'The anti-Christ is here. I think his name is Hillary'

He leant forward in the chair, clasped the young woman’s hand and closed his eyes.

“Amen!” he would declare regularly, punctuating her stream of consciousness prayer in which she asked the Lord to do this, that and the other – a litany of desires, great and small, for her and those in her life in need of a little early morning blast of good ol’ religion.

“A-men!” he said again before drawing proceedings to a close with a “Get outta here gurl! Remember, no jerks, no bad boys. I put a whuppin on ’em, alright. God bless you!”

He then turned his attention to me.

“Hey brother, how you doin’?”

I was doing fine, I said.

“Praise the Lord!” he said. “Where you from?”

Ireland, I told him.

“Ireland! Welcome to America,” he said before asking why I was there.

To attend a funeral, I said.

“What are you?” he wondered, quickly providing the answer for himself: “You’re probably a Catholic.”

I’m probably an atheist, I said.

“You’re probably an atheist! What are you, Jewish?”

The man, a vast, rotund figure (400 pounds, he would announce in due course), wore shoes but no socks, and his trousers were hoiked up by a pair of stars and stripes braces, two streaks of red, white and blue running down the front of his plain, open-neck shirt. He was holding forth in the foyer of a budget hotel in Rhode Island, a neat, well-run place favoured by out of town contractors – line men (cable layers), air conditioning and smoke alarm fitters – and the occasional preacher man.

Old gangster

Over the next five minutes, the man gave me a version of his life story in the way that some Americans seem compelled to disgorge their personal history to total strangers. His name, he said, was Jack Patterson.

“I’m Jack,” he said, “my brother’s John.”

“I’m an old gangster,” he said. “Back in the old days, my daddy was a Hoffa boy. Jimmy Hoffa. I met Mr Hoffa when I was ’bout seven years old. They didn’t want him back. He knew too much.”

The “they” here was the mob, and trade union boss Hoffa is presumed, since July 30th 1975 when he vanished from the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Detroit, to be in a shallow grave somewhere thereabouts . . . or maybe underneath several tons of motorway concrete.

“I was born a preacher when I was 18,” said the Preacherman. “I was a gangster in crime – stealing, shooting, whatever. My brother got saved – heard the Gospel of Christ and how the Christ died for him and trust in Christ and I saw the difference in his life. He used to pack a 45 and he came in and started witness to me and he said ‘Jack, com’on down, I need someone to run a gas station for me in Florida.’

“So I come on down to Florida and he’s got this gas station where he’s got all these people working there, preaching to me and I’m trying to hit on all the girls, you know, on the beach, you know, and I’m having a good party. I’m smoking dope and stealing from him at the gas station. I’m 17 and have my hot rod car and so . . .

“But I saw a change in their lives and I went back to Detroit and got put back in jail for some other stuff – bribery or stolen car or summin’ – a week or so but I had to go back to court and I got outta it, you know.”

And so, since the age of 18 (he’s now 64), Preacher Patterson has been proselytizing the word of the Lord – based on a literal acceptance of each and every word and syllable of the Good Book – while paying his way making tanks.

“I built armoured tanks,” he told me. “Warfare brother, warfare! I probably built 2,000 tanks.”

Did he think that God liked that?

“Well sure He did. God blesses war. He gave you a head, use it. You defend your family. You come in my home and I’m gonna shoot you. I got a lot of guns, OK?

Creationism vs evolution

“I’m no atheist,” he says, as though anyone could possibly have thought otherwise. “Man’s only 6,000 years old. I dunno how old the earth is but man’s only 6,000 years old. There’s a gap between Geneses 1 and 2 about the earth. Nobody knows how old the earth is. I don’t care if its two billion years old. But man’s only 6,000 years old and he didn’t come from no monkey.”

A discussion as to the relative merits, evidence-wise, for creationism versus Darwinism is, not surprisingly, brief.

“Well how’d you get here? Evolution made your genes, your reproduction, your blue eyes? Evolution made that? Com’on!”

“After you die, so you’re just going in the grave? But after that, there’s a judgement. We’re going home!”

A man from the deep south apparently known to Preacher Patterson hoves into view in the lobby.

“A-men Alabama,” declares Patterson. “I’m preaching to him brother!” he says of me. “I believe Christ is coming and I’ll be praying for you. What you do?”

I tell him.

“Journalist! Liberal journalist, yellow journalism! Oh boy. I fight journalists all the time. I’ve had raids from welfare on my home, looking for trouble for hurting kids. I been fighting the court system for years for the kids. They want control of the kids, that’s what they want.

“What’s wrong in this country is child protection agencies. I hope they shut them down. Get more money. Feed more people. Take care of Israel.”

Child abuse

I learn later that this bellowing, Bible-thumping know-all has been investigated for child abuse by an Alabama district attorney, Tommy Rountree, who characterised him simply as “evil”. In November 2008, Patterson was running the Redemption Boys Ranch in Empire Alabama which was raided after a complaint of torture from a boy described as an “escapee” who said staff at the ranch would “go hunting for runaways”.

Eleven children were taken into care after officers found handguns, leg irons and handcuffs.

According to journalist and author Kathryn Joyce (The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption), writing in 2011, "because deputies neglected to seize Patterson's computer, which the escapee claimed contained files of videotaped beatings, Patterson was able to plead his felony charges down to a "verbal harassment" misdemeanour carrying a $500 fine. He now runs a home for adult men on the Reclamation Ranch property and a girls' home called Rachel Academy in neighbouring Walker County – and is in the process, he says, of opening new homes in Ohio, Florida, and Michigan."

“Isaiah 55,” Patterson shouts in the lobby. “He’s gonna come and rule and reign in Jerusalem and He’s gonna walk through that eastern gate and there’s 50,000 Muslim graves front of that eastern gate, the Bible says, Zachariah 12 to 14, ‘when His foot hits the ground, the ground’s gonna bust open’ and. . .

“Bible’s a fascinating book. . .”

He rises from his chair and, clutching his large take-away coffee and brown paper bag from Dunkin Donuts, waddles down the hotel corridor shouting, it seems at no one in particular.

“The anti-Christ is here. I think his name is Hillary.”