The Tony Alamo Story

Los Angeles Times
March 7, 1995
by MarK Sabbatini

Abuse Charges Against Evangelist Are Dropped: Prosecutors won’t pursue case against Tony Alamo, accused in beating of an 11-year-old, because he has been imprisoned for tax evasion.
[Valley Edition]

Prosecutors have decided not to pursue a child abuse case against flamboyant evangelist Tony Alamo because of a six-year federal prison sentence he received last year for tax evasion, authorities said.

Alamo was accused of ordering followers at his Saugus church in 1988 to paddle a misbehaving 11-year-old boy about 140 times. The evangelist’s case has been frequently delayed because he was a fugitive for two years and was then tried and convicted on the tax charges.

Alamo would probably have served only five months in state prison if convicted of child-abuse and child-endangerment charges, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Asari said. He said that wasn’t a long enough addition to the federal prison sentence to fight what would have been a difficult trial.

“Obviously, memories dim over a period of years and that hurts the prosecution,” Asari said.

Bringing in witnesses who live out of state and requiring Jeremiah Miller, now 18, to recount the experience would have been difficult, Asari said. Miller won $550,000 in damages in a civil lawsuit in 1990 over the incident.

“We contacted (Miller) beforehand and he said he had no objection to (the decision not to pursue charges),” Asari said. “He’s willing to testify, but as you can imagine, at the age of 18 he’s got a lot of other things going on with his life.”

Asari announced the decision to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger on Friday.

“We’re very pleased that there was a decision, but it took a long time for it,” said Alamo’s attorney, Susan James. James said Alamo, who is serving his sentence at a federal prison in Florence, Colo., continues to deny any involvement in the beating.

Miller testified at a 1991 preliminary hearing that four followers, on Alamo’s orders, beat him for alleged misbehavior ranging from asking a science question in a history class to wearing a scarf designed by Alamo without permission.

Alamo disappeared in 1989 when he learned authorities were investigating the incident. He was recaptured in July, 1991.

He was convicted last June of filing a false tax return in 1985 and none at all the following three years. He received the maximum prison sentence and a $210,000 fine. Local prosecutors subsequently discussed a plea bargain in the child abuse case, but no settlement could be reached.

Alamo, whose real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman, and his wife, Susan, founded the Holy Alamo Christian Church in the 1960s, taking young dropouts and drug users off the streets of Los Angeles and providing them with food, shelter and anti-Catholic religious lectures.

His communes and church-owned businesses earned millions of dollars in the 1970s and ’80s, in part by using free labor provided by followers in California, Arkansas and Tennessee. Especially lucrative were rhinestone-studded denim jackets, which sold in exclusive boutiques for up to $600.

Legal battles and odd incidents have surrounded the church for years. When his wife died of cancer in 1982, Alamo displayed her body in their Arkansas mansion for several weeks, stating he expected her to rise from the dead.

She was later interred in a marble mausoleum, but her body was stolen in 1991 and has not been recovered.

James said Alamo’s church is still active, but Alamo is not presiding over it while in prison. She said he still faces a number of legal
battles ahead, including a bankruptcy case and appeals on the tax conviction and Miller’s civil case.

“I anticipate he’ll be litigating for many more years,” she said.

Credit: Los Angeles Times

As part of a plea agreement that saved him from a possible death penalty, confessed killer Richard Church agreed to tell the full story of his three years as a fugitive, authorities say.

Church escaped Aug. 21, 1988, after killing Raymond and Ruth Ann Ritter and savagely beating his former girlfriend, Colleen, and her 10- year-old brother. He was arrested in Salt Lake City Nov. 21,1991. In between those dates, Church, 23, spent time in California and other states with a religious cult headed by the Rev. Tony Alamo.

To avoid the death penalty, Church pleaded guilty Thursday in McHenry County Circuit Court in Woodstock and agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison. He also agreed to spend several weeks giving police details of his life as a fugitive so they can work to close holes in the nation’s law enforcement network.

Church’s attorney, Harold McKenney, said in 1989, Church narrowly escaped arrest when Internal Revenue Service agents made a raid on the Alma, Ark, headquarters of Alamo’s religious group.
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His crime was featured on the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries”. Click on the video below to view the episode. Click HERE to be directed to the Illinois Department of Correction inmate search to view Richard Church and his full profile.

CULT LEADER’S KIN EXPLAINS HER “CON”

I didn’t catch the show myself, but one interested viewer called with some thoughts about a segment of last week’s Unsolved Mysteries. It seems that a former Los Angeles street hustler named Tony Alamo, who had transformed himself into a religious cult figure in Arkansas, had disappeared owing the federal government $19 million.

According to the TV show, the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service are looking for Alamo on tax evasion charges, as well as threatening a federal judge.

There was more. When it became expedient to abandon the Susan and Tony Alamo Christian Foundation in Alma, Ark., Tony and some of his followers broke into a mausoleum and stole Susan Alamo’s body. Susan died of cancer in 1982, inadvertently removing the wind from the organization’s sails.

She had been the charismatic leader. When the organization peaked in the late ’70s, Susan Alamo was well known as a TV preacher in a region bounded by Memphis, Fort Smith, Ark., and Monroe, La. Tony hung in the background, occasionally releasing an album like the one titled, Susan, I love you so much it hurts me.

He wasn’t a great singer, the man on the telephone said.

Susan was a little girl around Arkansas who went wild, said the man.
She was married at 14, had a kid at 15, and was divorced at 16. She fled to California, eventually building an empire with a thousand followers, moved back to Arkansas, and almost bought up the town she had left. To see her and Tony become charismatic leaders of a cult was a study in abnormal psychology.

The man on the telephone was, in fact, Susan Alamo’s son [Charles Brown], who is a marketing director for a Sacramento manufacturing concern. Since he was never part of the cult and is not known to his associates as Susan’s son, he asked his name be kept out of it. Also, he is not interested in the attention of Tony and his body-snatchers.

So we will call the man Howard [Charles Brown].
[Tony, Susan, Charles and his wife]

Howard [Charles Brown] lives in a prestigious east-area development with his wife. He is, by all indications, a nice guy. Howard was not happy with Unsolved Mysteries. It had several things wrong, he said.

Despite the absence of religion in their backgrounds, the Alamos recognized an unlikely niche for themselves in the late ’60s, Howard said. They would become the ministers of Sunset Strip, helping the street people and the dope-addled hippies to a better life.

I don’t think it was ever totally altruistic, but there were some good intentions, initially, he said. The ministry skyrocketed, and they moved it out to Saugus, Calif., where they bought an old motel and dance hall and turned it into a church.

The Alamos left California under cloudy circumstances in the middle ’70s, moving back to Susan’s hometown of Alma. They took as many as a thousand followers with them, and left about 700 in Saugus.

Unlike later TV ministries, such as that of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the Alamos did not wheedle money on TV. They profited from the labors of their members. A system of elders kept those members in line. Once in Alma, they developed a large restaurant and showroom that featured country music stars, a concrete plant, a nursery, motels and apartments, a clothing concern and other businesses.

It’s amazing how far you can go on free labor, Howard said. Mother showed me a financial statement once that depicted their ministry being worth $52 million in Arkansas alone. She couldn’t understand why I was so stupid, refusing to come into the church, the amount of money that was flowing.

But I had no use for the hate stuff. As with all of these organizations, there was a big hate factor involved. Us against them. I was never interested.

Mother was a great con artist in her own right. They got a lot of kids off the streets, off drugs, but it’s the old story money corrupts. The money flowed, and the power of controlling that many people was very corrupting.

When Susan Alamo died, Howard and his wife paid a dutiful visit and confronted a bizarre greeting.

Tony told me, “You don’t understand the real truth.’ He lined up 15 kids to tell me how a miracle was going to happen, that my mother would come back to life. She was in a coffin in this huge house they had built, 18,000 square feet on a mountaintop. It was like that for months. The state of Arkansas eventually had to sue him to seal the coffin.

Then when Tony took it on the lam, he took the coffin with him. That’s when I began to consider how twisted this might possibly be, said Howard.

On the one hand, Howard, now 54, can express admiration for his late mother. She was always a dreamer who had this great vision of being tremendously wealthy. It was kind of fascinating to see her come into all that money and power in her own life.

I dialed the 800 hotline for Unsolved Mysteries and spoke with a pleasant young woman named Monica. As of Tuesday, no one had been able to provide a trace, as they say, of the vanished Tony Alamo.

Few Mourn Tony Alamo Group’s Fall

DYER, Ark. – Resident John Chitwood said he thinks few in this town will be sad to see the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation leave.

“They wouldn’t even talk to us. They looked down on us,” he said of the group that calls itself a Christian foundation and is known for distributing anti-Catholic pamphlets.

“Nobody really knew anything about them,” Chitwood said.

The foundation’s 250-acre compound on Georgia Ridge, which overlooks Dyer, and a cluster of buildings in town have been seized by the U.S. marshal’s office in nearby Fort Smith, Ark.

The seizure and planned sale of the property is to pay a $1.8 million court judgment against Tony Alamo in favor of six former foundation members for alienating the affections of two of the members’ wives.

One of the former members also alleged Alamo brainwashed the man’s wife and abused his son.

Alamo is a federal fugitive wanted by the FBI for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

In the seizures, which began Wednesday, deputy marshals confiscated 1,000 rhinestone-studded denim jackets hidden in the woods and equipment used to manufacture them by foundation members.

Chief Deputy Marshal Mike Blevins said the jackets apparently are the foundation’s chief money-making venture. He said he has heard some of the jackets sell for up to $1,800 apiece at stores such as ones on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif.

He expects the sale of the the seized property to draw a crowd.

People in the Fort Smith area already have begun to ask, “When can I buy my Tony Alamo jacket?” he said.

At the compound, a crossbar prevents visitors from entering a private road unless a guard raises the bar. Guard dogs are chained nearby.
The only building visible from the road is a large beige brick dormitory.

Hidden behind the trees, Blevins said, are houses, another dormitory, a cafeteria, a school and the mansion Alamo once lived in – complete with a heart-shaped swimming pool. There also is an Olympic-sized pool on the grounds.

Blevins said more than 100 foundation members were on the property when it was seized. By Sunday, officials said, the compound was vacant.

The members would not allow a reporter to enter the grounds Friday but offered some of their pamphlets.

A foundation member who would not give his name also discussed Satan, the end of the world and the evils he said mark the Catholic church.

Other members gathered in groups and stared. Some petted the guard dogs.

Their clothes – jeans, down jackets and flannel shirts – are a far cry from the studded denim jackets seized by deputies or the Elvis Presley-type costume Alamo wears on the cover of a foundation pamphlet.

The members did not bother lawmen while they were seizing property Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, but Blevins said, “They obviously didn’t agree with our being out there.”

The cluster of buildings in town includes the foundation’s Holiness Tabernacle Church, some apartments and a house.

One building is in shambles after the foundation’s printing press – used to produce their pamphlets – was removed to the compound.

The cluster of buildings is on the opposite side of the street of a grocery store. Chitwood, who was visiting with friends at the store, said foundation members will only walk on their side of the street and will not walk on the grocery store side.

Deputy marshals also seized the mausoleum of Mrs. Alamo, who died of cancer in 1982 at age 56.

Crawford County officials say officers making rounds Saturday evening at the compound discovered the headstone was broken and the tomb was empty.

The foundation once operated a restaurant in nearby Alma, Ark. Chitwood said the rumor he has heard is that Mrs. Alamo’s body was kept in the restaurant’s cooler until it was placed in the mausoleum.

Townspeople worry Alamo may try to rebuild religious empire upon prison release

DYER, Ark. _ The guards who once kept outsiders away from the Alamo compound are long gone.

So is Susan Alamo’s body, and the followers who kept it inside the mansion as they prayed for her resurrection high atop this ridge overlooking Dyer.

The only evidence of the massive raid that closed the compound are the dozens of doors kicked in by federal marshals.

Still, many of the townspeople remain uneasy.

After all, Tony Alamo, 63, is nearing release after a six-year stay in prison.

When he is freed on Dec. 8, ex-followers believe he will try to rebuild his ultra-conservative religious empire.

“I have no doubt that once he gets out, he will go right back to doing what he was doing before,” said Tom Smith of Goleta, Calif., who spent 15 years inside Alamo’s California and Arkansas compounds.

“Whether they’re going to do it in western Arkansas or somewhere else, I don’t know,” said Smith, a former follower who helped design the 16,500-square-foot mansion on the grounds here.

At its height, the church claimed thousands of members nationwide. More than 200 of them lived in the dormitories, houses and duplexes here on Georgia Ridge.

“The people he still has are few,” Smith said, “but they’re extremely dedicated.”

Those dedicated few, known for stuffing leaflets under car windshield wipers, now use more high-tech methods of getting their message out. Alamo Christian Ministries operates a home page on the World Wide Web. And the group, also known as Music Square Church, still holds worship services not far from Dyer in Fort Smith, Ark.

“It would not surprise me at all if he builds up whatever is left of that church and goes on to bigger and better things,” said Ronald Enroth, a sociology professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., who has done extensive research on extremist religious groups.

“He’s got that kind of charisma,” Enroth said, “that strange charisma.”

Inside the group’s Georgia Ridge compound, Smith recalls, “there was a tremendous amount of peer pressure.”

“You pick up a fortress mentality, kind of an us-against-them, us-against-the-world mentality,” Smith said. “It was always hammered home every morning, every day that we were the last bastions of Christians in the world and if you left here, God was going to throw you on the ash heap.”

Smith left in August 1986, hiking down from Georgia Ridge in the middle of the night after deciding that “Tony wasn’t using us as human beings … we were just tools.”

The threat of eternal hellfire, Smith said, kept followers from leaving.

“We were told that anyone who left there was either found dead, went insane or turned to a life of crime and went to prison,” he said.

It was Alamo who went to prison in 1994, after being convicted in Memphis, Tenn., of failing to file tax returns on church profits.

Alamo is serving the last few days of a six-year sentence in a halfway house in Texarkana, Ark. He refused to be interviewed for this story.

Georgia Ridge was among property in Arkansas, California and Tennessee that was seized by lawmen and later sold at auctions to pay Alamo’s debts.

About three years ago, its spectacular views led a California couple to buy the property and rename it Harmony Hill.

Truman Hance, a traveling evangelist who moved here from Bakersfield, Calif., and his wife Opal are now restoring the Alamo mansion.

“There’s probably people in this town who would be afraid to stand in front of this house here,” Truman Hance said outside the mansion, a few feet from the heart-shaped swimming pool out back and Susan Alamo’s empty crypt on the front lawn.

Susan Alamo grew up in the Dyer area as Edith Opal Horn, then moved to Hollywood with hopes of becoming an actress.

Her daughter Christhiaon Coie has said the two would visit churches, posing as a missionary and her daughter to con parishioners into giving them money.

Susan Alamo “was the power behind the movement when it started, and in those days he was kind of a shadow that stood behind her,” said Enroth, the sociology professor.

She married Alamo, born with the name Bernie Lazar Hoffman, in Las Vegas in 1966.

Together, their unorthodox church was well-established by the early 1970s.

Followers recruited new members _ known inside the compound as “Baby Christians” _ by handing out leaflets in Hollywood. Dozens of followers lived at the Alamo compound in a remote area near Saugus, Calif.

“I had moved to Los Angeles for college and was away from home for the first time, and it left me feeling really lonely,” Smith recalls. “I ran into Alamo’s people on Hollywood Boulevard … They would witness all day in Hollywood and then invite people to take a bus ride up to Saugus for a service at night.”

Smith compares his first few weeks in the Alamo compound to basic training in the military.

“It strips away your individuality and prepares you to be part of the group,” he said.

By the mid-1970s, Smith was deeply devoted to the organization and helped the Alamos move their headquarters from California to Georgia Ridge.

And Alamo, whose followers made jackets studded with rhinestones and sold them to country music stars from a store in Nashville, Tenn., was amassing enormous wealth.

“He started with $4,000 in cash and 10 years later had a $50 million enterprise,” said Ed Sanders, a retired religion professor at Harding University in Searcy, Ark.

Alamo’s businesses included a grocery store, a construction company, an auto repair shop, a restaurant and a hog farm.

The Arkansas Ozarks offered an attractive home to the compound, partly because “mountain people are private,” Sanders said.

“They don’t care what you do in your holler, as they say, as long as you don’t bother them in their holler,” Sanders said.

And no one did bother them.

So why, Smith now wonders, did he guard the gates from the squirrels, the deer and the occasional stray dog in the pre-dawn hours so many nights on Georgia Ridge?

“We were always told there were unseen demonic forces trying to get in and murder everyone,” Smith said.

When Susan Alamo died of breast cancer in Tulsa in 1982, Smith and other followers prayed around the clock, each doing two-hour shifts.

“We were praying by the coffin for God to raise up Susan from the dead,” Smith recalls.

About that time, worship services were held in the mansion, which had three fireplaces, marble bathtubs, a 40-by-30-foot master bedroom and a recording studio in the basement.

To the north are buildings that once served as a school, a cafeteria and dormitories.

“This was kind of like a paradise,” Opal Hance said of the grounds.

Eventually, though, Tony Alamo’s legal troubles touched off the raid that sent followers hitch-hiking to the bus station in nearby Alma, Ark.

He was charged with child abuse after an 11-year-old boy told police he was paddled 140 times by four men on orders from Alamo at the Saugus compound in 1988. Prosecutors dropped the charges seven years later, saying too much time had passed.

He was also charged in 1991 with threatening to kidnap a federal judge in Arkansas. He was later acquitted after a jury trial.

In February 1991, 30 federal and local law officers raided Georgia Ridge and much of the property was seized by the IRS. They found Susan Alamo’s tomb broken into, her body missing.

After Coie sued to get her mother’s body back, it was returned by followers last summer and she was buried in Tulsa’s Memorial Park Cemetery in August.

Despite Alamo’s run-ins with the law, Sanders said “If I were ranking dangerous people, I wouldn’t put him near the top.” It’s Alamo’s followers, though, who concern Sanders.

“There’s always the danger of some misguided disciple deciding to take matters into his own hands,” he said.

Misguided or not, folks in Dyer are convinced they’ll be tucking their leaflets under windshield wipers for years to come.

The Rev. Herman Porter of Dyer’s New Bethel Church, who has known Alamo for years, said “he’s got followers all over the place and always will, I guarantee that.”

X X X

(c) 1998, The World, Tulsa.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

Judge Orders Alamo To Returned To Arkansas To Face Charges

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Religious Leader Wanted In 2 States

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Fugitive Cult Leader, Tony Alamo, is Arrested in Tampa

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TAMPA — A flamboyant cult leader sought by federal agents was arrested Friday at his upscale south Tampa home after two years as a fugitive.

Tony Alamo, who once displayed his embalmed wife’s body and said she would rise from the dead, was charged with threatening a federal judge, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution on a child abuse charge and contempt of court. In the last two years, the leader of the anti-Catholic sect worked in a Tampa restaurant, broadcast radio sermons and designed expensive, trendy jackets.

“Not hiding out,” he told reporters as he was led from the courthouse in shackles and a bright tie-dyed T-shirt. “Not hiding out.”

Alamo (pronounced al-AH-moe) was held without bail Friday night at the Hillsborough County Jail, where he is awaiting a court hearing Monday. He said the charges against him are false.

“I’m framed,” he said.

Alamo also spouted biblical references. “Why did Jesus get held by federal officials, and the Apostle Paul and everybody else who ever preached the true gospel?” he asked.

Asked if he likens himself to Jesus Christ, Alamo replied: “I’m certainly saved by him.”

The leader of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation fled California in 1989 after he was charged with child abuse. An 11-year-old boy told investigators Alamo ordered four male sect members to beat him with a paddle 134 times.

Alamo, 56, also is charged with threatening to kidnap a federal judge who had ruled against him in a civil suit.

He reportedly called an Arkansas newspaper, vowing that U.S. District Judge Morris Arnold of Fort Smith “will stand before me in my court” and “should be hanged as a traitor.”

Alamo also is charged with failing to appear in court after a federal ruling that his sect violated fair labor laws.

The self-styled minister is the leader of a multimillion dollar sect that has papered walls and windows in numerous U.S. cities, including Tampa, with posters attacking the pope, who Alamo contends is a Nazi and a homosexual.

“This has been a massive manhunt,” David Jacobs of the U.S. Marshals Service said Friday. “He has been very, very elusive.”

Others say Alamo has continued his public lifestyle despite being a fugitive.

“My husband has not been hiding,” said Alamo’s wife, Sharon, who said he has continued to sell their famous designer jackets for $600 and more. “He’s been very busy supporting his family.”

Alamo worked as a consultant and adviser for Wild Child, a new family-style restaurant in Temple Terrace. A taped sermon of his one-hour radio show, The Watch-man, Rightly Dividing the Word, was broadcast six days a week from Largo-based WRFA-820 AM.

“The tapes came in on Federal Express and so did his money orders,” said WFRA program director Jim White, “He paid right on time every week.”

During his years on the run, Alamo reportedly called journalists to offer interviews and faxed Bible verses to law enforcement agencies. He settled in Tampa two years ago.

“I don’t have a special reason why,” said Mrs. Alamo, a Jewish-born convert to Christianity who claims God led her to Alamo’s fundamentalist Arkansas church. “We like the weather.”

The woman who rented to the Alamos, Jean Marston of Ohio, said she thought she was leasing her spacious three-bedroom waterside home at 4912 San Rafael to Paul and Cathy Bapal, a quiet couple with a 9-year-old daughter. They said they were in the electronics business.

But instead, in moved Alamo, a man of many identities. He was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman to a Jewish family in Chaplain, Mo., his wife said. In recent years, the man labeled an anti-Semite by federal officials called himself Tony Schwartz, Clarence Williams and Clyde Kipp.

Most neighbors on the street that ends at Hillsborough Bay thought the house the Alamos lived in was vacant.

They said they didn’t see the gray van that pulled out of the blacktop driveway every morning and returned at 6 p.m. The Alamos taped black plastic over the garage windows and kept the shutters tightly drawn.

Each month, Mrs. Marston said an untraceable money order for the rent arrived at her Ohio home. Tony Alamo kept Mrs. Marston’s phone and utilities in her name.

“They did not leave a paper trail,” said Tampa police Detective Grady Snyder.

Mrs. Alamo, 33, a soft-spoken woman whose second child is due to be born Tuesday, said she expected the raid, if not Friday then someday. There have been other raids on Alamo’s church, including one last year on his 250-acre compound near Dyer, Ark.

She and her husband’s followers believe federal officials want to kill him because they say he has exposed the link between the FBI, Vatican and Mafia. Alamo, who was rumored to have doubles, bodyguards and a cache of weapons on hand, was alone with his wife Friday.

Officers handcuffed Alamo and hustled him out in his socks. Mrs. Alamo’s daughter had gone to the beach with a friend.

Tampa police and a federal marshal waited outside as IRS agents examined business records in the house.

Last year the IRS placed liens on Alamo’s churches, clothing stores and other property to satisfy a $7.9-million bill for back taxes. They seized his 150-acre church in Saugus, Calif.

In February, federal agents auctioned Alamo’s 400-acre compound in Arkansas to settle a $1.8-million judgment awarded to six former sect members.

Tony and Susan Alamo first gained attention in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s when they preached to young runaways on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. They formed the fundamentalist Foundation in 1969 in rural Saugus, and later moved to Arkansas.

Alamo gained notoriety when he said that Susan, who died of cancer in 1982, would be resurrected. He kept her embalmed body on display for months while his followers prayed.

Stories about Alamo on TV’s A Current Affair, Unsolved Mysteries, and 60 Minutes brought in a flood of tips, investigators said.

“There’s no question, (the shows) were a factor in it.” said U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Bill Dempsey.

Friday, Alamo told reporters his group was a church, not a cult. He denied being a hatemonger.

“I don’t hate anybody,” he said, “I preach the gospel. That’s love.”

Child Abuse Hearing for Evangelist Delayed Crime: A prosecutor says convicted tax evader Tony Alamo should be denied bail because he had married 15-year-old girls.

A Los Angeles hearing on child abuse charges was postponed Thursday for evangelist Tony Alamo, who remained in jail in Memphis, where a federal prosecutor accused him of marrying eight of his followers since 1993, including married women and 15-year-old girls.

Alamo, 59, was convicted by a Memphis federal court jury Wednesday on tax charges. The marriage accusations were made by federal prosecutor Christopher Belcher as an argument against allowing him to go free on bail.

Belcher said such offenses would fall under state laws against statutory rape in Tennessee and Arkansas, but state prosecutors have filed no such charges against Alamo.

Alamo’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Dickstein, who plans to appeal Wednesday’s conviction, argued that polygamy claims were no reason to deny Alamo bail while he awaits sentencing.

Following the jury’s verdict in Memphis on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla jailed Alamo at the request of federal prosecutor Christopher Belcher, who said Alamo posed a threat to his followers and that he might flee before sentencing on Aug. 26.

Alamo’s conviction in the tax evasion case clears the way for him to return to Los Angeles to stand trial on charges that he ordered the beating of a young boy at his onetime Saugus commune. A hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court in that case was rescheduled for July 29.
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NOTE:

At the IRS trial the evidence was SO overwhelming that even Tony didn’t deny the multiple wives on the stand. When Tony Alamo was asked about Lydia being his wife and Tabor was his son by Lydia, Tony Alamo took the 5th amendment! Lydia’s medical records regarding Tabor’s birth (Lydia was impregnated by Tony Alamo) were entered as evidence, as well.