Part One: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher

Robert sits down with Samantha McVey to talk about Tony Alamo, the evangelical cult leader who enslaved children to make denim vests for the stars.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
that is mourning the temporary loss of its producer. Today,
Sophie got into a little bit of a kerfuffle with
the the ftc some shots were exchanged. Anyway, she's on

(00:24):
the run now, but we're we're expecting her to report
back in from her mountain hide away any day. But
until she gets back, Samantha McVeigh is with me, uh
today this week, Samantha, how are you doing good?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
You know, I was just saying, I feel like Sophie
is our adult that supervises, so.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I'm a little nervous that she's not here.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
But it's okay because I also did another show with
Margaret and Sophie wasn't there either, So maybe she is
she mad at me.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Oh no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
No, it's she's just running.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's it's just she's on the run from from the law. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's it's fine. Once she once she gets
to our hidden mountain fastness, uh in an undisclosed location
in the Rockies, she'll she'll be back on the calls.
Everything will be fine. Yeah, it gets We're going to
be doing the podcast via Morse code. Yeah, that is
going to be the only way to communicate. Yeah, we're

(01:18):
going to get some code talkers, but with like maybe
maybe Klingon based. I don't think the Feds can crack
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?

(01:41):
You got anything else you want to plug up at
the top here before we get into our subject for
the week.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
I don't think so. Yeah, I'm on a podcast. It
has a book. It's been around for a.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Bit, it has it. Yeah, an OG. And speaking of ogs,
we're going to be talking about one of the OG's
of being an abusive Christian cult leader in the United States,
the worst preacher of all time, a guy that Los
Angeles residents might be are going to be aware of

(02:11):
as well as most of our Alabama listeners. Tony Alamo,
what have you heard of this guy? Do you know? Total?

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I don't know, which is what I'm kind of surprised
by because I was really.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Deep into the Christian world. So, oh, yeah, I know
this one.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
He is, Well, he's one of the weirder ones and
he's one of like the worst people wherever he This guy,
oh man, he does all of the evil cult leader things,
child trafficking, slave labor, you know, all all all the
good stuff, abusive, a corpse. It's great. We got a
lot of fun stuff today.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Some modern day Christianity.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Let's go yeah, yeah, yeah, So again, his last name
is Alamo, but it's spelled Alamo, but that's not how
it's pronounced because the State of Texas would have come
after him then he would have had the rangers on
him long before the FBI finally took him down if
he'd been weakening Texas' brand. But yeah, Tony Alamo. And

(03:10):
this is this is kind of a weird one in
that he is not the initial leader of his cult.
That's kind of his wife. So it starts out as
him being almost like 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

(03:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
And icon Well, that's exciting.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Yeah, it's good. Girls can do everything the boys can do,
including trafficking.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
That's right. Obviously, we're always saying that equal opportunity. I
love it.

Speaker 4 (04:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
So one of my favorite things about this is that
these guys the people were talking about today were very
good friends of one of our friends of the pod
who had a run in of his own with law
enforcement in a town called Waco. But I'm getting ahead
of myself.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Here, Okay.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
I was wondering, I'm not gonna lie.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah, a little bit of where there's some way to
go that comes in here. Yeah, ali O, Waco.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
All seemed too convenient.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
That's right. Now. Tony was not just the leader of
the cult, you know again, he was basically its first
member or maybe co leader, with the woman who became
his wife, who we're going to talk about before we
talk about Tony, because she is fascinating too, Edith opel Horn,
which is you know, and she's she's got that serial

(04:47):
killer name starting I know, Opal there's something sinister about that.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's a middle name is sinister, and it's also bless
your heart, like she's going to poison you, but it's
going to be a really great pie.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yes, And she is she is, This
is a she is a down home girl. Now, if
you if your first thought when I said Tony Alamo
was that like, oh, well, that's way too good a
name of a cult leader to be a real cult
leader's name, you are correct. And Tony was not born
Tony Alamo. He was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman on September twentieth,

(05:19):
nineteen thirty four, in Joplin, Missouri. So again, this is
kind of rare for evangelical Christian cult leaders, but he
was born into a Jewish family. His parents were immigrants
from Romania, and while this may seem like an unlikely
background again for an Evangelical Christian cult leader, Bernie's family
was never religious, and as a boy, his parents identity

(05:41):
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

(06:03):
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

(06:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
Just quarantine you out there.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, dad lives in the yard because otherwise they'll get
us all killed. Edith would later claim to have refused
to listen to what he said and like because she
was convinced that she could heal him by reciting Bible passages,
so she insisted on sitting next to his cot or
whatever night. This may have been later myth making after

(07:03):
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,

(07:26):
Like she's a dire like our kidsaw in the fucking
thirties and forties.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
What else is there to do?

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Well? I mean literally, there is nothing else that you
can do aside from get pregnant early and have your
brother's and husband die of various coal related diseases or
farming related accidents. You know. Yeah, yeah, obviously, like people,
there have numerous different things that they can do with
their lives, all of which involved dying young.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Dying young.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
So.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Debbie Scrivener describes what happened next in the book Whispering
in the Daylight, which is about the Alamos quote. She
married at fourteen, had a baby at fifteen, and divorced
at sixteen. It was then that Edith ople decided to
take charge of her own journey to stardom and headed
to California. When she reached Hollywood, Edith Ople changed her
name to Susan Fleetwood. After failed attempts at a singing

(08:20):
an acting career, she married and then divorced Saul Lippowitz
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

(08:41):
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

(09:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
It sounds like as an amalgamation of saying Christ and
then like Thessalonians, one of the chapters like.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
That maybe yeah, yeah, somebody's flipping through a Bible on
an epidural and is like, I got a name.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
I'll take these two things, buy them together. Beautiful, yeah, perfect,
no problems here.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. Now, according to Chris, we're going to call her
Chris because I'm not going to try to pronounce that
name the whole time, and that's generally what she seems
to go by. Edith, her mom makes a living during
this period, primarily as a con woman because she's trying
to find work. In the movie, she does some acting gigs,
but they do not her career doesn't take off right.

(09:55):
Her daughter will credit this to the fact that she
just does not have the look that hally Wood's going for.
In this period. She was, per her daughter quote, beautiful
in the weirdest way, not like you would look at
her and go wow, a striking beauty. But when she
walked in a room, she had so much command that
people stopped talking. So she's not the kind of she

(10:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
I mean, it's all tracks to where she goes.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
It feels like it's very perfectly natural. Yes, I'm seeing
the a to be here very easily, very quickly. When
she managed to get work or successfully work at con
the family would have money, and so during Chris's childhood
they swung wildly between mild solvency and absolute poverty with
such regularity that it made Chris's childhood kind of dizzying.

(10:53):
Also dizzying was the violence that Edith employed on a
near daily basis. And I'm not going to read a
lot of detailed stories of physical abuse here. Chris has
a book that she's going to write later about her childhood,
and her book, Mama Said, has some of the worst
and most descriptions of like the beating and psychological abuse
of a little kid that I've ever read. Edith is

(11:14):
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,

(11:34):
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

(11:55):
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

(12:16):
regular food. Quote, you would open these cans and whatever
you opened, you ate.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
It's like a surprise.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
It's like a surprise. Yeah, exactly. You're keeping your life interesting,
probably just pounding a lot of pure fucking coconut oil
or whatever, like right, imagining, Yeah, yeah, pie, if you're lucky,
pie me. Yeah, a lot of inspired suits. Suits. Oh
my god. Yeah, that's like that. That's such a perfect

(12:46):
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

(13:07):
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

(13:27):
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.

(13:47):
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

(14:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
I mean, if she truly was trying to heal her father,
realize it doesn't work and this is bs, I'm gonna
just take their money.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
Then I'm gonna take their fucking money. They're they lied
to me when my dad was sitting. Yeah, maybe there's
something there too, just like if I'm green lighting the
HBO mini series, that's at least how I try to gain. Yeah,
that's how we're going to start.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
Give her a little that's her villain origin.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right, right, So Susan nursed clear ambitions of turning her
daughter into a money ticket, and and Chris's initial ambition
was music. But Susan was the kind of mom who
was more than capable of acting on opportunity. One day
in nineteen sixty four or sixty five, when Chris was
in eighth grade, she rode home on a city bus.
Now this was during a time again we're talking sixty

(15:15):
four or sixty five, this is a time of a
heightened racial tension, particularly in Los Angeles. The way Chris
describes it decades later, and again, Chris is not being
raised what we would call racially open minded. Right, Her
mom grows up in the South in the twenties and thirties.

(15:36):
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

(15:57):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:41):
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

(17:02):
mom beat me so bad I have a concussion, right,
because then Mom's going to get arrested. Right.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
That's not great.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
That's not great. Yeah, that's like even even in this
period of time, in the mid sixties, that's child abuse. Yeah.
So because her injuries require an explanation, Susan on the
way over to the hospital is coaching her daughter, who
has a head injury, like, hey, you got to you
gotta say it was those girls on the bus. You
gotta say it was like a race thing that they

(17:27):
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

(17:49):
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

(18:09):
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

(18:32):
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

(18:54):
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,

(19:16):
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

(19:39):
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

(20:01):
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

(20:21):
just nearly drowned her with salt water.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
It's fine, fine, it's fine, A sailing solutions, everything's great.
You know, I'm actually surprised that the police didn't jump
in and be like, oh, racial stuff, let's go beat
some people like that seems like something they would want
to do because they don't actually want to work.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, I mean I think that's that's that's my expectation.
But also you have to you have to note that
a big motivator for them is always not doing anything.
So when they first get the phone call, they're going
to be like, well, I don't care like what he
tried to get me to do this? Okay, yeah, anyway,
uh so that's that's what's happened so far? Pretty fun

(20:59):
story of outrageous child abuse.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
What a beautiful fairy tale?

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, what a beautiful fairy tale. This this has is
a little bit there's a little bit of a fairy
tale feel, except for instead of like Chris getting rich
and powerful, her evil and abusive mother does right after
this point. But before we hit that, let's do some
ads and we're back. How are you holding up their?

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Sam, I'm just thinking about this. It seems like have
you ever heard the story of Gypsy Rose, Yes, the
child star them.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
This sounds like the redneck version of that, except church,
which makes sense if you want to be like real honest,
and I'm not gonna lie. I'm sorry to those who
live in Arkansas.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
I know it's not your fault, but.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Arkansas is one of the top four states that I'm
terrified to go through as a person of color, Like, yeah,
if I can, I'll never go through there.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
I mean, yeah, it's and again we're talking like seventy
years ago in that area. So even now Susan grows
up knowing like, yeah, it's like a whole different level
of racism. So yeah, Chris thinks that these girls who
get arrested based on her mom's lives get acquitted again.

(22:18):
She's like in her early teens at this point in time.
In her book, she speaks of feeling deep shame for
the incident, particularly the damage it may have done to
those girls. She claims it opened her eyes to the
kind of systemic bias that black people face, and I
have no reason to disbeliever her. In her autobiography she
expresses pretty honest guilt and sorrow over this, And given

(22:38):
that she is an eighth grader when this happens, I
hope we can agree none of this is her fault.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Like, so they found the right girls. They didn't just
pick random black girls that they are like, yeah, the suits,
I think surprising.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
She describes it as them finding the girls, but I
don't actually know that that's the case. Again, her memory
is not going to be perfect if anything happening right anyway,
that's Susan's background. This is the woman who becomes Susan Alamo.
What a delight, And she's not going to be our
primary character. So the fact that again she's going to

(23:09):
be kind of running the cult for its early years,
but she'll be out of the picture after a while,
and I just need to prep you with her story
because Tony's is so much worse. And this gets us.
And part of why we're doing this is because I
have a lot more detail on her early life and
young adulthood than I do the early life of Bernie Hoffman,
who becomes the future toorney Tony Alamo. He's about this

(23:33):
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

(23:54):
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,

(24:16):
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

(24:38):
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,

(25:04):
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

(25:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
So he's trying to let everybody know I have connections.
I did this.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, you know the guy who fumbled the bag bigger
than anyone has ever fumbled a bag. I worked with
that guy.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, the person you have to google because you're not
sure why you've heard of him.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, then you figure it out.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah, a guy who fucked up being in the Beatles.
Sorry Pete. So. Tony's usual spiel involved bragging about traveling
on the road with the Beetles and the Stones. Here's
an excerpt from one such recitation of his speech. The
bodyguard would open the door, throw down a big velvet pillow,
and we would step into the velvet pillow. The barber

(26:16):
would comb our hair, the nurse would take our pulse.
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.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
I Like, I can't imagine, because it's just the thought
that I was, like, I would have made immediately trip
Like that does not sound.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
Like why are they taking your pulse?

Speaker 3 (26:44):
Like what is wrong with you?

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Is the pulse thing?

Speaker 3 (26:46):
I don't get it. I don't get this.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, so this was not particularly believable to anyone with
real experience in the music industry. But those people aren't
Tony's target. He is trying to get the attention of dumb,
inexp sperienced young wannabes who have some cash in their
pocket and who he can convince like, oh, hey, you
got like if you've got a couple of grands, that's
all it's going to take for me to get this
demo tape into the hands of a DJ who's going

(27:09):
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

(27:29):
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.

(27:52):
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

(28:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
I mean, I guess if you know enough people or
the right people, you'll get good information.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, yeah, and she does. She gets warned about this guy,
and so she warns her mom because he starts walk
up to their table, and she's like, I've heard about
this guy. Do not talk to him. He's a fucking creep.
But Tony walks right up to their table. And my
read on what happened is that, weirdly enough, Tony and
Susan are kind of made for each other. They're both artists.

(29:00):
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.

Speaker 5 (29:11):
You know.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Tony starts talking about the stars that he was promoting,
and Susan is like, I'm an actress. You know, my
daughter's a singer. We've got connections. When she says that,
Tony's like, oh, I can make your daughter a star.
And Chris would later recall I'm watching them and it's
like a tennis match of horse crap. They both think
the other's got money. He gets to up to go
to the bathroom, and I turned to my mother and

(29:31):
I said, listen to me. This guy is an absolute bum,
he's living with that little pregnant girl. She puts her
finger in my face, which she often did, and said,
you mind your fucking business. When he gets back. You
wait a few minutes and politely excuse yourself from the
table and don't come home tonight. So again, year Mama, the.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Year Mama had a plan. At least she to'll look
it out of the house, I guess. I mean, yeah,
I could have gone really arrived very quickly.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
So it's going to go awry not much longer than this, unfortunately,
of course, But yeah, I mean you are right, Mama
had a plan, right, Like, Tony is not going to
wind up taking advantage of Susan, like she is going
to wind up kind of looping him into her thing.
So he comes back and he sits down at the

(30:16):
table and Chris looks at him or and sorry, and
Susan looks at him and says, Tony, I've got to
ask you a question. Did you know that Jesus Christ
is coming back to Earth again? And Tony looks deep
into 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

(30:36):
like evangelical con man and con woman flirting is I've
never really heard that story before.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
Oh amazing?

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Oh yeah, okay, we need to advertise that as the
perfect pickup line for other Christians.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Crime date Yeah, come on, yeah, are you looking to
like rob a bunch of maga people? Like this is
the dating site where you can find your person? Oh? Man,
So to make a show, how did you know that?
They just it's it's almost supernatural, right, They can feel
the vibrations of each other, like, oh, this is a

(31:09):
man who you know, uh is there's just nothing inside
of him, but is a desire to fleece people for
their money. And that's all I've got inside me. It's beautiful.
I love it when people find each other.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
You know.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
It's better than a soul.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, oh yeah, No, a soul is just going to
weigh you down right, true. Yeah, if you're just completely
hollow inside, you float like a witch in the fucking
sixteen hundreds or whenever. So, to make a short story
even shorter, the two hit it off and got married
three separate times over the course of forty eight hours. Now,

(31:44):
what did I say? Why did they get married? Three
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

(32:08):
from Mexico to Vegas without sleeping and purchases two marriage
licenses and pasting two different marriage ceremonies just.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
In case she backs out another one. Really is the
real one.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
This is the real one. And eventually Susan's like, all right,
I guess we're married enough. I think this might make
him the only person I've ever read about who is
bigamously married to his one wife. He is going to
do he does so much bigamy in the future, but

(32:45):
he kind of does start by getting bigamously married to
a single woman.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
He's a practice round.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, this is his practice round of big maybe Yeah, yeah,
he's the chosen one of bigamy. He's the fucking loop
Skywalker of bigamy.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
He's gonna do it right, and he's gotta practice it
and get it through and then like, you know, it
perflects everything that's right.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
That's right. You can't just start, you know, and assume
you're going to be good at it, like I don't know,
surgery or something easy. So the two change their names
to Tony and Susan Alamo, and they start preaching the word.
Now in the beginning, this is just an iteration of
Susan's extant con work at churches. Right, the new couple
would trawl the streets of Los Angeles for starving hippie kids,

(33:27):
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

(33:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
Keep your mom where she was okay.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
From the yeah okay, Yeah, Susan's not super committed to
being a mother. So Susan and Tony are in Las Vegas.
Chris eventually travels there because she misses her mom, and
as soon as she shows up, she claims Tony rapes her. Right,

(34:28):
she would have been fifteen or sixteen at this point,
Susan walks in as it's happening, calls her a whore,
accuses her of trying to steal Tony, and sends her
back to Los Angeles. And then a couple of months later,
Tony and Susan returned to LA because they've found another
wannabe celebrity to promote. This guy's name was Rovaugh. He

(34:49):
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.

(35:11):
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

(35:33):
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

(35:54):
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

(36:15):
that that's the Alamo con particularly her daughter's boyfriend.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Right.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
This is interesting.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Yeah, it's pretty bleak and a big part of what
they're doing is they're they're finding poor Jewish kids who
are living on the streets, some of them who had
converted to Christianity and others who they converted. Tony particularly
was really good at converting these like down and out
former hippie kids. And the more people they bring in,
the more money starts to come in. Some of it's

(36:46):
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

(37:08):
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

(37:32):
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

(37:55):
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

(38:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
Wow, I mean a little respect. They really did pull
people off those streets.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
They are off the streets. They are accurately describing to
an extent what they're doing. They're not giving these kids
a better life or a safer life. Really not on
the streets. Well, and it's it's such a fascinating like
through line of Okay, I can see why that works, right,

(38:52):
because you're able to say, hey, you know what, what
what are kind of like conservative conservative Christians more scared
about than anything in the early seventies the hippie movement, right,
sixty nine was not that long ago. We're cleaning up
after the Hippie movement, right, like that.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
Hippie movement exactly, anybody of different colors race.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right, and we're taking these people and putting them where
you don't have to see them, right, Yeah. And they
start making a lot of money doing this. Soon the
Alamos have enough cash to make the dream that every
cult leader has real, buying land and starting a compound.
In nineteen seventy one, they purchase acreage in Saugus, California,

(39:34):
and an old restaurant that they convert to a church.
Their followers are made to live in chicken coops. Married
couples get to live in shacks, and once it was
known that the Alamos are doing the good work of
cleaning up the shrapnel of the Hippie movement off the streets,
more money and followers start to flow in. This is
part of a broader trend in evangelicalism as counter swing

(39:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Perfect timing.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, yeah, Unfortunately, the worst people always have pretty good timing.
Speaking of Samantha, let's listen to the incredible timing of
some of our advertisers. We're back, oh Man, good stuff.

(40:41):
So in her book, Betty Shriver cites an article The
Great Guru Hunt by columnist Art Kunkin, who documented at
the time this kind of reactionary shift occurring and the
space that it was making for cult leaders like the Alamos.
There is very definitely something in the air, and it
is not, as I originally thought last year, just the
cycle of individualism and personal mystical search that could have

(41:05):
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

(41:26):
the crises. Which one of those? Would you say, we got.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
All?

Speaker 1 (41:35):
I mean, I find that so familiar to what we
saw happened after twenty twenty. Right, you have all of
these energies that get mobilized and then dispersed into these
different sort of like cultic movements and disinformation streams. You
know that the Internet and social media has really enabled yeah,

(41:57):
by egoistic persons who accelerate the christ that the mobilization
had existed initially to fight.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, and then they're the only ones profiting off right.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yes, yes, like we can. Oh boy, I mean it's sad,
it's good. I go back and forth between, like, I
guess it's comforting that this happened back then too, Like.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Yeah, is it?

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Or is it just frustrating that this cyclical thing has
to continue to happen and we just have to never learn,
like we never fucking learned, or the people that have
learned really well, and so they bring it back so
they can make that profit.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
I'm gonna throw this computer, keep it.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that that's yeah fair. As
the money flowed in, the Alamos constructed a new facility,
Music Square Church in Hollywood and started filling it with
street kids. Susan handled much of the 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

(43:00):
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

(43:22):
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

(43:45):
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,

(44:05):
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.

(44:27):
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.

(44:48):
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.

(45:10):
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,

(45:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
You know, this is the thing about cults, I think,
and this is kind of one of the big problems,
especially a cult like this. If you know, you want
to sit back and say the man they were, but
those rules apply for so many of the churches, like
literally the type that I.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Grew up in.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
They wouldn't say necessarily you couldn't turn on the lights,
But the idea don't bring in literature, don't learn things
on your own, was very much like place and told
us like things like seminary and the being, any of
those places were against God and not having faith. So
like Unfortunately that because this cult is so crazy, it

(46:26):
makes the other things look normal and it's not.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yeah, okay though, No, yeah, you're not very okay with
all that.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
I'm okay though.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
So.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Physical punishments were common, as is sexual violence from Tony,
who really seems to prefer young teenagers to adult women,
including his wife. What keeps people from leaving? You're not
going to be surprised to hear this. It's a fear
of hell, which is implicated daily from sermons by the
Alamos and their followers. Every day they would tell new
inductees and their old followers stories about people who had

(46:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
This method is proven, is sound. Let's keep going with it.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Yeah, exactly exactly why. It's like driving evolvo, you know,
why fuck with what works? Occasionally, So, the only reason
normal believers would need to leave the property was to work,
and more and more of them worked for businesses owned
and operated by the Alamos. They also had to travel
to churches and civic centers to deliver what the Alamos
called popcorn testimony. These are the little speeches by former

(47:43):
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

(48:05):
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

(48:26):
interview where God wants his children to go first class
and I guess to have links links for jackets.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
I mean, you got to show off when you're blessed.
That's right here with hashtag blessed that's right.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
If you don't do that, people might not really believe
that God has blessed you, and that endangers their souls.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
That's the point. Yeah, you're not going to be blessed.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
I'm glad you understand it. Right, You're really doing this
for their souls, right.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
I mean, I'm not going to show you my jacket
right now. I'm just saying.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
No, no, but you have a lot of links. Uh,
you're you're heavy, heavy end the lynxes, which who isn't Yeah, exactly,
That's all I wear is lynxes. This is one hundred
percent lengths hoodie. It's really hot though, it's incredibly warm. Yes,
not at all comfortable, especially when I've got the heat on.
So in nineteen seventy five, we finally get some good news,

(49:18):
which is that Susan gets diagnosed with cancer. Now, as
a little girl, she had claimed to have been struck.
Sometimes she would claim that she caught tuberculosis from her father,
right and that she had been healed by God after praying.
And as a result, when she gets sick, she prescribes
herself and as well as prescribing Tony and most of

(49:38):
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

(49:59):
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

(50:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
I needed to be shaggy carpeting.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Oh yeah, oh my god, some like.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Yeah, bear skin rugs, that's right, I need all of them.
And then golden candles, yes.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Golden candles. Every wall is pure velvet, like I mean,
the instant you drop a cigarette in this place, it
goes up right. Just beautiful stuff. So at this time
they also begin construction on a sprawling Victorian home on
the mountain, complete with dormitories for their followers in a
heart shaped pool for Susan. A grand church hall is

(51:16):
constructed for their evangelical TV show where Tony sang loves
songs for Susan such as my personal favorite, I love
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

(51:37):
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

(52:00):
as like megachurch pastors who are widely beloved.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
The clip that I'm about to play is from a
performance that they make at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee,
which is a very real, very major venue for country
Western musicians. Right, this is not like a fringe thing.
If you're at the grand Ole Opry, like you have
a degree of legitimacy within the music within at least
like the country Western chunks of the music industry.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
At the time.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
Or did they just pay a lot of money.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
I mean, I think that may be what they did,
but in terms of people looking out from the from
the outside end, or just say like, well they're on
the grand Ole Opry, so they must be legit.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Right, legitimate. Yeah, it's a Dolly Parton right there, right.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Well, Dolly Parton will show up in this story unfortunately. No.
Oh yeah, it's it's not all that bad in terms
of her involvement. But she's not completely uninvolved with the
Alamos either. Great stuff. So I'm going to oh, yeah,
look at them, why do they off?

Speaker 3 (52:59):
They're an off break? And like Johnny Cash.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
He is so tony Alamo. If you're not able to
look at the video of this, you should. I would
recommend checking some of them out on YouTube. They're all
over YouTube. Tony looks like off brand Johnny Cash if
he like if he put on about forty pounds of
just water weight and.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
A week shipped from Timu, Yeah, ship from He's because he.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
Got a little melted in the shipping container. And then
I don't know, like honestly, Susan and I like she
she's wearing like a fucking opallescent white out like pure white,
but it's like a shiny opalescent.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
White, so uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
It looks horribly uncomfortable. She is dying of cancer at
this point, but legitimately yeah, yeah, yes, yes, she's sick
by this point. It's going to take her a while
to actually fucking die, like years, but she is sick
at this point. She her head, the shape of it.

(54:01):
She looks kind of like one of those gray aliens
wearing a skin suit, like that's Susan Alamo looks except
for like a lot of makeup too.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
What is that one movie I already forgot that has
the aliens and obviously the White House is.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
Involved, like uh ship Glenn closes in it, and I
think he like, do you know.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
Correct, Let's let's let let's let's look this up real quick.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
Could be wrong. There's those aliens that's so bad, like digitally.

Speaker 4 (54:37):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
That doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Mar Wait,
they're saying at Mars attacks. Yes, yes, she does look
like she's she's got, she's got, like if those aliens
were wearing like a rubber human.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Suit head what loos like?

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah, fascinating. What I what I want to get across
is that they really don't look like regular people, like
real people. Like they both look like almost cgi.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
Humans and she scares me.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
They are both frightening, I would say, but her particularly yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
Like she I see her beating people. I see that.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Oh yeah, not hard. So now that we've said that,
let's listen to them play beautiful music.

Speaker 6 (55:19):
Together to be dedicated to a message in songs. And
it's Tony Alamo, J D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet,
and we're going to try to preview as much of
this album as we possibly can. So if you'll just
stay right here with us and now, Tony Alamo, J D.

(55:41):
Summer and the Stamps Quartet, I love you so much
it hurts me.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
She stills expiring.

Speaker 5 (55:48):
This song is dedicated to my wife, Susan. It's a
message and song that's so very dear to my heart
because I lived every word of this song during a
very long long news.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
With my Susan.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
This is so painful.

Speaker 5 (56:03):
During those long dark years, I cried out to God
every day of my life to let my sweetheart live.
God and his divine mercy hurt my cries, and he
answered my prayers.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
I love your soul much.

Speaker 5 (56:27):
It hurts me.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Okay, I think we're good.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
It went away.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
Oh I stopped it. We didn't need it, We didn't
need to keep going. I want to hear his singing voice.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Really bad, Liken skip the Sunday.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
It feels like a parody of like Johnny Cash is
a fucking uh scam preacher. Yes, his outfit is amazing.
He's like standing alone on this bad Yeah, it's so
good to haunt me. It's a haunting vibe.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
Right, I need someone come say to my house.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
It's like it's a deeply evil vibe. Yeah, like I can.
I'm so glad the cancer came back, which it does.
Susan dies in nineteen eighty two from the same cancer
that had inspired the move back to Arkansas. Now, sam
this creates real issues for Tony because by this point
he and Susan they had spent seven years or so,

(57:29):
you know, since she got sick preaching that she and
he couldn't die.

Speaker 5 (57:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Susan had described herself because they have a TV station
by this point, she would call herself the Lamb of
God and would say that she and Tony were both
had to be alive on earth to act as witnesses
for the end times. Right, So the fact that she
is dead now creates a real pickle for Tony Alamo
and the cult, one that they're going to have to

(57:54):
resolve in part two. You got any ideas about how
they resolve it.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
I'm thinking like we can a Bernie Oh my god,
yes you've got it.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Oh yes, yes, indeed, absolutely, like an R rated weekended Bernie'.
Unless Weekended Bernies was rated R I was. I think
it was in the eighties, then like an X rated
weekended Bernie's. Okay, uh, Samantha, before we record that, you
want to throw out your pluggables here because we're done

(58:23):
with part one.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yeah again, you can find me on stuff Mom Never
told you. With my co host Annie, we talk about
a lot of intersectional stuff, so that means really sad
stuff right now until like you know, we're actually on
the list and people come at us. But anyway, that's
a podcast that I'm on. And then you can find
me on Blue Sky McVeagh Sam, and that's about it.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Yep, yep, check out Sam, find her on the Blue Sky.
Listen to her podcast, and you know, listen to this
podcast that you just listen to, go back in time
and listen to it a second time so that we
start trending in the other time streams, you know, right.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Or also listen to that song to your love, you
know what.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Put that song on and listen to nothing else for
the next like forty eight hours. Right, It'll be fine.
You're gonna be great. You're gonna do You're gonna do good.
You're not gonna lose your mind.

Speaker 4 (59:19):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(59:40):
At Behind the Bastards