Boy Taken From Alamo Commune Says Life Was Harsh, Isolated

Three boys taken by authorities from a fundamentalist Christian commune of Tony Alamo and turned over to their fathers under court order appeared Friday at a news conference in Santa Ana during which the oldest of the boys said that their lives in the unorthodox sect were marked by harsh discipline and isolation from the secular world.

The boys, 4, 9 and 11, are at the center of a bitter dispute between their fathers, who fled the sect in September saying they feared for their lives, and Alamo and their mothers, who apparently remain devoted to the sect’s leader.

Thursday, after Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies seized the boys in an early-morning raid on Alamo’s commune in rural Saugus, Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald E. Owen placed them in the custody of their fathers, two brothers who live in Orange, until an April 11 hearing.

The two fathers have accused the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation of exploiting followers and “brainwashing” their wives.

“Tony had a bunch of people at different times spank different people,” Jeremiah Justin Miller, 11, the adopted son of Corey Lee Miller, 34, said at a Friday press conference in Santa Ana. “If you’re disrespectful, they spank you.”

Describes Commune Life

The boy, called Justin, went on to describe a life in which children slept apart from their parents in Spartan dormitories and were kept ignorant of such outside influences as television, newspapers and popular music.

The attorney for the Miller brothers, Sidney L. Radus, stopped the boy from describing the alleged physical and emotional abuse that the men said would befall the children if they remained in the sect.

The fathers, however, spoke freely of the 15 years they spent in the sect and of their disillusionment with Alamo, who also runs a commune in the Ozarks of Arkansas where hundreds of followers work to support the group.

“It’s a classic cult,” said Robert Alan Miller, 35, who joined Alamo in 1972. “You’re 18, 19, 20 years old, and you are looking for something.

“I don’t even remember making a decision to join. I went up to Saugus to take a look. And then I woke up 10 years later.”

It was then, he said, that he arrived at the opinion that Alamo’s religious theories, which include assertions that the Pope is homosexual and that the Vatican controls the press and government officials, were unsatisfactory.

Still, Robert Miller said, he stayed with Alamo because he had built a life within the group, marrying a fellow adherent and siring two sons, Kody Macai Miller, now 9, and Robert Lee Miller, now 4.

“I haven’t believed that stuff for years,” Robert Miller said of the doctrines preached by Alamo. “I still have my strong beliefs in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but not in the way (Alamo) used it.”

The Miller brothers left the Arkansas commune in a dispute with Alamo over control of a trucking firm they had started. They contend that Alamo tried to wrest control of the concern from them, while Alamo says the Miller brothers “embezzled” church funds through their business.

The men said Alamo then excluded them from the commune, which they say is guarded and ringed with barbed wire. Several days later, the men sneaked back into the commune at night to gather their families, they said, but their wives remained devoted to Alamo.

Robert Miller said he could not find his wife, Susan, but that Corey Miller found his, Carol.

“She was so brainwashed, she screamed out to him: ‘It’s Corey, that devil!’ The whole place woke up, and we ran through the woods for our lives.”

The men said they were chased by Alamo guards and adherents, finding safety the next morning in the nearby town of Dyer.

The Millers said that they then returned to Southern California, where they spent the next six months working with a private investigator to track down their children, discovering that they had been moved to Saugus.

After the Millers’ flight, the sect issued divorce papers for their wives, the brothers said, and Alamo married the women to two of his devotees. The brothers contend those actions were invalid.

Robert Miller said Alamo devotees are made dependent on the sect through various economic and psychological pressures. Sect members sign papers turning over their earnings and assets in exchange for food and shelter, and they are “brainwashed” by group leaders, he said.

“Intimidation is greatly used,” he said. Sect leaders promote their beliefs by “getting up in their (adherents’) faces and screaming, ‘You are a devil and you are going to hell if you don’t do what God wants you to do’ ” as defined by Alamo.

Adherents are taught that Alamo “is the judge of the world,” Corey Miller said.

Strict Regimen

The Millers said sect members support their leader’s life style by working in “sweatshops” turning out Western clothing that is sold in Nashville, Tenn.

Adherents live under a strict regimen and often do not leave the sect’s communes for years, although Alamo travels widely on church business, they said.

Justin said that after the Miller brothers fled the Arkansas commune, sect leaders tried to persuade him that his father and uncle were criminals.

“Slowly and slowly, they put it into my head that they are weasels and stuff,” he said.

The Millers were joined at the press conference by representatives of the Commission on Cults and Missionaries of the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles and the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center of Orange.

They brought with them Judy Shapiro, 38, of Los Angeles, who said she had been an Alamo adherent for 11 years before being ejected from the sect in 1982.

She said her husband, Daniel Shapiro, had remained with the sect and taken her two daughters in violation of a court order granting her custody. As a result, she said, she has not seen the girls, now 10 and 11, for six years.

Shapiro said she lived in Alamo communes from 1971 to 1982, working as a baby-sitter for the children of devotees and having little contact with the outside world.

The description of the foundation given by the Millers and Shapiro closely follows that outlined to The Times by former members of the church, who said the sect preys on unfortunates who are attracted by promises of free food and shelter, as well as spiritual fulfillment.

But Alamo, in a telephone interview Thursday, denied the Millers’ assertions and accused them of betraying the church that rescued them from their misfortunes more than a decade ago.

“It’s a sad state of affairs to have people turn on you after you feed and clothe them for years,” he said.

Alamo said the Millers’ ex-wives were in New York with their new husbands selling clothing and were not available for comment.

He added, however, that “there’s no dominion or domination over anybody over there. This is just garbage that people like to print. It makes good copy and sells papers, I guess.”

The Alamo foundation, founded in the mid-1960s, says it aids the down and out by giving them work at its communes.