Part One: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher

that one yet. Uh not anymore. They got all those feds out. Those are the first people the Trump folks fired. Samantha stuff your mom never told you? Is your podcast? You got anything else you want to plug up at the top here before we get into our subject for the week.

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

was born into a Jewish family. His parents were immigrants from Romania, and while this may seem like an unlikely background again for an Evangelical Christian cult leader, Bernie's family was never religious, and as a boy, his parents identity like it told him, hey, you should tell people that you're Romanian, not Jewish, because if you tell him you're Jewish, you're gonna get beaten up. Right Like we're in We're

in Joplin, Missouri in the forties and fifties. You know, you know, you really don't, you know what I mean? Dropping that too much now. Edith was also born into a Jewish family on April twenty fifth, nineteen twenty for in Alma, Arkansas, a small town about the same size as Dire, Kansas, where the family moved shortly after her birth. Her father was a convert or, her family was mixed religion.

It's a little unclear to me because she told her daughter later that she first encountered the Bible reciting passages from it at her father's sick bed. He'd been sent home from the military early due to contracting tuberculosis, and over the course of several years he wasted away and tried to stay outside to avoid spreading the illness to his family. So he's like camping out to try to stop from getting his family sick, which is yeah, I mean that's some real like thirties.

whatever night. This may have been later myth making after she converted, Because our only source on her childhood is her either way, what we can confirm is that from an early age, Edith dreamed of being a star in the newly forming film industry, which had just come to be centered in Hollywood, California. But her dreams were interrupted by the northern normal patterns of life in a small

southern town. By which I mean she got pregnant extremely young, obviously, right, Like she's a dire like our kidsaw in the fucking thirties and forties.

and converted from her Jewish roots to Evangelical Christianity. She began to preach and teach informally. And she just straight up abandons her son right now. This is her son that she has at fifteen. But yeah, she just kind of bounces on the family she's got over there, moves to Hollywood and starts trying to make it. And the one daughter that she has with Saul Lippowitz is named Christhion like christ Hiao n KOI I'm guessing Koy was. I mean, I don't actually know where Koy comes from here.

That must be her married name. That's what she writes under as an adult. I have never heard of the name Christhian before. This may be a misspelling of the name Christaan, like like christ o in, which is a Latin girl's name that means follower of Christ. But I don't know. Chris theon doesn't appear to be anything right.

In this period. She was, per her daughter quote, beautiful in the weirdest way, not like you would look at her and go wow, a striking beauty. But when she walked in a room, she had so much command that people stopped talking. So she's not the kind of she doesn't have the right look to get the big Hollywood gigs. But she does have the right look to make people pay attention to her and kind of gravitates naturally to conning them as a result.

lot of detailed stories of physical abuse here. Chris has a book that she's going to write later about her childhood, and her book, Mama Said, has some of the worst and most descriptions of like the beating and psychological abuse of a little kid that I've ever read. Edith is a very bad mother, Like I cannot overemphasize how abuse of this woman is to her daughter, or at least

that's how Chris relates it. I don't know why she would lie about the specific things that she's lying about, given that they comport entirely with the life that Edith is going to live from this point forward. Right, So, Edith, now living as Susan and her daughter, spent years on the margins. Once Chris is thirteen, Edith is like, Hey, you got to start earning your keep, right, You're basically an adult woman. It's time for you to start going out for parts and recording demo tapes as a singer.

And you know, you kind of get the feeling that part of what she's doing is like, Hey, you know you're you're the age that a lot of creeps in Hollywood are interested in. If you can make that work for us, go do it. It's a it's a bad again childhood. The two live in a one room apartment with a pull down Murphy bed and survived primarily off of what Chris describes as mystery cans, which are canned foods with the labels removed that sold for cheaper than

regular food. Quote, you would open these cans and whatever you opened, you ate.

like absolute poverty, uh story right there. Yeah, just just eating mystery cans with my mom as she tries to pip me out to the music industry to go, Yeah, get pregnant or drop and eat pea, right, like, those are your options. So by this point, by the times Chris is thirteen, Edith has aged out of most of the roles that interested her. Right. She is, again, particularly for this period of Hollywood, too old to become a leading lady, right, and the bulk of her earnings now

come from con artistry. And here is how Debbie Scrivener describes her most successful and repeated con. She developed her evangelical skills by scamming churches under the pretense of being a missionary seeking funds. She would say to Chris put on address, We're going to do a church. They would go, and during the service, Susan would stand and say, I have a message from the Lord and I need to speak.

Susan would speak, Chris would sing, church members would pass a love offering and mother and daughter would leave with money. And so, at age thirty four, Edith Opelhorn gave birth to a new persona Susan Lippowitz, with business acumen, powers of persuasion, and gritty determination. Well in place. There's some disagreement in my sources of her when she's got that's going by Susan, but it appears to be something she takes on as part of this, like I'm going to

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

want to hear. They want to see my daughter singing. Yeah.

heightened racial tension, particularly in Los Angeles. The way Chris describes it decades later, and again, Chris is not being raised what we would call racially open minded. Right, Her mom grows up in the South in the twenties and thirties. She is raised believing some very racist things. So she sees Chris sees this group of black girls on the bus and quote, I may have given them a look.

They didn't like I'm not sure. One of the girls responds by sticking out her foot, and Chris trips and falls, and then the girls laugh at her, and other people on the bus start laughing too, and so Chris runs for the exit and then trips herself on her way out right, and so she winds up with like scraped up,

bloody knees and everything. And that's, as Chris says it, that's all that happened, right, Like, you know, she's probably this girl who's raised very racist, gives a mean look to a black girl who trips her, and the encounter ends right in the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal. But when Chris gets home, Susan sees that she has bloody hands and knees, mostly from the second time that she fell on her own. And Susan's like, what happened? And Chris told her, right, I got tripped

on the bus by this black girl. And Susan responds, you let a bunch of and then she drops several slurs in a row. Run you off a public bus. Chris tries to explain, I couldn't do anything, but Susan is drunk, so she beats her daughter mercilessly breaking her nose badly enough that she has to go to the hospital because there's blood coming out of her ears. Right,

So we're talking like very serious abuse here. So when they get to the hospital, they can't Susan, Like, Susan doesn't want her daughter saying, well, I got tripped on the bus and scraped up my knees and then my mom beat me so bad I have a concussion, right, because then Mom's going to get arrested. Right.

beat you up because you're white. And then her book, Mama said, Chris writes quote those six black girl and this is her talking about like how she what she tells the hospital, those six black girls beat me up on the bus. I told them I got on the bus and that girl tripped me, uttered racial slurs, knocked me down and kicked me. Mom chimed in to add another fantastic detail. Every time I retold the story, you know what they said to her. They were screaming at her, screaming,

We're going to take over America, you white bitch. They told her this is their city. The nurses, all white, would gasp and cluck, and then even more racist things

get said. I think you get the idea right. Like she is, Susan is very much leaning into the racial animus of the time in order to try and make this a story that she can sell not just to these like white hospital workers, but to the media, which is where she's going to go next, because when she calls the cops, the cops are like, we don't really care about some kids getting into a fight on a bus. This is where the lapd and this is the sixties.

There's so much else going on right now and where the LAPD, So we don't really care about much anyway. So she starts reaching out to every newspaper in town to tell them increasingly elaborate lies about the hate crime her daughter had suffered. The only reporter who shows up is a guy from the Harold Examiner, and the next day Chris is on the front page of the paper. Now this ignites a response from the local community, and

that's what brings the cops out. A whole bunch of particularly the most racist people in LA start sending bouquets of flowers to Chris, often with very racist messages in them. Susan, because again this is all about money for Sue, she tries to sue the bus company and eventually gets her daughter on local TV, which turns her into, in Chris's words, a martyr for the cause. The John Birch Society gets

interested and Susan and Chris are enrolled in the organization. Yeah, so this is she This is like the kind of the first big con. Susan realizes she can play with her daughter, is like, I'm going to try and make her like the face of the anti integration movement, right and it You know, this works for a little while. Spurred to action by media attention, the LAPD takes to the field with the usual degree of competence you would expect.

This is from Chris's book. Six black girls were arrested, thrown in jail, charged, and dragged into a courtroom to answer for my mother's crime. Mama told me I'd have to testify on the witness stand. The thought made me want to die. Mama caught me trying to overdose on pills before the court date. She poured salt water down my throat until I threw everything up. She didn't beat me this time, though. She couldn't have me showing up

to court with fresh wounds. So pretty bad, pretty bad story. Yeah, she didn't beat that's but she didn't beat her. She just nearly drowned her with salt water.

those girls. She claims it opened her eyes to the kind of systemic bias that black people face, and I have no reason to disbeliever her. In her autobiography she expresses pretty honest guilt and sorrow over this, And given that she is an eighth grader when this happens, I hope we can agree none of this is her fault.

because Tony's is so much worse. And this gets us. And part of why we're doing this is because I have a lot more detail on her early life and young adulthood than I do the early life of Bernie Hoffman, who becomes the future toorney Tony Alamo. He's about this is interesting as a male cult leader who has a lot of sex crimes. Later, he's about ten years younger than Susan, so hey, there you go. You know, he's not going to be consistent about that sort of thing

the rest of his life. But in this case, Susan is in more of a position to take advantage of him than he is of her. Right sure, I think she's also just much smarter and savvy. Bernie also moves to Los Angeles as a young adult, I think in his late teens, with a dream of striking and famous. He seems to have always wanted a career in entertainment. He was a good dancer and became an instructor for

Rudolph Valentino as a young man. While still a teenager, he moves to La to break into the music industry. He records several songs at the height of the British invasion in like sixty three sixty four where he's like trying to sing like a British person, but he doesn't really know how to. It's an odd it's an odd set of choices that he's making. Yeah, but he is

working with some actual people. Like the one of the songs he records, Little Yankee Girl, had been written by Bobby Jamison, who is a prominent songwriter for hire in the area, and was produced by Kim Fowley, who co wrote and produced songs for Kiss, Chris Christofferson, Alice Cooper, and others. So he is working with some people who

are real music industry folks. In conversations at parties and bars, Bernie, who by this point had started going by the name Tony Alamo, would claim to have ushered the Beatles into fame and worked with the Rolling Stones as well as Sonny and Chaer. The only musician that we can prove that he promoted was Pete Best, a former member of The Beatles, but he promotes Best after Best leaves the band.

And primarily what he seems to be doing is like conning people who want to be musicians out of their money by showing them this letter from Pete Best and being like, see, I helped get the Beatles started, even though the letter he's got from Best is after Best left the Beatles.

One of the fellows would spray us with cologne, and other strew flowers in our path, and the cops would stand at attention, and like, there'd be some video of this if anything like this ever happened to you, Tony, Like I know people were crazy for the Beatles, but this wasn't how they did it.

to put it on the air or something like that. Right, Like the these are the kind of cons that he is carrying out right, And he makes a living doing this, not a good one. He is not super successful. He is just kind of on the edge of not starving to death all the time as a result of his

income from this. Now, later in life he would claim that this year nineteen sixty four, during a business meeting, God struck him death and gave him an order start preaching the gospel or he'd be killed then and there. This is what he's going to claim later. Absolutely not what happens. And we know that because Susan's daughter, Chris, is there when Tony meets her mother for the first time, and the account she gives is a lot more believable.

One day, in I think nineteen sixty six, that the timeline's a little fluid, Tony steps into a bar that and her mom are drinking at right now. At this point, Chris is kind of making some money as a recording artist. She's not huge, but she's doing like backup vocals and stuff. So she understands a little bit about the industry, and she knows people in the industry, and she's been warned about Tony and that she'd tell you something in nineteen

sixty six. If you're a sixteen year old girl in the music industry, people warn you about Tony Alamo and like, you have to be really bad to cross that line. In nineteen sixty six, right, yeah.

I think initially they both identify each other as a good mark, right, because Chris claims they immediately both start lying to each other, right, trying to get money out of the other.

he's living with that little pregnant girl. She puts her finger in my face, which she often did, and said, you mind your fucking business. When he gets back. You wait a few minutes and politely excuse yourself from the table and don't come home tonight. So again, year Mama, the.

is coming back to Earth again? And Tony looks deep into horizon and says, of course I know that, Susan, but how did you know? And she's like, let's go to my apartment to talk about it, which is the like evangelical con man and con woman flirting is I've never really heard that story before.

I love it when people find each other.

times in two days. Yeah, it does, it does They They first go to Mexico where they get hitched, but then like right when they're about to have sex, Susan's like, actually, I worry that Mexic marriage isn't legal, and I'm not going to sleep with you until we're legally married. And Tony is apparently hard up enough that he drives them from Mexico to Vegas without sleeping and purchases two marriage licenses and pasting two different marriage ceremonies just.

Susan's extant con work at churches. Right, the new couple would trawl the streets of Los Angeles for starving hippie kids, generally kids who were like coming down from bad trips or who were living on the street because they had too many bad trips. And since these kids were broke, preaching to them wasn't there's no like money from these kids, right, So they get a bunch of followers, but those followers are just kind of eating them out of house and home.

So the Alamos tell them, hey, go get jobs and mail us the money. We've got to move to Las Vegas for unclear reasons. And so they do that and Chris, Susan just kind of leaves her daughter behind in La which is I would say maybe the best thing for Chris at this point in time.

back to Los Angeles. And then a couple of months later, Tony and Susan returned to LA because they've found another wannabe celebrity to promote. This guy's name was Rovaugh. He was a motorcycle riding, opera singer and yeah, very multi talented, right. I don't think his career takes off, but there's enough there that Tony's able to get a lot of backer money. He's able to convince people, hey, this guy's going to be huge, give me some money to get his career started.

And then he buys jewels, furs, leather jackets with that. But this business is not doing well. And so even though their first stab at becoming cult leaders hadn't really

made them a lot of money. They returned to that grift as soon as they get back to Los Angeles, so they start expanding their recruitment from just some down and out hippie kids to prostitutes, to other homeless people, to failing actors, to musicians and stuff who are kind of on the margins and like government housing and the like.

Some of their first marks are because they burst back into Susan's life and they take all of her friends and roommates and put them into a cult, basically convert them by being like, hey, you'll get regular meals, which they provide via diving and dumpsters for expired food. So they get all of these kids to start working, you know, just kind of bullshit jobs and funnelly that money, donating their salaries to an entity that the Alamo's established in

nineteen sixty nine, the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. So fascinating grifts so far, you're just kind of I mean, all they're ever doing is abusing poor people, right, like that that's the Alamo con particularly her daughter's boyfriend.

the more money starts to come in. Some of it's coming from members handing over salaries or like inheritances and savings accounts, but the real money comes in when Susan figures out what is their first really brilliant con So then like today, southern California has a massive homelessness problem right and specifically the kind of people who are filling the streets are the kind of people that the Alamos

make their business preaching to and converting. And then as now affluent, midass and middle class people are disgusted by homelessness and eager to support anyone who promised to take these people off the street. So once they get followers and they're pulling these people off the street and they're putting them up in like rented spaces and stuff, they're

warehousing them. Basically, they'll pile their followers into vans on the weekends and drive to megachurches in rich areas, and then Susan will line up with they'll clean these hippie kids up and Susan will line up with them and she'll start preaching the word, and she'll go down the line and have them all give like a version of like I was on the street, you know, doing heroin

or whatever, and then I got found by the Alamos. Right, and then Susan would conclude by being like, hey, does this church support work like this, right, getting these indigent kids off the streets and back to God. Right. Well, if you want to see me continue to do this, give some money to the Susan Antonio Lamo Foundation, right.

And that's the grift. Right, We're getting these homeless kids off the street, and the actual money is coming in from churches where they don't have followers, right, but they do have a lot of people who hate seeing homeless people. That's how they get their money.

sixty nine was not that long ago. We're cleaning up after the Hippie movement, right, like that.

Their followers are made to live in chicken coops. Married couples get to live in shacks, and once it was known that the Alamos are doing the good work of cleaning up the shrapnel of the Hippie movement off the streets, more money and followers start to flow in. This is part of a broader trend in evangelicalism as counter swing to the Summer of Love and this sort of leftward

tilt of culture at the end of the sixties. I think we're all familiar with the way in which this kind of stuff kind of yins and yang's out right, like you have your big sort of leftward shift and then this huge reactionary shift. Well, the Alamos grift hits right at the peak of that reactionary shift.

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

stop mankind from destroying itself, or the widespread dispersal of these same energies utilized by egoistic persons who will accelerate the crises. Which one of those? Would you say, we got.

street kids. Susan handled much of the foundations outward facing communications to what we might call normies, the big donors and leaders of other churches, while Tony handled converting new followers and took point on actually creating a belief system for their teeming legions to follow from a book by Greta p Allendorf quote, The Alamo ministry preached a wide range of ideas in times paranoia, UFOs as divine messengers,

and Vatican conspiracy theories. Tony hated the Catholic Church and blamed them for everything bad that had ever happened, including Nazism. One Alamo tracked entitled the Pope's Secrets Read the Vatican is posing as snow white, but the Bible says that she is a prostitute, and I I mean he's not one hundred percent wrong about the Catholic Church being particularly fucked up in this period of time, given what we're going to find out in the late nineties and early

two thousands. But it's also like not more responsible for that kind of thing than his own church is going to be, right, Like Tony's also you know, a prostitute of people's souls, you know, like he's a pimp of people's souls. I should say that's how he makes his money. Right. So, in her book, Betty does a pretty good job of

explaining how the conversion process worked for new inductees. After they were picked up generally hungry on the streets of Hollywood, they'd be promised a meal and taken by bus to Saugus. Quote from the moment Brenda and Daniel arrived at the corner of Hollywood and Highland to catch a bus. The brothers and sisters separated them. A woman known as Sister Cynthia ushered Brenda to a seat For the next forty

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

the grounds. Brenda, Daniel, and the others were ushered into a large hall where they sat on benches and waited expectantly. The room was packed with people standing room only. Brenda was a bit uneasy, but Cynthia assured her that she was in for a treat. A man who called himself Brother Michael, stepped up to the podium and gave a hearty welcome to the gathering. You're as welcome as the flowers of May and the noonday sun. Praise the Lord. Amen.

He continued with a few rules that included no talking during services and a ban on literature from other places. Brothers walked through the rose to collect foreign forbidden materials. Brothers and sisters called over seers, monitored the physical needs and functions of the community, such as water supply, electricity usage, and even the distribution of toilet paper, often pages torn from telephone books. They had to seek permission from Tony

and Susan for every aspect of their existence. One evening, after dinner, sister Cynthia sharply reprimanded Brenda for overstepping the authority of an overseer, which he turned on the lights in a building. Brenda said, but I thought I should turn on the lights since I was the first to arrive. Cynthia retorted, there you go, thinking again, Oh fuck, that's some good classic cult banter. Yeah, I got.

joined the church, left and immediately died. Right, if you leave the church, basically you are instantly going to be dead, right, and then you go to hell. You go straight to hell. Right. You know it's not new, but it serves right. You know, this is a functional, functional cult thing to be doing.

called popcorn testimony. These are the little speeches by former hippies and homeless people that opened up donor pocketbooks, right you know where they're saying like, hey, if I hadn't if the Alamos hadn't found me, I'd be dead or in jail or in a mental institution. You know, these are the popcorn speeches. By the mid nineteen seventies, the

Alamos are wealthy, they're outwardly respectable. They're operating several successful businesses that we're keeping according you know, in the eyes of a lot of Angelino's, the riff raff off the streets, and you know where they belong, locked up somewhere away from the people with expensive houses. Susan Tony then got

to live the life of high rolling multi millionaires. On one famous occasion, Susan showed up for an interview wearing a Lynx jacket and a floor length address, telling the interview where God wants his children to go first class and I guess to have links links for jackets.

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

still keep the Saugust compound open. They still have their followers there like recruiting people off the streets of la and raising money working some businesses, but kind of the core of their best followers. And they take most of their money to a place called Dire, Arkansas, which is where she'd grown up, and they buy a compound. So this is a little town population less than five hundred, and they make, you know, people notice when they suddenly

drive in because they only have black Cadillacts. That's the only car his followers drive. So he has, like suddenly this huge fleet of new black Cadillacts and dozens of converted hippies move into this very small town. Their combat is centered around the home that had been Susan's home when she was a little girl. They expanded it and updated it with all of the least classy adornments their

new riches could buy. Greta Allendorff writes the couple was fond of red carpeting, chandeliers, and velvet wall coverings and installed them in every space they occupied. Just the most hideous place you could imagine.

you so much it hurts Me. Now. One of the things that interesting is that, like a lot less of his songs than you'd expect given who he is, are like actual religious songs, Like again, this is just him talking about how much he loves his wife, his horrible, evil wife. But I do feel like I'm legally bound to show you a video of the Alamos playing this song. Now, this should tell you something about like the level of because I'm talking about these people, they are a cult.

They're very abusive. That's not how they're treated. They are as like megachurch pastors who are widely beloved.