Live Wire is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Modulator Media.

In the mid nineteen eighties, Jefferson four forty was something of a dining institution in Denver, Colorado.

Don't try to find it today.

It's a Walmart now, But in the summer of nineteen eighty four it truly represented fine dining in the city, with a generously priced menu featuring steak, lobster, and cocktails.

The sprawling space offered plush leather seats, a healthy array of wood and marble, and even a massive functioning fireplace.

Male patrons wore ties, female waitresses wore skirts, and a waft of cigarette and cigar smoke covered over it all.

This is where alan Berg and his ex wife Judith dined under otherwise pleasant circumstances on June eighteenth, nineteen eighty four.

Despite their divorce, Judith and Allen had remained close, and alan Berg was enjoying a moment at this particular time in their lives, emerging as one of the city's most popular radio personalities, a rising media star who appeared poised for national exposure.

Judith, a longtime teacher, had just enjoyed celebrating her parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary.

The celebration for their anniversary was a Temple emanual.

Was a huge affair because they.

Were prominent in the community in Temple and so forth.

And then the next night he took me out to dinner.

And we were going to go home and call his mom.

He said, I want to let's go call mother and you can and I'll feed the dog.

And they come back from dinner.

It's about eight thirty or so.

When they start to come back, maybe a little bit later, alan Berg stops and he gets some bubble gum from Judith and some dog food for his beloved aradell named Fred.

That's journalist and Allenberg biographer Steven Singular.

And they pull in not to the driveway, but in front of his condo, and they sit there and they discuss whether Judith will come in for the night or not.

And they go back and forth, kind of the summation of their whole relationship over all these years.

Should we do this, should we do that?

Should we stay together?

Should we remarry?

What should we do?

He eventually says, you know, I'm kind of tired and I'm gonna take you to your car.

I said I'm gonna go see Bobby, a very close friend of both of ours, And he said, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go over there and see her also, but I have to go upstairs and make some phone calls.

So he took me to the car and I went over to Bobby's.

Berg pulls his car into his driveway, cradles the dog food he just purchased into his arm, and steps towards his door.

Then twelve or thirteen shots in the torso, instantly killing him.

His murder was the first known to me murder of a media personality that I was aware of in the United States.

Meanwhile, Judith Berg had no idea anything was wrong until she walked into the house that her friend Bobby shared with her husband.

Her friends are sitting in front of the television watching coverage of the murder, the assassination of Allen Berg.

I walked in, and he came over and he gave me a hug, and then he went back and sat down and looked at the TV.

And they're announcing that Alan Berg is shot in front of his house.

And I mean, I.

Can't say, I can't tell you these stories with the real, true emotional hysteria that each one represented.

What could I do?

So we got in the car and we came back over here.

He was right over here on Adams, and there were sirens and there were.

You know, the whole thing when happens, when that happens, and the sirens and the people and the neighbors, and it was just hysteria.

But they had to block it off for the for the ambulance and for the paramedic.

She essentially was shot when in the shock and has been living with that shaw ever since.

By the late evening hours that night, word of Allan's brutal murder had circulated among his peers at KOA, one of Denver's biggest radio stations.

Allan's colleagues were forced to balance the unbearable task of grieving for a friend who had just been murdered and reporting the news to his adoring public.

That thankless task fell upon radio personalities Rick Barber and Ken Hambler.

Ten thirty nine KOA time.

And I'm still trying to piece information together off the air.

I'm finding out that Channel seven has issued a report that said the best investigative efforts of the DPD has indicated that someone passing in a vehicle using a semi automatic weapon or an automatic weapon.

I'm not sure which fired upon alan Berg when he was exiting his vehicle in front of his home.

Ten or more shellcasings, to the best of my ability, are a number that would indicate an automatic weapon was found in the at the scene.

And alan Berg has in fact passed on.

He is no longer with us.

He'll always be with us, though.

I think he's touched each and touched each and every one of us.

He touched me and and Lee Larson and Jim Hawthorne are on their way into the station now, and Jim is program director.

Lee Larson is the station manager.

And it's a shock.

It's to describe how I feel right now.

I've got a high pitch winging sound in my ears.

My head is thropping, and I can't believe it.

Producer Susan Ryman heard the news from talk show host Rick Barber.

Seems to me it was like ninety five.

I don't remember why, and he just called me and he said Alan's dead.

And I said what, and he said, yeahen Alan was gunned down tonight in his driveway.

And I turned on Channel four and there was a live shot, and the cops are there and the car doors open, and I showed his body.

That's Peter Boyles, Alan Burk's longtime friend and colleague and himself a Denver broadcasting institution.

And ten minutes laterybody's pounding on my door.

It's TV guys and newspaper guys and wanted me to react to it.

And I was in shock what we were going like.

And plus at the time, I'm drinking and open, and that's when I said, they killed the Mockingbird.

And I remember sitting there talking to these people, and then the next I canna tell you something for real.

The next I don't know, ten days or y'or blur, I don't remember.

In the wake of Allenberg's shocking nighttime assassination, the Denver Police Department directed considerable resources to what was instantly one of the most high profile murders in the city's history.

Their investigation had no trouble finding motive in the murder of the men literally builled as the man you love to hate.

What they didn't have was even the faintest whiff of a suspect.

Here's Steve Singular.

The police launched essentially what was one of the largest, if not the largest in investigation into a murder in Denver's history.

And they did all the things that police do in those circumstances.

Case the neighborhood and questioned people.

Somebody interviewed the detective in charge of it.

He was in his office and they said, you have any suspects And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, they're probably two million suspects.

This guy, one time or another aggravated everybody.

I'm tal Pinschewski, a filmmaker and journalist, and this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking death of alan Berg.

Considering the details of this case, there's plenty to pour over here.

The most obvious question, other than who killed alan Berg just might be who is Alan Berg?

And why am I only now hearing about this brazen, violent assassination in a major American city forty years after the fact.

I didn't do it?

Why do you becoming because I'm just that.

I'm a road person.

I know I think you're great.

Why he's the best?

Hal it pal' hold it there one second?

Tell me about snooping the my level.

I don't think you.

Are I don't like you.

You have to like you.

What makes you?

You would think you're such a judgment maker.

You're gonna tell me you're a stoping on my level.

You're a great buddy.

Remember that you're on KOI.

You gotta have to know.

During the dawn of the shock Chock era on terrestrial radio in the early nineteen eighties, America's oldest broadcast platform was undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Radio wasn't simply about playing music and offering weather reports.

In their stead America who was introduced to inflammatory personalities like Howard Stern and Don Imis, who grabbed the medium with both hands and harnessed it with all the subtlety of a chainsaw.

Everybody who's been berating the station, they've been berating everybody else in time about how they can't stand Allenburg.

I always think, when you have a beef, take it to the person, don't take it behind his back.

I'm a great believer in that.

So if you've got a beef with me, maybe we can iron out.

Maybe we can't.

I'll give you a chance to be heard on this thing.

I'll give you my side of it.

Maybe we can make some good communication on this.

I don't think you have to like me to enjoy me.

Maybe that's the way a lot of people feel.

I never never appreciated the people will call, and that goes with the people who were for me and against me, Because the people who can't stand me make some of the best talk radio in the world.

The fact that you're.

Controversial and against me in that sense of the word makes for much more exciting talk to you.

To sit here all day and get stroked is wowsy talk radio.

So I'm hoping for as many people who disagree with me as possible.

What doesn't mean I don't love all the people that are forming, but needless to say, when we can get a different side of an issue and you can all contend, hey I'm rude, give me a shot.

Let's find out if I'm rude.

And Alan Berg, the biggest mouth in Denver, Colorado, was at the forefront of that shift, a shift that saw talk radio personalities carve out an aggressive, opinionated persona that confronted callers and listeners alike with an unrelenting subversive energy that made them beloved by some despised by others.

It's undoubtedly a broadcast model that helped shape today's fragmented media lends escape.

And alan Berg didn't just help shape this model, he mastered it.

You don't think he has any to deal with repression and discrimination.

It's occurred to you.

It doesn't seem to be that well, of.

Course not here.

You're as dumb as the rest.

I can't take anyone.

I can't take it to sell out.

Blacks couldn't get jobs, conas couldn't get jobs.

Civil Rights Commission comes along.

We have a fair guy there.

Reagan bounces him out to get a token black guy on there who probably never saw a black person in the ghetto with his whole life or understands the problem.

I'll be back with you tomorrow with more grief and hate and maybe I'll laugh or two.

I think he just knew it.

I think it was intrinsic.

I can just tell you what I observed.

But he was what we call flamethrower.

Once again, that's Allen's colleague, Peter Boyles.

And I.

You know, I've had my moments of getting angry at people and stuff like that, but I think I used to think sometimes that having been in therapy for many years because of my drugs and alcohol.

He was working things out emotionally, I really do.

I mean, I think his anger at the world, especially with his father and growing up and all the stuff that happened.

I later thought years later that he was working that out somehow, that that was his therapy.

I don't know.

I don't know.

That he did it, and he did it better than anybody.

And that's the the real mcguffin is, like how good he was.

He was that good.

Never in his wildest dreams did alan Berg foresee his emergence as a game changing broadcaster.

His entry into radio was more born out of a desperate attempt to move on.

Well at the point, I think was a beginning particular physical problem in my life which became a justification A particular speech impairment problem.

Okay, A what to you know?

This is like ken, you top this.

But another form of illness, a petty mall form of epilepsy, incurred in the course of my trial career.

You yes, all right, we allowed an alcoholic an alcoholic, an epileptic.

An epileptic.

Okay, that's enough for now.

God knows what else is coming up God, but no venarial disease to disease.

Okay, A highly intelligent trial lawyer practicing in Chicago, Alan Berg was one of the youngest people that passed the Illinois State Bar exam and appeared to have the world on a platter.

But there were problems, a number of them, actually.

But the first major barrier to any real success in the courtroom was something he couldn't control.

He had seizures in court, and he'd even have them at home.

And I don't know, he started to drink, and really, and truly, I'm not a doctor, but I think the drinking curtailed the seizures in a way, I think somehow medically.

And it didn't last very long because he still had the seizures.

And then he got.

Help, diagnosed with epilepsy and experiencing regular grandma seizures.

Berg thought he was replacing one problem with another by self medicating with alcohol, but his descent into alcoholism only seemed to stack one health concern onto another.

Before long, Berg was forced to consider a far more invasive solution to his seizures.

Grandma means very big.

And he just started convulsing and he didn't stop, and they took him to the hospital and they found a tumor in his brain, and they had to operate, which was effectively literally cut off the top of his head like a can opener.

Take it off, Go get the tumor, take it out, and you know, hopeful the best.

The doctor said, you know, you may never recover your mental faculties.

He probably won't be able to tar you know the way he once did.

Berg recovered his razor sharp wit and rapid fire verbal skills, but the operation left him with a long scar across his forehead.

He covered the scar with a bowl haircut, one of the many signature physical features he adopted over the years.

But even with the seizures under control, his alcoholism imperiled his once promising law career, a career in which he was suspected of being involved with the Chicago Mob.

He had a lot of criminal cases that were cash.

So he had twenty five thousand dollars.

Oh he only dressed to the nines.

You know that in his pocket, had his suit.

So I was home one day.

I taught all the time, I rarely had.

Oh, there was something else I wanted to tell you.

So I said, the cleaners came today and I gave him your suit.

You gave him, which the blue suit twenty five thousand dollars.

In the pocket.

During the normal criminal cases, he met people in the mafia.

And.

You know, they asked him for favors, and of course I think he did them.

And I went with them a couple of times to meet people, but I was either in the car or outside or whatever.

And they gave him great money and he did their cases and handled their tried their cases.

But it was the alcohol that ultimately ended Allen's legal career.

The story that he told me was that he had been court assigned to begin a murder beef murder trial and he didn't show up.

He woke up out of a blackout.

He was a blackout drinker, and he woke up out of a blackout with a woman in bed with him and he had missed the court.

That was the final at least according to what he's told me, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I had the good fortune to associate with.

I think that two of the greatest criminal lawyers in the United States today.

I will not mention their names because I deemed them, at least one of them, to be an alcoholic and the other one to be all a borderline case which would be really almost impossible to define.

At this particular point, this was my environment, This was the circumstance in which I functioned daily with these people around, these people, genius though they be.

Now, this is somewhat like joining the club.

It's like kids today wanting to belong.

It's the same format that we want to be a part of something.

And the drinking became a fun, tension relieving device for me.

Then as I moved on, I found it to be much more than it, in fact, a total escape, a total way of avoiding or facing all the ugliness that I saw within myself, within my own profession at that particular time.

More from Live Wire.

After this break, his law career over and facing a crumbling marriage, Allenberg found sobriety but remained adrift.

In the early nineteen seventies, Alan and Judith moved to Denver, where she had grown up, and Alan tried to start over.

He worked in a shoe store.

He had a great fascination of clothing, and first in a shoe store, he got fired from there for some remarks he made, and then he decided to open a short store in downtown Denver.

One of his customers was a man named Lawrence Gross who would come into the store and talk with Berg, and no matter what Gross brought up, you know, Berg had an opinion on it, He had a view.

He was very fast verbally.

Berg wasn't aware at first, but Lawrence Gross was a prominent figure in Denver radio, a host on local radio.

Gross also had a keen eye for talent, and he saw plenty of it in the recovering alcoholic shoe salesman who just couldn't seem to keep his mouth shut.

And they wanted to know if he would come into talk about something on the radio.

I don't know whether it was the.

Business or a cause they had, or it was something.

So he went.

He took me with him.

He said, if I go, will you go on with me?

So I said, okay.

So we went and.

Talked in some little hubble and went on and on and on and on.

When Alan Berg appeared as a guest on the radio with Lawrence Gross, they touched on a number of topics, but the one that generated the biggest response from listeners was the topic of Alan's alcoholism.

We're going to break away for the news now, which will be coming along in about twenty five seconds, and then we will be back with my guest, Alan Berger.

We're talking on alcoholism.

Alan is an alcoholic and he will answer any and all questions that you have.

So we're going to break away, we'll be back in, We'll be back and forth.

This is Lawrence Gross.

There is a predisposition in the birth of certain people towards alcohol.

The great, great mass of alcoholism in this country is nothing more than an emotional mental problem.

What is this man?

He's an addictive personality.

Okay, I consider myself an addictive personality who used alcohol as a way of self indulgence.

A little added context here.

This is someone on the radio talking about addiction as a pathology and a disease in the late nineteen seventies.

The American Medical Association didn't even officially term addiction as a disease until nineteen eighty seven.

So the ideas Berg was sharing with Lawrence Gross were kind of groundbreaking, and listeners loved it.

Yes, he's a very interesting man.

I've heard him before, but never on what you're talking about.

He this man has got he's got stories that would make ASoP.

He's got some smart.

Yeah, he's got some smart.

Almost immediately, alan Berg appeared to find his beacon through the fog.

Balancing a crumbling marriage, alcoholism, racious appetite for life and women, and a lack of any viable career prospects.

Following the implosion of his once promising legal career, alan Berg finally appeared to have something.

Would you consider coming back next Sunday?

All right, he'll come back and we'll continue this discussion.

It's really very interesting.

We're talking with someone that is more than intimately involved with it.

Alan didn't just make additional appearances on Lawrence Gross's program.

He launched his own career as a talk radio host, and he was uniquely suited for that role, drawing on a lifetime's worth of wild experiences and an array of strong opinions to draw in callers.

You're brash, right, is that what you're telling us?

No, I'm a lot of things after.

I think if you've never heard me before, you'll find on a lot of different dimensions.

And I hope people can hear that in me.

I hope I can entertain you.

I hope I can make you a laugh.

I hope I can raise some interesting questions.

I like to talk a lot about human behavior.

I am an turn buy background.

I practiced criminal law in Chicago for eleven years.

I was in the music business.

I was an interior designer without a swish, one of the rare ones.

Starting out on local Denver radio stations.

Berg found a job through which he could express his innermost thoughts, and there were a number of forces guiding Berg through this new chapter.

For one thing, talk radio is beginning to emerge as a prominent format in American media.

But Alan also had some new difficulties in his personal life that were driving him on the air, particularly his marriage to Judith, which by this point was over.

It was when I talk about it, it was absolutely devastating to think that it's ending.

It's over, you know, And I guess it could have been here also, it could have been there.

So you know, you can spend weeks and weeks.

Days and days, hours and hours on a couch with a psychiatrist.

But I think sometimes people just need to face stuff themselves.

We just didn't have a marriage, and I absolutely adored him, and I was crazy about him, and he.

Always acted like he was when he was with me.

But you know, the Bloom on the Rose just was gone, and his radio show was it was literally famous.

I don't know.

I'd listened to him and he was just he just caught on.

So then.

I thought, well, this can't keep going back and forth like this, so we have to be divorced.

And you kept calling and talking.

You know, it was just it was like a bad movie.

Those demons that Alan was dealing with helped him interact with callers struggling with their own problems.

He'd eventually become known for berating some callers, but he also demonstrated an innate ability to assist those who came to him looking for help.

Well, if I have a suicide on the air, which I've had many of in my life, and you actually save someone's life, that to me is something you accomplished directly, specifically accomplished.

Or if you're talking about a human problem, namely that someone is in trouble and maybe you can channel them in the direction and help them, or possibly something you're talking about on the air helps them in some fashion, then to me, you're really accomplishing someone.

So it can be a serious condo.

Oh yeah, it's a tremendous mix of things.

Probably why I love it the most.

It's a tremendously versatile business.

It's a little bit like Russian roulette.

You come here every time and you really don't know what's going to happen next.

Both lines when they like the uniqueness of talk is that we don't know what's going to happen.

I think that should be exciting for an audience because they don't know either.

But it took time for Alan to find that balance on the air.

By his own admission, Alan had a face for radio, but he also concedes that he didn't have a voice for radio either, and it took him time to find his footing in a space that was becoming increasingly inflammatory.

But I always felt that, you know, I grew up in the era of these great voices, and I was thought, you have a nasal twang, Chicago kind of style, and you figure, hey, how can a guy like me ever get into radio?

That's because styles changed.

If I had tried to get broadcasting in the era of Jim Hawthorn Evern, nobody would have listened to me.

It would have laughed at me there that you're hitting, You're ridiculous.

I still have a pretty much the devois and I think that that no.

But it has a sound that has not deemed the professional sound of that era.

I don't think it's quite deep enough though.

Yeah.

Mine, I show entry into this as I was.

I was a real nice guy.

I was scared to death, could come on the air just petrickfight lay out an issue and was just very unlike myself.

It took me a good two to three years before.

I finally started to be relaxed enough in broadcasting to just do me.

All I do now is me, I just do what is naturally me.

I think that's the biggest key in broadcasting is being natural.

There was an error in broadcasting when that wasn't permissible.

That's one of the most refreshing things about radio TV today, the namely to be yourself, and that comes through the noise.

Well, audiences are much brighter in one sense, certly not in all senses, but they sensed genuineness from going this day really did.

Alan's career was on the upswing.

He'd finally found something that he was good at, something that could put all that anger and resentment and insecurity to use.

Then he suddenly got fired after an incident at a charity auction for the local PBS station.

I did it for about six or eight years.

All right, right, I hold up the lamp.

It looked like something circa Howard Johnson's nineteen forty six.

Okay, from a motel.

I hold it up and I said, this is from an anonymous donor who wisely remained anonymous and donating this items.

Okay, were little shtick, a little bit, that's all want.

Okay, fine, remember when you wrote.

When Luiser ran up and said, that's wrong.

You have no right to say that about the donor.

I said, you mean I defamed the donor.

I said, the anonymous donor wisely remained anonymous.

How do you perceive I wrong?

Somebody?

She says, we don't want you on the air anymore.

Out there was a big hassle in town.

A story I written about me in the paper and the auction, and then they contended I crashed the auction.

I'm holding the invitation in my hands.

They had me scheduling the time.

Then they accused me of crashing the auction.

It was a classic.

Do you know how cantankerous one has to be to get banned off of BBS.

It's not easy to get fired for doing charitable work.

After a lifetime of restarts and resets, alan Berg was at a crossroads.

He was single, kind of famous, at least locally, and very much unemployed, but a sequence of events would soon make him one of the loudest and most prominent voices in American radio.

And the only thing more startling than alan Berg's shocking rise and unprecedented assassination were the details that emerged in the preceding murder investigation.

I'm Talpinschewski, a filmmaker and journalist, and I'll help guide you through all of it over the next several episodes, exploring alan Berg's groundbreaking work in radio right up to his murder, and the startling glimpse into America's underbelly that his murder investigation later revealed.

This is live Wire, the loud life and shocking death of Alan Burg.

Live Wire is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Modulator Media.

For more podcasts from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.