So funny yet so sad

Radio talk show host Alan Berg was gunned down in his driveway in Denver's Congress Park neighborhood 30 years ago today. Berg ... was Jewish. He was killed by a right-wing extremist group that targeted him and others for assassination.

The murder led to the book "Talked to Death" by Denver writer Stephen Singular, and it inspired a movie called "Talk Radio" directed by Oliver Stone, with Eric Begosian playing an acerbic talk radio host based in Dallas.

Singular says Berg dealt with divisive issues like race and religion and wasn’t afraid to confront people with different views. He could also be extremely harsh to listeners who called in.

“On the air, if certain buttons got pushed, you know he’d really go off on you,” Singular says. “He went through a period where he just hung up on everybody. You know, he just wanted to be the bad boy on radio.”

Singular says he got to know Berg when he wrote an article about him in the early 1980’s for the Denver Post Sunday magazine.

“He was markedly different in person,” Singular says. He was soft-spoken. He was always very funny. I always kind of thought of him as a Groucho Marx in talk radio.”

The white supremacist group responsible for the murder, called The Order, was formed in 1983, only a year before the killing.

“This group of 11 men got together in the woods and basically said: 'It’s time for a revolution in America [and] we’re going to get rid of minorities, feminists, gays, [and] whoever we decide are our enemies,'" Singular says. "They said: 'Our first assassination target will be Alan Berg.'”

Following the murder one of the suspects was killed in a shootout with the FBI. The other three received long prison sentences.

A former producer of Berg's believed that he was on a 'death list' because he was both Jewish, and he had challenged, on the air, the beliefs of members of the Christian Identity movement, who believed Jews were descended from Satan. At the trial for his murder, prosecutors contended that he was singled out for assassination because he was a Jew and because his personality incurred the anger of white supremacists. At the conspiracy trial of members of The Order, the white supremacist organization responsible for organizing the assassination, a founding member of the group, Denver Daw Parmenter, was asked why Berg was targeted. Parmenter responded that Berg "was mainly thought to be anti-white and he was Jewish"....

David Lane was a former Klansman who later joined the Neo-Nazi Christian Identity group Aryan Nation. He steadfastly denied any involvement in Berg's murder, but neither did he regret that Berg was dead. In an interview presented as part of the History Channel documentary, Nazi America: A Secret History, Lane admitted to calling the show and goading Berg into an exchange and stated: "The only thing I have to say about Alan Berg is, regardless of who did it, he has not mouthed his hate-whitey propaganda from his 50,000-watt zionist pulpit for quite a few years".