Alamo Gets 6-Year Term for Federal Tax Evasion

For the first time in his years of trouble with the law, flamboyant evangelist Tony Alamo was sentenced to prison Friday, a six-year federal tax-evasion term that has Los Angeles prosecutors wondering whether they need to follow through on his scheduled child abuse trial.

Alamo, winding up a three-day hearing in a federal court in Memphis, asked for probation or some other alternative to prison.

“As far as I’m concerned, you could deport me to Israel and that would be just fine,” he said.

The 59-year-old evangelist, who once ran a religious commune in Saugus and proselytized throughout the Los Angeles area for converts to his Holy Alamo Christian Church, has been at odds with the law for many years.

He was a fugitive for almost three years after he disappeared in 1989 as Los Angeles County authorities investigated allegations that he gave telephone instructions to four men to strike an 11-year-old boy 140 times with a large paddle at the Saugus commune.

He was captured in July, 1991, and is still awaiting trial on the child abuse charges in Los Angeles.

The federal judge in Memphis on Friday imposed the maximum possible prison term on Alamo and fined him $210,000 for his June 8 conviction on charges of filing a false income tax return in 1985 and failing to file tax returns for the next three years, Internal Revenue Service spokesman Dan Boone said.

He has been in jail since his conviction.

Alamo, whose real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman, was scheduled to return to Los Angeles to stand trial on state charges in the alleged beating of a young boy, but the federal prison sentence has local prosecutors wondering if the effort would be worth it.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Asari said his office must now consider how much of the federal sentence Alamo will serve, and weigh the trauma to the alleged victim of putting him on the stand against the additional prison time Alamo might receive if he is convicted of child abuse.

“At this point we’re prepared to go to trial,” Asari said. “But this gives us something to think of in terms of settling the case.”

A hearing on the state case is scheduled for Sept. 26.

Alamo gained fame and fortune when he and his wife, Susan, 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 religious sermons.

Communes and church-owned businesses staffed with free labor by hundreds of followers in California, Arkansas and Tennessee earned millions in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly off the production of glitzy rhinestone-studded denim jackets Alamo designed, which sold in exclusive boutiques for as much as $600 each.

The IRS eventually stripped the Alamo Foundation of its tax-exempt status. IRS officials claim the Alamos shortchanged the government an estimated $10 million in taxes on income earned from a variety of businesses, using the tax-exempt Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation and later the Music Square Church.

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

During Alamo’s tax-evasion trial in Memphis, the government accused him of controlling the private lives of his followers and said he has married eight of his followers since early last year, including two 15-year-old girls.