Child Abuse Hearing for Evangelist Delayed : Crime: A prosecutor says convicted tax evader Tony Alamo should be denied bail because he had married 15-year-old girls.

A Los Angeles hearing on child abuse charges was postponed Thursday for evangelist Tony Alamo, who remained in jail in Memphis, Tenn., where a federal prosecutor accused him of marrying eight of his followers, including married women and 15-year-old girls.

Alamo, 59, was convicted by a Memphis federal court jury Wednesday of falsifying his income tax return for 1985 and failing to file returns the following three years. The marriage accusations were made by a federal prosecutor arguing against allowing him to go free on bail to await sentencing.

Alamo’s conviction in the tax evasion case clears the way for him to be returned to Los Angeles to stand trial on charges that he ordered the beating of a young boy at his onetime Saugus commune. A hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court in that case was rescheduled Thursday to July 29.

Following the jury’s verdict in Memphis on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla jailed Alamo at the request of federal prosecutor Christopher Belcher, who said Alamo posed a threat to his followers and that he might flee before sentencing on Aug. 26.

Alamo, whose real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman, faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $550,000 fine on the tax convictions.

The federal prosecutor said Alamo has married eight of his followers since early 1993, including 15-year-old girls and women who already had husbands.

“He threw the husbands out of the church and took the wives,” Belcher said. One of the teen-agers was told that her family would be expelled from church if she did not marry Alamo, Belcher said.

Belcher said such offenses would fall under state laws against statutory rape in Tennessee and Arkansas, but state prosecutors have filed no such charges against Alamo.

Alamo’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Dickstein, who plans to appeal Wednesday’s conviction, argued that polygamy claims were no reason to deny Alamo bail while he awaits sentencing.

It is not the first time that Alamo and his wives have drawn notice.

After his wife, Susan, died of cancer in 1982 at 59, he kept her body on display for weeks in a mansion, amid widespread reports that he claimed she would rise from the dead. When the miracle never happened, he had her body interred in a marble mausoleum, from which the body was stolen in 1991. It has never been found.

Tony and Susan Alamo founded the Holy Alamo Christian Church in the 1960s, taking young dropouts and drug users off the streets of Hollywood and providing them with food, shelter and anti-Catholic sermons.

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Their religious following grew to hundreds of members in California, Arkansas and Tennessee in the 1970s and 1980s, when communes and church-owned businesses staffed with free labor from their followers earned millions of dollars, particularly off the production of glitzy, rhinestone-studded denim jackets that sold in exclusive boutiques for as much as $600 each.

Internal Revenue Service officials claim that the Alamos shortchanged the IRS an estimated $10 million in taxes on income earned from their businesses, using the tax-exempt Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation and later the Music Square Church.

Alamo argued he owed no taxes because he had no salary. He said the businesses financed his Christian ministry and the church simply supported him as its spiritual leader.