Summary of Investigative Journal Radio Program with Greg Anthony on First Amendment Radio
October 23, 2014
Today’s show is a summary of some new material regarding two affidavits from members of the Alamo Ministries.
I don’t think anyone would argue with the statement that every man deserves a fair trial no matter how small or large the charges brought against him by the state are. The question becomes how many people don’t get that fair trial? When you are charged with a more serious crime, it usually gets spread out all over the newspapers, at least if you’re not a Catholic priest or the Vatican emissaries that work for them who do these dastardly deeds that never seem to get reported. You might see an article on page 27 in the back pages, but sometimes when a person is charged with a crime, it’s splattered all over the newspaper, and how many of us convict that person even before he’s had a fair trial? The reason I say that is because when I went to law school, one of the things that I learned is that the legal system can be manipulated by fast-talking, money-grubbing lawyers, and by judges who sit on the bench. We all look at them as these men with black robes on, who demand respect, but they’re nothing but a human being just like you and me, and they only deserve the respect that their job merits. If you start looking at all the corrupt judges in our system and all these cases that turn on such flimsy evidence, and when they want to convict somebody, I’ve seen it over and over again, especially with people who criticize the powers that be, and they get close to their pocketbook, close to the truth, and do they come down on them! I wonder sometimes how many people have really been convicted even before they step into the courtroom.
The reason I’m doing this Tony Alamo story is that he was not only convicted in the court of public opinion, but had little chance when in his motion for a new trial you see the attorney representation in the beginning of his case was horrendous. Tony had criticized the Vatican and the Jesuit order and the powers that be in our country for working together for any kind of destruction of Bible-believing ministries who talked against the Vatican like they used to back in the time of the Reformation and in the time of the beginning of this country, and also the secular mishandling of our foreign and domestic policy geared on creating a one-world government, a one-world order, so to speak, a one-world religion. He’d been doing it for 40 years, and when I start looking at the insiders who tell me a lot about this case, I start looking at it from a point of view that if he’s not going to get a fair trial in the court of public opinion and in the Federal District Court in Arkansas, which is probably the most corrupt in this country, then at least he deserves some fledgling law student like me to try to at least show you what happened so you can make up your mind. I can’t undo what’s been done and him sitting in prison since 2008, but I can show you how I believe he wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for a concerted effort to frame him in the beginning by the government, and an inadequate trial preparation by his attorneys.
There had to be some kind of complicity between the defense and the prosecution in this case, and if those attorneys want to sue me for libel, go right ahead, because they ought to be disbarred for what I see in this case. To say they are defense attorneys is ridiculous. I could have picked a law student in his first year and he would have done a better job than what these attorneys have done. In fact, I think there was something going on behind the scenes. I’ve talked to insiders on this case who gave me some information about what went on in the beginning and what’s going on now. On the prosecution side, you’ll find that the judge had allowed so much information in that wasn’t related to the specific charges, evidence that was convictions for IRS violations, or about perhaps mishandling money, nothing to do with the charges at hand. I believe they were brought in and allowed by the judge to taint the jury and to convict him, not for the evidence presented, but for external evidence that should never have gotten in. At least his attorneys should have objected strenuously and with the idea that they understood the law. When you see the few simple objections that were made, you could have been at a moot court, like a third year law student would present at a mock trial, and I’ve seen my fellow students do a better job of objecting than these guys did, and a man’s life was on the line. Whether you agree with him or not, I think you agree that every person deserves a fair trial. This case should never have been tried in Arkansas because there wasn’t a person around that wasn’t tainted by what they read in the newspapers or saw on TV, so how can you get a fair jury? You’re not going to.
Right now their attorney is doing an adequate job, but he can’t undo the record due to the negligence of the original trial attorneys with no preparation, and almost no investigation into the complaining witnesses. They did not investigate the complaining witnesses and the government’s irregularity in taking them and sequestering them in an organization where they promised them things to get this kind of testimony.
Normal preparation for Tony’s trial was not done by the attorney they hired as soon as he was arrested, and he did little on the case. They hired a second attorney from Beverly Hills, Calif., who did even less than the first one. Then they hired a third attorney for the sole purpose of trying to get Tony out of jail until the trial, which he failed to accomplish. They were extremely close to trial at this time and had gone through three attorneys with absolutely no trial preparation done, and they always paid out of pocket. Danny Davis was paid $350,000 and asked for a three month trial extension and got 2 months, but was such an incompetent lawyer that Tony fired him and the first lawyer so they were left with a local attorney from Texarkana.
It was a disaster; they never spoke to the possible witnesses that should have been used. They did not investigate into the complaining witnesses. Almost no cross examination took place. The judge was constantly cutting the defense off and letting the lying witnesses ramble on and on. The head FBI agent in this case sat at the prosecutor’s table and coached the main witness on the stand with head shaking “no” when that answer was “yes.” This witness admitted in court that she had spoken to Randall Harris over 80 times before the trial. She was pampered by the FBI and was given a phone that she kept in constant contact with them on. They gave her presents on her birthday and Valentine’s Day, etc. The FBI agent even offered to adopt her. Her mother could tell you what a horrible liar her daughter was. Did her mother ever get on the stand? She did and had to plead the 5th so she wouldn’t have to give the location of her other children for the DHS to pick up. The attorneys refused to subpoena FBI agent John Peeler to testify when they knew how the government had a vendetta against Tony. It’s even in the record on the trial and we had Peeler on this show telling us what they’ve done for 40 years, but the jury never got a chance to hear this. The government was going to try accusing Tony of child porn, but never even checked computers when they went into his house at the raid, and there wasn’t any pornography to begin with.
They said that when Tony was in jail at the beginning, he was really close to dying; he lost over 70 lbs. before trial and almost had kidney failure, and he had no great medical attention for a long time, and he could not get them to do anything. The trial attorneys did not even communicate with him. The only one who came to see him was the one investigator they hired, and that just wasn’t enough. He was held pre-trial from October 2008 to February 2010 in Bowie County Correctional Center, a makeshift private jail only a few yards from the main commercial train conversions in Texarkana, TX. So trains wailed right next to him all day and night. It’s a long cinder block building with leaking roofs. 2009 was an extremely cold winter, and he went through it in terrible circumstances, held in a below-freezing cell. The guy in the cell next to him insisted there was ice in the toilets. He rarely got out of the cell at all. Food was bad and inedible sometimes; water from the sink was undrinkable. Several times Tony knew he got wrong medicine because after taking it he felt paralyzed and extremely sick. These conditions were abominable and his trial was even worse. He filed a 2255 motion which has no time constraint so the magistrate judge can sit on it indefinitely if he wants to, and he has been doing that so far.
How can you have a trial if your attorney just sits there and doesn’t cross examine or doesn’t object to anything? In this trial much of the testimony against Tony was extraneous and had nothing to do with the Mann Act which he was charged with violating by taking minors with the help of others across state lines for sexual purposes. There are a lot of people living in this ministry and every one of the 5 complainants had permission from their parents to live at the school and mission, and they kept in close contact with their parents who visited whenever they wanted to. In fact, they could have gone back home to their parents any time they wanted to, and they did go back to their parents at various times only to return and continue living at the ministry. Some of these had problems at home and preferred that. All of these 5 left between 2003 and 2006, and there was not one complaint from any of them. They didn’t go to the FBI and complain. They didn’t do anything. Then all at once the ministry started getting calls that the FBI was scouring the US for anyone who would testify against Tony. They hounded many people who told the ministry that. They refused offers of money. So the FBI offered money to these people to come and talk. How many people talk when there’s a lot of money on the table? Is that proper procedure of the FBI? Was any of this ever brought up in trial? No. They should have gotten these people who were hounded and put them on the stand to show what the FBI was really doing, as well as the FBI agent John Peeler who was assigned to frame Tony and bring him down. People will lie when they see money on the table, and that’s what happened in the Alamo case. The complainants were awarded $525 million, the largest settlement in Arkansas history.
The people at the Ministry live in close quarters there, and I’m sure that if something was going on, someone over the years would have gone to the FBI prior to them having to search out everybody and force people to testify by offering them money. These 5 girls were around a lot of people every day. The office was like Grand Central Station, very busy with people coming and going day and night. There were no complaints other than squabbles with friends. There was no mention of discontent towards Tony. In one case one of the complainants was actually told to leave the Ministry. There were times when these girls actually moved away and lived elsewhere, but they always wrote to Tony and asked to come back.
Many of these hand-written letters are still in the possession of the Ministry, but they were never presented at trial. Why did these girls ask to come back if they were victims, and why weren’t these letters authenticated at trial? One of the girls came from a large family and this one was a trouble maker labeled by many people there as a habitual liar and schemer. Her mother finally gave up and asked if her daughter could stay at the School and Mission in Fouke with her mother’s sister, her aunt whom this girl loved. It seemed to work out well, and she even went back to stay with her mother for half a year, then she went back to the School and Mission where she continued to lie and connive. The cross examination on this girl was nil. Her mother and father knew how easily used by the FBI she was. She was sent to a place in Albany, Ohio, called Wellspring, for a two-week intense counseling period with the FBI. She loved the constant attention from those around her who made her feel like she was the center of their world. She ate it up when they gave her gifts and so on up until trial. You didn’t hear any of this in court. The government paid for her phone calls and kept her under tight control. These people helped her move and get a job, and she admitted she was paid for, but admitted on the stand that she never spent one day on the job.
Another complainant and her mother moved into the Ministry in 1996. They had left their dad when he was found to be cheating on his wife. The girl didn’t get along with her mom and asked to move to the Fouke School and Mission before Tony got out of prison in 1998. That was when he was in prison for false IRS charges. By 2003, she was causing a lot of trouble at the church. She had an out-of-control temper and she was very angry at another person who lived there as well. People there who were in charge told her to move back with her mother as they couldn’t handle it anymore, but she didn’t get along with her mother and didn’t want that. She was given an alternative of moving to a nearby house with other people but she didn’t want to do that either. Instead she chose to move to Oklahoma and live with her father. At the time of the raid and Tony’s arrest, her dad sent emails of support to Tony. She sent an email giving regards to all after leaving. No hard feelings. Eventually she was contacted, though, by the FBI and sent to Wellspring for two weeks. In court, her mother was questioned on her other children’s whereabouts, and she was forced to plead the 5th. Her incomplete testimony was completely stricken from the record.
Another complainant had been living in New Jersey with her mother, dad, and sister until her mother drove off one day. She and her dad and her sister moved to Texarkana. Her sister left and went to her mother while she went to the School and Mission in Fouke. This girl and her mother kept being harassed by the FBI and they tried to hold them off, but finally they agreed to meet with them. The FBI offered to send this victim to an art college, and she agreed to be a witness as well and so did her mother. None of this stuff was investigated so how could he get a fair trial?
Another complainant lived next door to the School and Mission and she and her sister decided to move there. It was fine with her parents, and her mother visited them often. She decided to move back home after awhile, then in 2003 she moved back to the School and Mission. After 2 or 3 years she went back to live with her parents again. The FBI was contacting family members and this girl’s grandfather was really trying to get this girl to be a witness. She eventually went to live with him, and she too became a hostile witness.
In 1993, another complainant’s parents moved into the house in Ft. Smith just a few months before they left for Tony’s trial in Memphis. Then her parents and she moved to Memphis. Then they moved to Colorado when Tony was assigned to a prison in Florence, CO. Her family moved there also so she was always around her family. In 2000 she actually accused her own father of having sexual relations with her. Due to this, her family moved away from the Ministry. Years later she admitted that her accusation against her father was not true, but the damage had been done to her entire family. So she lied about that. This was never brought up in trial, and in 2005 she decided to go back and live with them. Within a few months she called a friend at the church; she was crying and depressed and wanted to come back to the church, and she did. But in 2006 due to her terrible lying in the past and her very bad attitude, she was asked to leave. She didn’t want to go, but couldn’t stay any longer. The FBI tried to get to her, but she insisted she wanted nothing to do with them in the beginning, but then for some reason she started to cooperate. She may have been threatened with her parents being prosecuted if she didn’t comply, so maybe to protect them she went along with the FBI and turned on Tony. She too went to Wellspring for 2 weeks and was paid for going.
A lot of these things should have been brought up in trial. Perhaps even a tainted jury would have a bad conscience about convicting this man. But what happened was worse than a kangaroo court, and Tony sits in prison to this day for 175 years.
In his 2255 motion the attorney writing this said that Merry Anne Barnett, an eye witness who was on the trip from Fouke to Nashville in February 1999 on count 6 of the indictment, she witnessed first- hand that the complainant was sent back from Nashville early while defendant Tony Alamo remained in Nashville. That the defendant sent this woman away from Nashville while he remained there supports the conclusion that he did not transport her from Nashville for sexual purposes. See exhibit 4, the affidavit of Merry Anne Barnett.
Debra Ondrisek had personal knowledge of the California trip of another complainant charged as one of the counts on the indictment. Ms. Ondrisek was personally aware that the complainant and her daughter had packed their bags in hopes of going on this bus trip out of state, however, the defendant did not want to take them, but both of these people requested permission to go on the trip right before they took off on the bus. The evidence denies the conclusion that the defendant had any motive to bring the complainant on the trip as charged in the indictment. These things are so relevant that if you don’t put them in the trial, how can you say that he got a fair trial?