Talk Radio Assassination!

Alan Berg

On June 18, 1984, radio talk-show host Alan Berg was machine-gunned into infamy in the driveway of his suburban Denver townhouse. Berg, whose life and violent death inspired Eric Bogosian's play (and Oliver Stone's ham-fisted movie) Talk Radio, was verging on national prominence, having recently been profiled on 60 Minutes and selected by his employer, KOA-AM, to cover the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

A self-proclaimed "Wild Man of the Airwaves," the controversial, belligerent Berg managed to enrage, abuse, provoke and fascinate- insulting and cutting off his callers while carrying on irreverent and frank discussions about oral sex, Christianity, racial intolerance, gun control and any other topic his angry, abrasive tongue could wag about. KOA's powerful signal, capable of reaching thirty-eight states in the evening hours, meant Berg's blitzkrieg was pissing off a lot of people. In 1979 while working at KWBZ, a listener named Fred Wilkins, a local head of the KKK, stormed into the air studio and told Berg to prepare to die. Berg informed his listening audience that Wilkins had pointed a gun at him, but Wilkins-- arrested and charged with felony menacing-- claimed Berg was just trying to up his ratings.

Also trying to up their "ratings" and come to national prominence were the members of "The Order," a virulent White Power/Aryan Resistance movement ranging throughout Colorado and the Pacific Northwest and affiliated with the Aryan Nations. Created and led by separatist/survivalist Robert Jay Matthews, "The Order" took as its blueprint and manifesto William Pierce's The Turner Diaries and had assembled a "hate list" of those who were deemed to be threatening the existence of the white race and thus worthy targets for assimilation. Among them were Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Fred Silverman-- and Alan Berg. Berg's assassination was a carefully planned paramilitary operation funded with bamk robbery proceeds. "The Order" self-destructed after coming up against a much more powerful military operation, the FBI.

-- Chris T.