Tony Alamo - Life and Career

Life and Career

Hoffman was born in Joplin, Missouri, to Jewish Romanian parents in 1934. As a child he moved with his family to Montana, where he was briefly employed as a delivery boy for Helena's Independent Record newspaper. In the early 1960s, Hoffman moved to Los Angeles, California, where he assumed the names Marcus Abad and Mark Hoffman and pursued a career in music, mounting a major publicity campaign to hype singer Bobby Jameson in 1964. He was briefly incarcerated for a weapon-related offense.

Hoffman married Helen Hagan (born Helen Alice Muller) in 1961. On May 25, 1964, the couple had a son, Mark Anthony Hoffman. While married to Helen, he met aspiring actress Susan Lipowitz (born Edith Opal Horn), a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity who was nine years older than Hoffman and married to a man whom Hoffman later described as a "small time Los Angeles hood". After both Hoffman's and Lipowitz' divorces, Lipowitz and Hoffman married in a 1966 Las Vegas, Nevada, ceremony, and the couple legally changed their names to Tony and Susan Alamo.

Together, the couple established the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation in 1969 in Hollywood, California. They also manufactured and sold a line of "Tony Alamo" brand sequined denim jackets, a business that eventually landed Alamo in prison for tax evasion. Susan delivered the sermons on the Alamos' syndicated TV program during the 1970s while her husband appeared to sing a gospel song. Susan was later diagnosed with cancer and died on April 8, 1982. Alamo stated she would be resurrected and for six months he had her body on display "while their followers prayed". After 16 years, her body was given to her family.

In 1984, Alamo married Birgetta Oyllenhammer, owner of a clothing design and manufacturing company in Southern California. Tony continued making clothes, under the brand name "Tony Alamo of Nashville", and Michael Jackson was one of his customers, owning two bib shirts of this brand. He then married Elizabeth Amrhein. After a custody battle, they lost control of her children. For a time Alamo had a retail store in Nashville, Tennessee, called The Alamo of Nashville. Alamo was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1994. He completed a prison sentence and was released on December 8, 1998. He then went to a halfway house in Texarkana.

Alamo's followers sometimes distribute tracts of his writings publicly. The tracts predict impending doom and Armageddon and invite the reader to accept Jesus as their savior. The tracts condemn Catholicism, the Pope and the United States government as a Satanic conspiracy behind events such as 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the John F. Kennedy assassination. Tracts currently being distributed include a picture of Alamo circa 1986. In a tract distributed shortly before the siege of the Branch Davidian establishment in Waco, Texas, Alamo protested the media's use of the word "compound" to describe the campus of his seminary and the word "cult" to describe his ministry.