Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: that is mourning the temporary loss of its producer. Today,
Speaker 1: Sophie got into a little bit of a kerfuffle with
Speaker 1: the the ftc some shots were exchanged. Anyway, she's on
Speaker 1: the run now, but we're we're expecting her to report
Speaker 1: back in from her mountain hide away any day. But
Speaker 1: until she gets back, Samantha McVeigh is with me, uh
Speaker 1: today this week, Samantha, how are you doing good?
Speaker 2: You know, I was just saying, I feel like Sophie
Speaker 2: is our adult that supervises, so.
Speaker 3: I'm a little nervous that she's not here.
Speaker 2: But it's okay because I also did another show with
Speaker 2: Margaret and Sophie wasn't there either, So maybe she is
Speaker 2: she mad at me.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: No, it's she's just running.
Speaker 1: It's it's just she's on the run from from the law. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's fine. Once she once she gets
Speaker 1: to our hidden mountain fastness, uh in an undisclosed location
Speaker 1: in the Rockies, she'll she'll be back on the calls.
Speaker 1: Everything will be fine. Yeah, it gets We're going to
Speaker 1: be doing the podcast via Morse code. Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: going to be the only way to communicate. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: going to get some code talkers, but with like maybe
Speaker 1: maybe Klingon based. I don't think the Feds can crack
Speaker 1: that one yet. Uh not anymore. They got all those
Speaker 1: feds out. Those are the first people the Trump folks fired.
Speaker 1: Samantha stuff your mom never told you? Is your podcast?
Speaker 1: You got anything else you want to plug up at
Speaker 1: the top here before we get into our subject for
Speaker 1: the week.
Speaker 3: I don't think so. Yeah, I'm on a podcast. It
Speaker 3: has a book. It's been around for a.
Speaker 1: Bit, it has it. Yeah, an OG. And speaking of ogs,
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about one of the OG's
Speaker 1: of being an abusive Christian cult leader in the United States,
Speaker 1: the worst preacher of all time, a guy that Los
Speaker 1: Angeles residents might be are going to be aware of
Speaker 1: as well as most of our Alabama listeners. Tony Alamo,
Speaker 1: what have you heard of this guy? Do you know? Total?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know, which is what I'm kind of surprised
Speaker 2: by because I was really.
Speaker 3: Deep into the Christian world. So, oh, yeah, I know
Speaker 3: this one.
Speaker 1: He is, Well, he's one of the weirder ones and
Speaker 1: he's one of like the worst people wherever he This guy,
Speaker 1: oh man, he does all of the evil cult leader things,
Speaker 1: child trafficking, slave labor, you know, all all all the
Speaker 1: good stuff, abusive, a corpse. It's great. We got a
Speaker 1: lot of fun stuff today.
Speaker 3: Some modern day Christianity.
Speaker 1: Let's go yeah, yeah, yeah, So again, his last name
Speaker 1: is Alamo, but it's spelled Alamo, but that's not how
Speaker 1: it's pronounced because the State of Texas would have come
Speaker 1: after him then he would have had the rangers on
Speaker 1: him long before the FBI finally took him down if
Speaker 1: he'd been weakening Texas' brand. But yeah, Tony Alamo. And
Speaker 1: this is this is kind of a weird one in
Speaker 1: that he is not the initial leader of his cult.
Speaker 1: That's kind of his wife. So it starts out as
Speaker 1: him being almost like you used by this cult that
Speaker 1: he later winds up running like he's always one of
Speaker 1: the people running it, but like his wife is definitely
Speaker 1: much more like the driving force of the cult when
Speaker 1: they get started, which is interesting. You don't see that
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, you know, So this is a
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about a feminist icon in the
Speaker 1: world of establishing a cult that chat traffics children across
Speaker 1: state lifes.
Speaker 3: And icon Well, that's exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's good. Girls can do everything the boys can do,
Speaker 1: including trafficking.
Speaker 3: That's right. Obviously, we're always saying that equal opportunity. I
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of my favorite things about this is that
Speaker 1: these guys the people were talking about today were very
Speaker 1: good friends of one of our friends of the pod
Speaker 1: who had a run in of his own with law
Speaker 1: enforcement in a town called Waco. But I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself.
Speaker 2: Here, Okay.
Speaker 3: I was wondering, I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of where there's some way to
Speaker 1: go that comes in here. Yeah, ali O, Waco.
Speaker 3: All seemed too convenient.
Speaker 1: That's right. Now. Tony was not just the leader of
Speaker 1: the cult, you know again, he was basically its first
Speaker 1: member or maybe co leader, with the woman who became
Speaker 1: his wife, who we're going to talk about before we
Speaker 1: talk about Tony, because she is fascinating too, Edith opel Horn,
Speaker 1: which is you know, and she's she's got that serial
Speaker 1: killer name starting I know, Opal there's something sinister about that.
Speaker 2: It's a middle name is sinister, and it's also bless
Speaker 2: your heart, like she's going to poison you, but it's
Speaker 2: going to be a really great pie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yes, And she is she is, This
Speaker 1: is a she is a down home girl. Now, if
Speaker 1: you if your first thought when I said Tony Alamo
Speaker 1: was that like, oh, well, that's way too good a
Speaker 1: name of a cult leader to be a real cult
Speaker 1: leader's name, you are correct. And Tony was not born
Speaker 1: Tony Alamo. He was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman on September twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four, in Joplin, Missouri. So again, this is
Speaker 1: kind of rare for evangelical Christian cult leaders, but he
Speaker 1: was born into a Jewish family. His parents were immigrants
Speaker 1: from Romania, and while this may seem like an unlikely
Speaker 1: background again for an Evangelical Christian cult leader, Bernie's family
Speaker 1: was never religious, and as a boy, his parents identity
Speaker 1: like it told him, hey, you should tell people that
Speaker 1: you're Romanian, not Jewish, because if you tell him you're Jewish,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get beaten up. Right Like we're in We're
Speaker 1: in Joplin, Missouri in the forties and fifties. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, you really don't, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Dropping that too much now. Edith was also born into
Speaker 1: a Jewish family on April twenty fifth, nineteen twenty for
Speaker 1: in Alma, Arkansas, a small town about the same size
Speaker 1: as Dire, Kansas, where the family moved shortly after her birth.
Speaker 1: Her father was a convert or, her family was mixed religion.
Speaker 1: It's a little unclear to me because she told her
Speaker 1: daughter later that she first encountered the Bible reciting passages
Speaker 1: from it at her father's sick bed. He'd been sent
Speaker 1: home from the military early due to contracting tuberculosis, and
Speaker 1: over the course of several years he wasted away and
Speaker 1: tried to stay outside to avoid spreading the illness to
Speaker 1: his family. So he's like camping out to try to
Speaker 1: stop from getting his family sick, which is yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's some real like thirties.
Speaker 3: Just quarantine you out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, dad lives in the yard because otherwise they'll get
Speaker 1: us all killed. Edith would later claim to have refused
Speaker 1: to listen to what he said and like because she
Speaker 1: was convinced that she could heal him by reciting Bible passages,
Speaker 1: so she insisted on sitting next to his cot or
Speaker 1: whatever night. This may have been later myth making after
Speaker 1: she converted, Because our only source on her childhood is
Speaker 1: her either way, what we can confirm is that from
Speaker 1: an early age, Edith dreamed of being a star in
Speaker 1: the newly forming film industry, which had just come to
Speaker 1: be centered in Hollywood, California. But her dreams were interrupted
Speaker 1: by the northern normal patterns of life in a small
Speaker 1: southern town. By which I mean she got pregnant extremely young, obviously, right,
Speaker 1: Like she's a dire like our kidsaw in the fucking
Speaker 1: thirties and forties.
Speaker 3: What else is there to do?
Speaker 1: Well? I mean literally, there is nothing else that you
Speaker 1: can do aside from get pregnant early and have your
Speaker 1: brother's and husband die of various coal related diseases or
Speaker 1: farming related accidents. You know. Yeah, yeah, obviously, like people,
Speaker 1: there have numerous different things that they can do with
Speaker 1: their lives, all of which involved dying young.
Speaker 3: Dying young.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: Debbie Scrivener describes what happened next in the book Whispering
Speaker 1: in the Daylight, which is about the Alamos quote. She
Speaker 1: married at fourteen, had a baby at fifteen, and divorced
Speaker 1: at sixteen. It was then that Edith ople decided to
Speaker 1: take charge of her own journey to stardom and headed
Speaker 1: to California. When she reached Hollywood, Edith Ople changed her
Speaker 1: name to Susan Fleetwood. After failed attempts at a singing
Speaker 1: an acting career, she married and then divorced Saul Lippowitz
Speaker 1: and converted from her Jewish roots to Evangelical Christianity. She
Speaker 1: began to preach and teach informally. And she just straight
Speaker 1: up abandons her son right now. This is her son
Speaker 1: that she has at fifteen. But yeah, she just kind
Speaker 1: of bounces on the family she's got over there, moves
Speaker 1: to Hollywood and starts trying to make it. And the
Speaker 1: one daughter that she has with Saul Lippowitz is named
Speaker 1: Christhion like christ Hiao n KOI I'm guessing Koy was.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't actually know where Koy comes from here.
Speaker 1: That must be her married name. That's what she writes
Speaker 1: under as an adult. I have never heard of the
Speaker 1: name Christhian before. This may be a misspelling of the
Speaker 1: name Christaan, like like christ o in, which is a
Speaker 1: Latin girl's name that means follower of Christ. But I
Speaker 1: don't know. Chris theon doesn't appear to be anything right.
Speaker 2: It sounds like as an amalgamation of saying Christ and
Speaker 2: then like Thessalonians, one of the chapters like.
Speaker 1: That maybe yeah, yeah, somebody's flipping through a Bible on
Speaker 1: an epidural and is like, I got a name.
Speaker 3: I'll take these two things, buy them together. Beautiful, yeah, perfect,
Speaker 3: no problems here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, according to Chris, we're going to call her
Speaker 1: Chris because I'm not going to try to pronounce that
Speaker 1: name the whole time, and that's generally what she seems
Speaker 1: to go by. Edith, her mom makes a living during
Speaker 1: this period, primarily as a con woman because she's trying
Speaker 1: to find work. In the movie, she does some acting gigs,
Speaker 1: but they do not her career doesn't take off right.
Speaker 1: Her daughter will credit this to the fact that she
Speaker 1: just does not have the look that hally Wood's going for.
Speaker 1: In this period. She was, per her daughter quote, beautiful
Speaker 1: in the weirdest way, not like you would look at
Speaker 1: her and go wow, a striking beauty. But when she
Speaker 1: walked in a room, she had so much command that
Speaker 1: people stopped talking. So she's not the kind of she
Speaker 1: doesn't have the right look to get the big Hollywood gigs.
Speaker 1: But she does have the right look to make people
Speaker 1: pay attention to her and kind of gravitates naturally to
Speaker 1: conning them as a result.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's all tracks to where she goes.
Speaker 1: It feels like it's very perfectly natural. Yes, I'm seeing
Speaker 1: the a to be here very easily, very quickly. When
Speaker 1: she managed to get work or successfully work at con
Speaker 1: the family would have money, and so during Chris's childhood
Speaker 1: they swung wildly between mild solvency and absolute poverty with
Speaker 1: such regularity that it made Chris's childhood kind of dizzying.
Speaker 1: Also dizzying was the violence that Edith employed on a
Speaker 1: near daily basis. And I'm not going to read a
Speaker 1: lot of detailed stories of physical abuse here. Chris has
Speaker 1: a book that she's going to write later about her childhood,
Speaker 1: and her book, Mama Said, has some of the worst
Speaker 1: and most descriptions of like the beating and psychological abuse
Speaker 1: of a little kid that I've ever read. Edith is
Speaker 1: a very bad mother, Like I cannot overemphasize how abuse
Speaker 1: of this woman is to her daughter, or at least
Speaker 1: that's how Chris relates it. I don't know why she
Speaker 1: would lie about the specific things that she's lying about,
Speaker 1: given that they comport entirely with the life that Edith
Speaker 1: is going to live from this point forward. Right, So, Edith,
Speaker 1: now living as Susan and her daughter, spent years on
Speaker 1: the margins. Once Chris is thirteen, Edith is like, Hey,
Speaker 1: you got to start earning your keep, right, You're basically
Speaker 1: an adult woman. It's time for you to start going
Speaker 1: out for parts and recording demo tapes as a singer.
Speaker 1: And you know, you kind of get the feeling that
Speaker 1: part of what she's doing is like, Hey, you know
Speaker 1: you're you're the age that a lot of creeps in
Speaker 1: Hollywood are interested in. If you can make that work
Speaker 1: for us, go do it. It's a it's a bad
Speaker 1: again childhood. The two live in a one room apartment
Speaker 1: with a pull down Murphy bed and survived primarily off
Speaker 1: of what Chris describes as mystery cans, which are canned
Speaker 1: foods with the labels removed that sold for cheaper than
Speaker 1: regular food. Quote, you would open these cans and whatever
Speaker 1: you opened, you ate.
Speaker 3: It's like a surprise.
Speaker 1: It's like a surprise. Yeah, exactly. You're keeping your life interesting,
Speaker 1: probably just pounding a lot of pure fucking coconut oil
Speaker 1: or whatever, like right, imagining, Yeah, yeah, pie, if you're lucky,
Speaker 1: pie me. Yeah, a lot of inspired suits. Suits. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. Yeah, that's like that. That's such a perfect
Speaker 1: like absolute poverty, uh story right there. Yeah, just just
Speaker 1: eating mystery cans with my mom as she tries to
Speaker 1: pip me out to the music industry to go, Yeah,
Speaker 1: get pregnant or drop and eat pea, right, like, those
Speaker 1: are your options. So by this point, by the times
Speaker 1: Chris is thirteen, Edith has aged out of most of
Speaker 1: the roles that interested her. Right. She is, again, particularly
Speaker 1: for this period of Hollywood, too old to become a
Speaker 1: leading lady, right, and the bulk of her earnings now
Speaker 1: come from con artistry. And here is how Debbie Scrivener
Speaker 1: describes her most successful and repeated con. She developed her
Speaker 1: evangelical skills by scamming churches under the pretense of being
Speaker 1: a missionary seeking funds. She would say to Chris put
Speaker 1: on address, We're going to do a church. They would go,
Speaker 1: and during the service, Susan would stand and say, I
Speaker 1: have a message from the Lord and I need to speak.
Speaker 1: Susan would speak, Chris would sing, church members would pass
Speaker 1: a love offering and mother and daughter would leave with money.
Speaker 1: And so, at age thirty four, Edith Opelhorn gave birth
Speaker 1: to a new persona Susan Lippowitz, with business acumen, powers
Speaker 1: of persuasion, and gritty determination. Well in place. There's some
Speaker 1: disagreement in my sources of her when she's got that's
Speaker 1: going by Susan, but it appears to be something she
Speaker 1: takes on as part of this, like I'm going to
Speaker 1: be scamming churches. And I think it's interesting again that
Speaker 1: she comes from like a background that is very much
Speaker 1: not evangelical Christianity, which may be why she knows how
Speaker 1: to manipulate these people so well, maybe it's just the
Speaker 1: simple fact that none of this is sacred to her
Speaker 1: and the way it is to these people. So she's
Speaker 1: able to kind of look in from the outside and like, oh,
Speaker 1: I know how to fuck with these I know how
Speaker 1: to get their money, right, Yeah, I know what they
Speaker 1: want to hear. They want to see my daughter singing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, if she truly was trying to heal her father,
Speaker 2: realize it doesn't work and this is bs, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: just take their money.
Speaker 1: Then I'm gonna take their fucking money. They're they lied
Speaker 1: to me when my dad was sitting. Yeah, maybe there's
Speaker 1: something there too, just like if I'm green lighting the
Speaker 1: HBO mini series, that's at least how I try to gain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how we're going to start.
Speaker 3: Give her a little that's her villain origin.
Speaker 1: Right, right, So Susan nursed clear ambitions of turning her
Speaker 1: daughter into a money ticket, and and Chris's initial ambition
Speaker 1: was music. But Susan was the kind of mom who
Speaker 1: was more than capable of acting on opportunity. One day
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty four or sixty five, when Chris was
Speaker 1: in eighth grade, she rode home on a city bus.
Speaker 1: Now this was during a time again we're talking sixty
Speaker 1: four or sixty five, this is a time of a
Speaker 1: heightened racial tension, particularly in Los Angeles. The way Chris
Speaker 1: describes it decades later, and again, Chris is not being
Speaker 1: raised what we would call racially open minded. Right, Her
Speaker 1: mom grows up in the South in the twenties and thirties.
Speaker 1: She is raised believing some very racist things. So she
Speaker 1: sees Chris sees this group of black girls on the
Speaker 1: bus and quote, I may have given them a look.
Speaker 1: They didn't like I'm not sure. One of the girls
Speaker 1: responds by sticking out her foot, and Chris trips and falls,
Speaker 1: and then the girls laugh at her, and other people
Speaker 1: on the bus start laughing too, and so Chris runs
Speaker 1: for the exit and then trips herself on her way
Speaker 1: out right, and so she winds up with like scraped up,
Speaker 1: bloody knees and everything. And that's, as Chris says it,
Speaker 1: that's all that happened, right, Like, you know, she's probably
Speaker 1: this girl who's raised very racist, gives a mean look
Speaker 1: to a black girl who trips her, and the encounter
Speaker 1: ends right in the grand scheme of things, not a
Speaker 1: huge deal. But when Chris gets home, Susan sees that
Speaker 1: she has bloody hands and knees, mostly from the second
Speaker 1: time that she fell on her own. And Susan's like,
Speaker 1: what happened? And Chris told her, right, I got tripped
Speaker 1: on the bus by this black girl. And Susan responds,
Speaker 1: you let a bunch of and then she drops several
Speaker 1: slurs in a row. Run you off a public bus.
Speaker 1: Chris tries to explain, I couldn't do anything, but Susan
Speaker 1: is drunk, so she beats her daughter mercilessly breaking her
Speaker 1: nose badly enough that she has to go to the
Speaker 1: hospital because there's blood coming out of her ears. Right,
Speaker 1: So we're talking like very serious abuse here. So when
Speaker 1: they get to the hospital, they can't Susan, Like, Susan
Speaker 1: doesn't want her daughter saying, well, I got tripped on
Speaker 1: the bus and scraped up my knees and then my
Speaker 1: mom beat me so bad I have a concussion, right,
Speaker 1: because then Mom's going to get arrested. Right.
Speaker 3: That's not great.
Speaker 1: That's not great. Yeah, that's like even even in this
Speaker 1: period of time, in the mid sixties, that's child abuse. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So because her injuries require an explanation, Susan on the
Speaker 1: way over to the hospital is coaching her daughter, who
Speaker 1: has a head injury, like, hey, you got to you
Speaker 1: gotta say it was those girls on the bus. You
Speaker 1: gotta say it was like a race thing that they
Speaker 1: beat you up because you're white. And then her book,
Speaker 1: Mama said, Chris writes quote those six black girl and
Speaker 1: this is her talking about like how she what she
Speaker 1: tells the hospital, those six black girls beat me up
Speaker 1: on the bus. I told them I got on the
Speaker 1: bus and that girl tripped me, uttered racial slurs, knocked
Speaker 1: me down and kicked me. Mom chimed in to add
Speaker 1: another fantastic detail. Every time I retold the story, you
Speaker 1: know what they said to her. They were screaming at her, screaming,
Speaker 1: We're going to take over America, you white bitch. They
Speaker 1: told her this is their city. The nurses, all white,
Speaker 1: would gasp and cluck, and then even more racist things
Speaker 1: get said. I think you get the idea right. Like
Speaker 1: she is, Susan is very much leaning into the racial
Speaker 1: animus of the time in order to try and make
Speaker 1: this a story that she can sell not just to
Speaker 1: these like white hospital workers, but to the media, which
Speaker 1: is where she's going to go next, because when she
Speaker 1: calls the cops, the cops are like, we don't really
Speaker 1: care about some kids getting into a fight on a bus.
Speaker 1: This is where the lapd and this is the sixties.
Speaker 1: There's so much else going on right now and where
Speaker 1: the LAPD, So we don't really care about much anyway.
Speaker 1: So she starts reaching out to every newspaper in town
Speaker 1: to tell them increasingly elaborate lies about the hate crime
Speaker 1: her daughter had suffered. The only reporter who shows up
Speaker 1: is a guy from the Harold Examiner, and the next
Speaker 1: day Chris is on the front page of the paper.
Speaker 1: Now this ignites a response from the local community, and
Speaker 1: that's what brings the cops out. A whole bunch of
Speaker 1: particularly the most racist people in LA start sending bouquets
Speaker 1: of flowers to Chris, often with very racist messages in them. Susan,
Speaker 1: because again this is all about money for Sue, she
Speaker 1: tries to sue the bus company and eventually gets her
Speaker 1: daughter on local TV, which turns her into, in Chris's words,
Speaker 1: a martyr for the cause. The John Birch Society gets
Speaker 1: interested and Susan and Chris are enrolled in the organization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is she This is like the kind of
Speaker 1: the first big con. Susan realizes she can play with
Speaker 1: her daughter, is like, I'm going to try and make
Speaker 1: her like the face of the anti integration movement, right
Speaker 1: and it You know, this works for a little while.
Speaker 1: Spurred to action by media attention, the LAPD takes to
Speaker 1: the field with the usual degree of competence you would expect.
Speaker 1: This is from Chris's book. Six black girls were arrested,
Speaker 1: thrown in jail, charged, and dragged into a courtroom to
Speaker 1: answer for my mother's crime. Mama told me I'd have
Speaker 1: to testify on the witness stand. The thought made me
Speaker 1: want to die. Mama caught me trying to overdose on
Speaker 1: pills before the court date. She poured salt water down
Speaker 1: my throat until I threw everything up. She didn't beat
Speaker 1: me this time, though. She couldn't have me showing up
Speaker 1: to court with fresh wounds. So pretty bad, pretty bad story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she didn't beat that's but she didn't beat her. She
Speaker 1: just nearly drowned her with salt water.
Speaker 2: It's fine, fine, it's fine, A sailing solutions, everything's great.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm actually surprised that the police didn't jump
Speaker 2: in and be like, oh, racial stuff, let's go beat
Speaker 2: some people like that seems like something they would want
Speaker 2: to do because they don't actually want to work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think that's that's that's my expectation.
Speaker 1: But also you have to you have to note that
Speaker 1: a big motivator for them is always not doing anything.
Speaker 1: So when they first get the phone call, they're going
Speaker 1: to be like, well, I don't care like what he
Speaker 1: tried to get me to do this? Okay, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: uh so that's that's what's happened so far? Pretty fun
Speaker 1: story of outrageous child abuse.
Speaker 3: What a beautiful fairy tale?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what a beautiful fairy tale. This this has is
Speaker 1: a little bit there's a little bit of a fairy
Speaker 1: tale feel, except for instead of like Chris getting rich
Speaker 1: and powerful, her evil and abusive mother does right after
Speaker 1: this point. But before we hit that, let's do some
Speaker 1: ads and we're back. How are you holding up their?
Speaker 3: Sam, I'm just thinking about this. It seems like have
Speaker 3: you ever heard the story of Gypsy Rose, Yes, the
Speaker 3: child star them.
Speaker 2: This sounds like the redneck version of that, except church,
Speaker 2: which makes sense if you want to be like real honest,
Speaker 2: and I'm not gonna lie. I'm sorry to those who
Speaker 2: live in Arkansas.
Speaker 3: I know it's not your fault, but.
Speaker 2: Arkansas is one of the top four states that I'm
Speaker 2: terrified to go through as a person of color, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: if I can, I'll never go through there.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's and again we're talking like seventy
Speaker 1: years ago in that area. So even now Susan grows
Speaker 1: up knowing like, yeah, it's like a whole different level
Speaker 1: of racism. So yeah, Chris thinks that these girls who
Speaker 1: get arrested based on her mom's lives get acquitted again.
Speaker 1: She's like in her early teens at this point in time.
Speaker 1: In her book, she speaks of feeling deep shame for
Speaker 1: the incident, particularly the damage it may have done to
Speaker 1: those girls. She claims it opened her eyes to the
Speaker 1: kind of systemic bias that black people face, and I
Speaker 1: have no reason to disbeliever her. In her autobiography she
Speaker 1: expresses pretty honest guilt and sorrow over this, And given
Speaker 1: that she is an eighth grader when this happens, I
Speaker 1: hope we can agree none of this is her fault.
Speaker 2: Like, so they found the right girls. They didn't just
Speaker 2: pick random black girls that they are like, yeah, the suits,
Speaker 2: I think surprising.
Speaker 1: She describes it as them finding the girls, but I
Speaker 1: don't actually know that that's the case. Again, her memory
Speaker 1: is not going to be perfect if anything happening right anyway,
Speaker 1: that's Susan's background. This is the woman who becomes Susan Alamo.
Speaker 1: What a delight, And she's not going to be our
Speaker 1: primary character. So the fact that again she's going to
Speaker 1: be kind of running the cult for its early years,
Speaker 1: but she'll be out of the picture after a while,
Speaker 1: and I just need to prep you with her story
Speaker 1: because Tony's is so much worse. And this gets us.
Speaker 1: And part of why we're doing this is because I
Speaker 1: have a lot more detail on her early life and
Speaker 1: young adulthood than I do the early life of Bernie Hoffman,
Speaker 1: who becomes the future toorney Tony Alamo. He's about this
Speaker 1: is interesting as a male cult leader who has a
Speaker 1: lot of sex crimes. Later, he's about ten years younger
Speaker 1: than Susan, so hey, there you go. You know, he's
Speaker 1: not going to be consistent about that sort of thing
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. But in this case, Susan
Speaker 1: is in more of a position to take advantage of
Speaker 1: him than he is of her. Right sure, I think
Speaker 1: she's also just much smarter and savvy. Bernie also moves
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles as a young adult, I think in
Speaker 1: his late teens, with a dream of striking and famous.
Speaker 1: He seems to have always wanted a career in entertainment.
Speaker 1: He was a good dancer and became an instructor for
Speaker 1: Rudolph Valentino as a young man. While still a teenager,
Speaker 1: he moves to La to break into the music industry.
Speaker 1: He records several songs at the height of the British
Speaker 1: invasion in like sixty three sixty four where he's like
Speaker 1: trying to sing like a British person, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: really know how to. It's an odd it's an odd
Speaker 1: set of choices that he's making. Yeah, but he is
Speaker 1: working with some actual people. Like the one of the
Speaker 1: songs he records, Little Yankee Girl, had been written by
Speaker 1: Bobby Jamison, who is a prominent songwriter for hire in
Speaker 1: the area, and was produced by Kim Fowley, who co
Speaker 1: wrote and produced songs for Kiss, Chris Christofferson, Alice Cooper,
Speaker 1: and others. So he is working with some people who
Speaker 1: are real music industry folks. In conversations at parties and bars, Bernie,
Speaker 1: who by this point had started going by the name
Speaker 1: Tony Alamo, would claim to have ushered the Beatles into
Speaker 1: fame and worked with the Rolling Stones as well as
Speaker 1: Sonny and Chaer. The only musician that we can prove
Speaker 1: that he promoted was Pete Best, a former member of
Speaker 1: The Beatles, but he promotes Best after Best leaves the band.
Speaker 1: And primarily what he seems to be doing is like
Speaker 1: conning people who want to be musicians out of their
Speaker 1: money by showing them this letter from Pete Best and
Speaker 1: being like, see, I helped get the Beatles started, even
Speaker 1: though the letter he's got from Best is after Best
Speaker 1: left the Beatles.
Speaker 3: So he's trying to let everybody know I have connections.
Speaker 3: I did this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know the guy who fumbled the bag bigger
Speaker 1: than anyone has ever fumbled a bag. I worked with
Speaker 1: that guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the person you have to google because you're not
Speaker 2: sure why you've heard of him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, then you figure it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a guy who fucked up being in the Beatles.
Speaker 1: Sorry Pete. So. Tony's usual spiel involved bragging about traveling
Speaker 1: on the road with the Beetles and the Stones. Here's
Speaker 1: an excerpt from one such recitation of his speech. The
Speaker 1: bodyguard would open the door, throw down a big velvet pillow,
Speaker 1: and we would step into the velvet pillow. The barber
Speaker 1: would comb our hair, the nurse would take our pulse.
Speaker 1: One of the fellows would spray us with cologne, and
Speaker 1: other strew flowers in our path, and the cops would
Speaker 1: stand at attention, and like, there'd be some video of
Speaker 1: this if anything like this ever happened to you, Tony,
Speaker 1: Like I know people were crazy for the Beatles, but
Speaker 1: this wasn't how they did it.
Speaker 2: I Like, I can't imagine, because it's just the thought
Speaker 2: that I was, like, I would have made immediately trip
Speaker 2: Like that does not sound.
Speaker 1: Like why are they taking your pulse?
Speaker 3: Like what is wrong with you?
Speaker 1: Is the pulse thing?
Speaker 3: I don't get it. I don't get this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this was not particularly believable to anyone with
Speaker 1: real experience in the music industry. But those people aren't
Speaker 1: Tony's target. He is trying to get the attention of dumb,
Speaker 1: inexp sperienced young wannabes who have some cash in their
Speaker 1: pocket and who he can convince like, oh, hey, you
Speaker 1: got like if you've got a couple of grands, that's
Speaker 1: all it's going to take for me to get this
Speaker 1: demo tape into the hands of a DJ who's going
Speaker 1: to put it on the air or something like that. Right,
Speaker 1: Like the these are the kind of cons that he
Speaker 1: is carrying out right, And he makes a living doing this,
Speaker 1: not a good one. He is not super successful. He
Speaker 1: is just kind of on the edge of not starving
Speaker 1: to death all the time as a result of his
Speaker 1: income from this. Now, later in life he would claim
Speaker 1: that this year nineteen sixty four, during a business meeting,
Speaker 1: God struck him death and gave him an order start
Speaker 1: preaching the gospel or he'd be killed then and there.
Speaker 1: This is what he's going to claim later. Absolutely not
Speaker 1: what happens. And we know that because Susan's daughter, Chris,
Speaker 1: is there when Tony meets her mother for the first time,
Speaker 1: and the account she gives is a lot more believable.
Speaker 1: One day, in I think nineteen sixty six, that the
Speaker 1: timeline's a little fluid, Tony steps into a bar that
Speaker 1: and her mom are drinking at right now. At this point,
Speaker 1: Chris is kind of making some money as a recording artist.
Speaker 1: She's not huge, but she's doing like backup vocals and stuff.
Speaker 1: So she understands a little bit about the industry, and
Speaker 1: she knows people in the industry, and she's been warned
Speaker 1: about Tony and that she'd tell you something in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six. If you're a sixteen year old girl in
Speaker 1: the music industry, people warn you about Tony Alamo and like,
Speaker 1: you have to be really bad to cross that line.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty six, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess if you know enough people or
Speaker 2: the right people, you'll get good information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and she does. She gets warned about this guy,
Speaker 1: and so she warns her mom because he starts walk
Speaker 1: up to their table, and she's like, I've heard about
Speaker 1: this guy. Do not talk to him. He's a fucking creep.
Speaker 1: But Tony walks right up to their table. And my
Speaker 1: read on what happened is that, weirdly enough, Tony and
Speaker 1: Susan are kind of made for each other. They're both artists.
Speaker 1: I think initially they both identify each other as a
Speaker 1: good mark, right, because Chris claims they immediately both start
Speaker 1: lying to each other, right, trying to get money out
Speaker 1: of the other.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Tony starts talking about the stars that he was promoting,
Speaker 1: and Susan is like, I'm an actress. You know, my
Speaker 1: daughter's a singer. We've got connections. When she says that,
Speaker 1: Tony's like, oh, I can make your daughter a star.
Speaker 1: And Chris would later recall I'm watching them and it's
Speaker 1: like a tennis match of horse crap. They both think
Speaker 1: the other's got money. He gets to up to go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, and I turned to my mother and
Speaker 1: I said, listen to me. This guy is an absolute bum,
Speaker 1: he's living with that little pregnant girl. She puts her
Speaker 1: finger in my face, which she often did, and said,
Speaker 1: you mind your fucking business. When he gets back. You
Speaker 1: wait a few minutes and politely excuse yourself from the
Speaker 1: table and don't come home tonight. So again, year Mama, the.
Speaker 2: Year Mama had a plan. At least she to'll look
Speaker 2: it out of the house, I guess. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: I could have gone really arrived very quickly.
Speaker 1: So it's going to go awry not much longer than this, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: of course, But yeah, I mean you are right, Mama
Speaker 1: had a plan, right, Like, Tony is not going to
Speaker 1: wind up taking advantage of Susan, like she is going
Speaker 1: to wind up kind of looping him into her thing.
Speaker 1: So he comes back and he sits down at the
Speaker 1: table and Chris looks at him or and sorry, and
Speaker 1: Susan looks at him and says, Tony, I've got to
Speaker 1: ask you a question. Did you know that Jesus Christ
Speaker 1: is coming back to Earth again? And Tony looks deep
Speaker 1: into horizon and says, of course I know that, Susan,
Speaker 1: but how did you know? And she's like, let's go
Speaker 1: to my apartment to talk about it, which is the
Speaker 1: like evangelical con man and con woman flirting is I've
Speaker 1: never really heard that story before.
Speaker 3: Oh amazing?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, we need to advertise that as the
Speaker 2: perfect pickup line for other Christians.
Speaker 1: Crime date Yeah, come on, yeah, are you looking to
Speaker 1: like rob a bunch of maga people? Like this is
Speaker 1: the dating site where you can find your person? Oh? Man,
Speaker 1: So to make a show, how did you know that?
Speaker 1: They just it's it's almost supernatural, right, They can feel
Speaker 1: the vibrations of each other, like, oh, this is a
Speaker 1: man who you know, uh is there's just nothing inside
Speaker 1: of him, but is a desire to fleece people for
Speaker 1: their money. And that's all I've got inside me. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1: I love it when people find each other.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: It's better than a soul.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, No, a soul is just going to
Speaker 1: weigh you down right, true. Yeah, if you're just completely
Speaker 1: hollow inside, you float like a witch in the fucking
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds or whenever. So, to make a short story
Speaker 1: even shorter, the two hit it off and got married
Speaker 1: three separate times over the course of forty eight hours. Now,
Speaker 1: what did I say? Why did they get married? Three
Speaker 1: times in two days. Yeah, it does, it does They
Speaker 1: They first go to Mexico where they get hitched, but
Speaker 1: then like right when they're about to have sex, Susan's like, actually,
Speaker 1: I worry that Mexic marriage isn't legal, and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to sleep with you until we're legally married. And
Speaker 1: Tony is apparently hard up enough that he drives them
Speaker 1: from Mexico to Vegas without sleeping and purchases two marriage
Speaker 1: licenses and pasting two different marriage ceremonies just.
Speaker 3: In case she backs out another one. Really is the
Speaker 3: real one.
Speaker 1: This is the real one. And eventually Susan's like, all right,
Speaker 1: I guess we're married enough. I think this might make
Speaker 1: him the only person I've ever read about who is
Speaker 1: bigamously married to his one wife. He is going to
Speaker 1: do he does so much bigamy in the future, but
Speaker 1: he kind of does start by getting bigamously married to
Speaker 1: a single woman.
Speaker 3: He's a practice round.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is his practice round of big maybe Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's the chosen one of bigamy. He's the fucking loop
Speaker 1: Skywalker of bigamy.
Speaker 2: He's gonna do it right, and he's gotta practice it
Speaker 2: and get it through and then like, you know, it
Speaker 2: perflects everything that's right.
Speaker 1: That's right. You can't just start, you know, and assume
Speaker 1: you're going to be good at it, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: surgery or something easy. So the two change their names
Speaker 1: to Tony and Susan Alamo, and they start preaching the word.
Speaker 1: Now in the beginning, this is just an iteration of
Speaker 1: Susan's extant con work at churches. Right, the new couple
Speaker 1: would trawl the streets of Los Angeles for starving hippie kids,
Speaker 1: generally kids who were like coming down from bad trips
Speaker 1: or who were living on the street because they had
Speaker 1: too many bad trips. And since these kids were broke,
Speaker 1: preaching to them wasn't there's no like money from these kids, right,
Speaker 1: So they get a bunch of followers, but those followers
Speaker 1: are just kind of eating them out of house and home.
Speaker 1: So the Alamos tell them, hey, go get jobs and
Speaker 1: mail us the money. We've got to move to Las
Speaker 1: Vegas for unclear reasons. And so they do that and Chris,
Speaker 1: Susan just kind of leaves her daughter behind in La
Speaker 1: which is I would say maybe the best thing for
Speaker 1: Chris at this point in time.
Speaker 3: Keep your mom where she was okay.
Speaker 1: From the yeah okay, Yeah, Susan's not super committed to
Speaker 1: being a mother. So Susan and Tony are in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Chris eventually travels there because she misses her mom, and
Speaker 1: as soon as she shows up, she claims Tony rapes her. Right,
Speaker 1: she would have been fifteen or sixteen at this point,
Speaker 1: Susan walks in as it's happening, calls her a whore,
Speaker 1: accuses her of trying to steal Tony, and sends her
Speaker 1: back to Los Angeles. And then a couple of months later,
Speaker 1: Tony and Susan returned to LA because they've found another
Speaker 1: wannabe celebrity to promote. This guy's name was Rovaugh. He
Speaker 1: was a motorcycle riding, opera singer and yeah, very multi talented, right.
Speaker 1: I don't think his career takes off, but there's enough
Speaker 1: there that Tony's able to get a lot of backer money.
Speaker 1: He's able to convince people, hey, this guy's going to
Speaker 1: be huge, give me some money to get his career started.
Speaker 1: And then he buys jewels, furs, leather jackets with that.
Speaker 1: But this business is not doing well. And so even
Speaker 1: though their first stab at becoming cult leaders hadn't really
Speaker 1: made them a lot of money. They returned to that
Speaker 1: grift as soon as they get back to Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: so they start expanding their recruitment from just some down
Speaker 1: and out hippie kids to prostitutes, to other homeless people,
Speaker 1: to failing actors, to musicians and stuff who are kind
Speaker 1: of on the margins and like government housing and the like.
Speaker 1: Some of their first marks are because they burst back
Speaker 1: into Susan's life and they take all of her friends
Speaker 1: and roommates and put them into a cult, basically convert
Speaker 1: them by being like, hey, you'll get regular meals, which
Speaker 1: they provide via diving and dumpsters for expired food. So
Speaker 1: they get all of these kids to start working, you know,
Speaker 1: just kind of bullshit jobs and funnelly that money, donating
Speaker 1: their salaries to an entity that the Alamo's established in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. So
Speaker 1: fascinating grifts so far, you're just kind of I mean,
Speaker 1: all they're ever doing is abusing poor people, right, like
Speaker 1: that that's the Alamo con particularly her daughter's boyfriend.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: This is interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty bleak and a big part of what
Speaker 1: they're doing is they're they're finding poor Jewish kids who
Speaker 1: are living on the streets, some of them who had
Speaker 1: converted to Christianity and others who they converted. Tony particularly
Speaker 1: was really good at converting these like down and out
Speaker 1: former hippie kids. And the more people they bring in,
Speaker 1: the more money starts to come in. Some of it's
Speaker 1: coming from members handing over salaries or like inheritances and
Speaker 1: savings accounts, but the real money comes in when Susan
Speaker 1: figures out what is their first really brilliant con So
Speaker 1: then like today, southern California has a massive homelessness problem
Speaker 1: right and specifically the kind of people who are filling
Speaker 1: the streets are the kind of people that the Alamos
Speaker 1: make their business preaching to and converting. And then as
Speaker 1: now affluent, midass and middle class people are disgusted by
Speaker 1: homelessness and eager to support anyone who promised to take
Speaker 1: these people off the street. So once they get followers
Speaker 1: and they're pulling these people off the street and they're
Speaker 1: putting them up in like rented spaces and stuff, they're
Speaker 1: warehousing them. Basically, they'll pile their followers into vans on
Speaker 1: the weekends and drive to megachurches in rich areas, and
Speaker 1: then Susan will line up with they'll clean these hippie
Speaker 1: kids up and Susan will line up with them and
Speaker 1: she'll start preaching the word, and she'll go down the
Speaker 1: line and have them all give like a version of
Speaker 1: like I was on the street, you know, doing heroin
Speaker 1: or whatever, and then I got found by the Alamos. Right,
Speaker 1: and then Susan would conclude by being like, hey, does
Speaker 1: this church support work like this, right, getting these indigent
Speaker 1: kids off the streets and back to God. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to see me continue to do this,
Speaker 1: give some money to the Susan Antonio Lamo Foundation, right.
Speaker 1: And that's the grift. Right, We're getting these homeless kids
Speaker 1: off the street, and the actual money is coming in
Speaker 1: from churches where they don't have followers, right, but they
Speaker 1: do have a lot of people who hate seeing homeless people.
Speaker 1: That's how they get their money.
Speaker 3: Wow, I mean a little respect. They really did pull
Speaker 3: people off those streets.
Speaker 1: They are off the streets. They are accurately describing to
Speaker 1: an extent what they're doing. They're not giving these kids
Speaker 1: a better life or a safer life. Really not on
Speaker 1: the streets. Well, and it's it's such a fascinating like
Speaker 1: through line of Okay, I can see why that works, right,
Speaker 1: because you're able to say, hey, you know what, what
Speaker 1: what are kind of like conservative conservative Christians more scared
Speaker 1: about than anything in the early seventies the hippie movement, right,
Speaker 1: sixty nine was not that long ago. We're cleaning up
Speaker 1: after the Hippie movement, right, like that.
Speaker 3: Hippie movement exactly, anybody of different colors race.
Speaker 1: Right, and we're taking these people and putting them where
Speaker 1: you don't have to see them, right, Yeah. And they
Speaker 1: start making a lot of money doing this. Soon the
Speaker 1: Alamos have enough cash to make the dream that every
Speaker 1: cult leader has real, buying land and starting a compound.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy one, they purchase acreage in Saugus, California,
Speaker 1: and an old restaurant that they convert to a church.
Speaker 1: Their followers are made to live in chicken coops. Married
Speaker 1: couples get to live in shacks, and once it was
Speaker 1: known that the Alamos are doing the good work of
Speaker 1: cleaning up the shrapnel of the Hippie movement off the streets,
Speaker 1: more money and followers start to flow in. This is
Speaker 1: part of a broader trend in evangelicalism as counter swing
Speaker 1: to the Summer of Love and this sort of leftward
Speaker 1: tilt of culture at the end of the sixties. I
Speaker 1: think we're all familiar with the way in which this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff kind of yins and yang's out right,
Speaker 1: like you have your big sort of leftward shift and
Speaker 1: then this huge reactionary shift. Well, the Alamos grift hits
Speaker 1: right at the peak of that reactionary shift.
Speaker 3: Perfect timing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Unfortunately, the worst people always have pretty good timing.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Samantha, let's listen to the incredible timing of
Speaker 1: some of our advertisers. We're back, oh Man, good stuff.
Speaker 1: So in her book, Betty Shriver cites an article The
Speaker 1: Great Guru Hunt by columnist Art Kunkin, who documented at
Speaker 1: the time this kind of reactionary shift occurring and the
Speaker 1: space that it was making for cult leaders like the Alamos.
Speaker 1: There is very definitely something in the air, and it
Speaker 1: is not, as I originally thought last year, just the
Speaker 1: cycle of individualism and personal mystical search that could have
Speaker 1: been expected to fill the vacuum left by the failures
Speaker 1: of mass political activism in the nineteen sixties, a certain
Speaker 1: cat is being let out of the bag accidentally or
Speaker 1: by design, which will either result in the creation of
Speaker 1: many socially motivated individuals of great personal energy who can
Speaker 1: stop mankind from destroying itself, or the widespread dispersal of
Speaker 1: these same energies utilized by egoistic persons who will accelerate
Speaker 1: the crises. Which one of those? Would you say, we got.
Speaker 3: All?
Speaker 1: I mean, I find that so familiar to what we
Speaker 1: saw happened after twenty twenty. Right, you have all of
Speaker 1: these energies that get mobilized and then dispersed into these
Speaker 1: different sort of like cultic movements and disinformation streams. You
Speaker 1: know that the Internet and social media has really enabled yeah,
Speaker 1: by egoistic persons who accelerate the christ that the mobilization
Speaker 1: had existed initially to fight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they're the only ones profiting off right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, like we can. Oh boy, I mean it's sad,
Speaker 1: it's good. I go back and forth between, like, I
Speaker 1: guess it's comforting that this happened back then too, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is it?
Speaker 2: Or is it just frustrating that this cyclical thing has
Speaker 2: to continue to happen and we just have to never learn,
Speaker 2: like we never fucking learned, or the people that have
Speaker 2: learned really well, and so they bring it back so
Speaker 2: they can make that profit.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna throw this computer, keep it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that that's yeah fair. As
Speaker 1: the money flowed in, the Alamos constructed a new facility,
Speaker 1: Music Square Church in Hollywood and started filling it with
Speaker 1: street kids. Susan handled much of the foundations outward facing
Speaker 1: communications to what we might call normies, the big donors
Speaker 1: and leaders of other churches, while Tony handled converting new
Speaker 1: followers and took point on actually creating a belief system
Speaker 1: for their teeming legions to follow from a book by
Speaker 1: Greta p Allendorf quote, The Alamo ministry preached a wide
Speaker 1: range of ideas in times paranoia, UFOs as divine messengers,
Speaker 1: and Vatican conspiracy theories. Tony hated the Catholic Church and
Speaker 1: blamed them for everything bad that had ever happened, including Nazism.
Speaker 1: One Alamo tracked entitled the Pope's Secrets Read the Vatican
Speaker 1: is posing as snow white, but the Bible says that
Speaker 1: she is a prostitute, and I I mean he's not
Speaker 1: one hundred percent wrong about the Catholic Church being particularly
Speaker 1: fucked up in this period of time, given what we're
Speaker 1: going to find out in the late nineties and early
Speaker 1: two thousands. But it's also like not more responsible for
Speaker 1: that kind of thing than his own church is going
Speaker 1: to be, right, Like Tony's also you know, a prostitute
Speaker 1: of people's souls, you know, like he's a pimp of
Speaker 1: people's souls. I should say that's how he makes his money. Right. So,
Speaker 1: in her book, Betty does a pretty good job of
Speaker 1: explaining how the conversion process worked for new inductees. After
Speaker 1: they were picked up generally hungry on the streets of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: they'd be promised a meal and taken by bus to Saugus.
Speaker 1: Quote from the moment Brenda and Daniel arrived at the
Speaker 1: corner of Hollywood and Highland to catch a bus. The
Speaker 1: brothers and sisters separated them. A woman known as Sister
Speaker 1: Cynthia ushered Brenda to a seat For the next forty
Speaker 1: five minutes. Cynthia fervently explained that all the signs of
Speaker 1: the end times written in the Bible were currently happening.
Speaker 1: She pointed out the vapors of smoke covering Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: She mentioned earthquakes and wars. Cynthia told her that God
Speaker 1: was looking for dedicated laborers to preach and save souls
Speaker 1: before Jesus returns. The bus pulled off on Sierra Highway
Speaker 1: and Saugus, the heart of Canyon Country. Hundreds of people
Speaker 1: were milling about, greeting the buses and leading people about
Speaker 1: the grounds. Brenda, Daniel, and the others were ushered into
Speaker 1: a large hall where they sat on benches and waited expectantly.
Speaker 1: The room was packed with people standing room only. Brenda
Speaker 1: was a bit uneasy, but Cynthia assured her that she
Speaker 1: was in for a treat. A man who called himself
Speaker 1: Brother Michael, stepped up to the podium and gave a
Speaker 1: hearty welcome to the gathering. You're as welcome as the
Speaker 1: flowers of May and the noonday sun. Praise the Lord. Amen.
Speaker 1: He continued with a few rules that included no talking
Speaker 1: during services and a ban on literature from other places.
Speaker 1: Brothers walked through the rose to collect foreign forbidden materials.
Speaker 1: Brothers and sisters called over seers, monitored the physical needs
Speaker 1: and functions of the community, such as water supply, electricity usage,
Speaker 1: and even the distribution of toilet paper, often pages torn
Speaker 1: from telephone books. They had to seek permission from Tony
Speaker 1: and Susan for every aspect of their existence. One evening,
Speaker 1: after dinner, sister Cynthia sharply reprimanded Brenda for overstepping the
Speaker 1: authority of an overseer, which he turned on the lights
Speaker 1: in a building. Brenda said, but I thought I should
Speaker 1: turn on the lights since I was the first to arrive.
Speaker 1: Cynthia retorted, there you go, thinking again, Oh fuck, that's
Speaker 1: some good classic cult banter. Yeah, I got.
Speaker 2: You know, this is the thing about cults, I think,
Speaker 2: and this is kind of one of the big problems,
Speaker 2: especially a cult like this. If you know, you want
Speaker 2: to sit back and say the man they were, but
Speaker 2: those rules apply for so many of the churches, like
Speaker 2: literally the type that I.
Speaker 3: Grew up in.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't say necessarily you couldn't turn on the lights,
Speaker 2: But the idea don't bring in literature, don't learn things
Speaker 2: on your own, was very much like place and told
Speaker 2: us like things like seminary and the being, any of
Speaker 2: those places were against God and not having faith. So
Speaker 2: like Unfortunately that because this cult is so crazy, it
Speaker 2: makes the other things look normal and it's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay though, No, yeah, you're not very okay with
Speaker 1: all that.
Speaker 3: I'm okay though.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: Physical punishments were common, as is sexual violence from Tony,
Speaker 1: who really seems to prefer young teenagers to adult women,
Speaker 1: including his wife. What keeps people from leaving? You're not
Speaker 1: going to be surprised to hear this. It's a fear
Speaker 1: of hell, which is implicated daily from sermons by the
Speaker 1: Alamos and their followers. Every day they would tell new
Speaker 1: inductees and their old followers stories about people who had
Speaker 1: joined the church, left and immediately died. Right, if you
Speaker 1: leave the church, basically you are instantly going to be dead, right,
Speaker 1: and then you go to hell. You go straight to hell. Right.
Speaker 1: You know it's not new, but it serves right. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a functional, functional cult thing to be doing.
Speaker 3: This method is proven, is sound. Let's keep going with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly exactly why. It's like driving evolvo, you know,
Speaker 1: why fuck with what works? Occasionally, So, the only reason
Speaker 1: normal believers would need to leave the property was to work,
Speaker 1: and more and more of them worked for businesses owned
Speaker 1: and operated by the Alamos. They also had to travel
Speaker 1: to churches and civic centers to deliver what the Alamos
Speaker 1: called popcorn testimony. These are the little speeches by former
Speaker 1: hippies and homeless people that opened up donor pocketbooks, right
Speaker 1: you know where they're saying like, hey, if I hadn't
Speaker 1: if the Alamos hadn't found me, I'd be dead or
Speaker 1: in jail or in a mental institution. You know, these
Speaker 1: are the popcorn speeches. By the mid nineteen seventies, the
Speaker 1: Alamos are wealthy, they're outwardly respectable. They're operating several successful
Speaker 1: businesses that we're keeping according you know, in the eyes
Speaker 1: of a lot of Angelino's, the riff raff off the streets,
Speaker 1: and you know where they belong, locked up somewhere away
Speaker 1: from the people with expensive houses. Susan Tony then got
Speaker 1: to live the life of high rolling multi millionaires. On
Speaker 1: one famous occasion, Susan showed up for an interview wearing
Speaker 1: a Lynx jacket and a floor length address, telling the
Speaker 1: interview where God wants his children to go first class
Speaker 1: and I guess to have links links for jackets.
Speaker 2: I mean, you got to show off when you're blessed.
Speaker 2: That's right here with hashtag blessed that's right.
Speaker 1: If you don't do that, people might not really believe
Speaker 1: that God has blessed you, and that endangers their souls.
Speaker 3: That's the point. Yeah, you're not going to be blessed.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you understand it. Right, You're really doing this
Speaker 1: for their souls, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm not going to show you my jacket
Speaker 3: right now. I'm just saying.
Speaker 1: No, no, but you have a lot of links. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're you're heavy, heavy end the lynxes, which who isn't Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: That's all I wear is lynxes. This is one hundred
Speaker 1: percent lengths hoodie. It's really hot though, it's incredibly warm. Yes,
Speaker 1: not at all comfortable, especially when I've got the heat on.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy five, we finally get some good news,
Speaker 1: which is that Susan gets diagnosed with cancer. Now, as
Speaker 1: a little girl, she had claimed to have been struck.
Speaker 1: Sometimes she would claim that she caught tuberculosis from her father,
Speaker 1: right and that she had been healed by God after praying.
Speaker 1: And as a result, when she gets sick, she prescribes
Speaker 1: herself and as well as prescribing Tony and most of
Speaker 1: their followers that they're going to pitch up stakes and
Speaker 1: move back to Arkansas where they'll be healed. Right, They
Speaker 1: still keep the Saugust compound open. They still have their
Speaker 1: followers there like recruiting people off the streets of la
Speaker 1: and raising money working some businesses, but kind of the
Speaker 1: core of their best followers. And they take most of
Speaker 1: their money to a place called Dire, Arkansas, which is
Speaker 1: where she'd grown up, and they buy a compound. So
Speaker 1: this is a little town population less than five hundred,
Speaker 1: and they make, you know, people notice when they suddenly
Speaker 1: drive in because they only have black Cadillacts. That's the
Speaker 1: only car his followers drive. So he has, like suddenly
Speaker 1: this huge fleet of new black Cadillacts and dozens of
Speaker 1: converted hippies move into this very small town. Their combat
Speaker 1: is centered around the home that had been Susan's home
Speaker 1: when she was a little girl. They expanded it and
Speaker 1: updated it with all of the least classy adornments their
Speaker 1: new riches could buy. Greta Allendorff writes the couple was
Speaker 1: fond of red carpeting, chandeliers, and velvet wall coverings and
Speaker 1: installed them in every space they occupied. Just the most
Speaker 1: hideous place you could imagine.
Speaker 3: I needed to be shaggy carpeting.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh my god, some like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bear skin rugs, that's right, I need all of them.
Speaker 2: And then golden candles, yes.
Speaker 1: Golden candles. Every wall is pure velvet, like I mean,
Speaker 1: the instant you drop a cigarette in this place, it
Speaker 1: goes up right. Just beautiful stuff. So at this time
Speaker 1: they also begin construction on a sprawling Victorian home on
Speaker 1: the mountain, complete with dormitories for their followers in a
Speaker 1: heart shaped pool for Susan. A grand church hall is
Speaker 1: constructed for their evangelical TV show where Tony sang loves
Speaker 1: songs for Susan such as my personal favorite, I love
Speaker 1: you so much it hurts Me. Now. One of the
Speaker 1: things that interesting is that, like a lot less of
Speaker 1: his songs than you'd expect given who he is, are
Speaker 1: like actual religious songs, Like again, this is just him
Speaker 1: talking about how much he loves his wife, his horrible,
Speaker 1: evil wife. But I do feel like I'm legally bound
Speaker 1: to show you a video of the Alamos playing this song. Now,
Speaker 1: this should tell you something about like the level of
Speaker 1: because I'm talking about these people, they are a cult.
Speaker 1: They're very abusive. That's not how they're treated. They are
Speaker 1: as like megachurch pastors who are widely beloved.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The clip that I'm about to play is from a
Speaker 1: performance that they make at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: which is a very real, very major venue for country
Speaker 1: Western musicians. Right, this is not like a fringe thing.
Speaker 1: If you're at the grand Ole Opry, like you have
Speaker 1: a degree of legitimacy within the music within at least
Speaker 1: like the country Western chunks of the music industry.
Speaker 2: At the time.
Speaker 3: Or did they just pay a lot of money.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that may be what they did,
Speaker 1: but in terms of people looking out from the from
Speaker 1: the outside end, or just say like, well they're on
Speaker 1: the grand Ole Opry, so they must be legit.
Speaker 3: Right, legitimate. Yeah, it's a Dolly Parton right there, right.
Speaker 1: Well, Dolly Parton will show up in this story unfortunately. No.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's it's not all that bad in terms
Speaker 1: of her involvement. But she's not completely uninvolved with the
Speaker 1: Alamos either. Great stuff. So I'm going to oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: look at them, why do they off?
Speaker 3: They're an off break? And like Johnny Cash.
Speaker 1: He is so tony Alamo. If you're not able to
Speaker 1: look at the video of this, you should. I would
Speaker 1: recommend checking some of them out on YouTube. They're all
Speaker 1: over YouTube. Tony looks like off brand Johnny Cash if
Speaker 1: he like if he put on about forty pounds of
Speaker 1: just water weight and.
Speaker 2: A week shipped from Timu, Yeah, ship from He's because he.
Speaker 1: Got a little melted in the shipping container. And then
Speaker 1: I don't know, like honestly, Susan and I like she
Speaker 1: she's wearing like a fucking opallescent white out like pure white,
Speaker 1: but it's like a shiny opalescent.
Speaker 3: White, so uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: It looks horribly uncomfortable. She is dying of cancer at
Speaker 1: this point, but legitimately yeah, yeah, yes, yes, she's sick
Speaker 1: by this point. It's going to take her a while
Speaker 1: to actually fucking die, like years, but she is sick
Speaker 1: at this point. She her head, the shape of it.
Speaker 1: She looks kind of like one of those gray aliens
Speaker 1: wearing a skin suit, like that's Susan Alamo looks except
Speaker 1: for like a lot of makeup too.
Speaker 2: What is that one movie I already forgot that has
Speaker 2: the aliens and obviously the White House is.
Speaker 3: Involved, like uh ship Glenn closes in it, and I
Speaker 3: think he like, do you know.
Speaker 1: Correct, Let's let's let let's let's look this up real quick.
Speaker 3: Could be wrong. There's those aliens that's so bad, like digitally.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Mar Wait,
Speaker 1: they're saying at Mars attacks. Yes, yes, she does look
Speaker 1: like she's she's got, she's got, like if those aliens
Speaker 1: were wearing like a rubber human.
Speaker 3: Suit head what loos like?
Speaker 1: Yeah, fascinating. What I what I want to get across
Speaker 1: is that they really don't look like regular people, like
Speaker 1: real people. Like they both look like almost cgi.
Speaker 3: Humans and she scares me.
Speaker 1: They are both frightening, I would say, but her particularly yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Like she I see her beating people. I see that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, not hard. So now that we've said that,
Speaker 1: let's listen to them play beautiful music.
Speaker 6: Together to be dedicated to a message in songs. And
Speaker 6: it's Tony Alamo, J D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet,
Speaker 6: and we're going to try to preview as much of
Speaker 6: this album as we possibly can. So if you'll just
Speaker 6: stay right here with us and now, Tony Alamo, J D.
Speaker 6: Summer and the Stamps Quartet, I love you so much
Speaker 6: it hurts me.
Speaker 3: She stills expiring.
Speaker 5: This song is dedicated to my wife, Susan. It's a
Speaker 5: message and song that's so very dear to my heart
Speaker 5: because I lived every word of this song during a
Speaker 5: very long long news.
Speaker 1: With my Susan.
Speaker 3: This is so painful.
Speaker 5: During those long dark years, I cried out to God
Speaker 5: every day of my life to let my sweetheart live.
Speaker 5: God and his divine mercy hurt my cries, and he
Speaker 5: answered my prayers.
Speaker 1: I love your soul much.
Speaker 5: It hurts me.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think we're good.
Speaker 3: It went away.
Speaker 1: Oh I stopped it. We didn't need it, We didn't
Speaker 1: need to keep going. I want to hear his singing voice.
Speaker 2: Really bad, Liken skip the Sunday.
Speaker 1: It feels like a parody of like Johnny Cash is
Speaker 1: a fucking uh scam preacher. Yes, his outfit is amazing.
Speaker 1: He's like standing alone on this bad Yeah, it's so
Speaker 1: good to haunt me. It's a haunting vibe.
Speaker 3: Right, I need someone come say to my house.
Speaker 1: It's like it's a deeply evil vibe. Yeah, like I can.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad the cancer came back, which it does.
Speaker 1: Susan dies in nineteen eighty two from the same cancer
Speaker 1: that had inspired the move back to Arkansas. Now, sam
Speaker 1: this creates real issues for Tony because by this point
Speaker 1: he and Susan they had spent seven years or so,
Speaker 1: you know, since she got sick preaching that she and
Speaker 1: he couldn't die.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Susan had described herself because they have a TV station
Speaker 1: by this point, she would call herself the Lamb of
Speaker 1: God and would say that she and Tony were both
Speaker 1: had to be alive on earth to act as witnesses
Speaker 1: for the end times. Right, So the fact that she
Speaker 1: is dead now creates a real pickle for Tony Alamo
Speaker 1: and the cult, one that they're going to have to
Speaker 1: resolve in part two. You got any ideas about how
Speaker 1: they resolve it.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking like we can a Bernie Oh my god,
Speaker 3: yes you've got it.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, indeed, absolutely, like an R rated weekended Bernie'.
Speaker 1: Unless Weekended Bernies was rated R I was. I think
Speaker 1: it was in the eighties, then like an X rated
Speaker 1: weekended Bernie's. Okay, uh, Samantha, before we record that, you
Speaker 1: want to throw out your pluggables here because we're done
Speaker 1: with part one.
Speaker 2: Yeah again, you can find me on stuff Mom Never
Speaker 2: told you. With my co host Annie, we talk about
Speaker 2: a lot of intersectional stuff, so that means really sad
Speaker 2: stuff right now until like you know, we're actually on
Speaker 2: the list and people come at us. But anyway, that's
Speaker 2: a podcast that I'm on. And then you can find
Speaker 2: me on Blue Sky McVeagh Sam, and that's about it.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, check out Sam, find her on the Blue Sky.
Speaker 1: Listen to her podcast, and you know, listen to this
Speaker 1: podcast that you just listen to, go back in time
Speaker 1: and listen to it a second time so that we
Speaker 1: start trending in the other time streams, you know, right.
Speaker 3: Or also listen to that song to your love, you
Speaker 3: know what.
Speaker 1: Put that song on and listen to nothing else for
Speaker 1: the next like forty eight hours. Right, It'll be fine.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be great. You're gonna do You're gonna do good.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna lose your mind.
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