Revered insult comic Don Rickles performed for a number of mobsters during the early stages of his career and found himself in harm’s way on more than one occasion. One night in New Jersey, he told a wiseguy in the audience that his wife looked like a moose. The man confronted him afterward, but Rickles put in a call to a friend in New York who had some connections, and his buddy helped smooth everything over. That wasn’t his only brush with danger, however; another time, the comedian came very close to witnessing one of the most infamous mob hits in American history.
On April 7, 1972, Colombo crime family captain Joe Gallo (a.k.a. “Crazy Joe”) attended a midnight performance by Rickles at the Copacabana in New York. Despite apparently being warned not to, Rickles made some jokes about Gallo and, luckily for him, lived to tell the tale. Part of that show was recreated by Martin Scorsese for his 2019 film The Irishman. Jim Norton played Rickles in the scene, and Sebastian Maniscalco appeared as Gallo:
After the show, Gallo asked Rickles and his mother to join him at his table. “My mother, rest her soul, she was great. Joey Gallo one night said, ‘Come on, sit with us.’ And we sat down at the table, and there were guns around,” Rickles once told Tom Snyder. “I said, ‘Mom, these guys got guns.’ She said, ‘They’re wonderful people. These are the people that are gonna make you a star. Do you understand me?’”
Gallo then reportedly invited Rickles to join him at Umbertos Clam House, an Italian seafood restaurant in Little Italy. Rickles politely declined, and the two parted ways. At around 4:30 a.m., Gallo was gunned down in front of his family at the same restaurant he’d invited Rickles to earlier that morning. The hit was also dramatized by Scorsese in The Irishman, though some have questioned the accuracy of its portrayal.
The post Don Rickles Nearly Witnessed an Infamous Mob Killing appeared first on VICE.
