I don't actually know where Koi 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 Christian before. 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 out 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 these two things, spice 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?

Her daughter will credit the fact that she just does not have the look

that Hollywood's going for in this period.

She was, 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.
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 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.

You kind of get the feeling that part of what she's doing is like, hey, 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.
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.
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 meat, maybe.
Yeah, pie meat. Expired soups.
If you're lucky, pie meat. Yeah, a lot of expired suits.
Soups. Oh, my God.
Yeah. That's such a perfect absolute poverty story story right there yeah just just eating mystery cans with my mom as she tries to pimp me out to the music industry she beats me tells me yeah beats me yeah get pregnant or drop an ep right like those are your options so by this point by the time uh 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 yeah i know what they want to hear they want to

see my daughter singing yeah i mean if she truly was was trying to heal her father realize it

doesn't work and this is bs they're like i'm gonna just take their money then i'm gonna take

their fucking money they're lying they lied to me when my dad was sitting but yeah maybe there's

something there too just say that's a trauma if i'm if i'm green lighting the hbo miniseries

that's at least how i try to like give her yeah that's how we're gonna start give her a little

Thank you. But yeah, maybe there's something there too.
Just saying. Trauma.
If I'm green lighting 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, 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 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, like 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.
So because 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 got to say it was those girls on the bus. You got to 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 girls, and this is her talking about like 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, would gasp and cluck. 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

Six black girls were arrested, thrown in jail, charged, and dragged into a courtroom to answer for my mother's crime.

Mama told me I'd have to testify on the witness stand.

The thought made me want to die.

Mama caught me trying to overdose on pills before the court date.

She poured salt water down my throat until I threw everything up. She didn't beat me this time, though.
She couldn't have me showing up to court with fresh wounds. 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 like that seems like something they would want to do because they don't actually want to work yeah i mean i i think that's that that's my expectation but also you have to 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 gonna, 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.
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How are 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. Like if I can, I will never go through there.
I mean, yeah, it's, and again, we're talking like 70 years ago. Yeah, even more so.
But even now, the words Susan grows up knowing, up knowing, like, yeah, 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 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 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 if anything happening right anyway that's susan's background this is the woman who becomes susan alamo what a delight and she's she's not going to be our primary character.
So the fact that, 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 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 and 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 set of choices that he's making. Interesting.
Yeah. But he is working with some actual people.
Like the 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. 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.
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.
Yeah. But then you figure it out.
Yeah. A guy who fucked up being in the Beatles.
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, another drew 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 like i can't imagine because it's just the thought that i was like i would have been immediately trip like that does not sound like a safe way to walk about 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 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 the kind of cons that he is carrying, 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 Chris is there when Tony meets her mother for the first time. And the account she gives is a lot more believable.
One day in, I think, 1966, the timeline's a little fluid, 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, 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? 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, Mama of the Year. Mama of the Year.
Mama had a plan. At least she told her to get out of the house, I guess.
I mean, it could have gone really awry very quickly. 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.
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 and talk about it, which is the 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? They just, it's almost supernatural, right? They can feel the vibrations of each other. Like, oh, this is a man who, you know, there's just nothing inside of him, but 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. It's better than a soul.
Come on. Oh, yeah.
No, a soul is just going to weigh you down, just gonna weigh you down right true yeah if you're just completely hollow inside you float like a witch um in in the fucking 1600s or whatever 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 um now why do they get married three times in two days? It's excessive. 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've got another one. I got another one.
I really, really need to fuck. This is the real one.
Yeah. This is for real.
For real. This is the real one..
And eventually Susan's like, alright, 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? I didn't know for sure. How does that work? He is going to do lots of bigotry.
He does so much bigamy in the future. But he kind of does start by getting bigamously married to a single woman.
He has a practice round. Yeah, this is his practice round of bigamy.
Yeah. Yeah, he's the chosen one of bigamy.
He's the fucking Luke Skywalker of bigamy. 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, preaching to them wasn't, there's no like money from these kids, right? So 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. 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. And then a couple of months later, Tony and Susan return to L.A.
because they found another wannabe celebrity to promote. This guy's name was Rovon.
He was a motorcycle riding opera singer. Multi-talented.
Yeah, very multi-talented, right? I don't think his career takes off, but there's enough there that Tony's 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 return 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 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.
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 in 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 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 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 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 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 megachurches 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 back 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're they are accurately like 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. They're not on the streets.
Yeah.

Well, it's such a fascinating through line of, okay, I can see why that works, right? Yeah.

Because you're able to say, hey, you know, what are kind of conservative Christians more scared about than anything in the early 70s?

The hippie movement, right?

Yeah, of course.

69 was not that long ago.

We're cleaning up after the hippie movement, right? Right. Drugs, hippie movement, right? 69 was not that long ago.
We're cleaning up after the hippie movement, right? Drugs, hippie movement, 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. 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. Well, the Alamo's grift hits right at the peak of that reactionary shift.
Perfect timing. Yeah, yeah.
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And it seems like a We're back. Oh, man.
Good stuff. So, in her book, Betty Shriver cites an article, The Great Guru Hunt by columnist Art Kunken, 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. 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, you know, that the, the internet and social media has really enabled. Yeah.
By egoistic persons who accelerate the crises that the mobilization had existed initially to fight. Yeah.
And then they're the only ones profiting off of anything. Yes.
Yes. Like we can.
Oh boy. I mean, it's sad.
It's sad. I, I like it.
I go back and forth between like, I guess it's comforting that this happened back then too. 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.
so they bring it back so they can make that profit. I'm going to throw

this computer. Keep going.
Yeah.

Yeah. I think that that's

fair. As the money

flowed in, the Alamos constructed a new facility

Music Square Church in Hollywood

and started filling it with street kids.

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

I'm going to go ahead. 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 teaming legions to follow.

From a book by Greta P. Allendorf, quote, The Alamo ministry preached a wide range of ideas, end times paranoia, UFOs as divine messengers, and Vatican conspiracy theories.
Tony hated 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 not more responsible for that kind of thing than his own church is going to be, right? Like, Tony's also a prostitute of people's souls.
He's a pimp of people's souls, I should say. That's how he makes his money, right? 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 some good classic cult banter, yeah. You know, this is the thing about cults, I think i think this is kind of one of the big problems especially a cult like this is 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 don't learn things on your own was very much like place and told us like things like seminary and the 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 okay though no yeah you're not very okay with all this.
I'm okay 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, 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? You know, it's not new, but it serves, right? You know, 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, you know, 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 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 belonged, locked up somewhere away from the people with expensive houses. Susan and Tony then got to live the life of high rolling multi-millionaires.
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, 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.
If 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, no.
But you have a lot of links. You're heavy, 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

Thank you. One of the things that's interesting is that like a lot less of his songs than you'd expect given who he is are like actual religious songs.
Like 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 like 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. 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 a fringe thing. If you're at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a very real, very major venue for country Western musicians, right? This is not like a fringe thing.
If you're at the Grand Ole Opry, like you have a degree of legitimacy within the music, within at least like 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 outside in, you just see like, well, they're on the Grand Ole Opry, so they must be legit, right? Legitimate.
Yeah. Next to Dolly Parton, right there.
Well, Dolly Parton will show up in this story, unfortunately. Oh, yeah.
It's not all that bad in terms of her involvement, but she's not completely uninvolved with the Alamos either. Great stuff.
So going to oh oh yeah look at them aren't they beautiful they're an off-brand like uh johnny cash he is so tony alamo if you're not able to look at the video of this you should i would recommend checking some of them out on youtube they're all over youtube t 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.
Like, honestly, Susan and I, she she's wearing like a fucking opalescent white out like pure white.

But it's like a shiny opalescent white suit.

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 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 um obviously the white house is involved like what is that shit glenn close is in it and i think he like do you know that's it i'm gonna get corrected later let's let's let's let's look this up real quick all right i 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 mark wait a second mars attacks yes yes she does look like she's she's got she's got like if if those aliens were wearing like a rubber human suit right because her head has that shape it's like, yeah. It's fascinating.
What I want to get across is that they really don't look like

regular. human suit right like because her head has that shape it's like yeah it's fascinating um i what i 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 she i see her And putting people out.
For sure. Not hard.
She is. So, now that we've said that, let's listen to them play beautiful music together.
We're going to be dedicated to a message in songs. And it's Tony Alamo, J.D.
Sumner, and the Stamps Quartet. And we're going to 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 sounds inspiring. 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 prayers. 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 like 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.

It's like.

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, you know, 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.

Yes,

indeed.

Absolutely.

Like,

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 eighties. Then like an X ratedend 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, McVay, 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?

Right.

Or also listen to that song and sing it to 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 do you're gonna do good you're not gonna 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 iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.
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