If you were a nightclub comic at any point between the 1930s and the 1960s, chances are you performed at a venue owned by the Mob. It didn’t matter how successful you were; whether you liked it or not, you were working for the so-called “Outfit.” That, of course, meant that danger was never too far away. Don Rickles even dodged a bullet by turning down “Crazy” Joe Gallo’s offer to join him for a meal once; Gallo was subsequently gunned down at the restaurant. Joe E. Lewis wasn’t as lucky and had his throat slit by an associate of Al Capone for working at a rival mobster’s club.
Another comic we can add to the list is Milton Berle. Shortly after Prohibition ended in 1933, “Uncle Miltie,” as he was affectionately known, found himself in a period of transition. Vaudeville was dead, and the Mob-owned clubs he was working out of required him to have a much longer act than he was used to. To make up for the time difference, Berle would look for audience members to ridicule. It evidently went well for him—until he picked on the wrong guy, that is.
According to the 2015 book The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of Comedy, Berle set his sights on mobster Louis “Pretty” Amberg and his wife one evening at the Vanity Fair club in New York. “Oh, it’s Novelty Night—you’re with your wife,” the comedian reportedly said, without realizing who he was talking to. No sooner did Berle get to his dressing room than he was summoned to Amberg’s table. “Nobody at the table nodded or said hello or even smiled at me,” Berle later recalled. “When the waiter left, no one spoke. I was getting very nervous, so I said, ‘Did you like the show?’ ‘No. It stunk.’”
At that point, Amberg grabbed Berle by the throat and started pulling on his tie. Berle stood there helplessly as Amberg grabbed for a fork. “He jabbed the fork straight into my chin,” Berle remembered. Another mobster, Marty Krompier, then stepped in and broke things up, pushing Berle into the street and sending him off to a doctor in a cab. When all was said and done, Berle walked away with eight stitches; two for each prong of the fork.
Amberg was later found hacked to death in a burning car in 1935. His murder remains unsolved.
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