The Cult Leader Behind Those Pamphlets All Over South Philly
Who the heck is Pastor Tony Alamo and why is his face all over South Philly? That’s the question that led me down a bizarre rabbit hole.
It began innocently enough. A mid-thirties guy with shaggy hair and a hipster mustache offered a pamphlet to my buddies and me while we enjoyed some sidewalk drinking. We passed.
The next morning, I found the pamphlets under my car’s windshield wiper. Normally, I rip these annoying marketing brochures off and crumple them into paper balls that collect on my car floor. This one, from the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, I couldn’t crinkle. Why not? I had to see what was up with the guy in the photo. This photo.
Religious marketing junk isn’t that unusual, but they normally have a somewhat recent photo of the respective evangelist. This one has a photo of Pastor Tony Alamo from 1985! Inside this brochure, was another one with a more modern photo from…1986!
1985-86 must’ve been a rough year as Pastor Tony Alamo looks far less chiseled (bloated) but with a creepy party vibe and a pair of hustler sunglasses. He looked more lounge singer than a prophet.
These types of windshield direct-marketing efforts are a nuisance. Nobody wants them so if you have the inclination to do this sort of marketing, please don’t. They end up strewn all over the place. I’ve seen Alamo’s mug all over South Philly.
WHO IS PASTOR TONY ALAMO?
I needed to know who was this Tony Alamo, the guy on the face of all this litter, and what did he currently look like. To the internet, I went. The search result provided a bundle of crazy information about good old Pastor Tony.
No current photos of Tony exist because he’s dead. He died in 2017 at a federal prison in North Carolina at the age of 82.
WHY WAS HE IN PRISON?
This time, the time of his death, he was in prison for taking girls across state lines for sex. He was convicted at the federal level on ten counts in 2009. One of the girls was as young as nine. He was a polygamist. There are reports that one of his wives was fifteen years old and maybe some younger. According to a Washington Post article about Alamo’s death, he once told the Associated Press that “consent is puberty.”
Tony Alamo, or as his parents named him Bernie Lazar Hoffman, had dreams of becoming a Hollywood pop star. He ended up as a street preacher in Hollywood in the 1960s with his wife Susan, preying upon young kids on the Hollywood streets. They started a church called Alamo Christian Foundation in 1969 and forced their followers to take a vow of poverty and turn over all their money and possessions to the church. In 1976, Alamo moved the church to Arkansas.
He started numerous businesses and created a multi-million dollar industry that included clothing stores, a record company, gas stations, a motel, a hog farm, and a quarry. He claimed the 300 people working for him were volunteers and entitled to $5 each per week while working as many as 15 hours a day.
Tony had two earlier stints in prison. Once for a weapons charge and another time for tax evasion.
This is one of the more recent photos of Tony Alamo floating around the internet.
ALAMO THE GRAVE ROBBER
He preached that his wife, who died in 1982, would resurrect. She never did, but he did take her corpse on the run with him for 7 years just before federal agents raided his compound in 1991. The corpse was returned after the daughter of his deceased wife, from a previous marriage, sued and won in court for the corpse’s return.
ALAMO THE UGLY COAT DESIGNER
Alamo also had a successful custom jacket business that seems to have mostly been a gaudy mashup of bedazzling and airbrushing. The jackets are, in a word, hideous. However, for some bizarre reason, celebrities took to his jackets. Don King, Miley Cyrus, and Michael Jackson bought them. Michael Jackson wore an Alamo jacket on the cover of Bad.
TONY ALAMO IN YOUR HOME
If you’re an Xfinity/Comcast subscriber and have the X1 system with the talkie remote control, you can press the talk button and say “Tony Alamo”. This will pop up. It’s a four-part miniseries from Sundance channel on dude. It’s worth a watch if you’ve come to the end of Netflix and Amazon Prime. They have a video of an Alamo deposition and interviews with former cult members.
That’s the guy on the front of the pamphlets scattered throughout areas of South Philly. He was a cult-leading, grave-robbing, polygamist convicted of weapons charges, tax evasion, and sex-trafficking girls across state lines, who also made hideous jackets, owned a hog farm, and a quarry.
I wanted to know who Tony Alamo was. I found out. A vile human.
Take two things away from my obsession with Tony Alamo. Don’t join a cult. The leaders are always scam artists or worse as in this case. And, celebrities wearing ugly gear doesn’t make that gear cool, especially when designed by a guy convicted of bringing girls across state lines for sex.
If you see these brochures around Philly, do us all a favor and toss them into the nearest trash receptacle.
Links:
NY Times
Washington Post