Alamo’s Life as a Fugitive Was Spent Out in the Open : Religion: Untraceable cellular phones and taped radio shows helped the fundamentalist minister hold the reins of his church and businesses while federal agents tried to track him down.

Although hunted across the nation by federal agents, religious cult leader Tony Alamo lived an open, if not completely public, life before his capture this month in Florida.

For nearly three years, the fugitive preacher wanted on child-abuse charges in Los Angeles traveled the country often--almost always with an entourage of followers or at the very least a chauffeur. Investigators say he started and operated businesses from coast to coast. He dropped in on the mayors of some cities he visited. He called newspaper editors and radio talk shows. His sermons--often tape-recorded denouncements of President Bush, the Pope and the investigators who trailed him--could be heard on as many as 50 radio stations each week.

In the Tampa area, where authorities believe that Alamo made his home base during much of the time he was a fugitive, the fundamentalist preacher and his followers operated a hardware store and had recently opened a family-style restaurant. Investigators said Alamo was so involved in running the businesses that he personally interviewed salesmen and ordered all supplies. He designed the restaurant’s menus himself. The business card from the hardware store said: “We’re bigger than you think!”

Authorities said Alamo, 56, lived in a rented $300,000 home on a canal that empties into scenic Old Tampa Bay. He kept $12,000 in a drawer. And every day at 1 p.m., he could turn on the radio and hear one of his sermons broadcast by a radio station across the bay.

“He did pretty well for himself,” Deputy U. S. Marshal Wayne F. Fuchs said. “He lived good--for a wanted man.”

But it was Alamo’s high-profile lifestyle and reliance on his followers that ultimately led to his capture and may result in the end of his Holy Alamo Christian Church. A task force of federal agents monitored the gathering in Tampa of Alamo followers from across the country and then ultimately followed them to him.

At the end of his run, the flamboyant preacher seemed surprised. Handcuffed and sitting on the driveway outside his waterfront home, he looked up at the federal agents who had just arrested him and said: “How’d you guys find me?”

“Divine guidance,” he was told.

Controversy has followed Alamo since the early ‘70s when he and his wife, Susan, began taking busloads of young dropouts, drug addicts and drunks from the streets of Hollywood to a compound in Saugus, where they were treated to fire-and-brimstone admonitions that included Alamo’s anti-government and anti-Catholic beliefs.

The growing church planted branch communes in Nashville and the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and operated numerous businesses, including the manufacture of a popular line of expensive denim jackets that carried the preacher’s own rhinestone designs.

But the growth was accompanied by allegations that children were abused in the communes, that Alamo’s followers were brainwashed and forced to work for little pay, and that he lived luxuriously off the profits. Alamo received widespread attention when his wife died in 1982 and he predicted that she would be resurrected. He reportedly placed her embalmed body on display in an Arkansas commune for six months.

In 1985, Alamo’s church was stripped of its tax-exempt status after the Internal Revenue Service determined that it was a profit-making enterprise. Three years later, the preacher with a penchant for Western-style clothing disappeared as Los Angeles County authorities investigated the beating of an 11-year-old boy alleged to have occurred at the Saugus commune. Authorities said Alamo directed the beating via telephone from another location.

Now, in the wake of his capture, federal authorities are trying to document the holdings of Alamo and his church, collect more than $7 million in back taxes, and retrace Alamo’s trail as a fugitive.

Fuchs, part of a 10-agent task force that tracked and captured Alamo, said investigators believe that Alamo settled in the Tampa Bay area almost immediately after fleeing California.

Authorities said Alamo had a core group of followers that helped him elude capture. Prosecutors have described these followers as bodyguards--”Christian soldiers” ready to protect their pastor with weapons, if needed.

“They assisted him; they protected him,” FBI Agent Donald Geisler testified this month in a Tampa courtroom where Alamo was seeking bail. Geisler said former followers of Alamo have told investigators that the group has access to automatic weapons and that “Mr. Alamo and his bodyguards should be considered armed and dangerous.”

The contention that Alamo’s group is armed or violent angers church followers. They point out that numerous searches have never turned up weapons on church property.

Albert Krantz, 40, a gaunt, soft-spoken former drug addict who credits Alamo with saving him spiritually two decades ago, came to Tampa last year to work with Alamo on clothing designs. FBI agents identified him as an Alamo bodyguard.

“It is completely and utterly ridiculous,” he said of the idea that a phalanx of Alamo soldiers is ready to commit violence to protect Alamo. “I don’t think anyone would consider me a bodyguard.”

Ray Arauz, a Los Angeles follower of Alamo who the FBI said is also an Alamo bodyguard, scoffed at such a contention.

“I am nobody’s bodyguard,” said Arauz, 41. “I have my own family to watch out for. This just shows the government harassment that is going on here. The whole thing is very unfair.”

Aside from the dispute over bodyguards and weapons, it is apparent that Alamo--nearly blind from glaucoma and unable to drive--was routinely in the company of several followers while he was a fugitive.

Alamo has remarried and has a 9-year-old stepdaughter. Federal agents said they believe that the family moved often from house to house in the Tampa area. They say they have documented that he moved from a house in Madeira Beach, near Tampa, earlier this year when a neighbor complained to police about the large number of people who stayed at the home and the late-night comings and goings of the entourage.

Billy Johnson operates a private postal box store next to the Big Time Discount hardware store that authorities said Alamo--using the name Harvey Cochran--opened in Pinellas Park, across Old Tampa Bay from Alamo’s rented house. Johnson said Alamo made several visits to the hardware store each week, always arriving in a van with four or five other men. Alamo always carried a cellular phone, Johnson said.

“They did no advertising; some days they didn’t even open,” said Johnson, who became suspicious of his neighbor. “It was like they were in business but they didn’t care if they got any business.”

The store has been closed since the arrest, and church followers have begun removing its inventory.

Investigators said Alamo’s frequent moves of his household and his use of cellular phones--which are untraceable--mail drops and numerous aliases were the chief impediments to his capture.

The FBI said Alamo made calls from Tampa using cellular phones registered in New Jersey. This allowed him to frequently call newspapers and a Nashville radio talk show hosted by his brother, Dan Hoffman, without fear of giving away his whereabouts.

As an example of how he tried to prevent his mail from being traced, investigators said Alamo sent tapes to be broadcast on radio station WRFA-AM in nearby Largo to a post office box in New York. A follower would pick up the tapes, then remail them so that they arrived at the Florida radio station with New York postmarks.

Investigators said they know of at least seven aliases used by Alamo while he was a fugitive.

Known as Harvey Cochran at the hardware store, his name was G. Elmo Justine at the waterfront home he rented in Tampa. After Alamo was arrested, agents found a business card in his wallet from a restaurant called Wild Child’s in Temple Terrace, northeast of Tampa. The card belonged to H. Colling, general manager of the restaurant.

Federal agents went to the restaurant and learned that H. Colling was Alamo, who had orchestrated the opening of the restaurant two weeks earlier, making all the decisions right down to the design of the restaurant’s logo and menus. The agents also learned that several of the restaurant’s employees were followers of Alamo’s church who had moved to the area in recent months to be near their pastor.

One employee is Jennifer Colbeck, a 17-year-old waitress who was born in Saugus and lived in Alamo church communes until she moved to Tampa this year. She said she came with her husband, John, also an Alamo follower and a dishwasher at Wild Child’s. Like other followers who would talk to the media in Tampa, she recited, seemingly by rote, a denunciation of the pursuit and capture of the preacher she called “Papa Tony” while growing up.

“Tony’s been my pastor all of my life,” she said. “He is the only preacher I know of. He preaches the gospel and some people don’t like that. They know he is telling the truth and they just want to shut him up. It’s unfair. He’s done nothing wrong.”

Investigators believe that profits from the businesses started by Alamo and operated by his followers helped the fugitive preacher finance new ventures as well as avoid capture.

Johnson, owner of the shop next to the hardware store, said Alamo had expressed interest in buying his postal box business but was arrested before serious negotiations began.

“Harvey--that’s what I knew him as--told me he was looking for businesses to buy because he had a lot of people to put to work,” Johnson said.

Alamo’s high-profile activities were unusual for a federal fugitive, authorities said. They concede that had he divorced himself from his church and its followers, he might still be free.

“He thumbed his nose at federal authorities,” Assistant U. S. Atty. David Jennings said. “Not until the task force was put together did he see that he couldn’t keep doing that.”

The federal task force was formed in May after authorities received information that numerous Alamo followers were flocking to Tampa, said Mike Blevins, chief deputy marshal in Fort Smith, Ark.

“We thought that the probability was good that these people were going there because he was using Tampa as a hiding place,” Blevins said.

The migration of followers to Tampa had in part been spurred by the seizures of numerous church properties in Arkansas and Tennessee to satisfy IRS tax liens. A lien has been placed against the property in Saugus, which has been boarded up and unused for several months.

Other properties were seized to pay a $1.8-million court judgment won against Alamo by a family of former followers who claimed that the preacher had abused children, alienated family members and violated labor laws. That case prompted more criminal charges against Alamo when he called up a Fort Smith newspaper and allegedly threatened the life of the judge who heard the suit.

But some followers of Alamo said their arrival in Tampa was coincidental to Alamo being there.

Rick Tiner, an Alamo follower for 20 years, said he moved there without knowing that Alamo was nearby. “Other brothers of the church said it was a good area to get a new start,” Tiner said. “And I had never been to Florida before. I didn’t know Tony was here until after I got here.”

Federal authorities have dismissed such claims, derisively referring to the gathering of followers in Tampa as “miraculous.” Prosecutor Jennings said the followers came because they are part of Alamo’s “nationwide support group, . . . people who would abandon their lives to come to Tampa to harbor him.”

Blevins said task force agents located many of Alamo’s known followers by checking applications for Florida driver’s licenses.

That started nearly two months of surveillance of the followers as the agents waited to be led to Alamo. The plan paid off July 3 when agents followed a church member from the Big Time Discount hardware store to the Tampa neighborhood of Palma Ceia where comfortable houses line a network of man-made canals.

The man they followed pulled into a driveway on San Rafael Street, where behind a sweeping front lawn stood a ranch house with a red brick facade.

When the man left, the agents stayed. They secretly watched the house for two more days until the morning of July 5, when an overweight man with an unkempt gray beard and thick, dark glasses stepped out the front door and picked the morning newspaper up off the driveway.

“That’s our subject,” one of the deputy marshals whispered into his radio, a low-key report that signaled the end of Tony Alamo’s run.

A few hours later, the task force moved in.

NEXT STEP

Tony Alamo was moved by federal marshals last week from Tampa, Fla., to Fort Smith, Ark., where he is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court today on charges of contempt of court and threatening the life of a judge. A trial date has not been set and Alamo was being held without bail. After the Arkansas charges are resolved, Alamo must face a child-abuse charge filed against him in Los Angeles County in 1988.