After years of legal troubles during which he engaged in abusive behavior against his followers,[3] Tony Alamo was convicted of 10 child rape offenses in 2009.
Tony Alamo (September 20, 1934 – May 2, 2017) was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman to a Jewish family in Joplin, Missouri.
[1][2] At the age of nine years old he was abandoned at the Father Flanagan Boys Town where he claimed to have been abused for his Jewish ancestry.
[4] After the couple divorced their respective spouses, Hoffman and Horn got married during a ceremony which was performed in Las Vegas in 1966.
Alamo started a business, which relied heavily on unpaid child labor, of decorating denim jackets and airbrushing them with bright, colorful designs.
Susan led the preaching aspect of the ministry, with Tony mostly staying in the background in a production role, making only occasional appearances, usually to perform an inspirational song on camera.
She died 17 days short of her 57th birthday, at the Oral Roberts City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Her estranged daughter, Christhiaon Coie, filed a lawsuit against Tony Alamo because he had stolen the body.
Her stepfather (by an earlier marriage of her mother) obtained a court order which required Tony Alamo to return the body.
[16] After the federal government had started investigation of the entity, the IRS retroactively revoked that tax-exempt status on April 5, 1996.
The IRS Commissioner found that "MSC was so closely operated and controlled by and for the benefit of Tony Alamo that it enjoyed no substantive independent existence; that MSC was formed and operated by Tony Alamo for the principal purpose of willfully attempting to defeat or evade federal income tax; and that MSC was inseparable from Tony Alamo, and failed to operate for exclusively charitable purposes.
[17][18][19][1][2] In June 2013, the federal government filed forfeiture and collection actions in federal court on 27 properties which were owned by members of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, in an attempt to collect $2.5 million in restitution that Alamo was ordered to pay to his victims.
Its members adhered to a moral code which required proper dress and standards of behavior, and condemned and forbade the use of drugs, homosexuality, adultery, birth control, and abortion.
[11] In 2016, playwright Ernest Kearney produced his one-man show My Alamo War for the Hollywood Fringe Festival in Los Angeles, California.
He succeeded in getting the high-end jackets which were designed by Alamo and manufactured by unpaid cult members removed from a majority of the clothing stores which were located on Hollywood Boulevard.
Following his conviction, the program charged Tony Alamo with being a child abuser, a polygamist and a pedophile.