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4/30/10 – Radio station KVCE-AM removes Alamo broadcasts from schedule ***COMMENTS***

Texas Politics
April 30, 2010
Posted by Joe Holley

Does Patrick remember the Alamo?

Metroplex radio listeners who tune in to state Sen. Dan Patrick’s KVCE-AM (1160) can hear the program “Living with Joy,” financial planner Ray Lucia, former Houston talk-show host Sam Malone, Patrick himself for two hours daily – and, until a couple of days ago, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, from 11 p.m. until midnight every weekday night.

You remember the Alamo, right? He’s the one-time street preacher who built a multi-million-dollar ministry based most recently in Arkansas and who’s now serving 175 years in prison for taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex.

What Alamo (accent on the second syllable) was doing on Patrick’s station, which bills itself “the new conservative voice of Dallas and Fort Worth,” the Houston Republican and ardent defender of family values couldn’t say. He’s out of the country on vacation, station manager Bonnie English said, and was unreachable by cell phone.

English said it was purely coincidental that the station dropped the program after the Chronicle began inquiring about it. “The programmer made some decisions to stop carrying the program,” she said. “It’s something we do periodically, always trying to get the right mix.”

English said she had never heard the program and had never heard of Alamo. “If you check on every single program, you know. . . .”

With a little checking, English would have discovered one of the most bizarre characters in the world of cultdom this side of David Koresh. Now 75, Alamo’s been preaching since the 1960s that polygamous unions between older men and young girls is the will of God. [ALAMO DIDN’T START PREACHING ABOUT POLYGAMY UNTIL 1993 WHEN HE HIMSELF STARTED TAKING MULTIPLE WOMEN]

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin, Mo., he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and, according to a 2008 Associated Press report, married his first wife, [ACTUALLY, SHE WAS HIS 4TH WIFE], a chain-smoking would-be actress named Susan Lipowitz. They established a ministry to hippies, junkies, drifters and street people who hung out on Hollywood Blvd.,[ALSO MIDDLE CLASS CHURCH GOERS AND COLLEGE STUDENTS], and provided free food and lodging in return for unpaid labor in one of the couple’s many business ventures. The best known was Alamo Designs, manufacturer of rhinestone-studded jean jackets that were popular with Dolly Parton, Brooke Shields, Mr. T and other celebrities.

When Susan died from lung cancer in 1982, Alamo displayed her embalmed body in a glass coffee table [NO GLASS COFFEE TABLE OR CASKET, SHE WAS IN A NORMAL CASKET]and ordered his Hollywood congregants to pray for her resurrection. With Susan Alamo still under glass [NO GLASS], members began fleeing the cult with tales of corporal punishment, forced marriages and being refused food for days. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office charged Tony Alamo with felony child abuse and the FBI launched a manhunt. He served four years in federal prison on tax charges in the early 1990s [1994-1998].

When prison gates swung open, he moved to tiny Fouke, Ark., near Texarkana, and established a 15-acre compound with upwards of 300 followers. He still preached that the end of the world was nigh, that the Catholic Church was a conspiracy responsible for everything from World War II to 9-11 and that young girls – some as young as 8 – made the best wives. (He contends that Mary was 6 when she conceived Jesus.)

Alamo was arrested again in September 2008 and convicted a year later on charges of taking his underage “wives” across state lines as early as 1994, violations of the Mann Act. He’s serving his sentence in the high-security U.S. Penitentiary near Tucson, Ariz..

Metroplex radio listeners who miss Alamo’s message on KVCE — sister station to Houston’s KSEV-AM (700) — can now find taped Alamo shows on Dallas station KKGM-AM (1630), or they can go to his website, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. There they’ll find the answer to the question “some demonic newspapers are asking” – namely, if Alamo is in jail why is the ministry continuing?

The answer: “Pastor Alamo is in jail, but Jesus isn’t. Jesus is watching all of you, and no matter how hard you try, you’re going to stand in judgment before Him because you know that Pastor Alamo is innocent, as Jesus was innocent, and the Apostle Paul was innocent. But Jesus is watching this whole scene, and He knows all of you. You don’t believe in Him now, but you will.”

Last week, Houston attorney Don Ervin filed court documents on Alamo’s behalf, claiming that statements by U.S. District Judge Harry Barnes at sentencing show that the judge “imposed his own sense of religiosity” when he gave the preacher the maximum sentence on each of 10 counts listed in the indictment. Ervin’s court filing accused Barnes of allowing his own religious beliefs to color his judgment when he said, “Mr. Alamo, one day you will face a higher and greater judge than me. May he have mercy on your soul.” The longtime Houston attorney says he successfully used the same complaint against a judge when he represented defrocked televangelist Jimmy Bakker.

Ervin also contends that the government never proved its basic charge against Alamo – that he violated the Mann Act by taking underage girls across state lines for the “dominant purpose” of having sex with them. He and fellow lawyer John Wesley Hall, of Little Rock, Ark., argue that the sex was “incidental.”

In: 2010, News Blogs & Forums

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2 Posts

  1. Ridge Kid Says:

    Uhhh, exactly what is “incidental” sex? Papa Tony, you had SEX with children. Face your punishment and rot in jail then hell.

  2. Anyonmyous Says:

    The sex was incidental? What? Why did he marry little girls if the sex was incidental? Why bother to tote them around from state to state if the sex was incidental?
    Was his ritual of preparing them for intercourse incidental too? It just happenebd to follow that a pastor finds himself, among other duties, preparing little girl’s for his advances?
    How is sex with a minor incidental? How is sex to a spiritual man of God incidental, ever? Isn’t it supposed to be a sacred act of God, created by a creator to further creation? According to his own system of believe, sex cannot be incidental. Incidental sex would be secular, and he’s a man of God. His inconsistent pattern of belief has now been stretched to the furthest possible limit. And no longer holds.

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