Original subtitles

I believe Tony Alamo to be probably one of

the more evil human beings

that United States has seen.

I want to be here to tell this story

to set the record straight

and to shed light on the nature of this cult

and the atrocities that he committed in the name of God.

A year or two after I had escaped,

I purchased a gun

and was going to drive down to Arkansas,

and I was going to try to kill him.

He was a monster of epic proportion.

The way he terrorized human beings,

it was second to none.

I would call him a sadistic

narcissistic sociopath.

And he used religion as a cover.

Tony and Susan Alamo,

probably in the early '70s,

and I see the congregation in back of them.

In 1969,

Tony and Susan Alamo married each other and also

incorporated the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation.

At this point, they've probably got 300 to 500 followers.

I think they saw themselves as parents, in a way.

Everyone called Tony Alamo Papa Tony,

and most people called Susan Alamo Grandma Susie,

and then all of the people inside the church,

we called them brother and sister.

Tony is pictured here without his dark glasses.

He's smiling. He looks like a pretty regular guy.

But he was an evil, sadistic, megalomaniac,

narcissistic monster.

As a child, I did not know my biological mother.

I grew up believing that my mother was an evil person.

One of the things that I would hear often from the pulpit was

that my mother was an adulterer,

and that she left the group,

and that she had died and gone to hell.

As a result, I grew up passed around from family to family.

My relationship with my father was spotty at best.

Tony Alamo sent the men away and kept them working,

and the children in turn had to look

to Tony as their father figure.

The rule was that everyone had to go

to at least one service every single day.

When Tony Alamo would preach,

he would start walking around in a circle.

He was a commanding figure.

He always wore these dark sunglasses so you couldn't see

into his eyes, and he said

he was the prophet of God, and he said that he spoke to

and heard God's voice.

Tony Alamo's religious style was... extreme fear

was the cornerstone of his doctrine.

When Tony talked about hellfire and brimstone,

I used to have really bad nightmares.

Tony Alamo's sermons were full of hate and conspiracies,

against the Catholic church, conspiracies against

the United States government,

and hate for anyone that was not in our organization.

He positioned himself to be the savior.

The only place for salvation was inside of our organization.

People outside in the world were not saved,

and they were all going to hell.

I don't remember a single individual

ever questioning Tony Alamo's connection to God.

We believed everything he said.

In Arkansas alone, we had 29 businesses, um,

that employed only church members.

Everyone who worked turned over their paychecks.

Tony said you were giving it to God.

Additionally, in 1985, Tony Alamo started

designing Rhinestone jackets

that he was selling throughout the United States.

Those jackets were made by the members of the church.

The children of the church did the rhinestone settings.

We would work from, say, after dinner,

say five o'clock to midnight, and... or even later,

sometimes at two a.m. in the morning.

And we would be put in small rooms where you'd

have, like, 10 to 15 kids at a desk,

and they'd all have little trays, and we'd have to set

hundreds, if not thousands, of these rhinestones

in... in the metal casing, and the metal casings

had really sharp ends on the end.

So our fingers were always cut and bloody.

But we thought of this as a godly pursuit.

We thought we were making money so that we could fight

the beast, so that we could fight the one world government.

So we did this with... With gusto, with enthusiasm.

It was a privilege to go do this,

because we didn't know anything else.

A lot of celebrities bought these jackets.

I know for a fact that Don King wears them.

Mr T. wears them.

Nicki Minaj has worn them.

Miley Cyrus was photographed wearing this, and the children

never got a penny for making

any of these, and Tony Alamo made millions of dollars off of

these, literally millions.

One time, a seamstress who had been working on these jackets

came in to explain

to Tony Alamo that this portion right here was too tight.

They were like this.

And when you put the jacket on, you couldn't move your arm.

She questioned him, and no one questioned

this man without some sort of repercussion.

I was nearby playing with some toys.

I have a suggestion about the jackets.

We need to open up the seams here more so that they can move.

Tony became irate, accusing her of not being

connected to the spiritual nature

of the design and that she had to get her soul right with God.

And when she still persisted, saying this design

doesn't work, he accused her

of essentially being filled with the devil.

Are you questioning the word of the Lord?

That startled me, and I obviously focused on Tony

to see what he was gonna do next.

This design came from God.

You understand me?!

And he's, you know, like pointing at her, and he's

telling her, "You're not filled with the spirit of God."

You know, "I am filled with the spirit of God."

You know, "I am the apple of God's eye."

You know, "How dare you bring this to me."

You're a damn disgrace, you know that?

He was just so angry at her for questioning him.

The majority of people who lived

on the property were afraid of Tony.

You go and pray.

Something would trigger him, and he would go from being,

like, a nice sort of

cordial guy, and then in an instant, he would just flip.

One of the first times that I really saw Tony was

beating people, I think I was eight years old.

I saw a boy who was three years older than me

walking by himself, and the way he was walking, he was limping,

he was, like, almost dragging his leg but he was hunched over.

Flynn!

He was a close friend of mine,

So I ran up to him, and I said, "Hey, what's going on?

What happened to you?"

And he said, "Get away from me, because Papa Tony

just beat the devil out of me."

I didn't understand.

What are you talking about?

And so I pressed him a little more, and I said,

"Why are you walking this way?"

And he said, "Papa Tony just beat me with a belt."

And he lifted up his shirt.

And he had red welts on his back.

That was one of the first times I had seen

blood and marks on a child.

He told me that all he did,

he had a note that he passed

a girl in class, Tony found out about that.

Why would he do that?

Because I have Satan in me.

When my friend told me to leave him

alone for fear that I would be

beaten for spending time with him,

I thought there's no way I could be beaten like that.

I did not think that could ever happen to me.

Fear was the primary motivator in the church.

Tony Alamo was

crystal clear that God spoke to him, and because God spoke to

him and God knew what we were thinking,

he told him what we were thinking.

And, as a child, I grew up believing that if

I had an impure thought, God was telling him these things.

An impure thought could range from anything from thinking

your parents didn't know what they were talking about,

to something lustful,

and if I had an impure thought, we were

taught to say this mantra...

The blood of Jesus is against you, Satan.

And you kept saying that, and you kept saying it

and saying it until your thoughts were cleared.

The blood of Jesus is against you, Satan.

The blood of Jesus is against you, Satan.

We would often be walking around the property,

and you would just hear people

saying, "The blood of Jesus against you, Satan,"

and you would know

that person was thinking something, and they had to

cleanse their mind.

The blood of Jesus is against you, Satan.

We were trained to tattle on each other.

So you had to be careful when you said it.

Oftentimes, I would say it under my breath.

If somebody had heard me saying the blood of Jesus

against you Satan,

they had an opportunity to ask me,

"Why are you saying the blood of Jesus?"

Which would then open me up to ex...

Explaining to them that I had sinned, and if I had sinned,

then they could put me on report.

There were repercussions for that.

It would get back to Tony that somebody was having impure

thoughts, and then he would...

He would eventually deal with them in his own way.

Tony had a clipboard in the office that had a list

of all of the reports, and he called it the reports list.

Everyone knew that if your name ended up on

the reports list that something was gonna happen

to you.

When Tony would read from the report list,

he always made sure there were groups of people,

large groups of people, and you saw it all.

Once, there was a mother with her son, and the son had

reported his mother, saying that she had misinterpreted

two verses in the Bible.

Your son says that you tried to teach him

- the verses of King Saul. - Yes.

And Tony became irate,

told her that she had no right to interpret the Bible.

He told her that she was a sweat hog.

He often used to call women sweat hogs.

You make me sick.

He told the child to go up to

his mom and hit his mom in the face...

and to tell her, "May the devil

be driven from you," and then smack her.

And the child smacks his mom, barely

smacking her, and Tony said, "No, harder."

Do it again.

The child hits the mother again... this time,

it's a little harder, but still not hard.

And Tony says, "If you don't hit her hard enough that the demon

is hit out of her, I'm gonna beat you."

Harder!

So the child hits his mother as hard as he can.

Mother is crying. The child is crying.

I'm standing there watching this,

just like not able to believe my own eyes.

And Tony was just delighted,

just happy, smiling from ear to ear.

Tony Alamo is now ordering children to commit violent acts.

And the Bible says, "Lay your hands on no one."

The Bible says to not smite anybody.

So I began to see that and look at the Bible and say,

"This doesn't make sense.

What he's saying doesn't line up."

But if I had moments of doubt,

the only thing I would think was that I was evil.

You know, I was the one that

had the problem, because Tony was the prophet.

Because I was special in Tony's eyes,

I knew that Tony would take my word over other kids' words

and often over other

adults' words, and I used that advantage in the reporting

system to seek revenge against people.

When I was about 12 years old,

my friend and I managed to get a hold of the teacher's edition

of our science book, and we took it into the boys' bathroom

and we're looking at the anatomy of a woman.

We had never seen anything like it.

- And our teacher caught us. - Boys?

What's going on in here?

And he threatened to put us on report.

You know I'm going to have to tell Tony about this.

So I began to sort of mimic what Tony Alamo

was doing, using fear and retribution

as a control method.

I'll tell Tony you gave it to us.

I told him that if he put me on report,

that I would report him for giving me the book.

I would basically lie about it.

You wouldn't dare.

Didn't Papa Tony tell you to rip out those pages anyway?

He was supposed to have taken a black pen and blotted out

the anatomy, but he didn't do that.

So that would have got him in trouble.

I won't say anything if you won't.

Because he realized my status with Tony,

he agreed not to say anything.

But then, a week later, I got

put on report for not doing my homework.

I then ratted on him and said that he left

the book in a place where me and my friend could get it.

He's lying. I never gave him that book.

He called me a liar in front of Tony,

and Tony was like, "No, Benji doesn't lie."

Benji has God's blessing. I believe his word.

So the teacher was eventually beaten.

Get him out of here.

No. No. Benji, Benji, tell him the truth.

Tell him the truth, Benji. Please, tell him the truth!

I witnessed him getting ten swats.

He was bent over a table while a man with

a pretty big board hit him 10 times in the butt.

It was one of the first times that I began to get

a taste for power.

When I lied to Tony about other people,

I had a feeling of euphoria,

of power, that I had never experienced before.

I enjoyed it,

and I remember feeling invincible.

And Tony took me from one doctor to another,

and finally, they found it... It was breast cancer.

Because Jesus died,

I can live, and I will live.

Susan was the spiritual guru, if you will.

I think she was a con artist, but not evil.

She definitely wanted to advance her agenda,

and she wanted to have wealth.

I don't think she wanted to hurt people.

The day she died, they brought her into the church and put her

in a casket, an open casket, and everybody came and said

their... their respects.

Tony and Sue prepared the ministry for Susan's death

by saying that she would eventually raise from the dead.

During the first three days after Susan's death,

our entire ministry, we were praying,

and it was almost nonstop.

I believed with all my heart and all my soul, as did all

the other people in the church,

that she would come back from the dead

three days after her death.

When Susan didn't resurrect,

on the third day, Tony immediately began to blame

the congregation.

- They didn't believe enough. - It's because of you

she's still lying there, because of your

sinful hearts and your lack of faith!

We kept praying over her body

for six months, in an open coffin,

around the clock, 24 hours a day.

Nobody is leaving this room until their prayers

reach heaven.

After Susan Alamo died, and she didn't raise from

the dead, I began to... To really question what

Tony Alamo was preaching.

It was a big moment of doubt.

That's when I initially began to say,

"He said she was coming back, and she hasn't come back.

He must be a false prophet."

One of my friends, who was African-American,

got caught doubting Tony's veracity as a prophet.

His stepdad was the one that had found out about

his stepson's thoughts, and so he put his own son on report.

Your father tells me that you doubt

that I hear the voice of God.

When my friend first got

called in he told Tony, "Yeah, I don't think you're a true

prophet, because your prophecy didn't come true."

Take a hold of the sinner.

Tony congratulated the dad, saying, "Thank you for

reporting this."

You know, "We have to drive the devil out of this child."

He got beat pretty bad that day.

They would count the beating...

Three!

...and close to 30, he just couldn't take it anymore.

He started moving around a lot, too much, and whenever

they would move, they would start the beating over.

Thirty would end up turning into 60,

and I watched it just imagining that it would have

been me, because he believed the same exact thing as me,

but he had the courage to say something, and I didn't.

Around 1992, he began to preach about polygamy.

And over the years, Tony collected...

multiple spiritual wives.

The last count that I heard of was 24.

Almost all of them were under the age of 16 years old,

the majority of them.

He slowly began to groom these women and his followers

so that they would believe

that marriage and sex with him was

appropriate and sanctioned by God.

As Tony began to progress in marrying

younger and younger women,

he went on to say that puberty was consent,

that once a girl reached puberty, that that was

her body consenting to sexual relationships with her husband.

Tony Alamo justified both polygamy and marriage to

underage girls by finding verses in the Bible.

He quotes multiple sources in the Old Testament

where different kings had multiple wives.

Tony began

doing this thing with the young girls,

young girls as young as eight.

He would invite them over to his house for Bible reading

and Bible education for either a night,

a weekend, or even sometimes a week.

When the girls went over for Bible study,

I didn't think anything of it... When Tony would

select a child for this sort of Bible reading,

it was an esteemed thing, because Tony was the prophet,

and the adults were

happy that their child was selected to spend time with

the prophet of God.

Years later, I found out that Tony had multiple

houses whereby these women were being held

against their will.

In this recording, you can hear him saying, "Amen."

Amen is a code for, "You agree."

And he even says, "Right, Amen?"

Like, "You agree with me?"

He's getting the followers

to regurgitate and to process

what he's programming them to believe.

He was a master at that.

He keeps mentioning if these men of God

wanted more women, that God would give them more.

So he's trying to show his followers that he's okay, that

it's okay for him to have as many women as he wants.

It's disgusting to hear him use.

Old Testament gospel to justify what he's doing.

This is the man that I learned to hate over time.

But it's also the man that I grew up loving

and not knowing that he was

such a monster until many years later.

Oh, my. Okay.

So this photo is...

part of the entrance to the mansion that I grew up in.

The doors that are shown here, in back of those doors is

a room.

Many horrific things happened in the room back there.

The irony of this photo is that on the lefthand side

of this... of these doors

is a painting of Jesus Christ, and it looks

like he's casting out Satan.

The irony being that, on the other side of those doors,

hundreds of children suffered unspeakable crimes

and endured untold amount of pain.

These are the doors I went through on

that on the night that I was called in.

When I exited,

I was not the same person as when I had went in.

I've been traumatized too much.

Early one cold morning in November, I was woken

up by this man saying that Tony wanted me.

There was one section in that room that had a two-way mirror,

and in the middle of the room

was a desk, and on top of that was a solo speaker phone,

and on that phone was Tony Alamo.

Benji, you've been put on report for lustful touching.

What do you have to say for yourself?

Tony then began to question me and says, "One of the sisters

"says that you touched another girl on her breast.

Is that true? Did you really touch her?"

And I was, like, trying to figure out how do I get out

of it? So I immediately said...

I... I did do it,

but it was an accident.

When the bus stopped once, I touched this girl,

I fell into her, and I touched her breast.

That wasn't the truth, obviously.

In reality, she and I had been kind of going out for

a year at the time, and he said, "Don't lie to me, Benji,

"you know God talks to me, and your sisters have already

reported you."

You're a liar, and the devil must be beaten from you.

You have no control over what's about to

happen to you, and all you experience his pain.

One man held me up in the air,

and then a man took the "board of education" and...

beat me with it.

Uh, I don't have the words to express my disbelief at it,

that another human being can do that to children.

Yeah, I don't know... I don't know about that.

Let me just take a minute.

It's sad.

Tony was preparing the congregation for

the inevitable attack

by the beast, as he put it, by the IRS,

by peppering all of his sermons

with things that would eventually occur,

things like the seizure of our properties.

And then it was a few months after that,

that the IRS and the federal agents

showed up on our property.

And they came with guns, and it was like, this is the beast.

So it appeared as if his prophecies were coming true.

The agents told him that we had one week

to leave the property or face being put in jail.

Within one week,

the 250- or 300-acre ranch property was

completely abandoned.

Tony Alamo was in hiding in Florida.

My family planned on going to Long Island,

where we would stay with our grandparents.

Initially, I felt afraid, because I still thought

the ground would open and swallow me alive.

That was one of the things Tony used to preach was that

any... if you left the church,

that the ground would open up, and that's

how you'd go to hell.

And it took me a couple of weeks to actually walk on

the asphalt until I realized, it's not gonna open up

and swallow me alive.

I began to literally and openly question

the existence of God as I knew Him.

I went to a roller skating rink and flirted with girls.

I went to parties.

I met friends, guys that took me out to play football

and arcades and swimming pool parties, and you know,

we just did things that kids did,

and God didn't strike me down for that.

For me, that represented

a pivotal moment whereby

I began to question Tony Alamo

yet once again... Tony Alamo was a liar.

About nine months after we had been living in Long Island,

Tony ordered our family to go back to Arkansas to restart

the church.

Even though I was 16, my options were pretty limited.

I didn't have a social security number.

I couldn't stay on my own.

I had to go back with the family and start the church.

I had no other choice.

When we moved back to Arkansas,

I was supposed to fold gospel tracts and stuff them

in envelopes.

And while I was in the office, and I was putting away files,

I came across a file of birth certificates,

and one of them was mine.

I had no idea that this document even existed,

but there's my name in print, and it's got my mom's name,

my mother's maiden name, which I had no idea who this

woman was, what her name was, or anything about her,

and here she is in print.

This is a copy of my birth certificate that

I found while I was rummaging through the files,

and along with this, I found this photo

of my mom.

This photo of this beautiful woman with long brunette hair,

smiling, looking off into the camera.

Most of my life, I thought my mother

was dead and in hell.

And when I saw this, I... I fell in love with her,

and could not believe that I was holding a picture of her.

I kissed the photo.

I cried next to the photo.

My tears wetted this photo.

According to this,

my mother was from Brooklyn, New York.

I called information and began asking for these last names,

and eventually find one relative of my mother who had never

remarried and kept the same maiden name as my mother's

maiden name, and that woman knew where my mom was,

and she confirmed that my mom was alive, and she put me in

contact with her in California.

All the years and all the lies suddenly just faded away,

and I suddenly had a window to a new life.

I began to plan my escape myself

at 16 years old.

I called a cab early in the morning, around five a.m.,

the cab rolled up,

and it was rolling on the gravel that was in front

of our house, and so it woke up everyone in the house.

I got into the car,

and my stepdad chased me

all the way to the airport.

Please, you gotta help me.

The cab driver asked me, "Who's the man following us

in the van?" And I said, that's my stepdad.

I just found out that my own mom is alive,

and I thought she was dead for my whole life,

and the place where I come from,

they'll beat me if they catch me.

And that's when I said, "If you stop him, I'll give you $50 to

"stop him and hold him back from coming into the airport.

I have to get on that plane."

And he said, "Well, if they're gonna put

a hurting on you, I'll do what I can to stop him."

And with that, he sped up.

Thank you.

When I was in the airport, I was shaking.

My stepdad came out with a cell phone, yelling,

"Tony Alamo wants to talk to you.

"Tony wants to talk to you.

He said you can marry any girl you want, just come back,"

and I said, "Tell Tony Alamo he's a liar.

I found out my mom is alive, and I'm gonna go live with her,"

and that was it. I never looked back.

My mother picked me up from the airport in

Fresno, California,

and I began to really understand who she was

as she began to tell me her story.

I'm sure you have a lot of questions.

She told me about how her decision to leave was the most

difficult decision in the world,

and how the day she went to escape from

this group,

my father had come and taken me

from the nursery, and she couldn't find me.

And so she decided to leave without me.

If I didn't leave then, I didn't think I'd ever get out.

One of the things that my mom talked about was

the three times that she tried to come get me.

She hired a private investigator twice, and twice

that private investigator got shunned away by the church.

And then the third time, her and some of her friends tried

to actually kidnap me off the streets, and that didn't

work out, but she did try.

- I never gave up, Benji. - I understand.

And that actually made me feel

really good.

It showed me that she cared

and that she didn't actually just forget me.

She might have left me, but she didn't forget,

and that was important.

I forgave her.

It was about two years later I learned that Tony had married

some of these underage girls that he had been taking for

Bible study,

and I called the church, and I wanted to talk to

my sister, and they told me that I couldn't talk to her.

She was now married to Tony despite

her only being 15 or 16 years old.

When I learned that my sister had been raped by Tony,

I wanted to get revenge. I wanted to kill the man.

I had, like, a little 35 little revolver.

Hey, what are you doing with that?

- Give me that. - No.

And my mother talked to me,

and she said, "It's not your fight.

You need to stop."

So I never went.

I never killed him. But I wanted to.

His day is coming.

You have your whole life ahead of you.

Don't waste it on doing something silly like this.

I'm glad I did not kill him.

I'm glad I didn't drive down there.

I'm glad I didn't go through with it.

Taking someone else's life is never a good... a good option,

even if they are pedophile rapist child abusing preacher

who stole millions of dollars from thousands of people.

It's still not the right solution.

In 2008, I got a call from a former

church member who was assisting the FBI

investigating Tony Alamo.

They informed me that they had

been investigating Tony Alamo for several years

for transporting minors across state lines

for the purposes of sex.

But they wanted to add on

to that additional charges of child abuse.

They had enough to probably put Tony

away for the rest of his life.

I was ecstatic when I heard that he was arrested

and that he was gonna stay behind bars for 170 years.

But the way I understand it,

there's roughly probably close to 100 people,

maybe 150 people who are still run...

Either running the church or members of the church

and who followed the doctrine that Tony Alamo had

set forth.

I have a few friends who were in the group up until a couple

years ago, and when they got out,

I began talking to them and telling them, "Look, this is

"what Tony did to me.

This is what he did to the kids," and they were in

complete denial that Tony Alamo could ever do

any of those things.

When I learned that he passed away, I was relieved.

I struggled for most of my life to find some sort

of balance,

to find peace of mind.

It has taken me 30 years to

come out the other side and to recover.

I still see the beatings, I still can hear the sounds.

It's not something that goes away,

but through his hate, I have learned that we all suffer

and that we all have

a common goal, which is to live life as much as we can,

freely as we can.

And I refuse to ever live my life in fear again.