Agents from ASP and FBI agents raid the Tony Alamo Ministries compound Saturday in Fouke, Ark.
At least they haven't carted all the kids away this time.
Posted on 09/21/2008 8:14:12 AM PDT by TheDon
FOUKE, Ark.—Federal and state authorities, prompted by allegations of child pornography being produced on site, executed search warrants Saturday evening at Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.
Shortly before 6 p.m., agents from the FBI, Arkansas State Police and the Arkansas Department of Human Services converged on the multiresidential compound, which sits on the equivalent of a half-mile square. For about an hour, search teams were seen entering the church and several neighboring buildings belonging to the Alamo Ministries.
Allegations that children living at the Alamo facilities were being sexually and physically abused were central to the state investigation, said Bill Sadler, a spokesman for the Arkansas State Police.
“Every minor child residing inside the Alamo compound is being interviewed by law enforcement officers and state human services officials,” he said.
“If parents of these children can be located elsewhere on the premises, officers will strive to ensure a line of communication is maintained between the children and the parents. State and federal authorities are committed to reuniting the children who may have parents at the site as quickly as possible.”
....
A voice from a passing pickup truck on U.S. Highway 71 yelled “good job” to the Arkansas State Police troopers blocking the entrances to the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.
...
Jeanne Philyaw, who lives next to the ministries’ property, said the raid “was a long time coming.”
“I’m on the edge of tears. It’s both for joy and frustration,” she said. “How can people not know what was going on with Tony Alamo’s history?
...
Fouke Mayor Terry Purvis also watched the activity after the raid started.
“My fear was another Waco, but it appears to have gone smoothly. Praise the Lord,” he said.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at texarkanagazette.com ...
Wonder if Alamo will spin the media just like Warren Jeffs’ lawyers did too...
Agents from ASP and FBI agents raid the Tony Alamo Ministries compound Saturday in Fouke, Ark.
At least they haven't carted all the kids away this time.
Thats where the "Legend of Boggy Creek" was filmed.
Probably has them on retainer.
You guys remember good ole Tony Alamo, don’t you ?
No. Don’t know anything about him. What do you remember him for?
He started out in Saugus, CA in the late 60’s. Sadly, 2 brothers that I knew in high school joined his cult.
Tony & Susan Alamo had law problems there also.
Who could forget the Alamo?
Does this dude have the same landscaper as Michael Jackson?
Jeanne Philyaw, who lives next to the ministries’ property, said the raid “was a long time coming.”
“I’m on the edge of tears. It’s both for joy and frustration,” she said. “How can people not know what was going on with Tony Alamo’s history?
***
Can someone expound on this for those of us who have never heard of this guy? Thanks!
He was the king of sequined denim jackets.
He and his wife used to live in Nashville. He owned a famous clothing store, The Alamo. When Susan died I remember seeing him on tv, crying and saying she was going to be resurrected. He’s a true wacko.
Well I read the article, and there was no reference to the evidence they had to conduct the search, only that one had been carried out.
This Alamo guy could be a sleaze, to indict and convict the man by a few vague comments from the neighbors is not American IMO.
This could be a replay of the FLDS stuff with the B$ phone call from a Obama supporter kicking the whole thing off.
I say this because the idea is starting to form that Churches are fair game for innuendo based searches that amount to little more then trial by media.
That was my thought as well.
Most christians believe in a resurrection. Does that make them wackos? Or is it because of other things not mentioned in your post?
LOL! The reference would be hard to pass up for a reporter, or an editor.
He was trying to have her resurrected for months right after she died. I should have been more specific. I am definitely a Christian and believe in resurrection, but not by a so called preacher.
what is that a motel 6?
Oh no. You mean this could be a kiddie porn thing?
Imagine the broad brushing this will give legitimate Christianity and their retreats. GEESH!
Putting the wife’s body on display and waiting for her to be resurrected makes him a wacko...
“Can someone expound on this for those of us who have never heard of this guy? Thanks!”
Same here.
I’ve never heard of them.
LOL! It does have that look!
Tony Brown, head of Universal South records and his very pretty socialite and minor celebrity wife Anastasia live on the property now.
Around 10 years ago they raze Alamo's digs and I hear had it blessed anew to rid the Alamo darkness and then rebuilt a really cool fieldstone spread...
From Wikipedia: "Did you know that the Pope and Ronald Reagan are a couple of Anti-Christ Devils and that they are selling us all down the drain?"
His web page is enough to supply any conspiracy theorist for a lifetime. What a con man.
“In October 2007, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center on account of its anti-Catholic rhetoric.”
He was a fixture in Nashville for awhile. His big flashy clothes store in downtown on Lower Broad, the even creepier big billboards over the interstate featuring him and his wife... and, of course, what he did with his wife’s corpse. If Rev. Jim Jones had a brother, it’d be Tony Alamo.
Ummm, he meant she’d resurrect separate from the rest of the believers, kind of like Christ.
Alamo is nuts and a crook. He’s one who insisted that Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan were the anti-Christ.
Think “reanimated corpse.” This fella should’ve spent a long time in the nervous hospital next to Karl Childers.
uhm...okay, and where do you come down on 13 year old girls marrying 55 year old men...just wondering..
Thank you for posting this article.
I wonder if anything will come of this?
Excerpt:
...
Probably the strangest incident surrounding Tony Alamo Christian Ministries has to do with the body of Susan Alamo, who died of cancer on April 8, 1982. Tony Alamo quickly predicted that she would be resurrected and kept her embalmed body on display at the Arkansas compound for approximately six months before placing it in a mausoleum. In February 1991, Alamo ordered his followers to vacate the Arkansas compound prior to a federal raid and to bring along the body of Susan Alamo. A chancery court judge ordered Alamo to return the body in 1995 in response to a suit filed by Christhiaon Coie, Susan Alamo’s estranged daughter. On July 23, 1998, after a three-year legal battle, his followers brought the body to a funeral home in Van Buren (Crawford County). The following month, Susan Alamo was re-interred in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Alamo’s various marriages are controversial and difficult to number. Following Susan’s death, rumors spread that he had taken two fifteen-year-old girls as “wives.” On June 23, 1984, he married Swedish native Birgitta Gyllenhammar in Las Vegas, Nevada, though this marriage ended two years later; she later claimed that Alamo wanted her to have plastic surgery to look like Susan and that he regularly beat and drugged her. In the midst of his supposed third marriage, a 1986 Arkansas Gazette report concluded that Gyllenhammar had actually been Alamo’s sixth wife, as he had apparently been married four times prior to Susan. Between 1986 and 1990, the preacher remarried twice.
When Alamo was released from federal prison in 1998, he quickly reassumed his status as the head of a now smaller Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, which is currently headquartered in Miller County, with branches in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Los Angeles. He currently can be heard on over a dozen radio stations in the U.S. and more in Africa, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. He has claimed that the government actions against him were merely the machinations of Satan, and his followers still attract controversy for distributing his printed literature across the U.S. and beyond.
...
Another derranged kook.
Thanks for the info....what did he do with his wife’s corpse?
Thanks...I went back and read up-thread...all I need to know. Creepy!
bump
If God is going to resurrect someone, he can’t do it if they’ve been buried in a tomb?
(I think that’s a hypothesis that’s been disproven.)
So why did he feel he had to keep the corpse around for years?
Tony Alamo? Never heard of him.
Child pornographers and pedophiles need to be flayed alive... I support the death penalty for such people.
HOWEVER, having said that.. polygamy does NOT cause pedophilia or kiddie porn. The overwhelming majority of these pervs are monogamous or not in any relationship.
Lets just keep our facts straight.
“You guys remember good ole Tony Alamo, don’t you ?”
No, why do you think I should?
I only “bumped” the thread to come back to back for later read.
And because even though I’m in Mid-Missouri, late at night I sometimes
pick up WAAY, the religious programming station at 1090AM out of
Little Rock AR.
And Alamo has a show on there...and a bad one with zero production value!
I’d heard about his legal problems, but until now, nothing about his
bizarre carting around of his dead wife’s remains.
I was pinging my fellow Nashvillians. If you aren’t from here, you may not know who he is.
I live 30 miles from Nashville so I’ve heard a lot about him. Here is a picture of him and some links at the bottom for those who don’t know who he is.
“Fouke, Arkansas”
That’s what I said when Bill Clinton was elected...
(2 Pet 2:17-22) “These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. {18} For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error. {19} While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. {20} For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. {21} For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. {22} But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”
More info:
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/406-tony-alamo-christian-ministries-research-resources
I just wondered what the scoop on him is!
Child molesting charges on this level usually turn out to be baseless.
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